The Gay Origin of Yankee Doodle

When I was a kid in the 1960s, we had to sing "Yankee Doodle" in music class every five minutes.

They told us "It's a great patriotic song, nearly as great as our national anthem!  It celebrates rugged American masculinity."

Like this Currier & Ives print of a muscular American trouncing the effete British dandies.

Except it didn't make sense.  Yankee Doodle was the dandy.

And what's the nonsense about sticking a feather in your cap and calling it macaroni?

And the immeasurably heterosexist "With the girls be handy"?

Turns out that the song was a British satire intended to signify that American men were prissy, feminine, and not interested in the ladies.

The high "macaroni" wig with a tricorner cap atop it was popular among British fops of the era, and an all-around term for feminine or gay men.

Rictor Norton's sourcebook of gay history reprints a British newspaper article from the 18th century complaining that: "the country is over-run with Catamites...or Macaronis."

A broadside explains:

Macaronies are a sex, Which do philosophers perplex;
Tho’ all the priests of Venus’s rites agree they are Hermaphrodites.

The admonition to be be "handy" with the girls was pure sarcasm.  Yankee Doodle would never dream of putting his hands on a lady.  A man, maybe.

The gay coding of "Yankee Doodle" continues in the famous painting "The Spirit of '76," by Archibald Willard.  It was originally entitled "Yankee Doodle," intended to be humorous.

Willard only decided to make it serious after seeing the determination in the eyes of his models, especially the younger drummer (modeled by railroad magnate's son Henry Devereaux) gazing with sullen admiration at the older (modeled by Willard's father).

And in the 1942 movie Yankee Doodle Dandy, a fictionalized biography of composer George M. Cohan. James Cagney as Cohan falls in love on schedule and sings the obsessively heterosexist "Yankee Doodle Boy":

I've got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart -- she's my Yankee Doodle joy.

But his mannerisms are so flamboyant that the gay coding seems almost deliberate.  Cagney's movies are generally loaded down with gay subtexts, and he may have been bisexual in real life.

Dream of the Red Chamber: Gay Chinese Literature

When I was a kid in the 1960s, China didn't seem likely as a "good place."  There was a My Village in Japan, but no My Village in China.  Chinese art involved vast natural landscapes rather than the muscle gods of Greek myth, and all of the movie adaptations of the travels of Marco Polo gave the Italian explorer (Alfred Drake, Horst Buchholz, Desi Arnaz Jr.) a girlfriend.

Then came Bruce Lane and the kung fu craze, and the late 1970s was all awash with muscular Chinese  martial artists: Sonny Chiba, Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao (left).  Sometimes they got girls, but often they enjoyed homoromantic bonds with fellow martial arts students, kung fu masters, and "blood brothers."

So I took a course in East Asian Culture and Civilization, and found some hints and signals.

Chinese poetry minimizes heterosexual romance to concentrate on the manly love of comrades:

Drawing up the green silk coverlets,
placing our pillows side by side;
like spending more than a hundred nights,
to sleep together with you here (Bo Yuji)

In West Hollywood in the 1980s, I took a course in Chinese literature at USC.  The professor assigned The Dream of the Red Chamber, the 18th century masterpiece by Cao Xueqin, but  "forgot" to mention that the main characters are all bisexual.

When Pao-Yu, is an adolescent, he meets Chin Chung, handsome "but too shy and effeminate."  They become inseparable friend -- or more.  "Let's not talk about it now," Pao-Yu said.  "I'll settle with you later, after we go to bed."

The narrator continues: "It is not known what settlement Pao-Yu made with his friend that night nor how, and we will not venture any speculations."

See also: Confessions of a Mask

Paul Anka: The Gay Next Door

Paul Anka was the first teen idol to be known for his physique as well as his music.  Other teen idols of the 1950s -- Bobby Rydell, Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, Pat Boone -- may have been dreamy, but the teen magazines emphasized their cool threads, not their muscular chests. Paul not only had a face and a voice, he had a body, and he knew how to use it to his advantage.

His first single, "Diana," hit the top of the charts in 1957,  pushing hits by Jerry Lane Lewis and Elvis Presley out of the way.  "Puppy Love," "Put Your Head on My Shoulder," and "Lonely Boy" followed, all chart toppers, mostly about lost or unrequited love.








In the early 1960s, as the British invasion limited the appeal of the 1950s-era teen idols, Paul re-invented himself as an adult contemporary performer, and continued to enjoy a string of hits: "In the Still of the Night," "You're Having My Baby," "One Man Woman."

And he made movies that required more underwear, swimsuit, and semi-nude shots than any other teen idol of the era.  Look in Any Window (1961) is particularly memorable.

Craig Fowler (Paul), the teenage son of dysfunctional parents, has a paralyzing "sexual abnormality."  He goes to a youth center and ogles the buffed athletes working out.

Then he spies on his hunky neighbor (Jack Cassidy, David Cassidy's dad), kissing his wife in the swimming pool.

Meanwhile rumors of his sexual deviance run through the neighborhood.  Two teenage boys chase him, yelling threats, and the cops are on his trail.  "Let me get my hands on any guy that isn't normal!" one grunts.

Craig tries to pursue a "normal" life by courting girl-next-door Ellen (Gigi Perreau), but eventually even "true love" can't repress his aberrant desires.

Nope, Craig's not gay -- that would have been too controversial for Hollywood in 1961. There are still almost no gay teenagers in mainstream film.  Craig's a Peeping Tom.  But the gay symbolism is obvious.

Assumed gay in real life, Paul was actually heterosexual, though he was friends with gay teen idol Sal Mineo and bisexual Rat Packer Sammy Davis Jr..