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Reader Calls Out "Time" Magazine's Homophobia In 1948 Letter About Truman Capote

In 1948,  Truman Capote caused a literary stir with his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms — the semi-autobiographical tale of an effeminate 13-year-old who moves to New Orleans following the death of his mother.

Twentieth-Century Fox optioned the movie rights sight unseen, and Life magazine hailed the 23-year-old wunderkind as one of America's young writers to watch—all before the book was even published.

Other Voices spent nine weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list, with noted literary giant W. Somerset Maugham calling Capote "the hope of modern literature."

Time magazine was not having any of it: In its review, dug up to commemorate what would have been Capote's 90th birthday yesterday, an unnamed critic dismissed the novel as “a literary contrivance of unusual polish" and criticized "the distasteful trappings of its homosexual theme."

It might have been 1948, but one reader wrote in to call foul on the critic's anti-gay venom:

6778000262_1b6fcf16df_zSir:

You seem to advocate tolerance for the customary things discriminated against: race, color, creed, religion, etc.

However, I do not believe you have ever made a reference to homosexuality (a perfectly legitimate psychological condition) without going specially out of your way to make a vicious insinuation, caustic remark, or “dirty dig.”

Your review of Truman Capote‘s Other Voices Other Rooms (Time, Jan. 26) concludes: “For all his novel’s gifted invention and imagery, the distasteful trappings of its homosexual theme overhang it like Spanish moss.”

I have seen a great deal of Spanish moss in a lot of places... and I must confess that some of it is quite beautiful.

R. E. BERG

The editor simply responded, “It gives Time the creeps.”

Of course, Capote had the last laugh. Other Voices, Other Rooms made him a star well before Breakfast at Tiffany's, In Cold Blood and the Black and White Ball cemented his legend.

Eventually, in a review of a Capote biography from 1988— four years after his death—a Time writer called Other Voices, “well written and convincingly atmospheric, with no word out of place.”

What a difference 40 years make.

The full 1948 review of Other Voices, Other Rooms is available for subscribers in the Time magazine archives.

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