This essay explores how the Cold War conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union led to a tremendous reorganization of how Americans thought about identity, especially queer identity. The author discusses the activism of homosexual organizers who worked against state repression and then traces the shifting ways Cold War-era novels, plays, and poetry take up the subject of queerness and re-imagine the social possibilities for the homosexual citizen. The work of Tennessee Williams, Patricia Highsmith, and James Baldwin portrays same-sex desire as a social problem and records an overwhelming anxiety about the characters who are aligned with such desires. Later texts by writers such as Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga situate same-sex desire as a means of radical critique and as a site of connection. They make legible the active repression of gender and sexual nonconformity. This essay illustrates how ideas of queer freedom arise and transform in the shadow of repression.

Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure on stage as conductor, composer, pianist, and media persona, and off stage, too, in his physicality, sociality, charisma, and sensuous engagement with the world. His artistic and celebrity status granted wide berth to Bernstein’s ‘bohemian’ sexual and relationship practices, but he was not exempt from contemporary social expectations and anxieties. Indeed, Bernstein’s life and career illustrate the pivotal effects of twentieth-century sociosexual norms and homophobia on US musical modernism. A gay man in a heterosexual marriage, Bernstein was both a victim and beneficiary, and a sometime agent, of homophobia. In Bernstein the forces of twentieth-century homophobia converged with talent, ambition, and repression, yielding momentous results for his family, intimates, colleagues, and rivals, and for US and international arts and culture. Bernstein’s life and career were fatefully shaped by prevailing social forms and mores, and ultimately his social and cultural influence would contribute to their reshaping.