The Queerness of Textual Spaces: Critical Uncertainty and the Homoerotics of Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan’s three major texts, Autobiography of an Idea, Democracy, A Man-Search, and Kindergarten Chats together delineate a textual space wherein Sullivan works through the central preoccupations of his intellectual life: democracy, architecture, the influence of nature on each, and the importance of education to perfecting both. These texts also reveal another preoccupation—with the beauty of the male body, whose heroic stature becomes a metaphor for democracy and architecture both. In Autobiography of an Idea, Sullivan repeatedly describes the beautiful bodies of men in terms that are clearly erotic; in his other texts, he translates such homoeroticism to anthropomorphized descriptions of both skyscrapers and American democracy, regularly using terms like virile and masculine, describing both as having "vital thrust," being "proud and soaring thing[s]" while always "rushing out with outward and upward motion." Such descriptions caused a level of discomfort among architectural historians who made one of two responses, either ignoring the images entirely or responding with a homophobic discomfort.

My research interrogates the secondary scholarship on Sullivan’s life and textual production suggesting that the subtext of many of these critical responses is homophobic. Critical discomfort at the homoerotic elements of Sullivan’s texts surfaces in secondary sources as "closeted" allusions to Sullivan’s possible homosexuality or descriptions of his unconvincing heterosexuality. And although early secondary texts never directly mention the architect’s sexuality, they do present a picture of Sullivan that is highly feminized. This feminized language, which is always derogatory in architectural studies, represents the uncertainty of early historians responding to homoerotic texts. It is significant, though, that this uncertainty remains long after historians established Sullivan’s canonical position. My research traces both the homoerotics of Sullivan’s texts and the uncomfortable critical response to that element in those texts.

My methods are mainly rhetorical; this is a rhetorical analysis project wherein I provide a close reading of a range of primary and secondary texts, beginning with Sullivan’s own texts. In addition, I reread secondary texts, considering the ways in which Sullivan’s sexuality is portrayed, rarely openly, usually with discomfort. This is part of a larger book project on gender/sexuality and architectural autobiography. I'm comparing three architectural autobiographers who were (nearly) contemporaries: Frank Lloyd Wright, a hyper-straight man; Marion Mahony Griffin, a mostly straight (but cross-dressing) woman; and Sullivan, a closeted gay man. I discuss how the reception of their texts in secondary sources always depicts uneasiness about the gender/sexuality of all but Wright. (Although Wright’s hyper-masculinity, perhaps the most bizarre of these constructs of sexuality, is never mentioned, interrogated or questioned.)

Abstract sources

Sullivan Index