The credibility of Boswell’s book rests on three points. First is the authenticity of the medieval manuscripts containing the disputed liturgies, to whose existence in European archives Boswell says he was alerted by “a correspondent who prefers not to be named.” Second is the accuracy of translation of those manuscripts. Third is the interpretation of the texts.
I have no reason to doubt issues one and two. Boswell has told reporters he daily photographed the relevant manuscript pages, lest they be sabotaged. I also accept his claim of fluency in many languages. However, in my opinion, this book, like Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, demonstrates that Boswell lacks advanced skills in several major areas, notably intellectual history and textual analysis. The embattled complexities of medieval theology and the ambiguous nuances of language and metaphor familiar to us from great literature seem beyond his grasp. Speculative reasoning is not his strong suit.
Boswell argues that homosexual marriages of some kind were widely accepted in classical antiquity and that the medieval church simply continued the pagan practice. But his weak, disorganized, and anecdotal material on Greek and Roman culture never proves such marriages existed outside the imperial Roman smart set, whose cynical “Dolce Vita” decadence he does not see. Furthermore, he disproportionately stresses evidence from isolated or marginal regions, such as post-Minoan Crete, Scythia, Albania, or Serbia, all of which had unique and sometimes bizarre local traditions.
Insisting that heterosexual marriage had no prestige and was “primarily a property arrangement” in antiquity, he repeatedly portrays Achilles and Patroclus as lovers (a Hellenistic fantasy not in Homer), while shockingly never mentioning Odysseus and Penelope, one of the most famous marital bonds in literary history. Animus against or skepticism about heterosexual marriage runs through the book: Boswell dubiously claims, in a careless unsubstantiated note, that “more than half of all spouses commit adultery” in the United States.
The question of pagan survivals in Christianity is a fascinating one, but Boswell neglects the most obvious facts critical for his larger argument. Gnosticism and Neoplatonism are never dealt with. Addressing the ambivalent Judeo-Christian attitude toward sexuality, he shows no understanding of basic philosophic problems of body and soul, matter and spirit. He simplistically views opposition to homosexuality as motivated only by prudery or bigotry, never morality. He fails to see that the development of canon law and church hierarchy had complex intellectual consequences in the West, beyond his favorite, somewhat sentimental notions of oppression and intolerance.
Boswell’s treatment of the Middle Ages, ostensibly his specialty, is strangely unpersuasive. Surely, bonding ceremonies are of special interest to feudalism—a word that occurs just once here, and only in a footnote. Boswell has no feeling or sympathy for military or political relationships, which distorts his portrait of medieval society. Indeed, he seems grotesquely incapable of imagining any enthusiasm or intimate bond among men that is not overtly or covertly homosexual.
The subliminal sexual tension and process of sublimation in asceticism and monasticism, also prominent in Asian religions, are never honestly examined. Despite sporadic qualifications, Boswell repeatedly implies a genital subtext to intense spiritual alliances, even when his supporting manuscripts make clearly uncarnal invocations to martyred paired saints, who died in the service of Christ. Conversely, he under-interprets the profane excesses of corrupt Renaissance clergy, who may well have conducted illicit ceremonies of all kinds, including Black Masses.
Boswell’s style, here as in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, is to pack an enormous amount of dry, irrelevant bibliographic material into scores of footnotes, building a pretentious barricade around his thin and vacillating central presentation. Meanwhile, crucial research is often avoided. For example, one would expect a historian discussing medieval sexuality to at least cursorily consider the enormous “courtly love” tradition, with its inherent perversities, but that is relegated to a footnote, which glibly lists, without explanation, 23 books and articles for us to read. Boswell’s knowledge of psychology or general sexual history seems minimal, confined to a handful of chic, narrow academic books cited from the 1980s.
Whatever medieval ceremonies of union he may have found, Boswell has not remotely established that they were originally homosexual in our romantic sense. Their real meaning has yet to be determined. Sacrilegious misuse of such ceremonies may indeed have occurred, leading to their banning, but historians are unjustified in extrapolating backwards and reducing fragmentary evidence to its lowest common denominator. The cause of gay rights, which I support, is not helped by this kind of slippery, self-interested scholarship, where propaganda and casuistry impede the objective search for truth.
* [Front-page review, The Washington Post Book World, July 17, 1994.]
58
MAKING THE GRADE:
THE GAY STUDIES GHETTO*
That there has been a collapse of gay political leadership in America in the past three years is obvious to most observers. The major gay activist organizations have lurched through acrimonious personnel turnovers, while the openly gay congressional representatives and executive appointees in Washington have failed to achieve national stature, through their own lack of statesmanlike dignity and authority. None of them saw the stunning Republican sweep of the November 1994 election coming, nor have they yet acknowledged the part their strategic misjudgments played in alienating the electorate from progressive issues in general and the Democratic Party in particular. Their inability to learn from their mistakes bodes ill for the gay movement in a period when, worldwide, there is a shift toward economic conservatism and religious fundamentalism.
In the future, parochialism and conventionalism in gay thinking must be caught and corrected before they have such disastrous political consequences. Let’s start with gay studies, which is the biggest ghetto in the making in the current cultural landscape. If gay studies means taking oral histories from aging pre-Stonewall gays or writing honest, detailed, responsibly researched accounts of lost moments in gay experience, then I’m for it. Recent examples of the latter would be Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Robert Aldrich’s The Seduction of the Mediterranean, and George Chauncey’s Gay New York.
But if gay studies means distorting history, literature, and art with anachronistic contemporary agendas or using elitist, labyrinthine, jargon-infested post-structuralist theory to suppress or deny scientific facts about gender, then I’m against it. Not only are these abuses very common in gay studies, but they are exactly what has won unscrupulous opportunists the highest rewards of academe: top appointments at leading universities with stratospheric salaries. Authentic leftists—indeed, all ethical persons across the political spectrum—must oppose corruption and fraud wherever they occur.
The great cause of gay rights is not served by tolerating mediocrity, pretension, and deceit. The best work in gay studies remains that informed by rigorous traditional standards of historiography and criticism as well as by clear-sighted, unbiased observation of the larger, non-gay world. Without a sympathetic sense of social life as a whole, writers of any specialized interest risk loss of perspective. When human sexuality is the topic, such narrowness is fatal. I call on young gay intellectuals to renounce gay studies as a lifetime preoccupation and to hone their skills instead on old-style, high-level history of ideas. Classical philology, as it was practiced by the magisterial nineteenth-century German scholars, for example, had precision, deep learning, and interdisciplinary breadth.
Only long immersion in the vast, 2,500-year-old treasury of still-relevant scholarship can prepare one to detect the shoddiness and sleight of hand in the work of a prominent, openly gay professor of history at Yale University. I speak of the late John Boswell, whose prizewinning Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is full of weak evidence and questionable conclusions but w
hose last book, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, is a shocking piece of propaganda, cunningly mined with traps to mislead the general reader. While some reviews of the latter were strongly skeptical (I reviewed it negatively for The Washington Post), most of the gay and mainstream press fell gullibly for it hook, line, and sinker. But the grim truth about Boswell is starting to emerge, as even the politically correct New York Times admitted in June in a disillusioned article marking the book’s one-year anniversary.
If gays do not stand for truth, they stand for nothing. When I see t-shirts for sale at a gay resort listing Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Janis Joplin, and Madonna as “gay,” I am embarrassed by the childish credulity and disrespect for facts that are now widespread in the gay scene. This sort of heavy-handed mistreatment of the subtleties of complex biographies is no better than hysterical superstition.
Similarly, there is wild overpraise of misogynous Michel Foucault by literary academics, who naïvely attribute to their gay idol breakthrough insights that have been common coin since Romanticism and the birth of modern sociology in the 1890s. Queer theory cannot go on trafficking in inflated reputations, such as those of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, glib game-players and cloistered careerists whose evident lack of hard knowledge of history, anthropology, psychology, and science makes their writing about sex absurd.
The gay studies sections of bookstores are bulging. But who is browsing in them except gays? Gay writers and thinkers are stunting their own development if they address only a gay audience. It’s time to rejoin the mainstream. I don’t seek sanitization and normalization: I stand with the prostitutes, boy lovers, drag queens, and transgendered. But gays, who are vulnerable to abrupt changes in political climate, must have disciplined free minds to see the present and past without sentimentality or fear.
* [Last Word column, The Advocate, September 5, 1995.]
59
GAY IDEOLOGY IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS*
Spin the gay bottle! Pin the tail on the gay donkey! Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of American public education.
The prestigious Oak Hill Middle School of Newton, Mass., has posted, for the edification of its 11- to 13-year-old students, the photos of fourteen major gay figures of the ancient and modern world.
The purpose? To show that “it’s OK to be gay” and that “gay is good,” school officials told The Boston Globe. The female art teacher who created the bulletin-board exhibit declared, “Kids commit suicide over their sexuality; it’s up to us to take this issue from under the covers, and say, ‘It’s OK, it’s normal.’ ”
Who made the Newton gay hit parade? Not just professed gays like Marcel Proust, Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, and Newton’s own Congressman Barney Frank, but Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman—and Eleanor Roosevelt. “If kids question how the wife of a president could be gay, good,” declared the teacher, who defined her professional goal as “teaching tolerance and respect.”
But wouldn’t students be better off if their teachers fed them facts rather than propaganda? Proclaiming Eleanor Roosevelt gay is not only goofy but malicious. It reduces a bold, dynamic woman whose entire achievement was in the public realm to gossip and speculation about her most guarded private life.
Only in puritanical Anglo-American culture could kisses and hugs (the acts with which Mrs. Roosevelt is charged) be transformed into salacious evidence for prosecution and conviction. False accusations in seventeenth-century Salem got you hanged as a witch. False accusations in twentieth-century Newton get you hoisted as a gay saint.
As a specialist in the history of the arts, I am outraged at the coarse political exploitation and distortion of art, a trend that began twenty-five years ago on our college campuses. That Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Walt Whitman were attracted to young men, I have no doubt. But those phenomenally productive geniuses were obsessively solitary characters who may have diverted their sexual energies into art. In the absence of hard information, to call them “gay” is ethically wrong. And to introduce major artists to schoolchildren via sexual scandal rather than through the art itself is a perversion of education.
Those who promote Shakespeare’s homosexuality for their own ideological agenda conveniently overlook the fact that none of his thirty-seven plays address homosexuality or allude to it except in negative terms. (Is Iago, with his evil fixation on Othello, now to be a gay role model?) On the contrary, Shakespeare is world-famous for his celebration of heterosexual love, as in the eternally popular Romeo and Juliet.
There are two romantic objects of Shakespeare’s sonnets, conventionally called the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth, but it is not at all clear that physical consummation occurred with the latter. In fact, in Sonnet 20, Shakespeare remarks that his friend’s penis is an obstruction to their union and elsewhere explicitly urges him to marry.
Sexual orientation is fluid and ambiguous, and homosexuality has multiple causes. It certainly is not inborn, as was claimed by several small, flawed studies of the early 1990s. The intrusion of militant gay activism into primary schools does more harm than good by encouraging adolescents to define themselves prematurely as gay, when in fact most teens are wracked by instability, insecurity, and doubt.
Questionable and overblown statistics about teen suicide (like those about rape a few years ago) are being rankly abused. In most cases, the suicide attempts are probably due not to homophobic persecution but to troubled family relations—which may be the source of the social maladjustment and homosexual impulses in the first place. Trumpeting gayness in adolescents short-circuits their psychological inquiry and growth.
Many pressing civil-liberties issues remain to be resolved for gays—the right to serve with honor in the military, for example, or the extension of equal benefits to domestic partners. But the kind of arrogant cultural imperialism shown in Newton—where “tolerance and respect” would clearly not be accorded to a fundamentalist Christian or Hindu who declared homosexuality immoral—can only create a backlash empowering the religious far Right.
Preachers of the Left and preachers of the Right must stay out of our public schools. “Self-esteem” is not the purpose of education. Teachers should stop posing as therapists and do-gooders and get back to introducing the huge expanse of art, literature, history, and science to American students, who desperately need cultural enrichment and intellectual development.
* [“It Wasn’t Romeo and Julian” (their headline), The Wall Street Journal, February 22, 1999.]
60
THE DEATH OF CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS*
I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week. The New York Times, for example, first posted an alert calling him “the father of modern anthropology” (a claim demonstrating breathtaking obliviousness to the roots of anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and then published a lengthy, laudatory obituary that was a string of misleading, inaccurate, or incomplete statements. It is ludicrous to claim that Lévi-Strauss singlehandedly transformed our ideas about the “primitive” or that before him there had been no concern with universals or abstract ideas in anthropology.
Beyond that, Lévi-Strauss’ binary formulations (like “the raw and the cooked”) were a simplistic cookie-cutter device borrowed from the dated linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the granddaddy of now mercifully moribund post-structuralism, which destroyed American humanities departments in the 1980s. Lévi-Strauss’ work was as much a fanciful, showy mish-mash as that of Joseph Campbell, who at least had the erudite and intuitive Carl Jung behind him. When as a Yale graduate student I ransacked that great temple, Sterling Library, in search of paradigms for reintegrating literary criticism with history, I found literally nothing in Lévi-Strauss that I felt had scholarly solidity.
In contrast
, the twelve volumes of Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915), interweaving European antiquity with tribal societies, were a model of intriguing specificity wed to speculative imagination. Though many details in Frazer have been contradicted or superseded, the work of his Cambridge school of classical anthropology (another of whose ornaments was the great Jane Harrison) will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today’s sterile academic climate.
* [Salon.com column, November 10, 2009.]
61
THE COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL MASSACRE*
Last week’s horrifying massacre at Columbine High School in a suburb of Denver has brought widespread attention to clique-formation in high school—a pitiless process that has remained amazingly consistent for the past sixty years. The arrogant jocks and debs still sublimely sail over the cowering nerds and wallflowers, who compensate by organizing their own pecking order, in minute gradations of status painfully obvious to everyone.
“We are hierarchical animals,” I declared in my first book. Rousseauist liberals and armchair leftists (like Michel Foucault) think hierarchy is imposed on free-flowing human innocence by unjust external forces, like the government and the police. But hierarchy is self-generated on every occasion by any group, especially in a philosophical vacuum. As an atheist, I acknowledge that religion may be socially necessary as an ethical counterweight to natural human ferocity. The primitive marauding impulse can emerge very swiftly in the alienated young.
Provocations Page 48