The throne trembles

Robert Aldrich, editor
GAY LIFE AND CULTURE
A world history
384pp. Thames and Hudson. £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 unfamiliar to many readers: Vincenzo Patanè 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 Patanè’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.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Richard Davenport-Hines is the author of Sex, Death and Punishment, 1990, and of A Night at the Majestic, published last year. He is writing a biography of Lady Desborough.