Homosexuality In Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

During the 1950s, Homosexuality was deemed a danger to society and social order, so much so that the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept a watch list of known gays and lesbians. In writing In Cold Blood, Truman Capote—an openly gay man—gives some evidence that the two men, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, shared an intimacy beyond a simple friendship. Within the novel, Dick and Perry display very traditional male and female gender roles. Upon introducing Perry, he is seen with “a guitar, and two big boxes of books and maps and songs, poems and old letters” (Capote 25). In contrast to Perry, Dick is then seen with a “twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun, brand-new, blue-barreled, and with a sportsman’s scene of pheasants in flight etched along the stock” (33). Capote describes Perry’s physical appearance as a short, statured man; his legs and feet were small and delicate. In essence, Perry is fulfilling the female role in the relationship. Dick, however, is described with a typical, hardened male features:
In the latter state, he seemed a flimsy dingy-blond youth of medium height, fleshless and perhaps sunken-chested; disrobing revealed that he was nothing of the sort, but, rather, an athlete constructed on a welterweight scale . . . More markings, self-designed and self-executed, ornamented his arms and torso: the head …show more content…
In contrast to Perry, Dick is fulfilling the male role in a relationship. While Perry anxiously read the news about the murders, Dick reassures him that they would not be caught. In heterosexual relationship, men typically offer reassurance and women are typically the worriers. Dick was convinced that even though Perry was sane, but with a flick of a switch, he could be a “natural killer” (67). In his article about homosexuality in In Cold Blood, Nathan Smith hypothesizes Dick’s plan to rape Nancy as a “brutal and unforgivable transgression” and “symbolic adultery” to