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GREGORY HAMM
Friday, October 27, 2006
Gay history has finally come out. With the field of ‘gay studies’ emerging as a bona fide academic discipline separate from gender or minority studies, it was only a matter of time before someone got around to spinning the story of gay life into a readable history. Billed as “the first ever comprehensive, global account” of homosexuality, “Gay Life and Culture: A World History” attempts to trace gay culture from Classical Greece to the present day.
Edited by Robert Aldrich, a professor at the University of Sydney who has written widely on gay subjects, the volume features chapters both chronological (“The Homosexual Age, 1870-1940”) and topical (“Desire and Same-Sex Intimacies in Asia”) by a diverse group of historians and gay studies scholars. Each chapter is concise, but in the aggregate, the fourteen essays amount to a dauntingly thick tome, made lighter by a slick pictorial lineup.
“Gay Life and Culture” is not an encyclopedia: readers cannot look up an entry on Gertrude Stein, for example, to find a synopsis of the writer’s autobiography and contributions to gay life. Rather, Aldrich and his writers, painting in broad strokes, attempt to craft a narrative overview of the march of gay history in Western civilization, with detours to Asia and Africa and other non-Western cultures.
ANY GOOD WORK of historical scholarship makes some kind of argument, if subtly, and “Gay Life and Culture” is no exception. According to Aldrich, the combined essays “give the lie to any assumption that [same-sex] desires are aberrations in human history, or that there is a universal set of ‘natural’ sexual mores from which they depart.”
Gay readers might see nothing ground-breaking in this assertion, but it is a giant step forward to dismiss out of hand the notion — implicit in the messages of conservative groups like Focus on the Family — that being gay is a modern phenomenon intent on destroying the institution of marriage. In this way, the book itself becomes a piece of history, as a normative device.
A sweeping work of history like “Gay Life and Culture” runs the serious risk of revisionism. The term “homosexuality” came into existence only in the late 1860s (“gay” entered the vernacular of sexual orientation much later), and, as gay French philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out, without the name there can be neither the social category nor the identity.
Historians can talk about “women-centered women” or “men passionate for other men” or “same-sex partnerships” in ancient Greece, but to label an individual as “gay” or “lesbian” would be to commit a scholarly blunder. Even the term “sodomy” is fraught with medical, legal, religious and social implications unique to a specific context.
Wisely, the authors steer clear of these and other revisionist pitfalls. For example, the question of President Lincoln’s sexuality, the subject of media speculation after the publication of C.A. Tripp’s “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,’ does not receive a word of mention. Instead, “Gay Life and Culture” focuses on the various known permutations of same-sex desire across time. If there is a shortcoming, it is a tedious dryness that results from the authors’ obsession with political correctness.
The pictures provide the needed spice — a telling photograph of Walt Whitman seated aside a male companion; Otto Dix’s landmark portrait of the androgynous journalist Sylvia von Harden; a Japanese woodcut featuring two women experimenting with a dildo. All of these images drive home the book’s central thesis: gay history has developed throughout time and with extensive contributions from varying cultures.
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