ABSTRACT
A key part of the integration of sexual minorities into the larger, U.S. society, is a matter of establishing communities—first, communities of the sexual minorities themselves. The suicide depicted in Hellman’s play (treated in Chapter 8) is committed by a woman who is ostracized from the mainstream community. A critical factor in her death is that she had no communal support to work against that homophobic ostracism. The function of such alternative communities is taken up in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood . Barnes considers the constitution of an expatriate community for sexual minorities, addressing both homosexuality and transgender experience. She considers the formation of such communities in part through their relation to American identity and the psychological deformations of a society that denies a significant and common part of its sexuality.
