Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 is gay. It is not, or at least not only, a satire about absurdity and war. It is a novel about love, madness, entrails, and death — the four most gayest things. Here are the opening lines of Catch 22, which I think might be my favourite opening lines which have ever been written:
“It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the Chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”
It’s so beautiful. When I opened that book, that chapter, up as a bisexual idiot at the age of 15 or was it 18 I felt an instant sense of wonder and connection to Yossarian. I, too, would have certainly fallen in love with that chaplain. The next few pages make it very clear that this affection is not a joke and, moreover, that it is reciprocated:
“The chaplain flushed again and gazed down at his hands. He was a slight man of about thirty-two with tan hair and brown, diffident eyes. His face was narrow and rather pale. And innocent nest of pimple-pricks lay in the basin of each cheek. Yossarian wanted to help him.”
There is something extraordinarily skillful in this subtle rendering of attraction and it feels so true and familiar. I guess what I’m trying to say is… he’s just like me for real.
Then a little later they have this little exchange:
“I’ll come and see you tomorrow.”
“Please do that,” Yossarian said.
“I’ll only come if you want me to,” the chaplain said shyly, lowering his head. “I’ve noticed that I make many of the men uncomfortable.”
Yossarian glowed with affection. “I want you to,” he said. “You won’t make me uncomfortable.”
Are you kidding me right now???? I make many of the men uncomfortable! Oh but you won’t make me uncomfortable! Everybody shut up this is so fucking gay!!!
Okay, okay, I am going to addend something a bit more difficult and interesting: in fact this is lesbian flirting. Come on, imagine it. You could slip this dialogue right into the centre of Portrait of a Lady On Fire (2019) and it would fit right in. And, but, relatedly, there’s this perfectly equal blend of masculine and feminine tendencies and devotions in this interaction. Yossarian wants to help the chaplain — that’s a female attraction instinct (sorry boys, but it’s true). But from that urge, he pursues the chaplain, who blushes and demurs at these advances — this, too, is female, and the way the chaplain is physically described is coded female as well. Then in the action of advancing his affections, Yossarian almost reads as male again, only not quite; and while the chaplain’s initial reticence towards Yossarian and his abrupt, businesslike questions initially put him in the more male position, the way he is coaxed to intimacy by Yossarian’s affections undoes this entirely. On the other hand, maybe I’m wrong, maybe none of this is even remotely gendered in any way. But that would make it even more gay, precisely because of that.
I don’t understand why we don’t talk about this novel as gay. I have searched high and low in vain over the years for what should be a large corpus of serious essays or reports suggesting other people find it as gay as I do, as gay as it obviously is. I found one book which apparently argues that Catch 22 is Gilgamesh and thus gay, which is an excellent point, but man I had to search for it. I also found, with some digging, a lit crit article about Catch 22 as an example of “innocent homosexuality” which I guess we would now call homoromanticism. But these examples are esoteric. The only people online really talking about this are on fucking stackexchange, which at this point, one can only infer is a last bastion of internet humanity along with Ao3, GitHub and Wikipedia (don’t fucking at me).
It’s true that the chaplain’s role and station is a big part of what Yossarian feels for him; he’s never met a chaplain, he says so several times, and it is to some extent it’s this that makes Yossarian feel so ecstatic. But if we discount attraction based on role or station as being necessarily inauthentic then I fear we may not have many heterosexuals left.
And anyway just go and read the dialogue and the description. It’s gay as shit! Later on in the intro, talking to Dunbar, Yossarian describes the chaplain as “sweet”. And yes Yossarian may be an unreliable character prone to lie and exaggerate (and so should he) the emotion here reads as terribly sincere. He glowed with affection; who fucking glows with affection? It’s gay as! The chaplain is then largely absent from Yossarian’s journey until he arrives again at the very end to set Yossarian free, like a meekly avenging angel, waltzing with Danby before threatening ineffectually to beat him up to give time for Yossarian to get away. The love of the chaplain saves Yossarian in this story. Gay gay gay gay gay.
There is simply no reason not to read all of this seriously unless we are approaching the text with the certitude that there can be nothing gay in it. This, I think, is where the friction is. Nobody else says Catch 22 is gay, so it can’t be gay; it can’t be gay, so these passages must be a joke even though there is literally zero indication of anyone joking and the narration is no more ironic and humorous than it is in the rest of the book; nevertheless I must be misreading it because nobody else agrees; I am embarrassed to be so out of tune with others so I will say nothing of my feelings; the paradox itself is Catch-22-ish, and like an interlocking system of gear wheels turning over the next reader is slotted into the quandary and we go a solid 62 years not collectively realising that Catch 22 is fucking gay.
Alright.
Okay, I admit: a proper reading of Catch 22 would pitch Yossarian as bisexual. He is filled with affection for women as well as men, although a lot of his sexual interactions are not erotic and instead played for hijinks, though not always.1 But still. I think his expansive feeling, his pansexuality, is an essential part of him (I don’t much care to make a distinction between the prefixes bi and pan here). Yossarian is full of desire and love; he thirsts; he wants to be alive, that’s what makes him so crazy. That’s what makes him different, and makes his life so hard. He does not want to give up. Burdened by his love and agency, yet when he is about to escape at the end, Danby, witness to his quandary, says: ‘Wouldn't it be nice if they could disappear us the way they disappeared the others and relieve us of all these crushing burdens?' Yossarian says no.
I suppose really I am using the term “gay” as an umbrella term for all homoaffection, of any kind, of any depth, mingled or unmingled with affection for others. And I will continue to do so! Friendship is gay, football is gay, Lord of the Rings is gay, the military is gay, reddit and 4chan are gay, Kolmogorov was gay which makes probability gay, the ancient greeks were gay, Michelangelo was gay, Sontag was gay which means criticism is gay, all paradox is gay, Turing was gay so computers are gay, music is certainly gay and finally so are seafaring, islands and poetry.2 Diana Souhami wrote the excellent biography of Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe, because she said that to be a lesbian in society felt like being marooned on an island. Semi-relatedly, I have zero sympathy for the idea that applying the label gay to things in the past is anachronistic — if it were, then to think of historical people as straight or heterosexual would also be anachronistic, and you don’t see people vociferously insisting we can’t imply anyone before 1969 was straight.
I’m not even necessarily insisting Yossarian wants to fuck men (though let’s be real, he does, whatever). What I’m insisting on is that he loves men, and we have no textual reason to think he wouldn’t fuck them. We are imposing that assumption on the text for ourselves. After all, he has this dream about holding a live fish in his hand. I apologise if it’s not immediately obvious to you but this dream is gay. Get with the program. And anyway he says that his fish dream is a sex dream, and then he says that another man’s dream about having violent sex with a woman is “a fish dream”, to which Major Sanderson, obviously representing heterosexuality as a concept, recoils “as if he had been slapped”.
Meanwhile, the chaplain sees Yossarian naked in the tree, a vision, a body, hallucination, revelation; the chaplain’s time on the island can be divided into before and after Yossarian, who keeps the chaplain “in an ambiguous state of enjoyable trepidation” with his antics; when he gets hurt, the chaplain dreams that his own wife and children are hurt too.
There truly is an ambient homoaffectionate queerness in the novel, and not just because it’s about being in the military. The reminders are constant; the symbolism is everywhere. There is the naked male body appearing to the chaplain in his visions. My boys on stackexchange all agreed that the body the chaplain sees is Yossarian, and although this managed to escape me in my own reading, I went back and checked it and they are right. Living men are often portrayed as “giggling”. Milo and Yossarian sitting in a tree, stroking the branches affectionately (look it up!!). Yossarian is naked in the tree that time too; that’s what’s in the vision.
Now you may say well it was a different time. Giggling during World War 2 was considered very manly and het. Alright, I fucking dare you to find me contemporaneous sources of robust, hetero-masculine giggling. Bring me the references. If I’m wrong I’d like to drown in them.
There is occasionally an argument that one should not parse substantial same-gender affection as gay because we do not want straight men anywhere to feel in any way more reticent than they already are to express their affections and emotions to each other. That’s fair enough but I consider this to be straight men’s business and not mine. Anyway if straight men (and women) anywhere would get over their fear of being gay, or just a little gay, or understanding love as an entirely too amorphous and esoteric thing to ever really fit into a category, then we would not have this nor a good deal many other problems. However, that issue is in the 101 level curriculum. We are in the advanced class here.
Anyway I promise you I am using the term gay expansively. I want you, reading this, to feel included. Yes, Steven Yeun and the Second City sketch was right: you are gay. There’s also even a way in which wanting to please women too sincerely reads as gay in men —
has an excellent essay about this in the context of Richard Gere’s performance in American Gigolo (1980). So I hope this will do to assure you that by saying a thing is gay I am not saying it is not heterosexual. (It is not, however, straight; there is a distinction.) And I am not saying heterosexuals cannot and do not have access to it. They do.Let’s get back to Catch 22. I guess my point is that this ambient gayness— neither explicitly remarked upon nor subject to any attempts to hide it — is entirely related that Yossarian’s core identity as a rebel and a truant, a “collector of good questions”, incisive, transgressive, willing to lie rather than go mad, willing to feign any illness or defect to get out of his apparent duty to die at others’ behest. Yossarian is cursed to be serious. He alone, or almost alone, sees through the farce of the social order. He alone understands the sick futility of obeying the rules. He seeks pleasure, he seeks meaning, he seeks escape. And the narration is supporting him and egging him on at every turn. Just read it; it is not subtle. The world is wrong. Yossarian is right.
And therefore what else is so accessible about Yossarian is that he is rightly a portrait of confusion, rage and frustration.
“'Danby, must I really let them send me home?' Yossarian inquired of him seriously.
Major Danby shrugged. 'It's a way to save yourself.'
'It's a way to lose myself, Danby. You ought to know that.'
'You could have lots of things you want.'
'I don't want lots of things I want,' Yossarian replied.”
To see that being sent home means that you will lose yourself is gay. Rebelling against not just the social order but the part of yourself that wants to be sent home to it is even gayer. Or more bisexual. Whatever, you get my drift.
It is also very important, and I must do my duty to my fellow bisexuals to mention it, that Yossarian is a wise-aleck little shit:
'Where were you born?' The fat, gruff colonel reminded Yossarian of the fat, gruff colonel who had interrogated the chaplain and found him guilty. Yossarian stared up at him through a glassy film. The cloying scents of formaldehyde and alcohol sweetened the air.
'On a battlefield,' he answered.
'No, no. In what state were you born?'
'In a state of innocence.'
This type of line seems pat to us now, but it still goes, folks. And anyway, I suspect this text is where it came from.
So far so good. Yossarian is a bisexual, a rebel and a truant. You probably agree, even if not logically, that something like this is going on at the vibes level. But the real proof of all of this, and the real thesis of the novel, lies in Snowden. His secret, as Yossarian put it, is buried in his guts. (Gay).
I cannot overstate the importance of Snowden to the meaning of this novel. His wide-open body is the apex of the narrative, his death its horrendous ecstatic peak; Snowden, who is introduced to us as dead, who dies it seems a thousand times between the pages, whose death we witness again and again. I submit to you that there is no scene in literature more poignant, more beautiful, and more emblematic of tenderness, grief and love than the scene in which Snowden dies in Yossarian’s arms, and we, like Yossarian, relive it many times. (Again, I feel I must say this is particularly lesbian; but here I will not elaborate.) This scene and this scene alone is what the book is about, and everything around it exists purely to support it.
In fact Catch 22 is so fundamentally about guts and death that it cannot help but be inherently homosexual, in the same way that it is inherently feminine to make art about the void. That’s right folks, here and now, in the fond and excellent tradition of Leo fucking Bersani, I am going to carry the banner for his claim that gay sex, entrails, and death are deeply involved with one another. And there is no text in our history that does any better than Catch 22 at exploring guts and death.
If this sounds speculative to you then you really should definitely read Bersani’s excellent and maybe even mind-blowing 1987 essay “Is the rectum a grave?” And if you haven’t already, let me set it up for you, here is the first line:
“There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it.”
This observation is actually everywhere in Catch 22. There’s even this incredible aside:
“The colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him.”
Later in history, on twitter,
reformulated this as:Hey, you know who else would agree with this? Milan Kundera! I found him quoted, through one of his stories, by
here:“Nowadays hedonists no longer exist… […] [People] are eager for admiration and not for pleasure. For appearance and not for reality. Reality no longer means anything to anyone. To anyone.”
The example Kundera (in character) gives is exactly aligned with Bersani. He says people would rather be seen about town with a beautiful woman than privately go to bed with her if given the choice. Insane, on the one hand — yet think further, and why wouldn’t they? Being seen with a woman is not risky (for men). When one is alone with her one worries about performance (that is universal).
Bersani explains on a more general front: most people of all sexualities feel the need to have — or appear to have — some form of sex regularly for identity reasons and for the accompanying sense of social power and desirability. But they often do not really enjoy that sex, because they are terrified to lose control of themselves, and their sense of respect for themselves along with it. People by and large treat their bodies and even their desires as if they are disgusting but necessary footsoldiers, subordinates to their will; then we all live in terror of an inevitable rebellion. You cannot enjoy sex that way. In fact there is no way to truly be connected to a bodily experience — or, any experience — while at the same time seeking to dominate or control the outcome of it, or even just the way you yourself appear within it. Genuine connection with anyone or anything is always the remission of control.
Bersani gleefully rubs our noses in this, pointing out that there is something deeply, almost obliteratingly vulnerable about sex if you are present with the loss of control inherent in it, something scary about being inside our treacherous bodies, shaking; I agree with this but I still don’t fully understand why this is except that maybe the body is terrifying purely because the body can be annihilated and die. And if I admit that I am in it, that I am the same thing as it, then I admit that when it goes it is taking me with it. And, as Bersani says, there is something gay in risking that destruction, something queer that driving towards obliteration anyway. Sex is gay. Bodies are gay. This is part of my wanting to assure you that I am invoking an extremely broad and expansive reading of the word gay. There is a sense in which gayness is simply the thing inside all of us which loves and does not submit to order.
There is actually something peculiarly Catch-22-ish about parts of Bersani’s famous essay. Here is a striking aside, for example:
“Finally, the story that gave me the greatest morbid delight appeared in the London Sun under the headline "I'd Shoot My Son if He Had AIDS, Says Vicar!" accompanied by a photograph of a man holding a rifle at a boy at pointblank range. The son, apparently more attuned to his father's penchant for violence than the respectable reverend himself, candidly added, "Sometimes I think he would like to shoot me whether I had AIDS or not””
It almost reads like an addendum to Heller, right? The son sounds like the ghost of Yossarian! And so I’ll say it again, I simply don’t accept that Catch 22 is a satire. Heller is describing real fucking life! Just most of us are not ready to accept it.
This, all of this, above, is in fact the central secret Yossarian is circling around. And the final unspooled offering Snowden gives to him is this: the world wants to kill you, and no matter what happens, the world will do it, and you are going to die.
Listen to this (the final passage emphasis is mine):
“That was the secret Snowden had spilled to him on the mission to Avignon - they were out to get him; and Snowden had spilled it all over the back of the plane. There were lymph glands that might do him in. There were kidneys, nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There were tumors of the brain. There was Hodgkin's disease, leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer cell. There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of the lung, diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries. There were diseases of the head, diseases of the neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of the crotch. There even were diseases of the feet. There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe.”
Your own body, your flesh, your “fertile red meadows” (gay!!!), primes the site of your destruction even as it sustains it, and everybody fears it, and pretty much nobody ever wants to know.
So Leo Bersani was RIGHT.
When Yossarian finally lies down with Snowden I think it is some of the best-written stuff in the world:
“'I'm cold,' Snowden whimpered feebly over the intercom system then in a bleat of plaintive agony. 'Please help me. I'm cold.' And Yossarian crept out through the crawlway and climbed up over the bomb bay and down into the rear section of the plane where Snowden lay on the floor wounded and freezing to death in a yellow splash of sunlight near the new tailgunner lying stretched out on the floor beside him in a dead faint.”
And then later on Yossarian emerges — naked — with Snowden smeared all over him —
“Yossarian climbed down the few steps of his plane naked, in a state of utter shock, with Snowden smeared abundantly all over his bare heels and toes, knees, arms and fingers, and pointed inside wordlessly toward where the young radio-gunner lay freezing to death on the floor beside the still younger tailgunner who kept falling back into a dead faint each time he opened his eyes and saw Snowden dying.”
— and again, a little later on, revisiting it — and I don’t know how I didn’t notice before that there is a sensibility here that we would now associate with David Lynch, a sense of returning helplessly to the thing you’re trying to get away from, returning only to be struck down with terror again, a portrait of PTSD before we had a name for it —
“And Yossarian crawled slowly out of the nose and up on top of the bomb bay and wriggled back into the rear section of the plane - passing the first-aid kit on the way that he had to return for - to treat Snowden for the wrong wound, the yawning, raw, melon-shaped hole as big as a football in the outside of his thigh, the unsevered, blood-soaked muscle fibers inside pulsating weirdly like blind things with lives of their own, the oval, naked wound that was almost a foot long and made Yossarian moan in shock and sympathy the instant he spied it and nearly made him vomit.”
This, too, is gay; shock and sympathy; yawning, raw. The muscle fibres inside pulsating weirdly; the oval, naked wound. Again —
“Yossarian was stunned at how waxen and ghastly Snowden's bare leg looked, how loathsome, how lifeless and esoteric the downy, fine, curled blond hairs on his odd white shin and calf. The wound, he saw now, was not nearly as large as a football, but as long and wide as his hand and too raw and deep to see into clearly. The raw muscles inside twitched like live hamburger meat.”
Imagine “lifeless and esoteric” as a description of a man’s fine blond leg hair. Now realise we live in the same world as that description. Good lord.
I guess now you see, there really isn’t all that much erotic content in Catch 22, except, of course, for every god damn time we reiterate this death scene. In fact I think there’s a particularly beautiful and romantic moment the next time we revisit the passage:
“Snowden quivered when Yossarian pressed against him gently to turn him up slightly on his side. 'Did I hurt you?’”
COME ON.
“Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden's flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden's insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out. A chunk of flak more than three inches big had shot into his other side just underneath the arm and blasted all the way through, drawing whole mottled quarts of Snowden along with it through the gigantic hole in his ribs it made as it blasted out. Yossarian screamed a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes. His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here was God's plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared - liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes and turned away dizzily and began to vomit, clutching his burning throat.”
These passages are so powerful, so much more affecting than anything else in the entire novel, that sometimes it seems that the theme of being matter and viscera and undigested food in death is at odds or at least orthogonal to the theme of regimented idiotic social order.
But really the two themes are interlocking.
What is the social order’s function in our lives? To hide the fact that we are meat. Don’t misunderstand me: there are good reasons to impose order over chaos. But why cling with naive rigidity to the order we’ve imposed — why act like it’s immutable, not constructed? It’s because if we accept that we have ourselves constructed it then we will realise it cannot ultimately protect us. It is no more powerful than we are, it is from us that these rules draw their power and strength, and it will never be the other way around.
The rules can die just as we can die, and the rules do not protect us. I think this fear of understanding and accepting the truth of our own mutual co-construction — to put it another way, the truth that there is nothing more sacred than people — is nothing but transmuted fear of death.
In fact I think this is actually behind people’s weird responses first to the gay rights movement and now to the trans movement questioning the structures of gender. Who gives a shit what other people call themselves or ask you to call them or what they do in their bedrooms or on street corners? What does it have to do with you? Well, it has everything to do with you if you feel like it threatens the rules, and the rules are the thing that make you feel a sense of continuity, which in turn makes you feel like in some sense you are not going to die.
People want to feel that heterosexuality and cisgender norms are a world order that exists outside of themselves, an empirical finding rather than a definition, a natural law, immutable; to feel this way is soothing. It relieves people of the knowledge that they have made a choice to comply with a certain order — we all hate to be reminded of our choices, to feel our own share in the responsibility for what happens to us, the yoke of our own agency in our lives. And gender anchors people to something that they feel can define them, relieving them of the burden of needing to define themselves. That is why, or can be why, it destroys people to feel that gender, like all forms of social classification, like all attempts to impose order on the chaos of nature, really only has the powers we imbue it with. If gender or for that matter heterosexuality was truly an immutable natural order, then it could not be threatened or destroyed. But it can be. Because, just like us, it was born, and it can die.
We all understand that in the end we will be consumed again by that chaos we come from; that there is nothing we can do but join with it, submit to and receive it. The question is whether we will first submit to this knowledge. When we do accept it, then we can be transformed by it.3 But some of us will do anything to avoid it.
Catch 22 is explicitly about this question, and the avoidance of this truth. Yossarian describes Snowden spilling his guts all over him and dying as literally “spilling his secret” — the secret of his humanity, the weakness we all share. It reads for a lot of the novel as if this fact is closeted, and it is closeted, in a way, by the system, and by ordinary life. The fact that you and I are just matter, that we may die in our own cars or by falling down the stairs, and that if while chopping cloves of garlic for dinner you unexpectedly turned 45 degrees to the right and ran your companion through with the knife you are holding they would simply die and there’s no secret spiritual force that protects us all from that, is as closeted as anybody can be, as quiet and as muffled as the grave. And because you and all the people around you are going to die, your choices matter. Maybe nothing is more serious than this.
Having been, for himself, forced — by Snowden’s wet insides — to confront this truth and undergo its howling alchemy, the novel can only end with Yossarian rejecting the status quo’s bargain.4 Running away, which is a real act of courage and that’s why they’re always accusing you of cowardice if you do it, is symbolically blessed by the presence of the chaplain who appears again, here, in the final scene of the novel, to set him free.
'So long, Chaplain. Thanks, Danby.'
'How do you feel, Yossarian?'
'Fine. No, I'm very frightened.'
'That's good,' said Major Danby. 'It proves you're still alive. It won't be fun.'
Yossarian started out. 'Yes it will.'
'I mean it, Yossarian. You'll have to keep on your toes every minute of every day. They'll bend heaven and earth to catch you.'
'I'll keep on my toes every minute.'
'You'll have to jump.'
'I'll jump.'
'Jump!' Major Danby cried. Yossarian jumped. Nately's whore was hiding just outside the door. The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.
Escaping the status quo all alone, beautiful? Of course you are. But you need other men’s help to do it.
Gay.
Another great quote from the book: “He throbbed and ached with sorrow, fear and desire as he stared at her; she was so beautiful.” GAY (lesbian).
Because Sappho.
The ability to accept this, and the resulting transformation, is sometimes called enlightenment.
“'But why, Yossarian? It's a very good deal they're offering you.'
'It's a lousy deal, Danby. It's an odious deal.'
'Oh, dear,' Major Danby fretted, running his bare hand over his dark, wiry hair, which was already soaked with perspiration to the tops of the thick, close-cropped waves. 'Oh dear.'
'Danby, don't you think it's odious?'
Major Danby pondered a moment. 'Yes, I suppose it is odious,' he conceded with reluctance. His globular, exophthalmic eyes were quite distraught. 'But why did you make such a deal if you didn't like it?'
'I did it in a moment of weakness,' Yossarian wisecracked with glum irony. 'I was trying to save my life.’”
This is such a beautiful piece of writing, I love your exploration of gayness/queerness and your exploration of the characterisation of identity as discrete. It is often perceived that queerness is somehow a recent phenomenon, a comtemporary affliction (by those who reject it). I think your writing does a fantastic job of looking at how queerness has always been there in writing and other artistic expression in times gone by - if one only looks close enough to identify it. Thank you for this lovely and beautiful peice!
This is incredible. I shared it with several friends immediately.