The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name in the War Room

Dr. Strangelove and the McCarthyite Discourse on Homosexuality

Dr. Daniel Borus, Professor Emeritus from the University of Rochester, joined the pod to cover one of the classics of the 20th century—Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

In conjunction with the release of that episode (dropping shortly), we wanted to share the remarks that Dan gave in a talk about how the film deftly critiques its intersecting themes of sexuality, McCarthyism, and nuclear war. It could hardly be more timely given that 2025 has already confronted us with trillion-dollar militarism, a new fake red scare, and homophobia masquerading as “lethality” in the Department of War.

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It is customary in these talks to give a preliminary statement indicating how one became interested in the topic at hand. My interest, I suppose, dates from 23 October 1962. It was then at the ripe old age of ten years, eleven months and 360 days that I decided that Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy were trying to kill me.

Khrushchev did not surprise me. His recklessness in putting missiles in Cuba, after all, was precisely the sort of treacherous behavior my parents, teachers, and rabbis had informed me Communists undertook as a matter of course. Kennedy’s willingness to destroy the world in order not to remove missiles from Turkey he knew were obsolete was, on the other hand, unfathomable because he had earned his job by promising to prevent my early demise.

So I was primed nearly two years later, as I sat in the balcony of the Tivoli Theater in U City, MO, watching a movie, directed by Stanley Kubrick with the intriguing name Dr. Strangelove, to enjoy its criticism of the men who held the power of life and death over the entire planet and who seemed to believe that nuclear war was winnable. What I didn’t understand then was that the movie had a sexual politics.

In those days, puberty came later than it does today. By freshman year even I saw the sexual references in the opening scene of a mid-air refueling of nuclear bomber in which long, hard cylindrical hose from one plane was inserted into the awaiting circular gas tank of the other to the strains of “Try a Little Tenderness” and in the closing in which a pilot falls from a plane with a bomb between his legs.

Having just read C. Wright Mills for my American Intellectual History class, I decided strange love was the love of the power elite for implements of mass destruction—a love that could only be spoken in accents of “crackpot realism.”

While showing it to my History 269 class this fall, I had a new thought—“strange love” had historical meaning, a desire for objects more human than the Bomb, that of man for man.

What follows is a modest effort to work out my hunch. I will argue that, unlike “I Dream of Jeannie” or Howard Stern, two cultural artifacts I’ve recently seen praised as subversive, Dr. Strangelove is the real thing. It is subversive not only because it undercuts the legitimacy of nuclear strategists and generals by making them the subject of ridicule, but also because it contends that Cold Warriors learned to stop worrying and love the bomb because their need to survey, police, and punish forbidden desires in themselves and others left them few alternatives. One of the little-noted pleasures of the movie is its success in turning the discourse of homosexuality against those who propounded it. Put simply, it accuses the accusers.

I will no doubt commit that gravest of academic sins of so over-analyzing the humor that one wonders why anyone laughed in the first place. But I’ll not to use the Lacanian phrase “interpellate,” or prattle on about subject positions or conclude Dr. Strangelove champions the infinite play of differences.

And I’ve included audio-visual aids, which may result in a shortened question period. Given the subject matter, that result will be in accord with Clinton policy: You won’t ask and I won’t tell.

For those unfamiliar with the film, I offer a brief summary. The commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, Jack D. Ripper, worried about the insidious effects of fluoridation on our bodies’ essence, activates Plan R, which allows junior officers to retaliate if the commander-in-chief is incapacitated. Among the wing speeding towards its targets is a bomber commanded by Major T. J. “King” Kong and containing the usual melting pot contingent found in WWII movies, which is assigned the destruction of La Puta air base (Spanish for “whore,” for the non-multilingual]. Realizing that only Ripper has the recall code, the President, Merkin Muffley, dispatches the Army to retrieve it. He also invites the Russian ambassador, Alexis de Sadesky, into the hallowed war room, much to the utter dismay of Air Force general Buck Turgidson. Together President and Ambassador phone the Premier, Dimitri Kissov, a man of the people but also a man, at his mistress’s, in an effort to prevent nuclear exchange. De Sadesky learns that the first bomb dropped on the Soviet Union will activate the Doomsday machine, which will annihilate all life on earth. All but Kong’s plane are shot down or recalled, thanks to the discovery of the code by Ripper’s executive officer, Lionel Mandrake. Kong evades Russian air defenses and the unthinkable happens. The event so excites Dr. Strangelove, an ex-Nazi scientist and national security advisor, that after describing how life could begin again if the fittest are sent down into mineshafts in a ratio of ten women for every man, he arises from his wheelchair in a demonstration of what Howard Brick aptly terms the passion of amoral science.

On its release, the movie was hailed as a landmark. Lewis Mumford praised it as the first real break in the Cold War consensus and commended its brilliance in linking scientific expertise to exterminism. My old TA at Michigan, Chuck Maland, has extended Mumford’s argument, pointing to the film as a challenge to the liberal faith in progress through its portrayal of American life as a technological dystopia in which machines are more sophisticated than the political and emotional makeup of humankind. Tom Engelhardt, in Victory Culture, points to the film as the first postwar venture in which American leaders, not enemy aliens, are mad. For their part, film critics have celebrated its clever juxtapositions, extraordinary control of scene and plot, subtle command of detail, and imaginative camera work. In 1990, the Library of Congress designated it one of the fifty greatest American films, a judgment perhaps shared by noted film scholar Ronald Reagan, who, rumor has it, was surprised that the actual Pentagon war room did not resemble Strangelove’s.

Movies with characters who have names like Merkin Muffley or Lionel Mandrake are unlikely to be liberal message films that proclaim they are good for you. Such an earnest effort was, coincidentally enough, also released in 1964. Fail-Safe is the story of the reasonable President, Henry Fonda, who makes the harrowing decision to accept the destruction of New York to compensate for the accidental obliteration of Moscow. Kubrick might have created a similar plea for sane statesmanship had he been truer to the spirit of his source for Strangelove, Peter George’s Red Alert. That novel is a spare thriller in which the world just averts nuclear holocaust when the lone successful bomber’s payload fails to detonate.

George intended his novel as an argument for the policy of mutually assured destruction. Despite its ironic acronym, MAD, it should be recalled, was the late 50s liberal alternative to John Foster Dulles’s rhetorically aggressive massive retaliation. Such MAD proponents as Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn saw the strategy as the best guarantee of peace because it substituted predictable destruction for the chaotic unpredictability created by the fear of surprise attacks. In an environment in which risks outweighed gains, Kissinger maintained, no rational planner would undertake any action certain to bring destruction. Or as Strangelove put it: deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack you. Which is why he is so disgusted that the Soviets did not tell anyone about their Doomsday machine.

Regarding nuclear war as the one condition from which humanity could not learn from experience and intrigued by men who treated it as if it were a chess game, Kubrick so immersed himself in the literature of nuclear strategy that Kahn would later demand a portion of Strangelove royalties. But in the four years between the publication of Red Alert and Kubrick’s beginning the screenplay, the cultural climate had changed. In the wake of McNamara’s admission there was no missile gap, the Cuban crisis, and such challenges to conventional nuclear thinking as H. Stuart Hughes’ campaign against Edward Kennedy on a platform of disarmament, the publication of Catch-22, Mort Sahl’s famous quip that Werner Von Braun’s autobiography I Aim for the Stars should have been subtitled But Sometimes I Hit London, and the release of Dylan’s “With God on Our Side,” George’s plea for a sane escalation seemed considerably less compelling. Small wonder, then, that Kubrick had trouble adapting the novel. As he told interviewer Joseph Gelmis in 1970, the material he discarded as too ludicrous was the most truthful. “It occurred to me I was approaching the project in the wrong way. The only way to tell the story was as a black comedy, or better, a nightmare comedy, where the things you laugh at most are really the heart of the paradoxical postures that make a nuclear war possible.”

Black comedy has antecedents in the work of Nathaniel West, but it truly came to pre-eminence after the war. Spurred by the sense that daily social and political events had become increasingly illogical, grotesque, and mysterious, black comics blurred the line between fantasy and horrid reality. As Bruce J. Friedman, one of its most celebrated practitioners, noted in his 1965 forward to a collection of black humor, writers were always in danger of being outstripped by journalists.

Kubrick had dabbled in the form with Lolita, but it was Terry Southern who gave Dr. Strangelove its bite. Born in Texas in 1924, Southern spent much of the 50s in expatriate circles in Paris, where he hobnobbed with the likes of Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, and the British novelist Henry Green, and the hip precincts of Greenwich Village. Late in the decade he fashioned a name for himself with Candy, a parody of pornography that was suppressed as the real thing until 1964, and The Magic Christian (1959). The latter book about billionaire prankster Guy Grand, whom Southern described as a grand guy who liked to make things hot for people, enthralled Strangelove star Peter Sellers, who had given the book as a present to one hundred of his closest friends. Sellers recommended Southern to Kubrick, who was not unmindful that Columbia had put up the money on the condition that Sellers play multiple parts. It did not hurt that he admired Christian’s manic verve.

We are today still under the sway of the auteur theory, which holds that a film emanates from the single intelligence of the director. Despite incisive criticism that rejects the theory as an inappropriate throwback to literary models and as incapable of registering the collective, collaborative process in film making, we still make the director the prime mover. This focus has been especially true in Kubrick’s case. He has diligently cultivated his own aura as Romantic creator, going so far as to avoid using original music and demanding final cut on those rare interviews he gives. And it is particularly true for Strangelove, which had been celebrated in 1964 as Southern’s masterpiece in part because the movie appeared about the same time as Candy. Angered by what he felt was a denigration of his work, Kubrick went so far as to take out full page ads in major US papers disparaging Southern’s contribution.

Today, Strangelove is known as Kubrick’s movie. There is no doubt Kubrick shaped the film, but the impetus for much of the sexual politics came from Southern. I do not know who wrote which line and I can not prove Southern explicitly formulated an understanding that homosexuality was a central issue for anti-Communists. But homosexuality was an important component of Southern’s pre-Strangelove work. Nearly every novel he did prior to November 1962 when he went to London to work on the film mentions it directly or alludes to it. One 1962 piece explicitly connects male homosexuality with the military. Kubrick did do one gay-themed scene in Spartacus—the famous suppressed “clam-oysters” scene where Laurence Olivier tries to seduce Tony Curtis, but it was Southern who came to literary maturity in a milieu that regarded exaggerated displays of masculinity as proof of sexual insecurity and homosexual panic as the epitome of bourgeois repression.

On the face of it, sexual orientation would hardly seem to dictate political affiliation. In 1950, however, fear of Communist penetration of vital American institutions became coupled with a penetration of a forbidden personal kind. On 28 February, Undersecretary of State John Puerifoy testified that most of the ninety-one employees dismissed for moral turpitude were homosexuals. This admission, coming three weeks after McCarthy’s Wheeling address added another count to the Republican charges against the Truman administration. Uncertain how successful the “Communists in government” issue would be in light of Truman’s own tightening of security procedures, Republican National Chairman Guy Gabrielson informed party regulars that there was a “new homosexual angle.” He announced that sexual perverts had infiltrated the government, presenting a threat as dangerous to the republic as actual Communists. The Republican-sponsored clamor led to Senate hearings in June. The Chair of the Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments, Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, was certain a problem existed. “You can’t separate homosexuals from subversives. I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual. But a man of low morality is a menace in government, whatever he is, and they are tied up together.”

Wherry’s bondage fantasies aside, The Senate Report on the Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government explicitly tied same-sex eroticism to the health and security of the state. Homosexuals, it decreed, were security risks because they lacked the emotional stability of “normal” persons and were more easily inclined to succumb to the blandishments of enemy agents, who knew how to prey on their weaknesses. Given the stigma of perversion, the homosexual was a convenient target for blackmailers and would do anything to avoid exposure and opprobrium. Such logic was not, of course, applied to others who transgressed moral norms. But then, if adulterers were prohibited from service, it is doubtful that the government could be staffed. Nor would homosexuals necessarily chose treason over exposure. When caught in flagrante and threatened by Soviet agents, columnist Joseph Alsop simply told his pal, J. Edgar Hoover, who apparently had his own secrets to protect.

Eliminating the threat of blackmail by defusing hatred of gays was simply not on the agenda. The publication of the Senate report was the first act in what sociologists refer to as a moral panic. A low-level disgust became a matter of pressing public safety. The New York Daily News was especially active, publishing a series of sensational exposes of the prevalence of homosexuals in a wide range of professions. Fear of homosexuals had a perverse, if I may use the term, basis in reality. In the years after the war, gay communities had coalesced in such coastal cities as Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York as a consequence of the wartime demographic upheaval that thrown large numbers of men and women in close proximity to their own sex. When many chose not to return to the hinterlands, the basis for a new set of gay institutions—magazines, bars, and homophile organizations—had been established.

This new visibility prompted an escalating outrage and new government policies. The report singled out for severe criticism sympathetic supervisors who allowed known gays to transfer to other departments rather than dismissing them outright. For gays, the consequences were dire. John D’Emilio, the most accurate historian of the anti-gay crusade of the 1950s, notes that what had been five dismissals a month for sex perversion rose to more than sixty in 1951. When Eisenhower made sexual deviance reason for automatic removal, dismissals averaged 48 per month for his eight years in office, a figure that does not include those who left under threat of exposure. Nearly half of the 212 security risks were eliminated from the State Department on 7 June 1963, the NY Times reported, were “sexual deviates.”

Revisionist accounts, influenced by the ascendancy of gay and lesbian studies, have correctly emphasized the centrality of the anti-gay crusade to the Red Scare. This new work has emphasized how the Cold War at home worked to construct a narrow version of heterosexual normalcy. In a recent New Yorker review of the new biography of Whitaker Chambers, Sidney Blumenthal contends that, now that the Cold War has ended and Communism has become a dead letter, the most profound legacy that Chambers’ accusations about Hiss unleashed was homophobia.

Much of the new work has emanated from cultural studies and tends, from a historian’s point of view, to be imprecise. In addition to a strikingly large number of unwarranted assertions like postwar liberals opposed the right to strike and the New Deal was tilted towards women and African Americans, Robert Corber’s In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America makes gay-bashing and anti-Communism mutually determining, mutually reinforcing postwar developments. Corber sees the usual suspects of cultural studies—Leslie Fiedler, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lionel Trilling, and Robert Warshow—as exploiting and abetting homophobia in order, as he puts it, to reclaim reality from the Popular Front. By which he means, I take it, liberals demonized homosexuality to enforce a constricted version of the permissible in politics and culture.

Analyses like Corber’s ignore the internal weaknesses of the 30s and 40s left, which were just as important as anti-Communism in securing its demise. Such analyses also replicate the conspiracy paradigm of their ostensible foes, ignoring the more likely possibility that homophobic fears and extreme anti-Communism were coincidental developments rather than ones necessarily dependent upon one another.

Corber’s position can not account for the homophobia on the political and cultural left. Although the CPUSA could tolerate the lesbian Eleanor Flexner within its orbit, its official position was that same sex eroticism was bourgeois decadence that would disappear with the proletarian revolution. This intolerance led Henry Hay to leave the party and form the Mattachine Society. The anti-Stalinist left hardly had a better record. A. J. Muste, best known for his participation in the famous Autolite Strike, dismissed Bayard Rustin, his most popular and talented organizer, from the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1953 when Rustin was arrested on morals charges for having sex with men in a car parked outside his Los Angeles hotel. On more than one occasion Jack Kerouac proclaimed his support for McCarthy on the grounds that the Wisconsin senator “had all the dope on the Jews and fairies.”— a remark that must have surprised Allen Ginsberg.

And what are we to make of the red-baiting that drove Hay from the organization that he and his comrades founded?

None of this is to deny that postwar liberals linked communism and homosexuality. In The Vital Center, Schlesinger found Communists and their secret ways of communicating as “reminiscent of nothing so much as the famous scene in Proust where the Baron De Charlus and the tailor Jupien suddenly recognize their common corruption.” He further claimed that dissent in totalitarian regimes was “secret, sweaty, and furtive like nothing so much as homosexuality in a boy’s school: many practicing it but all those caught to be caned by the headmasters.”

Yet anti-Communists, whether liberal or reactionary, did not invent or popularize homophobia. That the Senate report declared same-sex eroticism immoral was hardly news. The report was a departure, however, in its equation of perversion and subversion. It accomplished this new understanding by appropriating and transforming the developing medical model for homosexuality. The medical model had originated among liberal professionals as a counter to notions that homosexuality was a sin or a crime deserving of imprisonment. It treated the sexual desire for those of one’s own sex as an illness, a deviation from normal development. Medicalization transformed what had been evil impulses into the primary constituent of one’s nature, inescapable because it permeated one’s being.

Dividing the population into those who were ill and need of treatment and those who were “normal” and did not was complicated by the 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, better known as the Kinsey Report. Kinsey argued that homosexual was an adjective, not a noun. It described a behavior, not defined a type of person. In Kinsey’s scheme, sexual identity was no either/or proposition, gay or straight, was fluid, ranging along a spectrum from sexual relations exclusively with men (about 3% of the population, he reckoned) to relations exclusively with women. In between these two poles, there were a number of intermediate orientations. In his most dubious and highly challenged finding, Kinsey concluded that nearly one out of every three males had had at least one homoerotic episode to orgasm. (Five years later the number for women was one in five.) This finding underwrote Kinsey’s challenge to a belief that those who desired same sex relations possessed the gender characteristics of the opposite one. Inverts, to use the nineteen-century term, naturally desired men because, the thinking went, they were really women. Perverts were gendered men who allowed themselves to indulge in unnatural acts. Male homosexuals, Kinsey contended, did not necessarily display such gender markers of women as the limp wrist, high-pitched voice, exaggerated walk, and other forms of camp behavior.

One might have read Kinsey’s data, as Kinsey himself did, as an argument for tolerance on the grounds that homosexual acts were neither foreign nor abnormal. One might have also taken the tack of medical professionals and regarded homosexuals somewhat patronizingly as “unfortunates.” Instead, the authors of the Senate report used elements of both paradigms to rehabilitate a moralistic outlook. Although Kinsey had been denounced as a threat to the moral order, the authors saw him as the authority who documented the menace of homosexuality. These acts were more frequent than supposed and engaged in by otherwise normal people. If Kinsey was right, anybody could be queer.

McCarthyite discourse on homosexuality depended upon what we might call misplaced metaphorical reasoning. As a rhetorical strategy, metaphor draws parallels between two unlike entities. The statement “my love is like a red, red rose,” for instance, calls attention to the beauty that both the rose and my love posses. If one wants to push the matter, one might add both can also be prickly if mishandled. Precisely because metaphors are so inventive, revealing characteristics we might not notice in unadorned description, it is often easy to forget that metaphors are not, logically speaking, statements of identity. If I watered or fed Miracle Grow to my love, we would regard my actions as category mistake. McCarthyite discourse fashioned the perversion-subversion link by treating the metaphor as a statement of identity, a literal truth. Homosexuality was made interchangeable with Communism and took on its qualities.

Kinsey made parallels between homosexuality and Communism easy to find. Like Communists, homosexuals had interests and desires that deviated from the norm. Like Communists, they were a secret fraternity. Like Communists, they were everywhere. Like Communists, they had no set signifier by which to identify them. Like Communists, they communicated secretly, in a second language as it were. By extension, homosexuals shared with Communists aimed at converting the unsuspecting. And like Communists, they had at their disposal a population too little vigilant, even eager for their own perversion. As the report concluded, the homosexual had a “corrosive influence upon his fellow employees. These perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices.” Both destroyed purity from within. Heterosexuality was thus moral, healthy, and politically correct.

Although the report conceded that not all homosexuals would be identified, it did hold out hope for the concerned that their inescapable nature would out. Just as Communists could be identified by their use of certain phrases like civil rights, so too homosexuals could be discovered by certain propensities that they couldn’t resist. The old markers returned to McCarthyite discourse with a vengeance, which is why McCarthy himself frequently ridiculed the British accents and striped pants of State Department officials, which allowed him to exploit class resentments and the disgust at sissies simultaneously.

In part, Terry Southern’s disdain for the 1950s demonization of homosexuality was undoubtedly personal. He was, after all, friendly with such open homosexuals as James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg. William Burroughs has told interviewers that Southern was one of the few men with whom he had a non-erotic friendship. A condition that is almost as scary as Dr. Strangelove running nuclear policy.

But his distaste for 1950s style gay bashing also had ideological roots. The bohemian cultural critics with whom he associated saw the postwar bourgeois order, which they understood in cultural terms, as resting on a series of absurd norms. What made middle-class respectability ridiculous was its insistence on a facade of placidity at odds with a turbulent, only partially repressed interior life. When preaching no longer corresponded to or connected with practices, the result was a culture of meaninglessness. Existentialists responded to such situations with a heroic effort to find authenticity; black humorists, rejecting the very possibility of authenticity, saw only opportunities for exaggeration and ridicule.

One would be hard put to find a more inviting target for black humor than the McCarthyite prescriptions on sexuality. No aspect of middle class life had as many prohibitions or taboos defining it as did sexual relations. Although most black humorists of the 1950s viewed Freud not as a liberator as previous generations of cultural dissidents had but as the voice of the oppressor, they nonetheless took from him the belief that in regulating desire sexual codes guaranteed social cohesiveness. A cohesiveness borne of only one acceptable form of desire mutilated selves, elevated a brittle rationality over instinct, guaranteed timidity rather than adventurousness, and denied rather than embraced life. Efforts to eliminate dissonance by fiat only led to falsity and hypocrisy. Such prohibitions, Southern had argued in Candy, had only made desire more obsessive. To find out what society really was, Bruce J. Friedman contended, “the very best way to go is by examining first its throwaways, the ones who can’t or won’t keep in step. And who knows? Perhaps “bad” behavior of a certain kind is better than “good” behavior.”

In theory, black humor might have been a critique, a special form of analysis that inhabits as it were the inside of an argument, plumbs its central assumptions, reveals its conflicting tensions, and offers a reconstruction in its place. In practice, however, it would be more precise to say black humor inverted McCarthyite views of sexuality, since it deployed the basic postulates of anti-communist sexual prescriptions against different targets. Southern’s views were less liberationist than anti-anti-gay. In practice, Friedman’s throwaways elicited little sympathy from black humorists, who more than once reverted to stereotypes of gays. Southern himself did so in 1964 when The Realist published “Terry Southern Interviews a Faggot Male Nurse”. The piece, a rejoinder to a front-page Times story that indicated some male homosexuals seemed to be proud of the deviancy, ascribed to the fictional interviewee the same markers of gender inversion that had historically provoked such anxiety.

Southern’s black humor shared with the McCarthyites it satirized the understanding that sexual orientation and political commitments were linked. In inverting their conclusions, Southern psychologized and introjected them. Which is a fancy way of saying Southern took a set of pronouncements about sexual conduct designed to eliminate doubt and uncertainty in a world in which anyone could be gay and made the doubt the constituent element of the makeup of the anti-Communist. He turned the tables, making the strident masculinity of gay bashers the consequence of their own latent homosexuality. If red-baiters conceived of homosexuals as political traitors, Southern saw patriots as dogged by fears of perversion. If the Senate report found homosexuals weak-willed, Southern found excessive masculinity a front for secret insecurities.

Morris Dickstein has correctly, I think, termed most of Southern’s work trivial and crude—a risk that campy exaggeration always runs. Yet exaggeration makes clear exactly what Southern was about. Take a short piece Southern wrote for The Realist just before he took on the Strangelove assignment about Ranger 3, the January 26 1962 moon shot that had missed the moon by 200, 000 miles, a distance longer than the shot itself. We were led to believe, he began, that it was an unmanned craft. But recently discovered fragmented video transcripts and audio tapes, he claimed, indicated that there were actually five astronauts aboard. The moon-bound spaceship, Cutie Pie II, he revealed, “was caused to careen off into outer space beyond the moon itself, when what has been called some kind of ‘insane faggot hassle’ developed aboard the craft during early flight stage.” The rest of the sketch describes the camping and drag parade of the three gay crew members in which the commander “pranced with wild imperviousness about the control room, interfering with all operational activity, and then spun into a provocative and feverish combination of tarantella and can-can at the navigation panel, saucily flicking at the controls there, cleverly integrating these movements into the tempo of his dervish, amidst peals of laughter and shrieks of delight and petulant annoyance.”

Surely, Southern continued, despite the negative and rather disappointing aspects of the flight, there are at least two profitable lessons to be learned from it: (1) that the antiquated, intolerant attitude of NASA, and of Government generally, towards sexual freedom, can only cause individual repression which may at any time—and especially under the terrific tensions of space-flight—have a boomerang effect to the great disadvantage of all concerned and (2) that there may well be, after all, an ancient wisdom in the old adage, “Five’s a crowd.”

No generals “prance with wild imperviousness” around the war room in Dr. Strangelove. Or “saucily flick” at the controls. But Dr. Strangelove is full of men who aim to stamp out deviance in both themselves and others. And as they do, we see at work the boomerang effect; repression of sexual desire and its transference to inappropriate objects has once again “negative and rather disappointing aspects.” The film derives much of its humor from its trafficking in the projected male fantasies of the military: the mid-air refueling, the fatal bomb between Kong’s legs, the numerous phallic symbols—cigars, machine guns, and the explosion of the bomb (a visual joke on the 1950s commonplace of the “little death” of the orgasm), Miss Scott, Buck Turgidson’s secretary who doubles as the centerfold with Foreign Affairs across her buttocks in the Playboy the crew is reading. Southern and Kubrick are mocking the incessant drive for purity that has become so powerful that it leads to total destruction.

The military fear of homosexuality is alluded to directly only once: when Army colonel Bat Guano encounters Group Captain Lionel Mandrake during the siege of Burpleson. [clip]

It is no surprise that “prevert” has become part of the language. In a single word, it encapsulates an entire satire, linking the insecurity inherent in military homophobia to the striding aggressiveness of war making. And it brands the homophobe as so confused and ignorant as to be unable to even use the proper slur. No wonder Wynn looks so uncomprehendingly when Mandrake fumbles with the phone. The joke is even richer when we consider that the phone booth was considered along with the restroom a prime site of assignation.

Lionel Mandrake was made English in part to showcase Seller’s ability to do a whole range of characters. But his nationality also allowed Southern and Kubrick to lampoon the frame of mind which equated difference in externals with difference in essence and difference in essence with perversion and perversion with subversion. It is, after all, his uniform that causes Guano’s suspicion in the first place.

No one asks about the President’s suit, but he too is part of the Southern-Kubrick strategy of inversion. Modeled on Adlai Stevenson, he is ineffectual, incapable of reversing inexorable logic of destruction. Yet there is a sexual component here. I refer to his name, both parts of which refer to female genitalia, and what some critics have called his prissiness in his chastising Turgidson and de Sadesky after their tussle with the immortal line, “Gentleman, you can’t fight in here. This is the war room.” And it is Muffley who makes this telephone call. [clip]

To borrow a phrase from Schlesigner, that resembles nothing so much as a lover’s spat. To be sure, Southern and Kubrick’s code ineffectuality as effeminacy and suggest that the mutual power to destroy creates a bond. Indeed, Russo’s Celluloid Closet report that rumors, which I have been unable to confirm, had it that Muffley was originally intended as an openly gay character.

I think, although I wouldn’t argue it strenuously, that they are also frame a good portion of it from Turgidson’s point of view. Doubting the President’s resolve, he is appalled that Muffley would act so wimpishly. Having already shown Turgidson to be a buffoon, the movie is not, I would advance tentatively, asking us to concur with his wince but reinforcing our knowledge of Turgidson’s distortions of the world.

The best example of Southern’s boomerang effect can be discerned in perhaps the most important way that the plot of Strangelove departs from that of Red Alert. George’s general was not mad, only terminally ill. He sent his wing to attack because he feared that if the Soviets go through with their plan to install launchers, they would have a temporary advantage in which they could force concessions from the free world. Ripper, on the other hand, fears not external attack, but internal subversion. Note in this scene his manly advances towards Mandrake, the arm around the shoulder, the look in the eye, the small, intimate talk, Mandrake’s obvious discomfort at the contact. Note as well that the nefarious nature of fluoridation occurred to him during the physical act of making love to a woman, upon which he immediately stopped never to allow them his essence again. [clip]

If there is indeed a subtext of suppression of homosexual desires in Dr. Strangelove, then we might look at the opening again. If the “mating” were in the missionary position, then the two planes would be belly to belly. But here one is on top of the other, evoking . . . Ah, but that would be too far-fetched.