The secret city

Part 3

by Tom Scocca

If Shand-Tucci's personal sensibilities inspired Built in Boston, though, they presented the biggest obstacle to his second major writing project, a biography of Gothic Revival architect Ralph Adams Cram. Cram was a prolific and influential creator of churches and other buildings from the 1890s through the 1930s, leaving his stamp on ecclesiastical architecture nationwide, and shaping such college campuses as Princeton, Bryn Mawr, and West Point. Shand-Tucci had been studying Cram's life and work since his undergraduate days; his first job after graduating was preparing a Cram exhibition for the Boston Public Library. He had even, in his childhood, sung in the choir in a Cram-designed church. But in the early '80s, when he tried to write Cram's life story, he found himself hopelessly blocked, unable to make any progress for nearly 10 years.

This time, he says, what he was trying to write was too close to home. "All of the material that I was dealing with made it fairly evident that Cram was gay," he says, "and it wasn't a thing that I was prepared to face up to in myself." Though Shand-Tucci had already come out to his close friends, he says, "I think the truth is that I had to come out publicly to write the Cram biography."

When he finally did -- inspired, he says, by having fallen in love -- he discovered that what he was writing was not just the story of Ralph Adams Cram, but of a whole set of turn-of-the-century gay Beacon Hill intellectuals, an influential group overlooked by conventional histories. To explain Cram's work, he argues, this greater social context had to be brought to light.

"If this circle of intellectuals and artists and architects, this gay and lesbian circle, had always been known to exist, I'm not sure the significance [to a Cram biography] would have been very great," he says. "But as it had been suppressed, as all memory of it had been deliberately obscured, it meant that when you began to go and look at the circle, you began to see a lot of [things] that had otherwise seemed rather elusive.

"Instead of uncovering three-deckers and Gothic churches and things like that, I was trying to uncover some of the patterns and reasons why various patrons and architects did various things."

For example, there's the question of how Cram's sexual orientation affected his architectural work. Shand-Tucci traces echoes of Cram's relationship with his collaborator and lover, Bertram Goodhue, in the way they designed buildings together -- Cram shaping the fundamental masses and Goodhue elaborating on them through ornamentation. But there is also an emerging architectural theory of "queer space," which looks for more literal manifestations of gay identity in construction. Shand-Tucci cites the example of Beauport, a house in Gloucester created by Henry Davis Sleeper, a contemporary and friend of Cram's, which inspired the Colonial Revival movement of the 1920s. "It's a house full of false starts and culs-de-sac and secret stairways and odd nooks and corners, and queer spaces," he says. "It's very much sort of a labyrinth of the mind of someone who was hiding."

How queer-space theory applies directly to Cram's work is less clear, at least to Shand-Tucci, but other scholars are building on his insights: "There's a new book out called Queer Space by some guy from San Francisco, which quotes Boston Bohemia at great length, and I don't understand what he's talking about. But you know, he's quoting me in support of his thesis."

Part 4

Tom Scocca can be reached at tscocca[a]phx.com.