Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
Page 30
Individuated strategies as well as individuated ways of imagining oneself, one’s aspirations, and individuated ways of life led people to take up discourses and behaviors that were mutually contradictory. There has never been a single way to live as a homosexual. Divergent legitimating discourses could even arise from the same intellectual tradition. When Symonds, for instance, invokes Plato and Greece it is to exalt masculinity and spiritual procreation; when Ulrichs does so, it is to establish a basis for the idea of
‘‘uranism,’’ of an ‘‘intermediate sex,’’ one between men and women, one that would soon be called the ‘‘third sex.’’ And these two species of discourse would even come to cohabit within a single work, as when Edward Carpenter takes up the theory of the intermediate sex at the same time as he sings of the viril love of comrades in Whitmanian terms.≤≤
All these traditions, in their complexity and contradictions, can also be found at the birth of the German homosexual movement at the end of the nineteenth century. The tensions caused by the contradictions will grow stronger through the years leading up to the 1930s. An increasingly marked opposition will be found between the proponents of a biological theory of a
‘‘third sex’’ (Magnus Hirschfeld is central here) and the proponents of the
‘‘virility’’ of male homosexuality, who made regular reference to ancient Greece. Proust will take up the biological theory of the third sex in Cities of the Plain ( Sodome et Gomorrhe), while Gide, in Corydon, will align himself with
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Greek love, pederasty, and masculinity, specifically setting out to struggle against the image of homosexuality being put forward by Proust.
In all of this one sees again that literature is playing a central role. Whitman himself said, ‘‘I think Literature—a new, superb, democratic literature—
is to be the medicine and lever and (with Art) the chief influence in modern civilization.’’≤≥ Symonds, Wilde, and also Gide learned this lesson, and Whitman would give them leverage, would provide a reference point for their attempts to reform society, to educate it, to cure it of its prejudices.
9
Margot-la-boulangère and
the Baronne-aux-épingles
In his autobiography, John Addington Symonds makes no secret of the fact that his debt to Whitman was not merely an intellectual one, but had to do with sexuality as well. Thanks to Whitman he was able to stop repressing his desire to meet men of the working classes, men he described (revealing his consistent obsession with his ideals of purity) as the uncorrupted sons of nature. It bears keeping in mind that the entire intellectual culture I have just described was not at all far removed from the gay subculture that also existed throughout the cities of Europe.
Unfortunately, we know little about these popular gay cultures. Of them we have only fragmentary glimpses by way of literary or medical texts or the dusty files of legal and police archives. One of the reasons we tend to grant so much importance to literary and intellectual culture when searching for the origins of modern gay identity is simply that that culture has passed on to us the largest number of documents, of identifiable and interpretable traces.
What do we know about all those people who never wrote anything, about what they were thinking? To put it bluntly, what was going on in the minds of the soldiers or workers who were drinking with the intellectuals, spending evenings with them in taverns, and sleeping with them? What was Dorian Gray doing on those days when he disappeared? Who did he spend that time with, time about which Wilde’s novel tells us almost nothing if not, in few words, that ‘‘it was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors . . . and that he consorted with thieves and coiners’’?∞
What can be known of these homosexual ways of life, ones constantly
being invented and reinvented within popular culture? What can be known of the life of bars and cabarets, of meeting places, the linguistic codes, ways of dressing, ways of being, ways of carrying oneself, and so on? According to Je√rey Weeks, judicial archives demonstrate the wide extent of ‘‘homosexual
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life’’ in large cities (London, Dublin) and in garrison towns and ports. The rich slang specific to this way of life gives some indication of the widespread nature and the durability of its subculture.≤ A London correspondent of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s writes to him in 1868 that he has just attended a party to which ‘‘uranists’’ came dressed as women. These men called each other by women’s names (‘‘Viola,’’ for instance). In other letters, the same writer describes costume balls to which men came dressed in drag. Yet he notes that on an occasion in which a man in drag arrived at a cafe that was mostly frequented by respectable uranists, he was very poorly received. Dances also took place that were reserved for uranists who did not dress in women’s clothes.≥ In Frankfurt, Ulrichs socialized with a small circle of uranists who called themselves Laura, Mathilda, Georgina, Madonna, Queen of the Night, and so on, and who referred to each other as ‘‘sister dear.’’∂
One hundred and fifty years earlier, London ‘‘sodomites’’ had already developed the practice of meeting in private homes or in a reserved room in a tavern. These molly houses ( molly being the word of the moment for sodomite) were numerous and, along with meeting areas such as St. James Park, helped make up a specifically homosexual universe, a city within a city. If we accept the evidence of police reports and newspaper articles published when various scandals broke out, this gay culture contained a whole set of complex customs, conventions, and rituals. Yet what most struck observers of the time was the transvestism and the extravagant e√eminacy they often came across. A theatricalized femininity—apparent in clothing, manner-isms, poses, language, witticisms, and the like—was more often than not a characteristic element of their evening parties. Of course this gay life struggled under the threat of repression: police raids, trials, and even, in 1726, hangings following a series of investigations led by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, a religious organization dedicated to struggling against debauchery.∑ It is important to note that class distinctions were not salient in the molly houses—in them all social levels mixed together. Among the visitors were, of course, many married men leading a double life. Should they have the misfortune to be arrested during a raid, even if they escaped punishment (which might have included being pilloried), their lives would be shattered.∏ During those periods in which repression was most severe, there would be fewer molly houses or they would be more discreet, at least until things returned to what we might call normal and life could return to its usual course—until the next round of police raids and arrests.
Cruising and meeting places were also placed under surveillance, of
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f course, and numerous arrests took place there as well, helped along by the traps that were set for ‘‘potential’’ sodomites: a young man would wait to be approached or would approach someone, and then the police would arrest the ‘‘sodomite’’ who hadn’t exercised su≈cient caution. Arrests at cruising grounds (urinals, parks, and so on) are one of the constants of gay history.
Descriptions of them can be found in judicial archives from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A scene of this nature lies at the heart of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, in which an aristocrat is sent to prison in the 1950s after having been arrested in a public restroom.
In the nineteenth century, urban gay culture was often quite audacious.
Young men would go so far as to walk openly in London or to go to the theater wearing dresses. This can be seen in the case of the arrest and trial of
‘‘Stella’’ Boulton and ‘‘Fanny’’ Park in 1870. The case against them was based on the assumption that given the way they dressed (as women) and carried themselves they must b
e sodomites. Their private letters were read aloud during the trial, and their clothes and even their underwear were produced as evidence. They were subjected to medical examination, and much time was spent discussing the question as to whether or not the dilation of the anus was proof of ‘‘sodomy.’’ The most extraordinary thing about this story is that the two men were acquitted! Their attorney pointed out that the crime of which they were accused was so frightful that it was unimaginable that anyone would display evidence of it in public, and therefore their comportment should be taken as evidence of their innocence. As Neil Bartlett puts it, the ‘‘evidence of Fanny and Stella’s visibility was converted into proof that they didn’t exist.’’π Doubtless, this was the preferred outcome for the two accused. Others were surely less lucky.
There were many scandals with which the press had field days. The
Cleveland Street scandal of 1886 was typical. A male brothel had been o√ering the services of young men employed at the post o≈ce or telegraph boys to economically more privileged clients—among them Lord Somerset, who was close to the Prince of Wales. It was in fact because this scandal lingered in people’s memories that the Scots Observer could write, upon the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, that it was a work aimed at ‘‘outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.’’∫ The allusion would have been perfectly clear to any informed reader of the time. It makes clear that Wilde’s novel was perceived in a similar manner both by his admirers and his detractors. It also
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makes clear the novel was a kind of intervention into a specific cultural world, one that extended well beyond the literary one.
Many other illustrations of this subcultural life of London could be of-fered, such as the fake marriage ceremonies celebrated between two men—
the one, for instance, that involved Alfred Taylor, known to us as the organizer of the brothel that supplied certain sexual partners to Oscar Wilde and who would contribute to his downfall.Ω It is this entire subcultural life that would be brought to trial, judged, and condemned in 1895. After all, Wilde had a co-defendant who shared his sentence: Alfred Taylor.
Such a culture existed in Paris as well and had existed for quite a while.
Historians, for instance, speak of a gay way of life in the period 1700–1750.∞≠
Police records describe ‘‘congregations’’ that met in certain taverns, where greetings such as ‘‘Good evening Miladies’’ were used, along with feminine surnames that referred jokingly to various professions (Baronness-Hatpin or Margot-the-Baker-Girl) or that parodied aristocratic titles (Madame de Ne-mours). The feminine reference is characteristic of this form of sociability, one that also understood itself to be a kind of free-masonry. According to one contemporary account, ‘‘Some members with napkins on their heads
imitate women and mince about like them.’’∞∞
Police records reveal that most of these taverns were little more than places to meet, eat, and drink. Yet some such businesses had two distinct kinds of spaces, one in which to drink and chat, and another that was reserved for sexual interactions—just as today one sometimes finds in bars a separation between the bar as such and a backroom.
Most important for our purposes is that the police files also describe certain locales for cruising (public urinals, the quais of the Seine, certain parks) in which sexual acts happened on the spot. The cramped living quarters of the time with their thin walls were not well suited to what we know as
‘‘private life.’’ Here an article by William Peniston concerning a murder that took place in 1877 on the quais of the Seine is relevant. The police file on the murder reveals that because of it a serious investigation of the gay milieu was undertaken, leading to the conviction of the killer. He had murdered his partner because his partner planned to leave him. The murderer had first claimed not even to have known the young man who had just drowned, but it turned out that they lived together. The archives reveal an entire gay universe, with festive meetings, dances (referred to as a ‘‘reunion of pederasts’’ in the
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f police files, which also recount raids of such events and arrests of ‘‘suspects’’), meeting places (restaurants and cafes) which, if not exclusively gay, were nonetheless known to be what would today be called ‘‘gay friendly.’’
There were also more specifically sexual meeting places, baths and parks (notably the Tuilerie Gardens, where soldiers stationed nearby would often indulge in attacks against homosexuals), and places to find prostitutes (such as the arcades of the Palais-Royal).∞≤
One police file lists the surnames of a group of young male prostitutes: La Pompadour, La Brunette, L’Africaine, La Baronne.∞≥ Police raids and arrests were frequent, and a good number of aristocratic and bourgeois men were among those the police interrogated. They were perhaps picked up during a raid on the ‘‘pederasts,’’ arrested in a urinal, or denounced by one of the young prostitutes who was a police informer or else trying to weasel out of a di≈cult legal situation. Clearly they were participants in a gay world that included people from all levels of society. Upon reading the work of historians and the documents from the police archives, it is di≈cult not to think of the declamation of Proust’s Baron de Charlus, in Cities of the Plain ( Sodome et Gomorrhe) in which, precisely because he describes his predilection for crossing class barriers, he unwittingly reveals to his listeners the penchant he is trying to hide: ‘‘I, who have had so many ups and downs in my life, who have known all manner of people, thieves as well as kings, and indeed, I must confess, with a slight preference for the thieves . . .’’ (rtp, 2:741). Oscar Wilde, who dined both with government ministers and with prostitutes who would subsequently blackmail him, could have said something similar.
(Wilde would in De Profundis refer to his dinners with male prostitutes as
‘‘feasting with panthers,’’ indicating the sense of excitement he experienced because of the dangerous nature of this kind of socializing, something he also claimed not to regret.)∞∂
This class ‘‘confusion’’ is often remarked upon in police documents or in medical texts of the nineteenth century. In the 1860s, Ambroise Tardieu expresses astonishment that men ‘‘apparently distinguished by education and fortune’’ could engage in sexual relations with other men characterized by moral ‘‘degradation’’ and by a ‘‘revolting filth.’’ Tardieu claims that it is more this violation of the boundary between the classes that threatens public order than homosexuality itself. In the homosexual universe, he explains, aristocratic and bourgeois men socialize with the dregs of society. Being thereby exposed to theft and blackmail, they are brought too close to the world of crime.∞∑ This idea of the proximity between homosexuality and
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crime becomes one of the central themes not only of police literature and medical and psychological literature, but of literature itself.
Clearly, then, it is not possible to describe the ‘‘elite’’ gay culture without situating it in a much larger cultural context involving large numbers of people, a context in which male prostitutes (soldiers and workers) from the popular classes rub elbows with transvestites from the middle classes, tavern owners or brothel owners, and all their clients from quite diverse social backgrounds. For doubtless it was to these kinds of places that the honor-able academics, artists, or writers repaired when in search of sexual partners. Symonds, for instance, describes how in 1877 a friend took him to a male brothel. Some time later, he tells us, he had what seems to have been his first sexual experience with a soldier who sold his services and whom Symonds met in a place to which he went looking precisely for what he then found. These kinds of meetings with the type of man that he desired, along with his own intellectual development of course, probably explain a great deal about the fact that by
the 1890s he had moved on from a simple defense of ‘‘pederasty’’ to an apologia for ‘‘camaraderie’’ and for a ‘‘new chivalry’’
based on friendship between men. Indeed, he was so moved by his meeting with the soldier just mentioned that he decided to see him again, for the simple pleasure of speaking with him (‘‘without a thought of vice,’’ he says).
He then reflects, ‘‘This experience exercised a powerful e√ect upon my life. I learned from it—or I deluded myself into thinking I had learned—that the physical appetite of one male for another may be made the foundation of a solid friendship.’’∞∏ Symonds would finally leave England to reside in Davos, in order to take care of his weak lungs—but doubtless also in order to escape from the repressive atmosphere of his social milieu and of Victorian England. In Davos, Symonds would finally permit himself to indulge in the
‘‘vice’’ that so appealed to him. He would enjoy dividing his time between Swiss peasants and Venetian gondoliers.
This imbrication of elite and popular culture can be found in the life—and often in the work—of a good number of the authors who could be thought of as crucial in the emergence in the twentieth century of a discourse in which to speak about one’s homosexuality. It would seem that the ideal sexual type of these homosexual men from the privileged classes was a young man from the popular classes and, for many of them, a ‘‘virile’’ young man. Such a figure would become a kind of model at the beginning of the century. E. M.
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f Forster would state, for instance, that he simply wanted ‘‘to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him.’’∞π