Lineages of Queer Parenting: Auntie Mame
In the 1950s, queerness and parenting were seen as incompatible, until a closeted queer father created a glorious and hilarious rebuke to the conservatism of the era.
Welcome back for the second post in what is going to be a continuing series on queer parenting. As I said in my first post, these ideas about queer parenting have been bouncing around in my head for a while and I am using this space to think through them in real time. This project is less a grand manifesto than an opening to what will hopefully be an ongoing conversation on this topic. (And if you are really interested in this conversation, you can sign up for a paid subscription and get extra content about my research into this topic.)
In her book Pleasure Activism, which has been very influential on this project, adrienne marie brown asks readers to reflect on their pleasure lineage: the people and ideas who helped them discover the importance of pleasure. I see queer parenting as part of brown’s pleasure activism, and so I want to make exploration of these lineages of queer parenting a regular part of this project.
I was raised in an environment with almost no models of queer parenting, so as was the case with my thinking on many topics, my ideas were often formed by the culture I consumed. So today we are going to explore what I think is an important text in the development of queer parenting: Auntie Mame.
If you know me, you know the importance of Auntie Mame in my life. My novel Life is a Banquet was my attempt to write a modern update of the story. A giant poster for the film version looms over my living room. My house itself is nicknamed Number 3 Beekman Place, after the address of Mame’s iconic apartment. But it is only recently that I have come to realize part of the reason Auntie Mame is so important to me is its portrait of queer parenting as I defined the term in my last post, even though both Mame and the child she raises, her nephew Patrick, are presented as purely heterosexual. Mame is a portrait of queer parenting in which “queerness” is not about sexual orientation but about, in the words of bell hooks, “the self that is at odds with everything around it.”
For the uninitiated, Auntie Mame is the story of 10-year-old Patrick, who comes to live with his aunt Mame in the 1920s after the death of his father. Mame is a childless bohemian with a love for avant garde art and bootleg gin. When she takes in Patrick, she promises that she is going to “open doors for you. Doors you never even knew existed” and she proceeds to do so, raising Patrick among her forward-thinking bohemian circle of friends. In this quest to raise Patrick to be open-minded and interesting, she is pitted against Mr. Babcock, the banker assigned to oversee Patrick’s inheritance, and a representative of bourgeois Republican conservatism.
Starting as a novel by Patrick Dennis (the pen name of writer Edward Everett Tanner III) published in 1955, the book was adapted into a Broadway play in 1956 and a Hollywood film in 1958, both of which starred Rosalind Russell. One of the first and most important things to know about Auntie Mame was how enormously popular it was in its various incarnations at the time of their initial release. The book, despite being written by an unknown1, was a near-immediate bestseller, with eventually more than two million copies in print. The stage rights to the novel were purchased almost immediately and the play, adapted by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (not that one), debuted a little more than a year after the book’s publication and was also a smash, running for two years on Broadway and reviving the career of Rosalind Russell, who had established herself as one of film’s great female comic actors in the 30s but had been largely discarded by Hollywood by the 50s. The 1958 film version, which was also a box office smash and earned Russell an Oscar nomination, completed Russell’s triumphant comeback and cemented Auntie Mame in American culture.
And this success all happened in the middle of the Eisenhower 50s, that era that has been so mythologized as the height of white patriarchal cishet normativity, in which the “American Dream” of a house in the suburbs and a nuclear family with 2.3 children became the hegemonic standard which every subsequent generation of Americans would either aspire to or rebel against. In this era of supposed conformity, millions of Americans embraced a story of parenting that not only thumbed its nose at the conservative “family values” agenda of the time but made avatars of those values the villains of the story.
And in a time where heterosexual conformity was policed like never before but a visible queer culture was starting to come together in the “gay ghettos” of big cities, Auntie Mame presented a heroic main character who while not queer herself, was an identifiable part of the emerging queer culture. It was mainstream culture’s introduction to the developing gay sensibility of camp, and it celebrated a lifestyle of sophistication and open-mindedness, where the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of justice are not just complementary but intertwined.
“Exclusively what and restricted to whom?”
The first major conflict between Mame and Mr. Babcock concerns, appropriately enough, education. On the one hand, this section is in many ways the most dated part of both the book and film, for reasons that will become obvious. But on the other hand, this satire of the New York private school scene circa 1929 is oddly prescient for our current moment.
Mame and Babcock make their way through a book of New York private schools, with Babcock suggesting conservative, “exclusive and restricted” prep schools of varying degrees of stuffiness (“exclusively what and restricted to whom?” Mame replies), while Mame counters with a series of progressive, experimental schools that are “generations ahead of...Montessori,” and that are clearly run by kooks and con artists of various levels of sincerity and competence.
Eventually, Mame just straight up lies to Babcock and says she will enroll Patrick in a conservative prep school but instead enrolls him in her friend’s experimental school “in the Village.”2 The school is a ridiculous mashup of Montessori-style hippy dippy schooling and pop Freudianism, most notable for the fact that class is conducted with both students and teachers completely in the nude. In other words, it is pretty much what the average contemporary Fox News viewer thinks happens at a Drag Story Hour.
While the comedic appeal of a nudist school has aged poorly,3 in general the Greenwich Village school is a brilliant satire of both the eternal silliness of woo woo lefty trends and the lurid fears of mainstream Americans of what “Greenwich Village” represented. Modern audiences often recoil at the nudist school for good reason, but for some reason are not as bothered by the open racism of the conservative schools (“exclusively what and restricted to whom?”), because of course a private school in the 1920s is super racist.
Inevitably, Babcock eventually learns of the scheme and Patrick is packed off to a boarding school in Massachusetts, with Mame only getting him on summer and Christmas vacations. From this point forward, Mame’s influence of Patrick’s education will be strictly extracurricular, and he will be pulled between Mame’s aesthetic and political open mindedness and Babcock’s white bread conservatism. But, as Mame says early in the book, “you could learn more in ten minutes in my drawing room than you did in ten years with your father.” And so Mame’s bohemian world, of seeing plays both on Broadway and in tiny experimental theaters, of literary teas with society ladies and boozy parties with “Mr. Benchley,” of art openings and shopping sprees, becomes Patrick’s second classroom. One of the first things Mame does is give Patrick a notepad and tell him to write down all of the words he hears at her parties to expand his vocabulary:
One, dated July 14, 1929, features such random terms as Bastille Day, Lesbian, Hotsy-Totsy Club, gang war, Id, daiquiri--although I didn’t spell it properly--relativity, free love, Oedipus Complex--another one I misspelled--mobile, stinko--and from here on my spelling went wild--narcissistic, Biarritz, psychoneurotic, Shonberg, and nymphomaniac.
This passage has always stuck with me because I remember the lists of words I didn’t know that I would keep as a teenager and college student. I was raised in the exact opposite of Mame’s drawing room and always self-conscious about my lack of sophistication. My cultural knowledge came through books and movies and TV, and I always wanted an Auntie Mame who could help show me the way. But I lacked mentors or role models like Mame.
“Aryan from Darien”
The battle for Patrick’s soul between Babcock’s conservatism and Mame’s liberalism climaxes with his engagement to the blonde, empty-headed WASP Gloria Upson. The sequence is set in 1939; Mame is closely following news from Europe of the war and Patrick wants a quick engagement so he can marry Gloria before he is drafted.
Dennis’ introduction of Gloria’s family is one of the great comedic sequences of the novel, showing his razor-sharp social satire:
The Upsons lived the way every family in America wants to live--not rich, but well-to-do. They had two of everything: two addresses, the flat on Park [Avenue] and a house in Connecticut; two cars, a Buick sedan and a Ford station wagon; two children, a boy and girl; two servants, man and maid; two clubs, town and country; and two interests, money and position.
Mrs. Upson had two fur coats and two chins. Mr. Upson also had two chins, two passions--golf and business--and two aversions, Roosevelt and Jews.
At first, Patrick puts the onus on Mame to conform. In a scene that will be familiar to any queer person who has been asked to “tone it down” for the comfort of the straights around them, Patrick says “the Upsons just aren’t like us” and “they don’t have to know about all your queer friends on Fire Island.” To which Mame gives a classic drag queen retort:
Should they know that I think you’ve turned into one of the most beastly, bourgeois, babbity little snobs on the Eastern Seaboard, or will you be able to make that quite clear without any help from me?
But Mame tries to be on her best behavior at first. She can gamely put up with the Upsons’ faux Colonial interior decorating and overly sweet cocktails, but things inevitably come to a head over the possibility of a Jewish couple buying the house next door to the Upsons. In the book, Mr. Upson’s antisemitism is explicit and ugly, with him eventually claiming he will form a lynch mob to keep Jews out of his town.4 Mame replies:
“Claude,” Auntie Mame said quietly, “do you realize that at this very moment a maniac in Germany named Adolf Hitler is talking just the way you are now?”
In the book, this sequence is the strongest and clearest statement of Mame’s intertwined aesthetic and political liberalism. The Upsons are tacky and boring and are also close-minded bigots. They are tacky and boring because they are close-minded bigots and they are close-minded bigots because they are tacky and boring. The two are inseparable. It is both an aesthetic and political imperative that she prevent Patrick from becoming an “Aryan from Darien.”
This conflict is also present in the film, but in a more muted form. The reference to Mame’s friends on Fire Island is gone, with the 1950s Hollywood Production Code shielding audiences from direct mention of homosexuality in the same way Patrick wants to shield the Upsons. But Mr. Upson’s antisemitism is still there, though less explicit, as he only complains about the house next door being bought by “a fella named Epstein.” Epstein happens to be a classical musician that Mame knows, and again the aesthetic and political are intertwined. She can’t believe the Upsons’ close-minded antisemitism could make them not want “all of that beautiful music right next door.”
From there, the explicit politics of the book is replaced with slapstick. Determined to break up Patrick and Gloria, Mame invites the Upsons to a dinner party at her house, which has been turned into a modernist funhouse and stocked with all of her eccentric chosen family. Mame tortures the Upsons all evening with a camp parody of a dinner party featuring rattlesnake hours d'oeuvres, flaming cocktails, and a Bauhaus-meets-Rube Golberg contraption for a couch. Much like the nudist school, it is an over-the-top parody of “free thinking.”
But even the film version of Mame doesn’t leave politics out of it entirely, as her final prank is announcing her donation to support the Epstein House in Connecticut, which is to become an orphanage for Jewish war refugees. Remember again that this scene, in which Mrs. Upson literally faints at the idea of living next door to a home for Jewish refugee children, takes place in 1939 but is being watched for the first time by audiences in 1958. Even in its diluted form in the film, a question is being posed for its 1950s audience: which side of history are you on? This is another scene that echoes loudly in 2024, when the line between the mainstream Republican Party and open Nazis keeps getting blurrier.
The 1950s, or at least the popularly imagined version of it, sits at the center of modern right-wing Christian Nationalist philosophy, an era of nuclear families and God-fearing patriotism. But the success of Mame, which brought a camp sensibility that was being developed in postwar gay bars in Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s North Beach to a mainstream audience, shows a widespread discontent with this aura of conformity even at the time. Cultural histories often point to vanguard writers like the Beat poets at the earliest formulations of what would become the counterculture to enter the mainstream, but Mame was far more mainstream than On the Road or Howl ever were, and more clear-eyed in its politics of nonconformity as a way of building alternate family and community structures.
Modern attacks on Drag Story Hour are an expression of conservative fear of the Auntie Mame: a parent (or parental figure) who instead of upholding traditional ideas of family and gender and sexuality tries to do things differently. Because all conspiracy theories aside, there is a simple fact that those who attack Drag Story Hour always seem to skip over: the demand among parents and kids for these programs.
“Life is a Banquet”
As I discussed in a recent post for paid subscribers, I am currently reading Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States Since World War II by Daniel Winunwe Rivers and the first two chapters of this book focus on two divergent ideas of queer parenting in the era between the end of World War II and the Stonewall Riots. On the one hand, many queer people in this era faced enormous pressure to conform to the heterosexual, nuclear family ideal of the time and entered into marriages and had children while suppressing their queer identity, with many leading “double lives.” On the other hand, there was a small number of queer people (almost exclusively women) who raised children while living at least semi-openly in the emerging bohemian and queer enclaves like Greenwich Village. But these openly queer parents were rare and necessarily kept low profiles, so gay neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, and gay life more broadly, was generally seen as a child-free zone. The general perception was that a person could live a conventional heterosexual family life or be part of a queer community, but not both. And people who tried to do both were being dishonest and deceptive.
Auntie Mame and its author illustrate this dynamic. As I mentioned earlier, Auntie Mame was the first novel by “Patrick Dennis,” the pen name of Edward Everett Tanner III, who had previously published two novels as Virginia Rowans. Though he would later publish two more books as Rowans, the massive success of Mame in its various forms made “Patrick Dennis” a star, and he published over a dozen books as Dennis over the next 15 years, most of which were massive bestsellers until his popularity fell off in the late 60s.
Dennis (or should I say Tanner) was married with two kids, and by all accounts a loving and attentive father and husband. But he was also bisexual and a part of the burgeoning gay scene in 50s New York. The success of Mame only gave him more opportunity to join this world and he seemed to live the classic double life of many gay parents of this period: Edward Everett Tanner was a heterosexual family man while Patrick Dennis was at the center of gay artistic life in Greenwich Village. The idea that Tanner could be a bisexual who was both a father and part of a queer community at the same time did not seem to occur to anyone, least of all Tanner himself.
But in Mame Dennis, Tanner created a fantasy of a queer parent who could be both things at once. Auntie Mame is a devoted parent and also part of a vibrant queer community. She teaches a set of values that is at odds with the conventional wisdom and prevailing prejudices of the day but is also intellectually and morally consistent. She is not a perfect parent (the nudist school really was a bad idea), but her way of doing things is more ethical, more educational, and also just more fun than the alternative. And conventional heterosexual life is exposed as both morally corrosive and dreadfully boring.
And again we come back to why queer parenting is such a threat to small-minded bigots, be they Claude Upson or Charlie Kirk. Because it presents that “attractive alternative” Michael Bronski identified. This is why they need to use school vouchers and charter school scams to build schools that are “exclusive and restrictive.” This is why they want to erase LGBTQ+ people from public life, like Patrick telling Mame not to mention her friends from Fire Island. This is why they hate art and culture of any kind that is not pure propaganda, because appreciating music by a Jewish musician might make you realize how stupid, self-defeating, and immoral antisemitism is.
The commercial success of Auntie Mame in the 50s shows the discontent that was already growing with postwar conservatism. And its continued legacy and presence in queer culture provide an inspiration for rethinking what family is and creating a mode of queer parenting that does not just replicate all of the limitations of hetero parenting. It presents a view of parenting that is both politically engaged and pleasure-centric.
In insisting family life and queer life were not incompatible, and in putting forth a philosophy of parenting that encouraged open-minded exploration and rejection of bigotry, Mame embodies her most iconic line: “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.”
Tanner had published two previous light romantic novels under the pen name Virginia Rowans. Auntie Mame was the debut novel of his “Patrick Dennis” persona. And if you think a man who had a drag nom de plum might indicate he was “in the family,” let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
In both the 1920s (when the scene is set) and the 1950s (when Mame debuted), Greenwich Village was known as the most famous bohemian neighborhood (and “gay ghetto”) in the world.
This is of course barely exaggerated. The history of antisemitic housing restrictions in Connecticut towns like the Upsons’ is so well-known it has its own Wikipedia page.