John Horne Burns's The Gallery, set during the Second World War and published in 1947, articulates parallel visions of the wartime threat to masculine mental and bodily integrity and the vitality of the erotic life force. The geographical centre of the novel is Naples in 1944 and in its representation of the collisions and negotiations of American and Italian culture, the novel offers a critique of American culture and, in particular, male American sexuality. A year later, in 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a professedly scientific work that stormed American public consciousness and stimulated a national debate about American sexuality. In American Sexual Character, an analysis of the reception of Kinsey's work, Miriam Reumann shows how it resonated with contemporary concerns about American identity. She argues for a reading of the ‘various crises of American sexuality as responses to post-war worries about the stability and strength of the nation and its population’ (Reumann 2005: 3). In this context, the Kinsey Reports ‘were received not only as collections of statistics but also as important statements about gender difference, social change, and American identity’ (5). In certain respects, such concerns about American national identity in relation to sexuality echo those discussed in the previous chapter in relation to courage and the American male character. The discourses relating to the sexuality of the American male are complex and contradictory. For example, anxieties about male sexuality encompassed both a fear of rampant and immoral behaviour and the perception of a decline in male sexual vitality, ensuing from the supposed feminisation of American culture and the deconstruction of traditional gender roles.

As Reumann's analysis makes clear, the representation of sexual attitudes and behaviour should be regarded as embedded in broader discourses about identity and culture.