The TLS
January 05, 2007
The throne trembles
Richard Davenport-Hines
NI_MPU('middle');
GAY LIFE AND CULTURE. A world history. By Robert Aldrich, editor. 384pp. Thames
and Hudson. Pounds 24.95. - 0 500 25130 4.
US: Universe. $49.95. - 0 7893 1511 4.
It is twenty years since Max Beloff, at the height of the convulsion
caused by the refusal of Oxford dons to award an honorary degree to
Margaret Thatcher, publicly scorned the classicist Sir Kenneth Dover
for having published a book entitled Greek Homosexuality. It was a
subject, Beloff seemed to think, not to be named among historians. The
supremacy of homosexual love in Greek imagination was indeed a topic
from which even Wilamowitz and Burckhardt had shied away; but in 1978
Dover confronted the entrenched prejudice and prudery which had denied
paiderastia as a vital component of ancient Greece. His methodology was
immaculate, and his cast of mind exceptionally wise; but few of the
flood of subsequent books on the history of homosexuality have matched
his pioneering work.
It is indeed a polymorphous literature that can include the
sociological earnestness of Jeffrey Weeks, the hectic slapstick of
Rictor Norton, the cheerful narrative histories by Charles Kaiser and
Hugh David, the moving study of British campaigns for legal reform by
Antony Grey, Michael Rocke's study of forbidden friendships in
Renaissance Florence, George Chauncey's superb study of the making of
the New York gay milieu before 1944, and Gary Leupp's restrained,
intensely researched and intriguing Male Colors: The construction of
homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (1995).
Dover wrote in 1978 that he knew of no other topic "on which a
scholar's normal ability to perceive differences and draw inferences is
so easily impaired". All too many of the historically orientated books
on gender and queer studies have proven his point. Too often they baulk
at any testing, evaluating or balancing of evidence, and blur the
distinctions between opinion, assertion and fact.
They combine an almost delinquent antipathy to any form of
institutional authority with a complacent assurance that the ethical
standards, sexual tolerance, social fluidity and cultural certainties
of a twenty-first-century graduate seminar represent the acme of human
progress.
Foucault insisted that the homosexual man was invented around 1870 as
the result of a single medical article -an article which, as Graham
Robb has argued in his excellent Strangers: Homosexual love in the
nineteenth century (2003), it is doubtful that Foucault bothered to
read. Foucault concocted the spurious idea that "the sodomite had been
a sinner" until the 1870s, but then became "a species". His version
devalued all same-sex experience before 1870, and arrogantly
abbreviated or denied any cultural heritage or emotional continuities
for gay or lesbian people before that date. His bluster, though, has
been finally discredited by Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and
Civilization
(2003). Marshalling a wide array of evidence from (inter alia) ancient
Graeco-Roman culture, medieval Islam, feudal Japan, and early modern
Europe, Crompton argued that "sodomites" had long possessed a distinct
and minatory identity, and judged cultures outside the Judaeo-Christian
traditions to have been less cruelly oppressive than, say, those of
early modern Europe or of the Western Enlightenment.
Robert Aldrich, who is Professor of European History at the University
of Sydney, has conceived the bold idea of a truly international
synthesis of all this recent research. He has recruited historians from
eight different countries -France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA to contribute surveys which
summarize the evidence and historical orthodoxies on same-sex relations
and cognate themes in classical antiquity, medieval and early modern
Europe, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, in the Middle
East, North Africa, Asia and colonial America. Individual chapters
"illustrate", Aldrich writes, "romantic attachments and carnal
pleasures through the ages: the paiderastia of ancient Greece, the
friendships of medieval monks, the multifaceted sexual world of
Renaissance humanists, the mignons of Louis XVI's court, women who
passed as men to emancipate themselves from social expectations", the
sexual customs of the Antipodes and the Pacific, the impact of gay
militancy in the 1960s, and much else. There are two discrete chapters
on lesbians in early modern Europe and in the modern world, and a
necessarily rather generalized final chapter on "The Gay World" since
1980.
Aldrich's contributors generally try to take the Dover road. They argue
against glib parallels "between historical instances of same-sex
behaviour and contemporary gay and lesbian identities", and seem
displeased with recent queer studies which, rather than seeking,
understanding and respecting the experience and conduct of
homosexuality in remote cultures, have angrily focused on
hetero-normative frameworks that supposedly, after 1870, narrowed
"sexual possibilities . . . into the governing binary system of
heterosexuality and homosexuality". They are indeed less insular and
less self-satisfied than most practitioners of gender studies.
Altogether there are admirably few invocations of Foucault's theories,
although some mentions of him as a sexual tourist.
It is inevitable that such a diligent and even-handed collection of
essays should sometimes seem staid, but the fairness of this book is
compensation for its dryness. Though there is much about homosexuality
drawn from philosophy, anthropology and the arts, there is rather less
about the role of homosexuality in comedy or indeed the role of comedy
in homosexuality. One longs, at times, for the humane irony with which
Kenneth Dover handled his subject: "if we could ask ancient Greeks why
homosexual eros, once invented, caught on so quickly, widely and
deeply, practically all of them . . . would reply rather as if we had
asked them the same question about wine: enjoyment of both females and
males affords a richer and happier life than enjoyment of either
females or males". Aldrich's contributors must be applauded for
treating boy-love in so unfashionably calm a manner: Gert Hekma bravely
utters some unsayable truths -"in general young people suffer no
negative consequences from intergenerational sex unless it happens
inside the family or unless violence is used against them" -and
intelligently contextualizes the prevalent Western hysteria about the
sexual abuse of children.
Sexual desire, which in Western societies used to be based on
differences of gender, age and class, must now be founded (according to
the bien pensants) on equality: "power relations have become
unacceptable, and this is especially true for intergenerational
contact". Several contributors agree with Crompton that the oppression
of same-sex conduct was most rigorous inside the Judaeo-Christian
tradition, and confirm for other cultures and periods Dover's
conclusion about Greece between the eighth and second centuries bc:
"The Greeks neither inherited nor developed a belief that a divine
power had revealed to mankind a code of laws for the regulation of
sexual behaviour", and therefore "felt free to select, adapt, develop
and -above all - innovate. Fragmented as they were into tiny political
units, they were constantly aware of the extent to which morals and
manners are local".
Two densely informative and subtly suggestive chapters contain material
that will be un- familiar to many readers: Vincenzo Patane on
"Homosexuality in the Middle East and North Africa", and Adrian Carton
on "Desire and Same-Sex Intimacies in Asia". One of the sayings
attributed to the Prophet Muhammad -"Whenever a male mounts upon a
male, the throne of God trembles" -sets the mood for Patane's story.
Penetration is "the crucial act around which Arab eroticism revolves",
he writes, and the speed at which ejaculation is attained is considered
"a sign of virility".
Passivity is thought irreversibly to damage virility:
the passive partner is "an inferior completely stripped out of the
status of 'man'", "a ghostly figure wandering in the margins of
society, with no chance of planning a life outside society's
unbreakable laws". Dover identified homosexuality as satisfying a
special need in classical Greek society, "the need .
. . for personal relationships of an intensity not commonly found
within marriage or in the relations between parents and children or in
those between the individual and the community as a whole". This
observation is supported by Carton's account of same-sex relations in
China and Japan. The bonding of scholars with their pupils, rulers with
their favourites, monks with their acolytes, and samurais with their
apprentices is well attested. More than half of the shogun who ruled
Japan between 1338 and 1837 had same-sex relations, Carton reports, and
the sexual affairs of the samurai were crucial in maintaining a sense
of loyalty.
The pictorial richness of this book is a delight: there are over 250
illustrations -half of them in colour -and they are always pertinent.
They are variously graceful, erotic, ribald, sad and sordid: a few
(including a photograph of fifty-one young men, arrested in Egypt in
2001, packed together in a cage during their trial) are very upsetting.
Overall, they splendidly enhance the text of this well- designed book.
They were selected by Wendy Gay, an elegant, vivacious figure who
enhanced the lives of those who noticed her at work in the London
Library and other haunts of picture researchers. She was killed last
summer in an accident outside the British Library: these pictures serve
as a reminder of her taste and wit.
Copyright 2006
The Times Literary Supplement Ltd.
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