13. See Adam, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement.
14. See on this point, D’Emilio, ‘‘Capitalism and Gay Identity,’’ in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–16.
15. Many other such examples can be found in George Chauncey’s book or Florence Tamagne’s dissertation.
16. ‘‘The achievements which surround us and which we want to change are old victories that have rotted’’ (s t g, 189).
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Specters of Wilde
1. How ‘‘Arrogant Pederasts’’ Come into Being
1. Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, 339. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 477–78.
2. Wilde, De Profundis, 938.
3. Ibid., 894.
4. See Bartlett, Who Was That Man?
5. Forster, Maurice, 159.
6. On Magnus Hirschfeld, see Wol√, Magnus Hirschfeld. On Virginia Woolf, see Vanita, ‘‘The Wildeness of Woolf,’’ in Sappho and the Virgin Mary, 186–214, esp. 186–89.
7. See Pollard, André Gide, 3; and Martin, André Gide ou la vocation du bonheur, 553.
8. Gide, If It Die . . . , 280–87. On Gide’s relations with Wilde in Paris, see Martin, André Gide, 160–62, and on Algeria, 250–51.
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9. See Martin, André Gide, 309–10.
10. See Gide, Oscar Wilde: In Memorium.
11. Delay, La Jeunesse d’André Gide, 2:547. If Delay does not hold Wilde fully responsible for Gide’s homosexuality, it is because he has two other explanations to provide: too frequent masturbation and a temperament marked by a notable ‘‘nervous weakness’’ (526). It is di≈cult to understand how a work such as this, which provides a condensed version of all the homophobic stupidity to be found in psychiatric discourse, could still be considered today as a ‘‘masterpiece.’’ For a (devastating) critique of the book, see Lucey, Gide’s Bent, esp. 120–21.
12. The journalist Maximilian Harden had accused two aristocrats who were close to the Emperor—Prince Philipp Eulenburg and Count Kuno Moltke—of being homosexual. The libel trials begun by those two aristocrats in 1907 and 1908 lasted for years, with many ups and downs. They were covered widely all over Europe. Of course, the lives and careers of the two aristocrats (and of several others) were ruined. The fact that Magnus Hirschfeld came to testify for Harden to the e√ect that Moltke was homosexual (with the crazy idea that in such a forum he would be able to defend the idea that homosexuality was inborn, that it was found even in the highest social levels, and thereby advance the cause of its decriminalization) had disastrous long-lasting e√ects for the German homosexual movement. On Eulenburg and the ‘‘A√air,’’ see Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918, 45–145.
On Hirschfeld’s role in the various trials, see Wol√, Magnus Hirschfeld, 68–85.
13. Gide, Corydon, 3.
14. Cited in Pollard, André Gide, 416.
15. On homosexuality in Proust’s work in general, see Rivers, Proust and the Art of Love. On Proust’s interest in the Eulenburg a√air, see 112–37. See also Antoine Compagnon’s ‘‘Notice’’ for the 1988 Pléiade edition of Sodome et Gomorrhe, which documents quite precisely the relation of the Eulenburg a√air and its coverage in France to the genesis of Proust’s novelistic project ( Recherche, 3:1196–1202).
16. Cited by Compagnon, in Recherche, 3:1201.
17. The letter is from August 1909. See Proust, Correspondance, 9:155.
18. See ‘‘Esquisse IV’’ ( Recherche, 3:955) and ‘‘Esquisse I’’ ( Recherche, 3:919).
19. rtp, 2:979. In one of the drafts for the novel, Charlus is very close to one of those accused in the a√air (see Recherche, 3:1202). Proust also mentioned the Eulenburg scandal in a draft composed in 1910–1911 (see Recherche, 3:952).
20. In Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the hero is ‘‘poisoned by a book’’
(in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 115). The book, which he reads over and over again, and from which he ‘‘could not free himself ’’ (102), is none other than Huysmans’s Against Nature. Dorian identifies with the novel’s main character, Des Esseintes. Huysmans’s inspiration for that character was Montesquiou.
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21. The book from 1908 that I mentioned earlier (Grand-Carteret, Derrière ‘‘Lui’’) was devoted to this subject. The trials are also discussed in a book by Weindel and Fischer, L’Homosexualité en Allemagne, that also appeared in 1908. It was also in 1908
that the book by Hirschfeld, Le Troisième Sexe was first published in French.
22. See Proust’s letter to Louis d’Albufera in May 1908, in Correspondance, 8:112–
13.
23. See Proust’s letter to Robert Dreyfus in May 1908, in Correspondance, 8:122–
123. See also Antoine Compagnon’s ‘‘Notice’’ in Recherche, 3:1198. And also Rivers, Proust and the Art of Love, 145–51.
24. Gide, Corydon, 7.
25. See Sibalis, ‘‘The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789–1815,’’ 80–101.
26. This growth toward the assumption of the right to speak is helpfully traced in Lepape, André Gide, le messager.
27. Sedgwick, Between Men, 114.
28. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 49. Gide should, of course, be added to the list. To speak of ‘‘modern homosexuality,’’ by which one understands ‘‘as we know it today,’’ poses its own set of problems, especially to the extent that it allows one to assume there to be some unique, unitary form of homosexuality and that we could take account of it by simply looking around us. But this would leave out, of course, all the forms that we do not ‘‘know,’’ that we do not see, all the forms that do not fit within the ‘‘homosexual/heterosexual’’ duality. Obviously the modern way of thinking of ‘‘gay identity’’ has not brought about the disappearance older ways of thinking of relations between people of the same sex (the Freudian model of bisexuality, classical ‘‘pederasty,’’ and so on) that have continued to cohabit with more recent forms. See, on all these points, Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, 46–
47, and her remarks at a colloquium at the Centre Pompidou, ‘‘Construire des significations queer,’’ 109–16, esp. 111–12.
2. An Unspeakable Vice
1. Dumézil, preface to L’Homosexualité dans la mythologie grecque, by Bernard Sergent. Republished as Homosexualité et initiation chez les peuples indo-européens, 9.
2. On Dumézil and World War I, see Eribon, ‘‘Georges Dumézil, un homosexuel au XXe siècle,’’ 31–32.
3. One historian has recently suggested that it was thanks to the experience of the war and of the period just after the war that real gay culture was able to emerge.
(See Tamagne, Recherches sur l’homosexualité dans la France, vol. 1, 45–52.) One should probably qualify Tamagne’s assertions a bit. In her remarkable work she shows a
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tendency to emphasis ruptures too much, at the expense of continuities that should be equally obvious. It would probably be better to think in terms of reorganization or of development rather than of emergence or creation.
4. Dumézil, preface to Homosexualité, 9.
5. Ibid., 9. He is referring to the article by E. Berthe that appeared in 1907 in Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, no. 62, 438–75.
6. One finds what must surely be that same will to legitimation by way of the claim of a relation to a glorious past in Boswell’s book, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
7. Forster, Maurice, 51.
8. See, on this subject, Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love, 2–3.
9. Cited in Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England, 290.
10. On Bentham, see Crompton, Byron
, 48.
11. Cited by ibid., 39.
12. See Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love, 4.
13. See ibid., 4. On Ulrichs and Plato, see Kennedy, Ulrichs, 50.
14. See Kennedy, Ulrichs, 167.
15. Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, 4–5.
16. For an idea of this cultural e√lorescence, see the anthology edited by Reade, Sexual Heretics. See also the analyses of Dellamora in Masculine Desire.
17. The full text of the poem can be found in Reade, Sexual Heretics, 360–62.
Reade also reprints another poem by Douglas, ‘‘In Praise of Shame,’’ which ends with the verse: ‘‘Of all sweet passions, Shame is the loveliest’’ (362).
18. See Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 386, 427–28.
19. Ibid., 386.
20. Merle, Oscar Wilde ou la ‘‘destinée’’ de l’homosexuel, 72.
21. On all these points see Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford.
22. See ibid., 80.
3. A Nation of Artists
1. Here I am following the analysis of Dowling in Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, 5–11, and citing 5. On English Republican discourse, see the classic study by Pocock, The Machiavelian Moment, which Dowling cites on many occasions.
2. See Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love, 3.
3. See chapter 3 of Boswell, Same-Sex Unions, esp. 55–62.
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4. Boswell, Same-Sex Unions, 57. Even Halperin, who, contrary to Boswell, insists on the fact that it is impossible to transpose the experience of ancient Greece into the terms of today’s homosexuality (because the relations of people of the same sex were always structured by relations of age or of class), notes that there existed in Greece and in Rome the practice of male prostitution about which the texts tell us very little (Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love, 94). More importantly, he criticizes the true ‘‘political agenda’’ that is hidden within the idea that pederasty was only ritualistic, that is to say, that it did not include the expression of any real desire between the younger and the older man, as if it were necessary to sustain the idea—the fiction—of a primary heterosexuality (ibid., 61).
We might add that Henning Bech has identified the same implications in the ways the ideas developed by Halperin (and by Foucault)—according to which, in the Ancient World, it was not the sex of the partner that mattered but rather the active or passive role in the sexual relation—have been taken up and understood by others. Some have gone so far as to say that for men in the active (and socially superior) position, there was an indi√erence to the partner’s sex. (See Bech, When Men Meet, 71, 236n126.) Bech sees here a perhaps implicit will—especially odd when it is formulated by gay men—to assert that when a Greek man had relations with a younger man, he might as well have been having relations with a woman—which amounts to a refusal of the specificity and the reality of homosexual desire. As I just indicated, David Halperin had already explicitly dissociated his own analysis from any such reading ( One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love, 33–
34).
5. Dumézil, preface to Homosexualité, 11. During a conversation I had with him when Sergent’s book was published, Dumézil expressed his reticence more clearly, telling me, ‘‘Bernard Sergent tends to believe too easily that what he finds in the texts allows him to know what was going on in reality.’’
6. Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets is reprinted in the collection of his texts edited by Lauritsen, Male Love, 12–145. This note is on 144.
7. The sentence from Plato is at Laws 636 c.
8. Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, 239.
9. See Bartlett, Who Was That Man? , 199.
10. Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. , in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 1175. On Platonism and love in the Symposium, see 1174. The other author to whom Wilde makes frequent reference in this work is none other than Walter Pater, from whom Wilde borrows his theory of aesthetic experience.
11. Cited by the editors of Wilde, Lettres, 44.
12. Symonds, The Greek Poets, cited by Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 33.
13. Bartlett, Who Was That Man? , 199.
14. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 113.
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4. Philosopher and Lover
1. Pater, ‘‘Diaphaneitè,’’ in The Renaissance, 154–58. See the commentary by Dowling in Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, 83.
2. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, 81.
3. See ibid., 101n14.
4. Pater, The Renaissance, 122–23. (The first edition of this book in 1873 was titled Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Pater changed the title for the 1877 edition, choosing The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. It is this later edition that is available today.)
5. In Art and Illusion, Gombrich insists on the fact that these statues were sculpted according to the strictest criteria, according to imposed schemas.
6. Pater, The Renaissance, 152–53.
7. Solomon’s paintings represent androgynous figures who sometimes recall John the Baptist or Leonardo da Vinci. Solomon was a homosexual who, in 1873, was arrested while out cruising and given a prison sentence.
8. Cited in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 84.
9. Cited in ibid.
10. See Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, 104–14.
11. Cited in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 176. ‘‘Charlotte-Ann’’ or ‘‘Mary-Ann’’ are expressions by which one designated e√eminate homosexuals or, indeed, all homosexuals. ‘‘Fairy’’ or ‘‘fruit’’ might be contemporary equivalents. There is also a play on words with charlatan.
12. See ibid., 169. ‘‘Epicene’’ refers to gender ambiguity, as opposed to the vigor and robustness of ‘‘sturdier minds,’’ that is to say, their virility.
13. Ibid., 29–30.
14. See ibid., 42–43.
15. The photographer Cecil Beaton went through something similar in the 1930s: showing up wearing a bit too much make-up to a ball given by the Count of Pembroke, Beaton was thrown into some water by a group of ‘‘virile’’ young men.
See Hoare, Serious Pleasures, 85–86, cited by Tamagne, Recherches sur l’homosexualité dans la France, 1:250.
5. Moral Contamination
1. On the Wilde trial, see Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 440–78, and also the recent book by Folsy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde. See also Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde.
2. Cited in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 447, 449.
3. Cited in ibid., 463.
4. Cited in ibid., 477.
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5. Cited in Hyde, Trials, 253.
6. Gide, Oscar Wilde, 1. Gide also comments that Wilde was not so much a great writer as a ‘‘great viveur,’’ and he adds that, ‘‘like the philosophers of Greece, Wilde did not write but talked and lived his wisdom’’ (x).
7. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 453.
8. Henri de Régnier, ‘‘Souvenirs sur Oscar Wilde,’’ 86.
9. Gide, Oscar Wilde, 17.
10. rtp, 2:638. In Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust also discusses Wilde’s fate as a kind of destiny of which Wilde himself would have had a premonition. He recalls a witticism of Wilde’s stating that the greatest sorrow of his life was the death of Lucien de Rubempré in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. He goes on: ‘‘There is something peculiarly dramatic moreover about this predilection and compassion in Oscar Wilde, at the height of his success, for Lucien de Rubempré’s death. He felt compassionate, no doubt, because he saw it, like all readers, from Vautrin’s point of view, which is also Balzac’s point of view. From which point of view, moreover, he w
as a peculiarly choice and elect reader to adopt this point of view more completely than most readers. But one cannot help reflecting that a few years later he was himself to be Lucien de Rubempré. The end of Lucien de Rubempré in the Conciergerie, when he has seen his brilliant career in the world come crashing down after it has been proved he had been living on intimate terms with a convict, was merely the anticipation—as yet unknown to Wilde, it is true—of exactly what was to happen to Wilde’’ (65).
11. See Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 108, 426–27.
12. See ibid., 450–51, 462.
6. The Truth of Masks
1. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative Texts, 232.
2. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 93.
3. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 322.
4. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 29, 32.
5. Ibid., 104. Even if very few readers today recognize Pater’s name, it could still be said that, by way of Wilde, he has been one of the most influential authors for gay intellectual and literary culture and for ‘‘gay culture’’ more generally. He may have given eloquent expression to rather than actually inventing his ideas about seizing the moment, about the ‘‘pulsations’’ that one should seek to multiply, about the need to be forever seeking out new sensations, about finding ways to renew one’s passions, and so on. But these ideas are certainly among the most remarkable constants of gay life, or at least of the representations that gay people like to give of their lives. The Picture of Dorian Gray, given that it was one of the most read books
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among gay men (often the first gay book they would read), could hardly help having deep and lasting e√ects on gay self-representation and self-perception—for instance, with the idea of the necessary youthfulness of the gay man. Is this not also one of the most generalized representations within received wisdom? An aging gay man, or, even more markedly, an elderly gay man, is surely the target of the most violent insults, all the more violent for the obscene sarcasm that often characterizes them. The old queen (or the old dyke) as a grotesque figure or a figure of ridicule is certainly one of the least examined of homophobic images, and one of the most widespread—even among gay people themselves.
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 53