Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard by Roger Austen Read Free Book Online Page A

and a desire, by piling sin on sin, to punish God for not taking him at his own valuation and making him a priest." 39
In Stoddard's far sunnier Catholicism, which Rolfe would have considered self-deceiving, the spiritual and the carnal were happily wedded, without any sense that he was heaping sin upon sin. Publicly, of course, Stoddard seemed to conform to "the ideology of nonsexual Christian brotherhood," which "legitimized (nonphysical) intimacy between men by precluding the possibility that such intimacy could be defined as sexual." 40 As George Chauncey, Jr., has shown in regard to the Newport scandal of 1919 and 1920, in which Episcopal and other Protestant leaders leapt to the defense of a fellow clergyman accused by the United States Navy of "lewdness" in his ministry to sailors, the churchmen's stigmatizing of same-sexual acts, rather than individual disposi-

 

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tions, as "perverse" served to protect from suspicion those engaged in Christian devotion to youth. The navy's "inquiry had questioned the ideology of nonsexual Christian brotherhood that had heretofore explained their devotion to other men." The confrontation between the navy and the churches "represented fundamentally a dispute over the norms for masculine gender behavior and over the boundaries between homosociality and homosexuality in the relations of men." 41
For Stoddard's generation, the battle lines in this dispute had yet to be drawn so sharply, if at all. No clear boundary existed between "homosociality" and "homosexuality" except within the ideology of Christian brotherhood, which Stoddard radically revised to suit his temperament. When he agreed to take a position at Notre Dame, in fact, he cited his devotion to young men as one of his strongest credentials. To his mind, there was nothing hypocritical in extending the lay ministry of his pedagogical office to include physical love itself. Indeed, Stoddard imputed no wrong to himself but only to those, such as the clergy at Notre Dame, who objected to his same-sex relationships. "How foul these brothers are," he wrote in his diary, "how prone to think evil and poison the minds of the lads.'' 42 The "palpable embodiment" of love, after all, was his "meat and drink" (D 19 Jan. 1885)no less sacred to him than the spiritual sustenance of Holy Communion. With native boys and college lads alike, Stoddard felt that human love brought him only closer to the love of God. As the clerical defendant was to be described by his character witnesses during his 1920 Newport trial, so Stoddard could sincerely have characterized himself as "'an earnest Christian man [who] was much interested in young men.'" 43
Although some of Stoddard's sexual relationships were with young men, such as Frank Millet and Reginald Birch during the 1870s, his deepest and most sustained love affairs were pedophilic. As he once wrote in his notebook, "I thank God that I have no children of my own to worry me . . .  butO! how I long for those of others" (D 6 Oct. 1905). 44 In 1878, for example, Stoddard was employed as a male companion to young William Woodworth, fatherless scion of a wealthy San Francisco family, whom he took sailing off Monterey and botanizing in the Redwoods. (Woodworth was to become a distinguished naturalist and a professor at Harvard.) Stoddard later recalled his idyllic days with Willie, only the first of many youths to be dubbed his "Kid": "The Kid was the very thinga youngster with happiness in heart, luster in his eye, and nothing more serious than peach-down on his lip; yet there was

 

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gravity enough in his composition to carry him beneath the mere surface of men and things." In his way, Willie recalled the frontispiece etching of Whitman in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Stoddard wrote of a day when "The Kid" had returned from hunting rabbits with a glow of moonlight in his eyes, a sunset flush on his cheek, and "the riotous blood's best scarlet in his lips." The boy stood