American Jewish History

If Laura Z. Hobson (1900–1986) has any name recognition today, it is as the author of Gentleman's Agreement (1947), the quintessential anti-antisemitism novel of the post-World War II era, which became an Academy-Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck. What is far less well known is that a generation after her most famous novel was published, Hobson made a significant contribution to American gay literature. The story of Hobson's later career and turn to anti-homophobia has important implications for our understanding of postwar American Jews and the social protest novel in America.

Published in 1975, Hobson's seventh novel, Consenting Adult, told the story of Tessa and Ken Lynn, and their gay son, Jeff, who discloses his gay identity to his parents. In 1985, Consenting Adult became a popular made-for-television film, starring Marlo Thomas and Martin Sheen, who played the parents of a gay child; like the novel, the film portrayed these parents as admirable for their acceptance of their gay son.¹ And like Gentleman's Agreement, Consenting Adult was the kind of social message story suited for multiple media.

At a time when parents of gay children were beginning to organize—PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) was founded in 1973 in New York City—Consenting Adult reflected contemporary concerns about the specific challenges faced by parents of gay children.² As the anthropologist Kath Weston has noted, it was only in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the emergence of the gay rights movement that deliberately disclosing one's sexual identity to relatives became "structured as a possibility and a decision for self-identified lesbians and gay men in the United States."³ Prior to gay liberation, "coming out" [End Page 579] carried a different meaning, usually signifying "a person's entrance into the 'gay world,' which could involve frequenting a gay bar or revealing one's sexual identity to a few close friends who were also 'in the life.'"⁴ Until the 1970s, in other words, revealing gay identity in a heterosexual context was primarily associated with loss; the price of coming out to straight parents was assumed to include damage to, if not the demise of, personal relationships with straight family members, while potential gains seemed fraught and uncertain. By the time Consenting Adult was published in 1975, the idea that a new and positive relationship between parent and child could be forged in the wake of a child coming out was still new within mainstream culture. Hobson helped to make this idea more palatable through her popular novel. Hobson accomplished this, in part, as she had done in Gentleman's Agreement, by focusing on educated, liberal, upper middle-class characters, for whom readers felt an aspirational connection.⁵ She wrote the novel, moreover, at a moment when the cultural climate regarding sexuality was changing and greater openness in discussing subjects that had once been considered private was becoming the norm–what Rochelle Gurstein describes as the disappearance of a "reticence sensibility" among Americans.⁶ The postwar liberalism in which Gentleman's Agreement had landed and which that novel promoted through its portrayal of anti-antisemitism, had evolved, leading to a reconsideration of themes such as assimilation, religious and ethnic particularity, racism, and prejudice, in Hobson's 1975 novel.

In this essay, I examine how these two novels fit into Hobson's arc of writerly interests. The connection between these two topics can be broadly explained as Hobson's concern for marginalized groups in the US and their relationship to the liberalization of American culture. In the late 1940s, Jews were the first notable group in a series of marginalized [End Page 580] groups to be integrated into mainstream society. Members of the LGBTQ community would go through a parallel process of integration almost seventy years later. Historian David Sorkin refers to these post-WWII processes of equalization, which include the equalization of Catholics and African-Americans, as emancipation processes, suggesting that Jewish involvement in the fight for gay liberation was an extension of their own post-WWII...