Fall 2000
Volume 27, Number 1

With disarming candor, Ackerley's stories of sodomite intimacies examine how "the homosexual" emerges as a "species" in twentieth-century England. In particular, the late narratives for which Ackerley is most remembered--the memoirs My Dog Tulip (1956) and My Father and Myself (1968) and the novel We Think the World of You (1960)--test multiple boundaries as they revolve around a man-loving man and his canine bitch, united in their sexual frustrations. In one sense, these texts increasingly deprivatize the modern British gay man's sexual anguish by aligning it with that of his canine companion, two sorts of outlaws in parallel structures who, in Ackerley's mind, are searching for sex in a cold cultural climate. In England at midcentury (where and when the stories are set), laws outlawing human anal sex augmented a customary prudishness about animal sex in public, what Ackerley terms a "human conspiracy" against canine sex, indicating how dogs and gay men come to embody "sexual trouble" (MDT, pp. 149, 154). Starting from these strangely shared circumstances Ackerley persistently weaves a mature version of the boy-and-his-dog tale--"a fairy story for adults," as he coyly termed his novel (A, p. 261)--that transforms this special zone of cross-species intimacy, what Marjorie Garber terms, "dog love," into a powerful means of countering the pervasive puritan mindset.

Reading these narratives together, I trace a pattern in which Ackerley couples man love and dog love to exploit the slippage between sodomy and sodomite, between defining homosexual identity and marking "the public space of gay identity." Taken together, Ackerley's narratives of man-dog intimacies work not only to conceptualize canine agency as constitutively different from that of the human individual but also to launch a notion of sodomite culture founded on aesthetics of multiplicity rather than individuality. These narratives start with the gay man's fascination with marrying his bitch to a suitable dog-mate and self-consciously tweak such heteronormative euphemisms for canine sex. But Ackerley's work does not simply manifest his "conflicted response to the construction of identity through sexuality" (EE, p. 150). Together these texts walk the dog along a thin line between recording gay male sexual frustration and validating outlaw sex in forbidding circumstances, ultimately positioning human-animal intimacy as a means of transportation from liminality in a sexually repressive heterosexual culture to centrality in sexually promiscuous sodomite cultures.

Susan McHugh is Marion L. Brittain Fellow of Writing in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture and the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Animal Cultures: Animal Agency, Visual Culture, and Collective LIfe.