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A Gallery of Players / 119sidered becoming a priest. 16 Neel painted him that way, with a monkish Nehrujacket and gentle, thoughtful gaze. Neel bifurcates the ƒgure, beginning withthe deep shadow that divides his face and continuing via the uninterruptedline drawn down the center of the torso, a compositional duality that establishesthe possibility of a double life. Kuyer’s stability is not internal but willedby the gesture of his hands ƒrmly pressed into his lap. No doubt, for Neel, gaymen in the 1950s, forced to deny their sexuality in order to protect their jobs,were like priests. 17 As a bisexual man, Rivers could paint an underground workof overt homoeroticism during the 1950s, whereas Neel, as a friend of gayartists in many ƒelds, painted what she knew of the struggles they faced in tryingto “pass.”Although Neel’s support of the artworld’s homosexual subculture was clearlylinked to her politics, her position put her in con„ict with the stance of theCPUSA. In his important study Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983),John D’Emilio documents the link between anticommunism and the persecutionof homosexuals by the U.S. government during the McCarthy era.As the anti-communist wave in American politics rose, it carried homosexuals withit. Gay men and women became the targets of a verbal assault that quickly escalatedinto policy and practice . . . Thus the senators’ information culled from the Kinseystudy of the American male . . . [was used] in order to argue that the problemwas far more extensive and difƒcult to attack than they had previously thought. 18In the U.S.S.R., meanwhile, Stalin was as active in persecuting homosexualsas the government of the United States, and according to D’Emilio, “the attitudeof the [American] Commmunist Party toward homosexuality was re-„ected mostly by its silence. Standard histories of the party in the 1930s and1940s give it no mention at all.” 19 For Neel, retaining her allegiance to theCPUSA throughout the 1950s but also maintaining her personal interest inthe plight of the homosexual minority, the Party’s refusal to champion homosexualityas a civil rights issue as they had the blacks must have seemed hypocritical.20In her portrait of the boyish Henry Geldzahler (1967, ƒg. 113) Neel mayhave used coded cues to his sexual orientation. Henry’s pinky appears painfullywrenched from its nearly boneless fellow digits by a huge ring, a likely referenceto his sexuality since “wearing a little ƒnger ring, especially on the lefthand, is a common way of indicating Gayness to other members of the secretor semisecret Gay underground in America.” 21 In this case the cue would behard to miss.At the time Geldzahler agreed to pose, he had just been appointed curatorof the newly created Department of Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan