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Date:          Mon, 13 Sep 1993 13:56:16 -0400
Reply-to:      anonymous sender <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject:       Hannibal laughs off talk that Twain was gay
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To:            Multiple recipients of list GLB-NEWS
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Hannibal, MO (UPI)-- The hometown of Mark Twain is laughing off a
biographer's new theory that the cherished American writer had a secret
homosexual streak.

But Hannibal folks also have sharp words for biographer Andy Hoffman of
Brown University and other modern writers whose search for fresh angles
could threaten the traditional reputation of their favorite son, the
author who created boyhood heroes Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

"I think the idea that Mark Twain was gay is stupid," James Hefley, a
small publisher in this river town of Baptist churches and 18,000
people, said Sunday. "They're always trying to come up with something
like this."

Hoffman's theory that Twain was gay before marrying and fathering four
children was introduced at a recent literary conference in Elmira, N.Y.

The theory, which Hoffman said he'll detail in a biography to be
published in 1995, emerged just months after Texas scholar Shelley
Fisher Fishkin stirred up a hornet's nest by suggesting that the
Huckleberry Finn character was based on a black youngster.

Twain is a perennial topic for academic interlocution worldwide. In
Hannibal, though, the author is a centerpiece of community pride and a
thriving tourism industry.

Tourism office manager Linda Hedges called the gay-Twain theory "a joke"
that "won't matter one bit."

"Besides," she said, "he liked the ladies."

Another skeptic is Henry Sweets, the town's resident Twain expert and
curator of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum. He hasn't seen
Hoffman's work but he's familiar with the ongoing search for unusual
material about the author who died in 1910.

"These people are trying to build something for themselves, and it's
off-base," Sweets said. "They're pulling things out of context."

The pieces of Hoffman's puzzle come from newspaper clippings and letters
dating to Twain's early days as a journalist in Virginia City, Nev.,
where he roomed with a male workmate. One clipping quips that Twain and
workmate Dan De Quille "are to be married shortly. About time."

Hoffman also found a letter to Twain from humorist Artemus Ward that
begins with "My dearest love."

Sweets and Hefley argued that Hoffman's evidence of homosexuality is
overshadowed by a mountain of information that suggests Twain was
straight as an arrow. They noted that Twain had -- and still has --
critics in Hannibal who consider him a ribald drinker, but not a
homosexual.

Hefley admits Twain "was not a conventional moralist" but he did attend
a Presbyterian church as a youth, married a woman from a puritanical New
York family and befriended a Congregational minister in Connecticut.

Sweets said Twain's love letters belie a devoted, heterosexual husband.

"If he was fooling around in the homosexual community, he sure covered
it up well," he said.

How would Twain respond to the new theory?

"He would probably tell some joke about it and go on," Hefley said.