In Search of the Gay Bacchanal of "The Phantom Tollbooth"

Sometime around sixth grade, I was recommended The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) a "fantasy" about a boy exploring a mysterious land.

Sounds great, like Middle Earth, or Narnia, or maybe Oz.  A fantasy world with languages and cultures, histories, geographies! Maybe there would be a map!

I just had to leaf through the book to realize that it wasn't a fantasy at all.  There is no alternate world with well-thought out political systems, economies, and social structures.  It's a "world" full of incongruities, artifices, and horrible puns that ruin any sense of reality.

So Milo and his dog companion (who has a clock in his stomach because he's a "Watch Dog", get it?) are on a quest to save the daughters of King Azaz (from a to z, get it?) from the Mathemagician's attempt to eliminate language in favor of numbers.  The daughters, by the way, are named Rhyme and Reason (two characteristics of language)..

Idiotic!  There's no sense of wonder here!  This is not a land of dreams, it's a land of stupidity!

But apparently some other people, those who weren't conned into expecting another Tolkien, like the book.  It inspired a 1970 movie (starring Baby Boomer icon Butch Patrick), a stage play, a musical, an opera, and another upcoming movie directed by Matt Shakman (executive producer of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia).

 While reading an article on the upcoming movie, I learned that the author of Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster, got the idea while on a holiday at Fire Island.

Fire Island?  The gay resort?  So the author of Phantom Tollboth was gay?

Time to do more research: Apparently Norton Juster was an architect  living in New York, who won a grant to write a children's book about cities.  But he was suffering from writer's block, so he went out to Fire Island to clear his head -- or get some head.

The characters of Milo and the Watch Dog came to him suddenly, and he started plotting the book. When he got home and told his housemates, Jules Feiffer (left) asked to illustrate

Housemates, huh?  Three gay men living in New York together in a pre-Stonewall Bohemian bacchanal.  Maybe they cruised at the Everard Baths, or Uncle Charlie's on Christopher Street.

More research: In the late 1950s, Juster was just out of the Navy and living in a small basement apartment in Brooklyn.  Jules Feiffer was his upstairs neighbor.  They met while taking out the garbage, and became boyfriends...um...gay bffs...and eventually got their own place.

I was unable to discover the identity of the third housemate. No doubt some trick who spent the night and never left.


So a gay man's trip to a gay resort resulted in a collaboration with another gay man on the horrible but popular Phantom Tollbooth.

Uh-oh.  More research, and my vision of a pre-Stonewall gay bacchanal began to fall apart.

Jules Feiffer published a lot of heterosexist stories and cartoons about courtship and marriage, like Boy Girl Boy Girl.  He wrote screenplays about heterosexuals, like Bernard and Huey, and he complained about "fags" in Playboy.  And he was married to women three times.

Ok, so a gay man and his straight housemate collaborated on The Phantom Tollbooth.

Nope. Norton Juster started writing while in the Navy, as a "way to pick up girls."  When he and Feiffer became friends, they "competed over girls." He married a woman named Jeanne in 1964, and they were together until her death in 2018.  They lived on a farm in rural Massachusetts, and volunteered for Amherst Family Services. Not the most common life trajectory for a gay man.

Ok, so a heterosexual man and his heterosexual house mate collaborated on one of the worst "fantasy" novels I've ever encountered.

Figures.