I, too, should apologize for not keeping my tone rationale and reasonable
when replying to the issue of Mark Twain's sexuality.  Partially, A.C.
Reese's
note did slide by me, more because of hasty reading than the speed of
his typing, but those words--whoever said them--were fighting words.

To impugn the younger generation of scholars is nasty.  And to imply that
Mark Twain scholarship is all done out does not do justice to Clemens'
work.

One curious thing about many Mark Twain academics--or so it
seems to me--is the superiority they feel over their subject.  That
was, in fact, one of the reasons that I felt drawn to studying Clemens'
work:
I felt that the scholars saw themselves as in a higher class than the man
they
studied and so, at the same time as they made their careers by writing about
him, they also belittled him.  This may or may not be true; it is a
*feeling*,
not a professional opinion.

In addition to hasty reading, I also engaged in hasty thinking.  Mark Twain:
the Man, the Myth,the Legend, is certainly an object of considerable
interest,
though it's not the way that I tend to think about him.

Mark Twain is an American icon--he made himself so as surely as P. T.
Barnum did--and thinking about what is happening to that icon-image
certainly tells us something significant about our society.

I also got to thinking about texts in which maybe there might be some
sexual impropriety.  (I don't give two bits for Hank's preference for
Clarence
in _CT Yank_; standards of relationships between males and males and
females and females were different in the 19th century, and that preference
seems to me to be a perfect example of such a difference.)

The texts I came up with were "A Medieval Romance" (1870)
and "Secret History of Eddypus (1880s?, 90s?).  Both of these stories have
cross-dressing in them:  in "Romance," a young German duchess has been
raised by her father as a boy so that she will ascend to the dukedom and in
"Eddypus," male "popes" (the descendents of Mary Baker Eddy) dress as
women out of homage to their female forebear.  In the first instance, the
cross-dressing leads to the brink of death for the young woman who cross-
dresses; the men in "Eddypus" are obviously degraded functionaries in
a despotic and evil social order.

I suppose you could say that these cross-dressing episodes show Samuel
Clemens'
 preoccupation with crossing sex and gender boundaries and that his
negative attitude shows that he felt guilty about his (mental?)
transgressions.
Or you could say that it shows that he out and out disapproved of sexually
inappropriate behavior.

*I'd* rather think about the connection in these texts between gender,
perverted
 gender identification, and the legitimacy of the social order.  I'm
not sure exactly what I'd make of it, but ultimately I'd want to look at
those
texts to see what they tell me about what kinds of ideas about gender and
society could have prompted Clemens to write them.  I'd rather see what
those texts tell me about nineteenth-century society than about the sexual
orientation of their author.

I've been long-winded; if it's boring or inappropriate, I apologize.

Susan Reed