"There lived in the Land of Oz two queerly made men": Queer Utopianism and Antisocial Eroticism in L. Frank Baum's Oz Series.(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)(Critical essay)

The film version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz serves as a pop-culture icon of twentieth-century Western gay culture. (1) With Judy Garland as the star, its exaggerated characters of good and evil, and its Technicolor wonderland of vibrant colors and outlandish costumes, the film displays a queer sensibility that countless viewers adore. Today gay bars in New Orleans, Seattle, and Sweden bear the name Oz, and the iconic polychromatic flag of the gay community pays homage to the film's theme song, "Over the Rainbow." References to the film appear in numerous other artifacts of gay culture, such as in Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band when one character derides another's ostensible heterosexuality by declaring "he's about as straight as the Yellow Brick Road" (27). Daniel Harris documents the "canonic" nature of references to Oz in the oft-repeated catchphrase, "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore" (19), (2) which, for certain T-shirt incarnations, has been campily reformulated as "Aunt Em: Hate you! Hate Kansas! Taking the dog. Dorothy" (Gilman 127). Although numerous other cinematic classics--from Mildred Pierce to Mommie Dearest--display a queer sensibility that elevates them to the status of cultural touchstones in the gay community, The Wizard of Oz towers above the rest in terms of its iconic role in queer cinema's relationship to queer culture. (3) As Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin observe, "almost every viewer (queer or not) probably enjoys the film not for its sepia-toned representation of banal 'normality' but for its breathtaking creation of a Technicolor Oz, a land where difference and deviation from the norm are the norm" (Queer Images 68).

In this essay, however, I would like to trace the roots of Oz's queerness to its beginning as a series of children's fairy tales. (4) Queerness bears a double meaning in studies of children's literature, in that these fictions often depict a world where oddness--which can be understood as asexual queerness--is embraced as a chief narrative value. In other usages queerness carries a sexual denotation referring to sexual identities resistant to ideological normativity, and it is this confluence of asexual oddness with sexual non-normativity that I seek to uncover in the ensuing study. As Kenneth Kidd observes, "[M]any classics of Anglo-American children's literature are fundamentally homosocial, or concerned with same-sex friendships and family bonds. In retrospect, some of these classics seem decidedly queer" (14). In such a light, the Oz books merit a retrospective analysis to plumb their queer depths. Certainly, they display an antinormative sensibility in their celebration of the unique, the eccentric, and the downright peculiar, but antinormativity as oddness at times intriguingly merges with hints of sexual queerness, resulting in texts that subvert constructions of gender and sexuality from their supposedly normative foundations.

After exploring the thematic queerness of the Oz series in its queer-friendly messages of embracing oddness and in its construction as an antinormative utopia, I turn to the ways in which Baum's Oz books fundamentally reimagine procreation, heterosexuality, and erotic drives. If we see Oz as a queer utopia, as a haven from the drudgeries of heteronormative inculcation, it becomes apparent that this fairy kingdom threatens the very possibility of heterosexuality by revising the meanings of romance and erotic attachment. The Oz texts are thus particularly pertinent to contemporary queer theory, especially in regard to current debates addressing the tensions between utopianism and antisociality in the construction of queer culture and identity. (5) As an erotically antisocial queer utopia, Oz challenges the libidinal economy of heteronormative reproduction and highlights queer alternatives to expected forms of social organization.

The Queer Utopia of Oz

In terms of Baum's portrayal of Oz as a queer utopia, numerous characters, places, and even objects in the books are passingly described as queer. (6) Within the opening pages of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy meets the Munchkins, "the queerest people she had ever seen" (WWO 5), and she then finds the Scarecrow, who has a "queer, painted face" (9). (7) The four travelers to the Emerald City--Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion--comprise a "queer party" (18), and even Oz itself is queer: "So [Dorothy] told [the Scarecrow] all about Kansas, and how gray everything was there, and how the cyclone had carried her to this queer Land of Oz" (10). Of course, the queerness in these examples--and in the vast majority of other instances when queer is used as an adjective in the series--is decidedly asexual, and Baum typically uses the word in its connotative sense of odd, unconventional, and eccentric.

Oddness, however, can be difficult to tame, despite the ideological inflection of a given text. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley argue that in creating a piece of children's literature, authors inculcate children into an ideological system: "If writing is an act of world making, writing about the child is doubly so: not only do writers control the terms of the worlds they present, they also invent, over and over again, the very idea of inventing humanity, of training it and watching it evolve" (xiii). Within the genre of children's literature, oddness typically facilitates the creation of an upside-down world in which readerly expectations are tweaked but in which a return to ideological and cultural normativity is expected, as when Alice leaves Wonderland by waking up; the oddness of much children's literature thus appears congruent with theoretical conceptions of the carnivalesque, an overturning of social structures and decorum that stimulates momentary release from the status quo yet ultimately reinforces this status quo. (8) Umberto Eco posits that the return to normalcy after a carnivalesque eruption tames it of any revolutionary potential: "comedy and carnival are not instances of real transgressions: on the contrary, they represent paramount examples of law reinforcement" (6). Terry Eagleton makes a similar point, declaring that "[c]arnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as a revolutionary work of art. As Shakespeare's Olivia remarks, there is no slander in an allowed fool" (145-46).

From this perspective, it is apparent that the preponderance of odd and carnivalesque incidents in children's literature refer primarily to asexual issues and that the literature serves to interpellate children into heteronormative ideology; at the same time, oddness cannot always be contained within hermetically sealed and ideologically approved interpretations after being so promiscuously unleashed in a world of fantasy and wonder. For example, Kiki and Ruggedo, the primary antagonists of The Magic of Oz, consider mixing the shapes of several animals into a new hybrid creature. Kiki initially resists the idea, asking, "Won't that make a queer combination?" Ruggedo tersely replies, "The queerer, the better" (681). As with many of the other examples of queerness addressed in the ensuing analysis, these lines do not emphasize gender or sexuality, yet they highlight the fundamentally queer drive of children's literature in that it so frequently rejects the banal for the unique. "The queerer, the better" could serve as a slogan for children's literature that lionizes a topsy-turvy and carnivalesque social order. Even though such queerness in most instances takes on an outer appearance of asexuality, the Oz series highlights the ways in which asexual oddness bleeds into queer depictions of sexuality and gender. In a world that so frequently foregrounds oddness as a delightful and amusing alternative to normativity, it is difficult, then, to hinder queerness from influencing depictions of gendered identities. (9)