How ‘Gay’ Became an Identity in Art: Two groundbreaking exhibitions in Chicago explore the shift in portrayals of same-sex attraction. They are being staged at a fraught moment. (New York Times)
St Sebastian, Guido Reni, c. 1615, Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa
D’où la possibilité qui t’est donnée de te constituer dans chaque musée que tu visites ton cabinet secret personnel, accessible à tous, mais où nul à part toi et quelques privilégiés ne sait qu’il est entré. Un savoir gai, William Marx, Minuit, 2018
From the introduction (Prologue) of Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, Will Tosh, Seal Press, 2024, the best book I have read on this topic:
I don’t see the need to look for incontrovertible signs that Shakespeare the person was gay or bi, because I don’t see anything wrong in taking it for granted that he was a queer artist, working in a culture that both enabled and frustrated his imaginative exploration of same-sex desire. For far too long, the burden of proof has been on scholars and biographers to provide ‘evidence´ beyond reasonable doubt that esteemed men like Shakespeare were anything other than robustly, swaggeringly heterosexual. Well, I don’t accept the terms of a methodology that has homophobic distaste baked into its requirements. Why prove something that is manifestly evident to anyone with the wit to see it? As the poet Don Paterson put it, with just the right degree of irritation, in his commentary on the sonnets: ‘The question “was Shakespeare gay?” is so stupid as to be barely worth answering, but for the record: of course he was? I’m going to take Paterson’s briskness as my guiding principle in this study of William Shakespeare, a queer artist who drew on his society’s complex understanding of same-sex desire to create some of the richest relationships in literature. (…) My book finds most to say about the obscure, poorly documented, much-fought-over period of Shakespeare’s life known as the ´lost years’: the era before his establishment in 1594 as a key member of the theatre company in which he’d make his name as a dramatist, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. And along the way, this queer quasi-biography gives stage time to the work of other Elizabethan writers who profoundly influenced the way Shakespeare thought about desire, sexuality and homo-eroticism: John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe and the pathbreaking queer sonneteer, Richard Barnfield.
According to the Guardian, Edmund White, an acclaimed novelist of gay life, « died on Tuesday evening while waiting for an ambulance after experiencing symptoms of a stomach illness. His death was confirmed to the Guardian by his agent, Bill Clegg, on Wednesday. » He died on June 3, only months after the death of Felice Picano, leaving Andrew Holleran as the only surviving member of the so-called Violet Quill Club.
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The first edition of Sodome et Gomorrhe in paperback
Baron de Charlus attends his first Verdurin dinner party at La Raspelière with Morel and he misinterprets Dr. Cottard’s gaze as some kind of sexual advance:
« Pour M. de Charlus, qui pensait peut-être aux dangers (bien imaginaires) que la présence de ce Cottard dont il comprenait à faux le sourire, ferait courir à Morel, un inverti qui ne lui plaisait pas n’était pas seulement une caricature de lui-même, c’était aussi un rival désigné. Un commerçant, et tenant un commerce rare, en débarquant dans la ville de province où il vient s’installer pour la vie, s’il voit que, sur la même place, juste en face, le même commerce est tenu par un concurrent, n’est pas plus déconfit qu’un Charlus allant cacher ses amours dans une région tranquille et qui, le jour de l’arrivée, aperçoit le gentilhomme du lieu, ou le coiffeur, desquels l’aspect et les manières ne lui laissent aucun doute. Le commerçant prend souvent son concurrent en haine; cette haine dégénère parfois en mélancolie, et pour peu qu’il y ait hérédité assez chargée, on a vu dans des petites villes le commerçant montrer des commencements de folie qu’on ne guérit qu’en le décidant à vendre son « fonds » et à s’expatrier. La rage de l’inverti est plus lancinante encore. Il a compris que dès la première seconde le gentilhomme et le coiffeur ont désiré son jeune compagnon. Il a beau répéter cent fois par jour à celui-ci que le coiffeur et le gentilhomme sont des bandits dont l’approche le déshonorerait, il est obligé, comme Harpagon, de veiller sur son trésor et se relève la nuit pour voir si on ne le lui prend pas. Et c’est ce qui fait sans doute, plus encore que le désir ou la commodité d’habitudes communes, et presque autant que cette expérience de soi-même qui est la seule vraie, que l’inverti dépiste l’inverti avec une rapidité et une sûreté presque infaillibles. » (Sodome et Gomorrhe II, Gallimard, 1922)
And here, the same passage in English:
« To M. de Charlus, who was thinking perhaps of the wholly imaginary dangers in which the presence of this Cottard whose smile he misinterpreted might involve Morel, an invert who did not attract him was not merely a caricature of himself but also an obvious rival. A tradesman practising an uncommon trade who on his arrival in the provincial town where he intends to settle for life discovers that in the same square, directly opposite, the same trade is being carried on by a competitor, is no more discomfited than a Charlus who goes down to a quiet country spot to make love unobserved and, on the day of his arrival, catches sight of the local squire or the barber, whose aspect and manner leave no room for doubt. The tradesman often develops a hatred for his competitor; this hatred degenerates at times into melancholy, and, if there is the slightest suggestion of tainted heredity, one has seen in small towns the tradesman begin to show signs of insanity which is cured only by his being persuaded to “sell up” and move elsewhere. The invert’s rage is even more obsessive. He has realised that from the very first instant the squire and the barber have coveted his young companion. Even though he repeats to him a hundred times a day that the barber and the squire are scoundrels whose company would bring disgrace on him, he is obliged, like Harpagon, to watch over his treasure, and gets up in the night to make sure that it is not being stolen. And it is this, no doubt, even more than desire, or the convenience of habits shared in common, and almost as much as that experience of oneself which is the only true experience, that makes one invert detect another with a rapidity and certainty that are almost infallible. » (Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright. The Modern Library, 1993)
Angelo Rinaldi, the French writer and literary critic, died in Paris on May 7. He will be remembered for his sharp, uncompromising reviews published in L’Express between 1972 and 1998 – a selection of which was recently reissued by the small press Édition des instants under the title Les roses et les épines(2025). His lifelong companion, Hector Bianciotti, passed away in 2012.
In his last book, The Loves of my Life (Bloomsbury, 2025), Edmund White writes these comments which I found interesting :
« The Pupil is one of the best gay short stories ever written, unless it’s Conrad’s The Secret Sharer – and he wasn’t even gay! »
« Now it seems to me all the most talented new novelists are gay – the Nigerian Arinze Ifeakandu; the Brits Thomas Grattan and Tom Crewe; in France, Édouard Louis; in Finland, Pajtim Statovci; in America, Garth Greenwell and Bryan Washington. »
« In the same period straight novelists tackled gay subjects. I’ve argued that the most brilliant gay comic novel is Pale Fire by that inveterate heterosexual Nabokov.
And Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat, written in 1970 by a married Oxford don just three years after homosexuality was legalized in Britain, is the most three-dimensional portrait of a gay marriage, according to Garth Greenwell. »
In his appraisal in the New York Times Dwight Garner overlooks El sueño del celta (2010), which, among the novels I have read, is my favorite. Interweaving Roger Casement’s last days in prison with flashbacks from his life, Vargas Llosa presents us with a fictionalized biography – yet based on thorough documentation – of a tormented man, a staunch anti-colonialist, a passionate defender of human rights and the indigenous cultures of his time, an Irish nationalist… and a homosexual.
To be read together with the excellent edition of Casement’s The Black Diaries by Jeffrey Dudgeon (Belfast Press, 2016).
