Strangers
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 @ 23:29
Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century
by Graham Robb (2003)
Robb challenges the common assumptions of the Victorian age as a tabloid image of homophobic hell populated by mean-spirited, fearful and envious ignoramuses from which gay people eventually liberated themselves. Despite its all-inclusive subtitle however, Strangers mainly focuses only on western Europe, with a few mentions of Eastern Europe and America.
This book is divided into three parts. Part One deals describes the treatment of gay men and women by the legal and medical professions and by society in general. Robb highlights how the use of law court records and criminal statistics as sources of information on the gay past has painted a grim, dismal picture of opression. “The Wilde trials. . . cannot be taken as straightforward evidence of homophobia, though that certainly played a part” and his “gay martyr” status has been exaggerated, even if with good intentions. “It is no more accurate to make Oscar Wilde the emissary of the 19th-century homosexuality than it is to see Queen Victoria as a typical Victorian.”
While on the medical or academic side (which Robb has warned to be wary about), the blanket influence of Foucault’s theory of sexual construction, although it allowed sexuality to be studied in the light of history and sociology, it has also popularized the view that gay people have no real heritage before the 1870s.
This fantasy about the power of academic discourse, which effectively devalues all gay experience before the advent of psychiatry, has been a Trojan horse of homophobia. It draws attention ot the fact that our notions of sexuality are peculiar to our own society and age, but also implies that the medical profession impigned on the lives of gay men and women to such an extent that they eventually saw themselves through the doctors’ eyes and become their own oppressors. Ironically, the idea itself has had such a huge effects on modern perceptions of the gay past that it is now its own best proof.
“The main problem was not a lack of intelligence or hatred of homosexuals but a professional desire to wring fresh ideas out of a subject that could not support them,” Robb writes, and the habit of attaching colourful causes to banal effects is definitely not peculiar to popular notions of homosexuality. We always look for causes, the fancier the better, and the more likely it’ll go down in history. Most ideas of homosexuality survive, often for centuries, not because they match real experience, but because they tell an interesting story.
Evidence of ordinariness tends to be neglected because it lacks dramatic interests. The temptation is to fill up the canvas with mass events — hysterycal mobs, purity campaigns, moral panics, and so on. This tends to reduce people to their sexual desires and to present them as helpless micro-organisms in the tide of majority opinion. But they were part of the societies which they helped to form. Like all social beings, they knew the art of compromise and concealment.
Part Two describes their lives and loves — how they discovered themselves and made contacts with like-minded people. Not blessed with the “default” status of heterosexuality, homosexuals refined the art of courtship that demanded more finesse and subtlety than heterosexual one. Dropped allusions, secret signs, particular expressions and gestures, while sometimes seen as a form of ghettoization, can also be enjoyed as a celebration of cultural wealth.
Networks, societies and organisations existed (even if less visible for lesbians), but gay rights movement, Robb believes, didn’t start until the end of 19th century, and some satirical texts are still mistakenly used as evidence of early genuine calls for equality (which only proves the scant number of early organized homosexual protest). The early stirrings of gay armed resistance could be found early in 1848 in France, proving that gay militancy didn’t start with Stonewall even if it never acquired the same symbolic importance. Magnus Hirschfeld, with his ‘Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäre Komitee’ (Scientific and Humanitarian Committee) — which Thomas Mann called ‘Dr Hirschfeld’s ghastly “Committee” ‘, although riddled with medical aura, along with the unfortunate but inevitable disputes and struggles (and regrettably, unexploited solidarity with with women, a recurrent theme in early gay rights), “did a lot of practical good” and was “a sign of progress”.
Part Three presents the available evidence for a vital gay presence in three areas: literature, religion, and something more diffuse that might be called the art of living in the modern world. “Until the 1880s, very few modern literary works mentioned homosexuality directly”, many of them were written without trumpeting their intentions, and the old ruse of altering the apparent sex of a character is well-known. Children’s literature, which generally allows more absence of ordinary laws, provided fertile grounds for fabulists as “any attempt to tear away the veil of innocence might have harmed the accuser more than the perpetrator.” A few are briefly discussed here (The Wind in the Willows, Robin Hood, and Hans Christian Andersen as “the Aesop of 19th century homosexuality), but Robb emphasised that “sexuality is not a skeleton key to the work of Andersen, Melville, or Kafka.” By the turn of the century there were signs of a more authentic literature and a wider choice of identities, and happiness became slightly less unusual, but the window was soon closed, following similar trends in the legal and medical treatment of homosexuality. While brief, in the chapter Gentle Jesus, Robb makes plenty of interesting points as he discusses the attempts to reconcile Christianity with homosexuality without limiting himself to mere discussions of the Bible.
There are times the book seems to be too hasty in making its claims, nevertheless it keeps readers entertained with many interesting, accessible, and funny points. It also comes with a few photographs and paintings (could do less with the single photos), helpful maps, graphs, endnotes and an index. This is the second Robb’s book that I’ve enjoyed (the first being his biography on Rimbaud), and I’ll be looking forward to reading more of his works. Along with Crompton’s encyclopedic Homosexuality and Civilsation and Tóibín’s Love in a Dark Time, Strangers makes a good, contemporary revisionistic addition to LGBT history.
May 11th, 2006 23:42
[…] And a few more mp3s for you, but I think the rest are better sent in CDs/DVDs to save you download time. If anyone else is interested in the few old mp3s I uploaded, feel free to download them (username: aduadu, pass: apaya). New reviews at books @ cc. Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb. Challenges the common assumptions of the Victorian age as a tabloid image of homophobic hell populated by mean-spirited, fearful and envious ignoramuses from which gay people eventually liberated themselves. Jump: and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer. No-cadence stories of (moral and psychological tensions of) life in a racially-divided country written with seemingly no committed specific political ideologies. As expected of Gordimer. We Did Nothing: Why the Truth Doesn’t Always Come Out When the UN Goes In by Linda Polman. Common horrifying-slash-absurd images of “humanitarian” movements gone wrong (as always). If anyone wants the book, I’ll ship it to you gladly. The Balkans by Mark Mazower. A short but broad-ranging history book, challenging the common one-dimensional stereotype of “the Balkans”. […]