6. Cited in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 47, 83.
7. See ibid., 83–85.
8. Wilde, De Profundis, 917–18.
9. See Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 83–84.
10. See ibid., 60–61.
11. Wilde, ‘‘Wasted Days,’’ in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 732.
12. Wilde, ‘‘Madonna Mia,’’ in ibid.
13. Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 42.
14. Ibid., 184–87.
15. Ibid., 78.
16. In Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood finally gives the real reason, hidden in Lions and Shadows, for his trips to Germany: he was able to live out his homosexuality freely there (ibid., 2–3).
17. He would still publish, in 1924, his masterpiece, A Passage to India, a book he had begun writing much earlier, but had given up on for a good number of years.
See Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, 2:132.
18. See the chapter ‘‘Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet,’’ in Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.
19. Gide, The Journals of André Gide, 2:409–10.
20. See Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 320.
21. Johnson, ‘‘In Honorem Doriani Creatoisque Eius,’’ cited by Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 323–24. On the rhetoric of flowers, omnipresent in gay literature and a veritable part of the counter-discursive ‘‘code,’’ see the chapter entitled ‘‘Flowers’’
in Bartlett, Who Was That Man?, 39–59. Flowers were not only a figure of discourse or a part of a literary or poetic code, they were also, in the real world, a sign to be recognized, a way of displaying what one was. At the premier of his play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, on February 20, 1892, Wilde and all his friends wore a green carnation, which became a kind of sign of homosexuality (see Bartlett, 50). A book even appeared on this subject, called The Green Carnation. When Gide published Corydon, Jérôme and Jean Tharaud exclaimed, ‘‘Whom will M. Gide convince that one should prefer green carnations to roses?’’ (cited by Gide in the appendix to
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Corydon, 135). There was an equivalent for lesbians. Maurice Sachs, in Au temps du Bœuf sur le toit, 199, describes ‘‘the ever so slightly lesbian ladies who wear violets in their buttonholes to identify themselves’’ (cited in Bard, Les Garçonnes, 22).
7. The Greeks against the Psychiatrists
1. Foucault, ‘‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex,’’ in Foucault Live, 217–18. Hereafter cited as fl . The interview first appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur, March 12–21, 1977.
2. Symonds, The Letters of John Addington Symonds, 3:394.
3. Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 34.
4. See Dover, Greek Homosexuality, and Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love.
5. Lauritsen, introduction to Male Love, by Symonds, ix.
6. Symonds, The Letters of John Addington Symonds, 3:691.
7. Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 57.
8. Symonds to Carpenter, December 29, 1892, reprinted in Symonds, Male Love, 149.
9. Ibid., 150–51. In The Artist of April 2, 1894, Charles Kains-Jackson, who doubtless had received a copy of A Problem in Modern Ethics from Symonds, issued a call for a new order of chivalry that would be held together by the exaltation of the ideal of masculine youth—just as the older order of chivalry, that of a nascent, still imperfect civilization, had been oriented toward the ideal of feminine youth. The colonial power of England, Kains-Jackson wrote, protects it from French or German invasion, and so there is no longer any need to be concerned about the need for population growth. (See Charles Kains-Jackson, ‘‘The New Chivalry,’’ in Sexual Heretics, ed. Brian Reade, 313–19.) Of course the manner in which these pleas on behalf of love between men are characterized not only by a profound misogyny but also by ideologies of national regeneration—and, more generally, by nationalist and colonialist ideologies needs to be looked into. Just as the rehabilitation of the Dorians by German intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century was able to resonate with the racial ideology of German superiority, so, upon its importation into England, it became linked to the ideology of England’s national and imperial greatness. This was not the case for Pater, who had left the warrior aspect of the discourse aside, but was certainly the case for Symonds. On this subject, see Dellamora, ‘‘Dorianism,’’ in Apocalyptic Overtures, 43–64. In the text by Kains-Jackson, the themes central to Symonds in his early period—the reference to Sparta, the praise of the joys of the palaestra and also of pederasty, both occasions for older men to pass on their experience to adolescents—can be found alongside more Whitmanian themes which are closer to Symonds in his later period: descriptions of male youths
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on river banks, in forests, descriptions of the pleasure of physical life and of life in nature, and so on.
8. The Democracy of Comrades
1. From a letter to Leonard Smithers, dated December 11, 1897. Wilde, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, 695.
2. Nordau, Degeneration, 320. The book was published in German in 1893. The first part is subtitled ‘‘Fin de siècle.’’
3. Nordau, Degeneration, 537, 557–59.
4. See Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 503.
5. Wilde, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, 695.
6. Cited in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 550. Although I have no particular justification for saying this, Wilde’s witticism has always made me think of Michel Foucault (the early Foucault, the Foucault of Madness and Civilization), who could easily have spoken those very words.
7. Wilde, De Profundis, 902.
8. Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, 246, 189.
9. Cited in Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life, 303–4.
10. Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, 189.
11. Symonds’s letter to Whitman is dated September 5, 1890, and is cited in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 396–97.
12. Ives’s journal is cited by Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 171.
13. Schmidgall, Walt Whitman, 303.
14. See Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 115–25.
15. See, for example, the account of a visit to Gide in 1948 in Gore Vidal’s autobiography, Palimpsest, 182–84.
16. Forster, ‘‘Terminal Note,’’ Maurice, 249.
17. Carpenter’s letter to Whitman of July 12, 1874, is cited in Rowbotham,
‘‘Edward Carpenter: Prophet of a New Life,’’ in Rowbotham and Weeks, Socialism and the New Life, 34–35.
18. Whitman, ‘‘One’s-Self I Sing,’’ in Leaves of Grass, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 165. This poem was written in 1860, and is included in the third edition of Leaves of Grass, published that same year, in which the ‘‘Calamus’’ section was also included. It is either this edition or that of 1867 that was read by Symonds, Wilde, and Carpenter. The poems were revised for the final edition of 1892 which appeared shortly before Whitman’s death.
19. Whitman, ‘‘Starting from Paumanok,’’ in Leaves of Grass, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 179.
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20. Whitman, ‘‘For You O Democracy,’’ in Leaves of Grass (edition of 1891–92), 272.
21. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in Leaves of Grass, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 927–94.
22. On Carpenter, see Rowbotham, ‘‘Edward Carpenter,’’ 25–138.
23. Whitman, preface to ‘‘Democratic Vistas With Other Papers—English Edition,’’ in Leaves of Grass, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 1195.
9. Margot-la-boulangère and the Baronne-aux-épingles
1. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 112.
2. See Weeks, Coming Out, 37, 42.
3. The letters are cited in Kennedy, Ulrichs, 116.
4. See ibid., 59.
5. See the chapter titled ‘‘Molly’’ in Bray,
Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 80–
114. See also Trumbach, ‘‘The Birth of the Queen,’’ 129–40, and ‘‘Sodomitical Subculture, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution in the Eighteenth Century,’’ 109–21.
6. See Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 89–91.
7. Bartlett, Who Was That Man? , 142. On the entire a√air, see 128–43. Je√rey Weeks o√ers a di√erent explanation. He underscores the fact that the concept of homosexuality was not yet well formed in 1871. It was not their ‘‘homosexuality,’’ he suggests, that was a problem, but rather their transvestism and the fact that they solicited men while dressed as women. See Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society, 101. Yet this ‘‘constructionist’’ or even nominalist qualification does not seem convincing to me. Above all, it changes nothing about what is essential here.
8. Cited by Bartlett, Who Was That Man? , 94.
9. See Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 474. See also the story Pierre Louÿs told Gide and that Gide prints in If It Die . . . , 272–73.
10. See Rey, ‘‘Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700–1750,’’ 179–91.
11. Ibid., 186–88.
12. See Peniston, ‘‘Love and Death in Gay Paris,’’ 128–45.
13. Ibid., 133.
14. Wilde, De Profundis, 938. On Wilde’s gay life much information can be found in Ellmann’s biography, but see also Schmidgall, The Stranger Wilde, especially chapter 9, ‘‘Ass-Thete: Lover of Youth,’’ 169–97.
15. Tardieu, Études médico-légales sur les attentats aux mœurs (Paris, 1862), cited in Thompson, ‘‘Creating Boundaries,’’ 115.
16. Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, 254.
17. Cited in Weeks, Coming Out, 41.
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18. Citied in ibid.
19. See Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind. On Auden, see the biography by Carpenter, Auden.
20. Schlumberger, Madeleine et André Gide.
10. From Momentary Pleasures to Social Reform
1. Gide, The Fruits of the Earth, 40, translation modified.
2. Ibid., 63–76.
3. Painter, André Gide, 33. Gide’s house was located at Cuverville in Normandy.
4. Gide, The Immoralist.
5. Gide, The Fruits of the Earth, 65–66.
6. Ibid., 185 (my emphasis), translation modified. New Fruits, a compilation of fragments composed over a twenty-year period, was published in 1935. (The English translation includes The Fruits of the Earth and New Fruits in the same volume.) Yet near the end of The Fruits of the Earth, Gide was already writing ‘‘Nathanaël, how I wish I could take you back with me to those love-filled hours of my youth when life flowed in me like honey.’’ This comes from a page that also mentions Athman, who will be so important in Gide’s life (172). On the place sexuality holds in the way that Gide imagines the posterity of his work, see Lucey, ‘‘Practices of Posterity, 47–71.
7. Gide, The Fruits of the Earth, 196.
8. Gide, Journal 1887–1925, 272. [Translator’s note: this is one of the passages in Gide’s Journal that was restored in the most recent French edition. It is not part of the English translation by Justin O’Brien published in the 1940s.]
9. Corydon is the name of a shepherd in Virgil’s second eclogue.
10. Gide, Corydon, 4.
11. Ibid., 5. In 1914, Gide would translate nine poems from Leaves of Grass for the Oeuvres choisies [ Selected Works] of Whitman published by the nrf . See Gide, The Journals of André Gide, 2:29–31.
12. See Pollard, André Gide, 63. Pollard’s book is a detailed study of Gide’s sources for Corydon.
13. Gide, Corydon, 118, 19.
14. See Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918, 108–45.
15. See Weeks, Coming Out, 126–27.
16. It is striking to see to what an extent the theme of the ridicule to which a nation can be subjected is omnipresent. Eulenburg makes his nation the laugh-ingstock of the French and Gide renders his nation ‘‘ridiculous.’’ On the attacks on Gide, see Ahlstedt, André Gide et le débat sur l’homosexualité.
17. Gide, Corydon, 87–88, 90.
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11. The Will to Disturb
1. Gide, The Journals of André Gide, 2:246. The italics are Gide’s.
2. See the description of his feelings upon watching the scene of sodomy between his friend Daniel and Mohammed in If It Die . . .: ‘‘I could have screamed in horror’’ (286).
3. Ibid., 287.
4. Ibid., 144.
5. See the ironical comments by Michael Lucey about French Gidians who spend their time explaining that Gide never had sex with Allégret, or only a little, or with Athman, and so on (Lucey, Gide’s Bent, 12, 64). Of course it is also important to think about Gide’s relation to the ‘‘Orient’’ and to the colonial situation in which his sexuality was at this moment grounded. On this subject as well the commentaries by certain French Gidians are remarkable for their astonishing naivete. Éric Marty, for example, wishes only to see in Gide’s (sexual) voyages to North Africa an attempt to rediscover the mythical Arcadia of Virgil, assuming thereby that Gide never stops thinking about Greece in metaphoric relation to the Orient. (See Marty, André Gide, 55–60.) It is true that Marty wishes to convince us that Gide was subject to no form of ‘‘perversion’’: ‘‘Gide is not perverse in the sense that he did not choose the pathological. ’’ Goodness me! And supposing he had chosen it? Marty continues:
‘‘If one does feel it necessary to employ the term perversion, it must be entirely redefined: one should simply see in it the part of desire that is exempt from the trivialities of sentimentalism and its corruptions’’ (Marty, 60–62; my emphasis). Here we find that the categories of thought of Professor Delay have lived on! Fortunately, there are more complex analyses to be found (politically more lucid and also less homophobic) of the relation between Gide’s sexuality and colonialism. See Said, Culture and Imperialism, and Lucey, Gide’s Bent, esp. 43√ and 143√.
6. Gide, So Be It or The Chips Are Down, 163–64.
7. Gide, The Journals of André Gide, 2:248.
8. ‘‘Réponse de François Porché,’’ in Gide, Corydon, 153. [Translator’s note: Porché’s response is not published in the English translation of the book.]
9. Gide, The Journals of André Gide, 2:339–40. On Maritain’s relentless e√orts to reform homosexuals (Cocteau, Crevel, Green, Mauriac, Sachs, and others), see Barré, Jacques et Raïssa Maritain. Although the book is written from a point of view close to that of Maritain, it is filled with interesting information. It allows one to see to what a degree the struggle against homosexuality was a central preoccupation of Catholic intellectuals of the time. Claudel, for example, never missed an occasion to express his hatred for Gide. We might also recall that in 1952, thirty or so years after Maritain’s visit, a year after Gide’s death, the Vatican would place all of Gide’s books on the Index.
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10. In the preface to the 1924 edition of Corydon, Gide wrote: ‘‘My friends insist that this little book is of the kind which will do me the greatest harm. . . . I do not believe I value greatly what it will rob me of: applause, decorations, honors, entrée into fashionable circles are not things I have ever sought out’’ (xix).
11. Gide says twelve copies in the preface written for the 1920 edition of the book (xxiii). Claude Martin sets the figure at twenty-two ( André Gide ou la vocation du bonheur, 555). The book was published under the title C.R.D.N. with no author’s name given.
12. Gide, Corydon, xxiii. In 1920, Gide has twenty-one copies printed, with the full title, but still without the name of the author (Martin, André Gide ou la vocation du bonheur, 556).
13. Gide, The Journals of André Gide, 4:130–31, 256.
14. Gide, ‘‘
Entretiens avec Jean Amrouche,’’ in Marty, André Gide, 289–93.
12. The ‘‘Preoccupation with Homosexuality’’
1. Martin du Gard, Journal, 2:295–96, cited in Lucey, ‘‘Practices of Posterity,’’ 56–
57. It should also be emphasized that Gide also felt released from a certain duty to be secretive out of respect for his wife, for in 1918 she destroyed all the letters he had written to her over a period of twenty years at the moment he left on a trip to England with Marc Allégret, telling her that he was ‘‘rotting away’’ at her side. See Schlumberger, Madeleine et André Gide, 189–90. In his journal he notes on November 24, 1918, ‘‘At least now nothing prevents me any longer from publishing both Corydon and the Memoirs in my lifetime’’ (Gide, Journal 1887–1925, 1077). [Translator’s Note: this passage from Gide’s Journal was not present in the version translated by Justin O’Brien in the 1940s.]
2. Brassaï, Le Paris secret des années trente. On the gay subculture in Paris, see Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, and Tamagne, Recherches sur l’homosexualité dans la France, volume 2.
3. Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 17.
4. See Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, 42 √. See also the texts brought together in Oosterhuis and Kennedy, eds., Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany. See also Hewitt, Political Inversions.
5. See Oosterhuis, ‘‘Male Bonding and Homosexuality in German Nationalism,’’
241–63.
6. It should nonetheless be noted that, at least in France, the invocation of Greece and classical culture, the kind one sees magnified in Corydon, was often linked, at least before the war, to Action Française, a right-wing nationalist group known to have influenced Gide during his youth. See Hanna, ‘‘What Did André Gide See in the Action Française?’’
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7. See Oosterhuis, ‘‘Political Issues and the Rise of Nazism,’’ 183–90.
8. Ibid., 188.
9. See Ibid., 189. It might be wondered if it was not equally the allegiance to masculinist values (or the recognition of masculine superiority that went along with their desire to disassociate themselves from the social roles traditionally assigned to women) that led members of certain lesbian circles (notably in Paris) to support explicitly profascist opinions in the 1920s and 1930s. If feminists were in the majority antifascist, a certain number of lesbians were, to the contrary, drawn to those ideologies. Djuna Barnes, Nancy Cunard, Colette, Sylvia Beach, and Adrienne Monnier were without question extremely hostile to the totalitarian regimes that were emerging in Europe after the First World War. The same cannot be said of Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Romaine Brooks, Radcly√e Hall, and Natalie Barney.
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