In the canon of American holiday fiction, perhaps no other piece is as fondly remembered by so many as among the most enduring as Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory." First published alongside advertisements for perfume and Cartier in the now defunct women's magazine Mademoiselle in December of 1956, the story initially seems to have made few waves. "A Christmas Memory" was to have something of a second life, however, after being reprinted in Capote's collected stories in 1963, and it received more or less a popular imprimatur when it was released as a relatively expensive stand-alone volume in 1966, essentially within the same year popular acclaim would greet his most famous work, In Cold Blood. In the half century since its original publication, the story has been reproduced in countless other forms, including anthologies, at least three television adaptations, numerous audio recordings, and even a live stage adaptation, and it remains a perennial favorite for school children and adults alike. 1

This popularity, I argue, makes the story something of a queer oddity. For its reception and unofficial canonization as one of the classic works of American Christmas literature would seem to suggest that its values are aligned with the same reactionary social and cultural forces that traditionally select which texts to promote as "family friendly" and that would seek to enshrine this story as a transmission of those very same reactionary values to American children. To compare for instance, other mainstream pieces of Christmas literature that remain popular in the United States such as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Clement Clark Moore's "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (also known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"), Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and even Bob Clark and Jean Shepherd's beloved film A Christmas Story, all to a greater or lesser degree, I would argue, are ideologically conservative or even unapologetically reactionary texts. 2 We might therefore expect a similarly popular piece like Capote's story to be similarly didactic in that way.

Curiously, however, a closer evaluation of the story in fact reveals a surprisingly subversive ideological project at work that actually presents a case against the reactionary forces that have historically anointed this text as one of the "official" American holiday traditions and as something "safe" for children. More specifically, I argue that "A Christmas Memory," through its twin deployment of both disability and queerness, enacts an instructively oppositional political alliance that argues in direct conflict with a conservative ideology that would seek to reduce the story — and hence to politically domesticate it — to a universal, nostalgic, and reflexively non-progressive representation of American life in the South. 3 In contrast, the story originally imagines a much more resistant world-view in which disability and queerness can come together positively and productively to create intense and politically enriching community-building, a reading that has been more or less lost in the story's later repurposing and commodification (and not, as we shall see, without its author's lamentable subsequent collaboration). It is important, therefore, that we re-examine this text in order that we might restore to it the once invigorated progressive queer and disabled potency that Capote's work, in advance of his later commercial success, originally engendered. Such a recovery of the story's original political orientation, I believe, will allow us to recognize in it a once valuable strategy for queer/disabled resistance to ableist and heteronormative dominance that far in advance of the creation of disability studies, gay and lesbian studies, or queer theory shows the importance of practical and theoretical bonds built on the shared political interests of disabled and queer people.

"A Christmas Memory" is a partly autobiographical short story, based on the author's experiences living with his mother's relatives in Monroeville, Alabama in the late 1920s and early 1930s, following his parents' acrimonious divorce. Its narrative concerns a young boy, Buddy, and his eccentric elderly cousin Sook — his best friend — as the two go through their annual ritual of making fruitcakes at Christmastime, a mundane occurrence that actually takes on a surprising but illuminating political dimension as the story unfolds. "I knew it before I got out of bed … It's fruitcake weather!" Sook exclaims in a couple of memorable early lines that set the story in motion. 4 The two close pals, an unlikely duo let alone a model for political intervention, proceed to scrape together just enough money from their extremely limited circumstances to buy the requisite baking supplies ("Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings") with no help and even active disapproval from their stuffy, straight-laced relatives. 5 Yet the two do prevail in their adventure and celebrate a scant but joyful final Christmas together before Buddy is eventually shipped off to military school the following year, presumably to make a man of him.

The narrator, a grown-up Buddy, is based on Truman himself, and in the story he initially encapsulates a kind of proto-queer meaning, associated as he is with the adult Capote, who is emblazoned in the public consciousness as a conspicuously flamboyant homosexual through, among other things, his many appearances in the 1960s and 1970s on television programs like The Tonight Show, The Dick Cavett Show, and The David Frost Show. Though "A Christmas Memory" does not dwell overtly on any sexual identity Buddy may or may not have, he is nonetheless colored quite clearly by what Eve Sedgwick calls "the sissy boy syndrome." 6 And indeed in the story's companion piece, Capote's sequel "The Thanksgiving Visitor," Buddy suggestively admits to being "a sissy of sorts," a richly ambiguous phrase that positions the character as a firmly anti-normative figure. 7 Of course, as Sedgwick points out, in U.S. culture it is tempting but problematic always to read sissiness as a symptom of latent homosexuality, for to do so is to confuse the signs of stereotypically non-normative gender behavior — Buddy likes to spend his time cooking in the kitchen with Sook, for instance — with a specific later sexual identity that may for some indeed go hand in hand with so-called sissiness, but which by no means necessarily must do so. 8 Thus it may seem that we are left only to speculate about Buddy's "orientation," framed as it is by statements about his sissiness such as the information that like many a sissy, Buddy doesn't care much for sports: "once we [Buddy and Sook] won seventy-ninth prize, five dollars, in a national football contest. Not that we know a fool thing about football. It's just that we enter any contest we hear about: at the moment our hopes are centered on the fifty-thousand-dollar Grand Prize being offered to name a new brand of coffee." 09

Capote, however, does provide other signs that link the young Buddy with a queer — by which I mean sexually and politically anti-normative — orientation much like the author's own. 10 For instance, in addition to Buddy's domestic preoccupations there is in the story the third wheel of Sook and Buddy's conspiracy, their dog Queenie, whose name implies a kind of suggestive in-joke for certain readers. Moreover, Buddy's fondness for "women's things" like working in the kitchen at least stereotypically seems to establish him as a protogay child. "In-the-kitchen-with-the-women sentiment embodies a stereotype of protogay boys," Ken Corbett points out. "The kitchen is a girlyboy domain. A stereotypical domain." 11 And though Capote seems to be relying on our recognition of that stereotype here, the characterization is an ambiguous one if for no other reason than that, as Corbett contends, it is even today very difficult to firmly conceive of such a thing as "homosexual boys." 12 True, "bullies identify sissies" and "psychiatrists identify sissy boy syndromes," but "there has been virtually no effort to speak of the boyhood experience of homosexuals other than to characterize their youth as a disturbed and/or nonconforming realm from which it is hoped they will break free." 13 Sissies in this culture, though we persistently associate them at an almost unconscious level with later adult homosexuality, nonetheless stubbornly refuse (and fortunately so for many reasons, unfortunately so for others) to collapse neatly into that category. In other words, though it remains the case that a certain specific kind of psychosexual paranoia attends to the young sissy, he at the same time is imbued with the enduring hope that someday he will just "grow out of it" and "become a real man." So while "in this culture anxiety and the resistance to the possibility of a protogay subjectivity discourages one from ever imagining (much less attempting to document) such subjectivities," I argue that Capote nevertheless at the very least initiates a productive meditation on the politics of sexual identity and childhood sissydom in U.S. culture through his autobiographical reconstruction of his own homo/sissy self, even as he provides one politically resistant account of the history of the sort of subjectivity Corbett mourns. 14 That is to say, while the "I" and "we" of "A Christmas Memory" are not strictly self-identical to the "I" of the real-life sissy and homosexual Capote, the author's autobiographical "faction" creates a necessary space for thinking about the queer relation between the sissy child and the homosexual adult, a space that doesn't phobically cement an intractable link between sissies and homos but that does make it possible to generatively reflect on instances in which those two "conditions" do coincide. 15

If, though, it is the case that the story involves an enriching moment for re-evaluating the impossibility of a (sometimes) evolutionary relationship between the sissy boy and the gay man (an evolutionary relationship, as Sedgwick and Corbett observe, whose possibility has sadly been lost because of the shameful denials of some adult gay men), it also importantly remains committed to a conception of queer resistance (in its own historical form) to heterosexist dominance. For lastly on this front, there is the matter of the story's explicit plot — the fruitcakes themselves — which are a rich symbol that of course signifies, in addition to other things, sexual fruitiness and consequently a "liberal" political attitude. 16 If then it is not quite right (or we are not quite able, depending on one's perspective and desire) to say that Buddy is a gay boy in waiting (though he certainly might be), we can at least say that the story situates him, in circumstance and in world view, firmly within the domain of what we would today call a queer politics. For of course queerness is not only or always a sexual orientation, but is often or even always necessarily a political orientation, a political orientation to which Buddy, as we will see, is explicitly, even if not consciously, dedicated. Queer is in this sense "a site of collective contestation, a point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings." 17 It is, in short, a way of imagining the future to be other than it is in its currently organized sex/gender system, an imagining facilitated, energized, and intensified through the bonds of collective — and this is crucial — contestation.

The catalyst for such collective contestation is Sook who, on the other hand, is a different sort of character, one who though she is the emotional and spiritual center of the story — in contrast to the barren Christianity of the rest of the family — is repeatedly dismissed and marginalized by readers. The critic Helen Garson, for example, explains that Sook is only even able to be Buddy's friend in the first place because "the white-haired, small, sprightly, craggy yet delicate-faced woman with sherry-colored, timid eyes has never outgrown the sunny world of childhood." 18 Likewise, Marie Rudisill describes the real-life Sook, Capote's distantly-related "aunt" Nanny Rumbley Faulk as "all innocence, unable to adapt to the demands of the world at large … the most fragile, dependent, and vulnerable of [her father's] children." 19 These descriptions actually stand in stark contrast to Capote's portrait of an active, energetic woman who can cut down a Christmas tree and drag it all the way home, poaches pecans with the enthusiasm of a veteran thief, builds and flies kites with vigor, and is brave enough to strike a bargain for some whiskey with the imposing native American bootlegger HaHa Jones (so nicknamed, though I think I hardly need say, because of his refusal ever to even smile). Yet Capote does himself partly concur, saying only that Sook "is still a child." 20 What these euphemisms suggest but refuse to say outright is that Sook seems to be intellectually disabled, a point that emerges from this marginalizing, infantilizing rhetoric of eternal childhood. 21 For as James Charlton points out, in its relation to people with disabilities, our culture "often must transform its subjects into children or people with childlike qualities," a troubling process that is routinely amplified when it comes to people with intellectual disabilities. 22 Indeed, it often discouragingly seems as though our culture lacks a vocabulary to talk in any other way. We see this problematic use of language even in the author's adoption of such rhetoric, as though he doesn't have the words available to think it differently, in what is otherwise in almost every respect a loving tribute to and representation of Sook/Faulk.

This culture-wide, paternalistic opprobrium is also embodied in the story in the form of Sook and Buddy's anonymous relatives. Buddy explains that "other people inhabit the house, relatives … they have power over us, and frequently make us cry." 23 The relatives do their best to manifest their authority and to instill normative values, as when they spoil Christmas morning with their rotten gifts and evangelical zeal — Buddy gets "socks, a Sunday school shirt, some handkerchiefs, a hand-me-down sweater and a year's subscription to a religious magazine for children. The Little Shepherd" 24 — or when the relatives interrupt a happy, drunken dance party after Sook, Buddy, and Queenie have consumed the dregs of their baking whiskey: "are you out of your mind? feeding a child of seven! must be loony! road to ruination! remember Cousin Kate? Uncle Charlie? Uncle Charlie's brother-in law? shame! scandal! humiliation! kneel, pray, beg the Lord!" 25 This is a significant moment for the positioning of Sook and Buddy as what I would term "dependent outsiders" for as Robert McRuer argues in his important essay "Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence," the "cultural management of the endemic crises surrounding the performance of heterosexual and able-bodied identity effects a panicked consolidation of hegemonic identities." 26 In other words, as devout as the relatives might be, they don't exactly affect a strict teetotaler's response here. Rather, it seems as though their panicky hollering stems from the point of view that Sook and Buddy are behaving, in their own ways, exactly how the relatives do not want them to — behaving like a sissy and a loony; their performance, in other words, confirms their unwelcome status as aliens. And such performances constitute a serious threat to the imperfect fiction of the family's pristine able-bodied heterosexuality. "Since queerness and disability both," McRuer observes, "have the potential to disrupt the performance of able-bodied heterosexuality, both must be safely contained." 27 To what then, we might wonder, does the shock of shame, scandal, and humiliation really adhere — merely to the drinking, or to the spectacle of Buddy's effeminate dancing and Sook's so-called lunacy?

However, in spite of their limited, because marginalized circumstances, Buddy and Sook do manage to heroically transcend the tyrannical normativity of their relatives in ways that "make us feel connected to eventful worlds beyond the kitchen with its view of a sky that stops." 28 The manner in which they resist that prison is primarily through their production of thirty-one yearly fruitcakes. The pair in fact seizes upon the very conditions of their minoritized status — the sissy boy who loves the kitchen and the disabled woman who is thanklessly relegated to being more or less the family cook — and they turn those conditions into an opportunity for community building and world making. They build emotional and psychic bridges outside of that limited view. For the fruitcakes are not gifts of appeasement for the oppressive relatives, but rather for "Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed the larger share are intended for persons we've met maybe once, perhaps not at all. Like President Roosevelt. Like the Reverend and Mrs. J.C. Lucey, Baptist missionaries to Borneo who lectured here last winter. Or the little knife grinder who comes through twice a year." 29 Buddy and Sook, then, in the face of the cultural imperative to able-bodied heterosexuality have created for themselves an imaginative and literal community, one that values their personhood in a way that their more immediate community does not. Unlike the family, this alternative community does not classify them exclusively and reductively as loony and sissy, but instead values them as full, dignified persons worthy of respect, communication, and emotional investment.

These fruitcakes — dense signifiers of both queerness and disability (e.g., nutty as a fruitcake, fruity as a, well, fruit) — are emissaries, queer/disabled emissaries that empower the loony and the sissy to resist being hidden away, restricted, and devalued. It allows them to break out of their individual closets and inhabit, even if only partially or imaginatively, a bigger portion of the world. 30 Instead they connect to a larger, more emotionally and spiritually fulfilling, and interdependent community, one that they are reminded of when they peruse "the scrapbooks we keep of thank-you's on White House stationary, time-to-time communications from California and Borneo, the knife grinder's penny postcards." 31 We might notice especially the double inclusion here of the White House and FDR, himself an important figure for disability history, and how he works as an access point to the state, one that though it does not bring genuine, practical political enfranchisement for all, nonetheless legitimizes in its own small way this rag-tag community of penny postcarders and their informal but valuable structures of kinship and reciprocal emotional and, let's not forget, spiritual, support.

Yet to call a practice as banal as the baking of fruitcakes a political act — much less political resistance — may seem like an immodest claim. Critics in recent years, however, have increasingly begun to think about the myriad ways that food and politics interact with each other in subtle but powerful ways in all sorts of cultural contexts. And many in particular have begun to focus their research on how gender — and to a lesser extent sexuality — are related to the politics of food. Julia Ehrhardt, for example, subscribes to the idea, prominent among many food studies critics, that "the study of foodways — the social beliefs and behaviors associated with the production, distribution, and consumption of food — provides powerful evidence about cultural conceptions of sex and gender." 32 Through an analysis of several works of chicana lesbian poetry, Erhardt shows the ways in which food becomes for some of these writers a means of expressing political resistance to heteronormative forms of dominance and oppression. However, her work also points up that though an investigation of such "foodways" has the potential to tell us a lot about how sex and gender operate in U.S. culture, nevertheless "how food and foodways shape the gender and sexual identities of people who are not heterosexual in addition to those who are has not been extensively investigated by food studies scholars working on gender." 33 In other words, she suggests that though many food studies critics have focused on the ways in which food is important to the study of gender, not many have begun the difficult work of thinking through how food operates in the lives of non-heterosexual and non-heteronormative people (Buddy of course being certainly the latter and possibly also the former). Erhardt thus argues that food studies criticism still needs to incorporate more of a dedicated analysis of the role food plays in the lives of non-heterosexual people, an analysis she terms "queering food studies." 34 "A Christmas Memory," I argue, does some of that work by showing us how one (politically and possibly sexually) queer subject — Buddy — uses food productively as a means of building a politically resistant, non-heterosexist community. But moreover it also, to adapt and extend Erhardt's formulation, shows that how food and foodways shape the identities of people who are disabled in addition to those who are not has not yet been extensively investigated by food studies scholars. For as I've pointed out, Sook and Buddy's queer/disabled community is an inclusive one that is at once non-heterosexist and non-ableist.

The emblem of this community, of course, is the fruitcake itself, an object that at once evokes the nostalgic idea of a Southern past but which is, as I've mentioned, also a richly symbolic device. For the fruitcake linguistically incorporates both disability and queerness into the letter of its form. 35 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, by the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries respectively, "fruitcake" signified both homosexuality and mental disability. A fruit, for example, developed in U.S. slang to mean "a male homosexual" while a "fruitcake" came to mean "a crazy or eccentric person; one who is insane." 36 But beyond the linguistic signification, the fruitcake has also developed a reputation in the United States as an especially queer and disabled foodstuff. 37 The crime writer David Mehnart, for instance, in a tongue-in-cheek article suggests that fruit is a quintessentially queer food. He writes, "Since the time of the Dutch masters, fruit arrangements have been consistent symbols of vanity and cultural decline. The abundance of like on like, of fruit marching together seems threatening and decadent." 38 That description would seem to fit the fruitcake as well, with its "cloying excess" and "insistent rainbow variety." 39 While I don't agree with Mehnert's flippant and essentialistic argument (though I do "get" his humorous tone), his comments do reflect a more widespread cultural attitude in the U.S. that views the fruitcake in the second half of the 20^th century as decadent, excessive, over-indulgent, crazy, and weird. Its connotation, as Johnny Carson was fond of implying in a regular joke on The Tonight Show, is disability and queerness. 40 That is the case, anyway, in the U.S., as opposed to some other contexts such as in the United Kingdom where fruitcake is a traditional wedding dessert and where it is understood as an emblem of fertility and heterosexual union.

It's tough to say for sure whether Capote was aware of — though surely, one assumes, he must have been as an urbane wit and man about town — these meanings and even tougher to say if he meant them to resonate in the way they do in the story. For as a semi-autobiographical account, it is of course completely reasonable to assume that the young Capote and his cousin did rather unironically make fruitcakes at Christmas every year. Yet it remains the case that the word does resonate — as with the dog Queenie — as queer and disabled for a certain readership in the know. And even for those less inclined to spot this winking linguistic symbol, "straight" criticism of the story still tends to include some of that same signification. "Less finished, less shaped than the other two stories [in Breakfast at Tiffany's]," one critic writes, "it seems more make-up than art. The bucolic mood, the descriptions of Southern woods and pastures, seem half-bred … It is a curiously heartless and unfelt story despite its sentimental intention, and is laced with maidenly metaphor." 41 Note in particular the author's peculiar double condemnation, that the story is "half-bred" — disabled — and "laced with maidenly metaphor" — or queerly phrased.

If, then, it is the case that Capote figures in the story a resistant political alliance built by his queer and disabled characters, the project I have described anticipates the call by Robert McRuer and Abby Wilkerson for "a queercrip consciousness [that] is about desiring more," a consciousness that "resists containment and imagines other, more inventive, expansive, and just communities." 42 The sort of community Sook and Buddy forge is just such a queercrip one, I argue, as it rejects compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness and instead embraces and desires sexual and bodily difference in opposition to the staid disapproval of the story's killjoy relatives. Buddy and Sook are engaged actively in "practices of freedom — practices that … work to realize a world of multiple (desiring and desirable) corporealities interacting in nonexploitative ways." 43 Temporarily (though of course only partially) exempt from the circuits of capital — itself an important component of the oppression and exclusion of disabled and queer people — the pair realize, albeit briefly, the sort of political consciousness that McRuer and Wilkerson imagine as a futurity. As such, the two provide a compelling example of an "oppositional subjectivity" that only "emerges from the encounter between disability and queerness." 44 This Eisenhower-era story, I contend, enacts the political strategy that critics like these have called for as a future goal, and thus it offers an instructive example of what such a community, enriched by the encounter between disability and queerness, may resemble, what sorts of tactics it might employ, and what sort of rewards it may bring. 45 Of course, this story is no utopia, and by the end Buddy is sent off to military school by the relatives and he gradually loses touch with an aging Sook. Yet I would like to suggest that the story offers something of a hope for progressive queercrip political consciousness, one in which disability and queerness can indeed work together, even temporarily to realize new ways (metaphorically or literally) of being in the world, new ways to look beyond the limited frame of a window with a view that stops.

There are of course other limits to how politically efficacious this story is and I do not mean to overstate its importance. On one reading, Buddy is actually re-inserted at the end of the story into a matrix of heterosexist dominance and American military imperialism as he "escapes" the deteriorating world of his childhood and more or less abandons Sook to her own devices when he goes off to school. Such a reading would stress the dissolution or failure of the community I have celebrated and would no doubt raise a stinging rejoinder to the more politically optimistic reading I have proposed. Moreover, the sort of rosy egalitarian community I have described as embodied in the epistolary friendships of "A Christmas Memory" significantly ignores the impossible to dismiss fact that Sook is used in many ways as an object for Capote. In other words, one could fairly say that this story is his more than it is hers. What would this story look like if Sook had told it in her voice? Surely, to ignore the fact that Sook is not empowered enough to tell her own story reflects a sad and broad history in the U.S. that would assume that those with intellectual impairments are not capable of even speaking for themselves at all much less narrating their own lives. Michael Bérubé has pointed out that "the relation between social justice and textual representation" is importantly framed by the way that historically "people with [for example] Down syndrome had to rely for their representation on the talents and good will of people without Down syndrome." 46 That is to say, until recently it was not even thought possible in most quarters that people with intellectual disabilities could, never mind should, author representations of themselves. To the extent that Sook is an object for the vastly more privileged Capote to use, the story would seem to confirm this unfortunate refusal of the voices and personal accounts of disabled people. I'm not going to attempt to dismiss either of these important objections. However, I do maintain that the sort of queercrip community Sook and Buddy are able to forge — however imperfect and impermanent — can provide one early model of twentieth century resistance. It can serve as a starting place, an historical precedent, and even as an unsustainable experiment that may require improvement as a model, but which nonetheless captures an important political spirit of resistance to ableist and heterosexist dominance based in queer and disabled cooperation.

I doubt, however, that Capote had much of this in mind, in the sense that the author never appeared to resist the politically homogenizing forces that championed and reinterpreted his story through adaptation. By 1966 anyway, he remarked to a reporter in Paris that "serious writers aren't supposed to make money, but I say the hell with that. My next book will be called A Christmas Memory. It's forty-five pages long, and it's going to cost five dollars and be worth every cent." 47 Monetary reward, at least in this revisionist boasting, seems to have displaced political intervention for Capote. That motive would begin to explain the dreary 1967 Capote-narrated television adaptation of "A Christmas Memory," which one gay writer remembers as "starring Geraldine Page, who played a developmentally challenged old woman living somewhere in the rural South. She and her lisping, sissified pre-teen cousin Buddy lived in poverty and spent the interminable broadcast hour making fruitcakes." 48 That reading emphasizes just some of the political problems with an adaptation that undoubtedly served to continue to line Capote's pockets. For that production's over-the-top representation of the cognitive disability of the character Sook and its reduction of Buddy's complexity to what seems scarcely more than a homo-yet-to-come, elides the productive, even potentially utopian political perspective of the story. It simply has no sense of political urgency and "reads" like the sort of neutered homespun yarn conservative elements would like it to be. The film collapses into a stereotypical and reactionary portrait that, although it remains sympathetic toward Sook and Buddy, nevertheless positions them as objects for our straight/able-bodied consumption (and pity) rather than allowing them to be the empowered, complex, oppositional subjects they were in Capote's original. We can speculate about the author's political intentions, but by this point at least he seems to have abandoned any sense of political urgency and seems instead to have been concerned only with making a buck.

Yet despite my reservations about the motives of the celebrity Capote of the 1960s and 1970s, the story remains a potentially valuable and subversive resource for thinking about queercrip community. And that resisting queercrip community, as I've said, makes this story a welcome but peculiar choice for an often deeply conservative U.S. education system — both formal and informal — to promote to children. We may yet view it as a welcome fact, though, that the work of the Truman Capote of the 1950s, with its implicitly progressive logic, has continued to circulate so prominently in the United States, and we may hold out hope that in time its original progressive queercrip values, once forgotten, may more broadly take hold as well.