As a result of the scandal, Arvin was forced to retire from Smith College at half-salary.

Sponsor Message.

As the appeals on constitutional grounds of the conviction of Spofford and Dorius made their way through the courts, the question as to their continued employment at Smith came to the fore. Against the recommendation of the faculty and the President, Smith College trustees insisted that their contracts not be renewed. Since the trustees said that the instructors' dubious convictions for possessing pornography had no effect on their decision, they apparently fired the instructors simply for being exposed as homosexual.

After the trustees reaffirmed their decision on Good Friday, 1961, and departed for church, Nellie Mendenhall, the wife of the college President, remarked, "They had just crucified two guys and were going off to celebrate the crucifixion of another one."

The scandal took an enormous toll on all concerned, perhaps especially on Spofford and Dorius. Happily, the appeals of their sentences were successful. Following some key rulings of the United States Supreme Court regarding both the possession of soft-core pornography and search warrants, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reversed their convictions in 1963.

Despite being branded as convicts and homosexuals and being forced out of the country to find employment abroad, Spofford and Dorius eventually went on to successful academic careers, Spofford at Stanford University, Dorius at San Francisco State University. Both were deeply scarred by the scandal, Spofford later suffering several breakdowns that were delayed reactions to the events of 1960.

After the publication of Barry Werth's excellent account of the scandal in The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (2001) brought it to wide public attention, the Smith College Board of Trustees, while refusing to apologize to Spofford and Dorius, in effect acknowledged the error of its earlier incarnation in failing to support the instructors. In 2002, the trustees voted to establish the $100,000 Dorius/Spofford Fund for the Study of Civil Liberties and Freedom of Expression and the Newton Arvin Prize in American Studies.

The scandal may be seen as one of the last gasps of McCarthyism and as a telling reminder of the precariousness of homosexuals in a virulently homophobic culture. Even in the relatively liberal precincts of academia, homosexuals in the 1950s and early 1960s were vulnerable to witch-hunts and morality crusades.

Still, as Werth observes, the scandal occurred at almost the last moment it could have, for with the election of a young, new President in 1960, the beginning of the (heterosexual) sexual revolution, and Supreme Court rulings that protected privacy at least to some degree, the country had turned a corner.

Conclusion

Before and after his sentencing, Arvin sought refuge in the Northampton state mental hospital. He was eventually released and attempted to put his life together. He received a great deal of support from friends across the country, and from some colleagues at Smith, but continued to regard himself as something of a pariah.

Arvin's last years were more productive than one could have predicted. He had just put the finishing touches on Longfellow: His Life and Work (1963), agreed to undertake the task of editing an ambitious series of paperbacks on American writers, and had begun an autobiography when he was stricken ill near the end of 1962. He died of pancreatic cancer on March 21, 1963.

It is not clear that Arvin ever acknowledged even to himself any culpability for ensnaring his friends and sexual partners in the Smith College scandal. He thus remains an ambiguous figure. As Caleb Crain describes him, "he was a victim of the closet who cooperated with its enforcers." In so doing, he caused the suffering of others.

After Truman Capote's death in 1984, it was revealed that Capote had left money in his will to establish the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. The Capote-Arvin award (now given both for lifetime achievement and for a particular work of criticism) is by far the most lucrative acknowledgment of excellence in the field of literary criticism.

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

Although sometimes coded as romantic friendship, both gay male and lesbian attractions are reflected in nineteenth-century American poetry and fiction, including works by such major figures as Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson.

Most gay, lesbian, and bisexual American writers who adhered to Marxist-oriented parties and social movements between 1917 and the 1960s strove to hide their sexual orientation, and some even depicted homosexuals negatively in their fiction and drama.

A form of behavior modification that employs unpleasant and sometimes painful stimuli, aversion therapy was one of the more popular treatments for homosexuality and cross-dressing in the 1950s and 1960s.

The contemporary literary awards given specifically to honor glbtq books may be seen as an outgrowth of the modern American gay rights movement, so intertwined are they with the movement for equality.

Glbtq historical fictions creatively interweave fiction with facts in ways that have not only won them a large readership but also have offered that readership insightful illuminations of glbtq histories.

McCarthyism, which attempted in the late 1940s and early 1950s to expunge Communists and fellow travelers from American public life, made homosexuals the chief scapegoats of the Cold War.

Although Northampton, Massachusetts is a small city, it has become a center of queerness, especially of lesbian activism.

Psychoanalysis, which began as a therapeutic procedure, ultimately became one of the most powerful methods of cultural analysis and critique of the twentieth-century.

Truman Capote's fiction and autobiographical works helped establish what might be called the quintessential homosexual writing style of the 1950s and 1960s.

Critic F. O. Matthiessen was instrumental in the inclusion of gay writers in American literary history, and the exchange of letters between him and his lover Russell Cheney are among the most revealing gay male documents of the 1920s.

The fiction of the sexually ambiguous Carson McCullers offers uncomfortable resistance to the social ideal of neat heterosexuality.

The most important American novelist of the nineteenth century, Herman Melville reflects his homosexuality throughout his texts.

Critic and composer Virgil Thomson was a pioneer in creating a specifically American form of classical music that is at once "serious" yet whimsically sardonic.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.