The Living Room Mysteries: Patterns of Male Intimacy

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

Jungian analyst Graham Jackson’s follow-up study to The Secret Lore of
Gardening explores the ramifications of archetypal personality
patterning in gay male relationships. In his first book, Jackson
examined what he called the green–yellow dichotomy among gay men. In
The Living Room Mysteries, he turns his attention to the “homoeros”
of blue and red men. Whereas Jackson’s first study focused on
elemental experience, the author’s gaze has here shifted inward to an
examination of “householding” details.

Marshaling an impressive array of literary sources, from Virgil’s
Aeneid to Forster’s Maurice, as well as weaving engaging life
narratives of friends and those he has counseled, Jackson argues that
blue men are technically proficient, organized, and in love with
control, characteristics that Western society has deemed masculine. Red
men, contrariwise, embody the “aesthetic point of view,” the
feminine half of psychic wholeness.

Through a combination of theory and observation, Jackson deploys his
structural model to make a number of important observations on
contemporary gay male culture. His point, for example, that the gay
community is fractured by blue males’ homophobic rejection of
“effeminate” men must be taken seriously by all people—regardless
of their sexual orientation—who are interested in healing personal and
community fragmentation.

On the down side, I confess to doubting the ultimate social utility of
archetypal criticism. In a period of post-identity politics, when queer
activists are arguing for the destruction of ontological models of
gender and sexuality, the pragmatic value of essentialist criticism has
been called into question for its underlying support of the status quo.
Jackson seems to recognize the ultimately conservative liabilities of
his own methodology, for, midway through his study, he paradoxically
quotes David Halperin (one of the archconstructionists in queer studies)
as saying that sexuality is a “‘cultural production.’” This
brief self-deconstruction is immediately shut down, however, in favor of
Jackson’s guiding universalist thesis. But it is a telling slip, and
one that adds to my uneasiness regarding the ideological, normativizing
cover-up such a study requires.