Gaya Scienza

The Dear Love of Comrades: Love Stories, Sex between Men before Homosexuality

Reading The Invention of Heterosexuality for my last post prompted me to open Love Stories, Sex between men before homosexuality (Jonathan Ned Katz, Chicago University Press, 2001, 426 pp.). It's an even better book than The Invention, with a simpler, direct style, without jargon, while addressing and expanding some of the hypothesis of the previous book.

Love Stories opens with the detailed description of the intimate friendship between Lincoln and Joshua Speed after they met in 1837, and ends with a visit to Edward Carpenter in England by a young American, Gavin Arthur, in 1923 (the visit, and extraordinary sexual encounter, were recorded by Arthur in his journal). The book is filled with engaging portraits of men, known or lesser-known. I particularly liked the pages on John Addington Symonds. The central character though is Walt Whitman (1819-1892), who appears in numerous chapters and is the link between many of the other men's stories. Katz writes:

In addition to the artistic achievements of the 1860 Leaves of Grass, it is one of an extraordinary decade's amazing man-love manifestos. It is the plain-speaking, poetic, American equivalent of the twelve prose pamphlets published in Germany between 1864 and 1879 by the lawyer and classicist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the open letter to the Prussian minister of justice, issued in 1869, by the journalist Karoly Maria (Kertbeny) Benkert.

Love Stories is well researched and through the analysis of stories of intimate relationships between men in the nineteenth century it illustrates the major shift that happened at the end of the century in the perception of sexuality. In nineteenth century America love was opposed to lust. Sexual behavior distinguished procreative acts (authorized by true love and marriage) and non-procreative or improperly procreative acts (considered lust, sodomy, buggery, indecency). Because true love was not considered sexual, 'it could, however passionate and physical, flourish between men and between women without raising suspicion of illicit intercourse.' Towards the end of the century love and lust began to converge to form a new ideal of sex-love, leading to the invention of heterosexuality (good sex-love) and homosexuality (bad sex-love)...

A very important book, though exclusively concerned with the anglo-saxon world. What was the situation in nineteenth-century France? This could have been an interesting topic to discuss in Rimbaud, The Double Life of a Rebel when Edmund White speculates on the poet's sexual and intimate life... But the book on Rimbaud's sexuality is still to come.

***

Sam Adams, the openly gay mayor of Portland, OR, made the pages of the national papers this week-end, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He recently admitted to lying during the campaign about having an affair with an intern, Beau Breedlove (I am not inventing the names), while he was a city commissioner. He now recognizes having had a relationship but only admits to have had sex with him after he was 18. Meanwhile, in Paris, as reported by Le Monde, Roger Karoutchi, the French minister for Relations with the Parliament, came out of the closet (first time for an acting French minister), spontaneously... well, there are  local elections in 2010 and he will run in the primaries destined to choose the leadership of his party in the Île-de-France region. "I am doing this, he says of his coming out, so that there are no more understatement or maneuvering on that topic, to allow me to focus all my energy on my project for the Île-de-France region."

2009.01.25

The Invention of Heterosexual Culture

L'invention de la culture hétérosexuelle / The invention of heterosexual culture (Louis-Georges Tin, Paris, Éditions Autrement, 2008, 205 pp.) is a short book easy to read. Louis-Georges Tin is a 'normalien' (he went to the prestigious École normale supérieure, as in their times Sartre, Foucault, Aron and so many other French intellectuals). He is best known for his editing of the The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience, recently translated into English.

In his new book, the first, preliminary part, of a projected trilogy, he starts from the observation that 'the world we live in is totally absorbed by the image of the heterosexual couple.' 'Children tales, adults novels, cinema and television, newspapers and magazines, advertising and popular songs, all celebrate without pause the couple of a man and a woman.' But this was not always the case. 'The importance given to love, or more precisely to heterosexual love, seems to be a peculiarity of our Western societies,' he claims. He tracks it back to the emergence of courtly love in Western Europe during the twelfth century.

Drawing from literary material primarily, Tin shows, quite convincingly, how starting in the twelfth century, brought about by the troubadours, courtly love became a recurring theme in medieval society, going against the prevailing cultures of the times, chivalry and religion, and becoming progressively the norm during and after the seventeenth century.

The book is divided in three parts, each describing the resistances to the developing heterosexual culture from respectively chivalry (favoring manly friendships between males), religion (favoring spiritual love) and medicine (distinguishing normal from abnormal behaviors). It is at the same time ambitious and simplistic. And confusing for that matter. Tin takes a word invented at the end of the nineteenth century, heterosexuality, and without exploring its meaning and significance, uses it to simply describe love between men and women...

While heterosexual practices are everywhere, the expression of heterosexual cultures are ubiquitous. In other words, the celebration of love between men and women is not a constant in human societies.

He does not provide a hint to the causes of the surge of heterosexual culture he describes ('This is not the place to investigate the causes of this phenomenon which remain relatively enigmatic and is the object of disagreement among specialists.'). But as Jonathan Ned Katz showed in 1995 in his well researched book The Invention of Heterosexuality (reprinted by The University of Chicago Press, 2007, 292 pp.) heterosexuality is a more complex concept than what Tin assumes. Heterosexuality and homosexuality were medical terms invented in the late nineteenth century to describe perverse nonprocreative forms of sexuality. Progressively though, 'the twentieth century witnessed the decreasing legitimacy of that procreative imperative, and the increasing public acceptance of a new hetero pleasure principle. Gradually, heterosexuality came to refer to a normal other-sex sensuality free of any essential tie to procreation.' Interestingly, 'only in the mid-1960s,' when gay movements were starting, 'would heteroeroticism be distinguished completely from reproduction, and male-female pleasure sex justified for itself.' Which allows Katz to write that his essay

points to the convergence of nonprocreative heterosexuality and nonprocreative homosexuality, judged by a late-nineteenth-century reproductive standard. A similar convergence of heterosexual and homosexual may be noted in the late twentieth century, judged by today's pleasure standard. Now, the decreasing value of procreation, and increasing value of pleasure sex, make heterosexual and homosexual seem ever more similar. This undermines, as we'll see, old rationales for unequal treatment, and, finally, the very basis of the heterosexual/homosexual distinction.

The invention of Heterosexuality leading to the end of Gay Culture? Let's wait for the other volumes of Louis-Georges Tin's trilogy...

2009.01.18

Bits and Pieces

We seem to be up to a good start with several, interesting (at least) new books, either published recently or soon to be published...

Let's begin with an apparently terrible biography of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life by Paul Mariani (New York, Viking, 2008, 496 pp.). This is what Mark Ford writes in the New York Review of Books:

'The one-time eccentric is now of course the Society of Jesus's chief literary glory, though his sexual leanings still present an obstacle to the hagiographical impulses of some of his latter-day Catholic admirers. Paul Mariani, in his quite dreadful biography, ignores the issue altogether, and even furnishes that most confirmed of confirmed bachelors, Walter Pater, with a wife. His knowledge of the Victorian culture from which Hopkins emerged is no more thatn sketchy, and his approach to the topography of England cavalier in the extreme - Horsham, for instance, is reported to be a hundred miles south of London, which puts it deep in the English Channel. All is written in a breathless present tense that grows more irritating with each page. Mariani has discovered no new facts to add to those presented in the excellent early 1990s biographies of Hopkins by Norman White and Robert Bernard Martin, and one can only hope, for the sake of the poet he would glorify, that his book sinks without trace.'

Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham (London, Verso, 2008, 548 pp.) was issued in December. Carpenter is a leading figure in early gay activism of the late 19th- and early 20th century Britain. He wrote several influential books on homosexuality, including: Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society (1894) and The Intermediate Sex (1908). He lived the 30 last years of his life together with his lover, George Merrill, a working class man, which certainly was something at the time. Sheila Rowbotham is a professor of gender and labor history at Manchester University.

The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War by Alexander Waugh, author of another fascinating family saga, Fathers and Sons, will be published in February in the US (New York, Doubleday, 2009, 352 pp.).

L'invention de la culture hétérosexuelle, (The invention of heterosexual culture) by Louis-Georges Tin (Paris, Éditions Autrement, 2008, 205 pp.) who edited The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience, recently translated into English (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008, 448 pp.) appears to be a rather intriguing book. I will have to come back to it.
 
In Paris, I missed a captivating exhibition: Mantegna, 1431-1506 (Musée du Louvre, until January 5, 2009). The catalog of the exhibition, edited by Giovani Agosti and Dominique Thiébaut (Paris, Hazan/Musée du Louvre Éditions, 2008, 480 pp.) is still available...

2009.01.11