GLR September-October 2025

dry by another male artist who, engorged with his talent, be comes more successful, a nod to The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Indeed, German editions put Wilde’s face on the cover.) Lewisohn may have seen himself as victim when Viereck, hav ing used Lewisohn’s greater fame to gain attention, threw him over, leaving his lover bereft, and beginning a string of affairs with women that generally ended badly. While Lewisohn’s novels focused on “free love” (i.e., sex beyond marriage) of men and women, one could argue that it was really gay male love he was always seeking and never finding. That may be why his marriages (and most of his novels) failed. Championed by the likes of Theodore Dreiser, beginning in his first autobi ography, Upstream, Lewisohn began to cast himself messiani cally not just as a Jewish voice but as a martyr against American prudery in literary matters and its Victorian view of marriage and sex, but he remained silent about his same-sex erotic experiences. Viereck continued writing books and poems that teased his readers as he implied that bisexuality was the norm. His Con fessions of a Barbarian (1910) was followed in 1931 by My Flesh and Blood: A Lyric Autobiography, with Indiscreet An notations , which contained a very tame reference to Lewisohn, who would never mention Viereck in his forthcoming autobio graphical volumes. Each messianic in his causes, it’s almost as if they were trying to outdo the other in vying for the attention of the American public. While Lewisohn weighed in on the fate of Jews in Europe and Palestine and spun off a very Freudian interpretation of American literature (he began analysis with Freud but stopped fearing the loss of the conflicts that fueled his art), Viereck pub lished books and endless articles wondering, for instance, whether most Americans would become nudists (probably not), or if the young gay murderers Leopold and Loeb had been in a sadomasochistic relationship. He also cast himself as liberator and martyr to sexual and other freedoms, interviewing and be friending playwright George Bernard Shaw, the early gay rights researcher and advocate Magnus Hirschfeld (whom he called “the Einstein of Sex”), Einstein himself, and even Freud, who asked for his help in popularizing psychoanalysis. Nikola Tesla befriended him, but it was his interview with Adolph Hitler that was most fateful. Denying that he was an anti-Semite, Viereck nevertheless became enthralled with Nazism, not having learned from his support of Germany in World War I, when a mob of angry Americans had tried to lynch him. He was sentenced to two to six years in prison in 1942 for failing to register as an agent of a foreign government. Released by the Supreme Court, he was again imprisoned, even as Lewisohn authored Breathe Upon These (1944), one of the earliest novels of the Holocaust. (For getful of his same-sex affair with Viereck, Lewisohn had earlier concluded that the Nazi Party was “drenched” in homoeroti cism.) After his release, Viereck published Men into Beasts (1952), a very early gay pulp title. His tell-all book of life be hind bars, including frank and thus startling depictions of situ ational homosexuality (which he only witnessed, he claimed), became an underground bestseller. His earlier novel All Things Human (1949) revolved around an ostensibly straight man pon dering “Grecian love” of men while imprisoned, and later some what regretfully romancing women when free.

But try as he might, Viereck never regained the public’s at tention, as both he and his long-ago lover Lewisohn faded from view. Each fathered a son, both sons became poets, and both re pudiated their fathers rather publicly. Viereck’s son Peter, a Pulitzer-prize winner for poetry who far outshone his father’s early promise, argued against Nazism, and Lewisohn’s son James converted to Catholicism after going to prison for killing his wife (accidentally, he pleaded), following the plot of Lewisohn’s most famous novel. As if in a final act of one-up manship, Lewisohn died on Viereck’s birthday, the latter dying less than a decade later. After a burst of obituaries, both faded into obscurity—until a couple of biographers appeared. Lewisohn is the subject of a 1998 biography in two volumes by the scrupulously honest Ralph Melnick, who seems to have recorded his subject’s every thought and activity. Readers never would have guessed from any of Lewisohn’s writings (his Uran ian poems were not published) or reports about him that, while supposedly a Don Juan with women, he had had a male lover, a future supporter of Hitler, no less. Melnick writes frankly of their love and sex life, though he never seems to see it as other than an aberration, nor does he, in a very psychologically ori ented work, entertain the idea that Lewisohn’s constant and im possible positioning of women on pedestals, only to be disappointed, may have really stemmed from conflicted homo erotic inclinations. Neither the word homosexuality nor any of its synonyms appears in the index, however, making the search for queer content in its more than 1,000 pages difficult. Like so much queer scholarship, you have to know it’s there in the first place to find it. With Viereck, the much more “out” of the two, this infor mation is virtually impossible to find. He attracted two biogra phers—Elmer Gertz, author of Odyssey of a Barbarian (1979), and Niel M. Johnson, author of George Sylvester Viereck, Ger man-American Propagandist (1972). What with his lurid lyrics, his teasing references to male beauty, his professed attraction to Wilde and Whitman, and his frequent depictions of male-on malesex( All That is Human is included in Anthony Slide’s Lost GayNovels ), you’d think there would at least be a reference or two to Viereck’s homosexual tendencies. But astonishingly, these authors (certainly more prudish than their subject), who are not hesitant to call out his amorality, his narcissism, and his willfully ignoring the deaths of millions caused by the man he lionized, are incredibly shy about alluding to Viereck’s sexual ity. It’s as if they are afraid to besmirch a moral monster with the taint of being queer. This skittishness may reflect the times when their books were published, the 1970s—versus Melnick’s book on Lewisohn in 1998—but therein lies not just a lesson but a warning. Lewisohn and Viereck—once in love with each other and then each in love with the contrasting missions they tried to per sonify—covered up facts of their own lives to better represent their ideals. Each seemed incapable of realizing they had done anything morally perverse, but for historians to do the same, to hide things that make them uncomfortable, is inexcusable. Per haps we thought it was a thing of the past—queer lives neutered by writers’ own reticence on the subject—but it’s still going on and even accelerating with governmental approval. “Never again” applies not only to the Holocaust but also to enforced si lencing and denial of LGBT lives and stories.

TheG & LR

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