Queering California Modernism: Architectural Figurations and Media Exposure of Gay Domesticity in the Roosevelt Era

Abstract

This paper examines three houses built for gay patrons on the California coast shortly before World War II. The first is the small structure that Harwell H. Harris designed for the future Arts & Architecture editor John Entenza in Santa Monica, completed in 1938; the second is this same architect’s masterpiece in Berkeley, of 1941, which he created for his lifelong friend, Weston Havens; the third, by William Alexander, is in Laguna Beach, built in 1937 to accommodate the love triangle involving author-adventurer Richard Halliburton, Paul Mooney and Alexander himself. Notwithstanding their different requirements and scales, these dwellings can be understood as dramatic observatories which, protected from inquisitive gazes, strove to see without being seen. Although the care that went into ensuring their inhabitants’ privacy might appear to conflict with the concern for making them objects of public seduction and media attention, both these strategies were inextricably intertwined. Yet, beyond the visual primacy in the organization of their interiors and the striking formal solutions to their exteriors, a comparative analysis of these houses and their physical and metaphorical modes of simulation, dissimulation and stimulation reveals the emergence of other spatial proposals, sensory invitations and symbolic registers which, as lines of flight of modernism, challenge normative ways of codifying identity, sexuality and queer affections.