A Reader on Reading

And warming his hands to the fire exclaimed, “Now where would we be

without fagots?”

Sir Walter Scott, Kenilworth

Homosexuality is not always socially condemned. In other societies human sexuality was known to cover a larger spectrum. In ancient Greece and Rome, no moral distinction was made between homosexual and heterosexual love; in Japan, gay relationships were formally accepted among the samurai; in China, the emperor himself was known to have male lovers. Among the native people of Guatemala, gays are not seen as outsiders: “Our people,” said the native leader Rigoberta Menchú, “don’t differentiate between people who are homosexual and people who aren’t; that only happens when we go out of our society. What’s good about our way of life is that everything is considered a part of nature.”

In European society, hostility against gays did not become widespread until the mid-twelfth century. “The causes of this change,” wrote the Yale historian James Boswell, “cannot be adequately explained, but they were probably closely related to the increase in intolerance of minority groups apparent in ecclesiastical and secular institutions throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.” And yet in spite of this hostility, until the nineteenth century the homosexual was not perceived as someone distinct, someone with a personality different from that of the heterosexual, someone who could be persecuted not only for a specific act contra naturam but merely for existing. Until then, noted Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality, “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”

With the invention of the species “homosexual,” intolerance created its quarry. Once a prejudice is set up, it traps within its boundaries a heterogeneous group of individuals whose single common denominator is determined by the prejudice itself. The color of one’s skin, one’s varying degrees of alliance to a certain faith, a certain aspect of one’s sexual preferences can and do become the obverse of an object of desire — an object of hatred. No logic governs these choices: prejudice can couple an Indonesian lawyer and a Rastafarian poet as “colored people” and exclude a Japanese businessman as an “honorary white;” revile an Ethiopian Jew and an American Hassid, yet pay homage to Solomon and David as pillars of the Christian tradition; condemn a gay adolescent and poor Oscar Wilde, but applaud Elton John and ignore the homosexuality of Leonardo da Vinci and Alexander the Great.

The group created by prejudice comes into existence not by the choice of the individuals forming it but by the reaction of those outside it. The infinitely varying shapes and shades of sexual desire are not the pivot of everyone’s life, yet gay men find themselves defined through that single characteristic — their physical attraction to others of the same sex—notwithstanding that those who attract them run the gamut of the human male: tall, short, thin, fat, serious, silly, rough, dainty, intelligent, slow-witted, bearded, hairless, right wing, left wing, young, old, with nothing in common except a penis. Once limited and defined by this grouping, the quarry can be taunted, excluded from certain areas of society, deprived of certain rights, sometimes arrested, beaten, killed. In England the promotion of homosexuality was illegal until recently; in Argentina, gays are routinely blackmailed; in the United States and Canada their inclusion in the armed forces is contested; in Cuba they are imprisoned; in Saudi Arabia and Iran they are put to death. In Germany many homosexuals who were victimized by the Nazis are still denied restitution, on the grounds that they were persecuted for their criminal, not political, activities.

A group, a category, a name may be formed and transformed throughout history, but direct experience of this is not necessary for a writer to express that experience in artistic terms — to compose a poem, to write a novel. Many stories touching on a gay theme stem from writers forced to exist within the gay ghetto. But many others have been written by men and women who have not been condemned to such enclosures. As works of fiction, they are thankfully indistinguishable from one another.

VARIATIONS IN THE LANDSCAPE

Variety is the soul of pleasure.

Aphra Behn, The Rover, Part 2