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| From gay conspiracy to queer chic: the artists and writers who changed the world | From gay conspiracy to queer chic: the artists and writers who changed the world |
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| Last week, the poet laureate joined the three judges of the Ted Hughes award to hand this year’s winner a cheque for £5,000. They then posed together for photographs: Ali Smith, Jackie Kay, Andrew McMillan, along with Carol Ann Duffy herself, who funds the prize. As someone with more than a passing interest in lesbian and gay culture, my attention was drawn to the potential for bias in this cheerful scene … But hang on a moment, something was not quite right. They had given the money to David Morley, a straight man. | Last week, the poet laureate joined the three judges of the Ted Hughes award to hand this year’s winner a cheque for £5,000. They then posed together for photographs: Ali Smith, Jackie Kay, Andrew McMillan, along with Carol Ann Duffy herself, who funds the prize. As someone with more than a passing interest in lesbian and gay culture, my attention was drawn to the potential for bias in this cheerful scene … But hang on a moment, something was not quite right. They had given the money to David Morley, a straight man. |
| What kind of racket did they think they were running? How could this decision possibly benefit the international gay conspiracy that has been so flagrantly running the arts for so long? Why, they might just as well have been straight themselves! And so, just when you thought the Twittersphere might be about to explode with homophobic abuse about misplaced special interests, there was nothing to complain about. | What kind of racket did they think they were running? How could this decision possibly benefit the international gay conspiracy that has been so flagrantly running the arts for so long? Why, they might just as well have been straight themselves! And so, just when you thought the Twittersphere might be about to explode with homophobic abuse about misplaced special interests, there was nothing to complain about. |
| Related: From Proust to Ellen DeGeneres, 10 gay works that changed the world | |
| Of course, by highlighting the sexualities of these writers, I’m engaging in much the same impertinence. The individuals in question were not there to represent a sexual minority, even if they were representatives of it. The matter was, and is, an irrelevance. And it would have been no less irrelevant if they had decided to give the prize to the short-listed poet Chris Beckett, who happens to be a gay man. However, I feel comfortable with having raised the issue, since it prompts interesting questions about the nature and influence of gay culture – whether it is a stagnant oxbow or a strong current at the centre of the mainstream. | Of course, by highlighting the sexualities of these writers, I’m engaging in much the same impertinence. The individuals in question were not there to represent a sexual minority, even if they were representatives of it. The matter was, and is, an irrelevance. And it would have been no less irrelevant if they had decided to give the prize to the short-listed poet Chris Beckett, who happens to be a gay man. However, I feel comfortable with having raised the issue, since it prompts interesting questions about the nature and influence of gay culture – whether it is a stagnant oxbow or a strong current at the centre of the mainstream. |
| It could be that official recognition is a relevant indicator here. Skim down the lists of the higher national honours and you’ll find, among the Companions of Honour, David Hockney, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Howard Hodgkin and the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. The Order of Merit includes Neil MacGregor and Hockney again. (Not many lesbians, though, at this stratospheric level.) Had the Ted Hughes panel been formally dressed, they might have come festooned with their medals: Kay with the MBE, Smith the CBE, and Duffy the OBE, CBE and DBE. Only two weeks previously, Jackie Kay had been named as the new makar, the national poet for Scotland. But let’s not get too excited: you have to run down the lists quite a long way before coming to Alan Hollinghurst, who won the Man Booker prize in 2004 and Marlon James last year, and to Thom Gunn and Duffy, who won the first and second Forward prizes in 1992 and 1993 respectively. Today, lesbians and gay men maintain a cultural visibility that is not new: it has been built up over a century and more. | It could be that official recognition is a relevant indicator here. Skim down the lists of the higher national honours and you’ll find, among the Companions of Honour, David Hockney, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Howard Hodgkin and the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. The Order of Merit includes Neil MacGregor and Hockney again. (Not many lesbians, though, at this stratospheric level.) Had the Ted Hughes panel been formally dressed, they might have come festooned with their medals: Kay with the MBE, Smith the CBE, and Duffy the OBE, CBE and DBE. Only two weeks previously, Jackie Kay had been named as the new makar, the national poet for Scotland. But let’s not get too excited: you have to run down the lists quite a long way before coming to Alan Hollinghurst, who won the Man Booker prize in 2004 and Marlon James last year, and to Thom Gunn and Duffy, who won the first and second Forward prizes in 1992 and 1993 respectively. Today, lesbians and gay men maintain a cultural visibility that is not new: it has been built up over a century and more. |
| But the question of gay influence is not entirely gratuitous. That it was a hot issue in the 1920s and 1930s accounts for the invention of the idea of the Homintern. Lenin had established the Comintern (Communist International) in 1919. Homintern was the name various people jokingly coined to describe a sprawling, informal network of contacts that occupied a prominent site near the centre of modern life. It may have started as a joke, but it was taken all too seriously by those whom it infuriated. | But the question of gay influence is not entirely gratuitous. That it was a hot issue in the 1920s and 1930s accounts for the invention of the idea of the Homintern. Lenin had established the Comintern (Communist International) in 1919. Homintern was the name various people jokingly coined to describe a sprawling, informal network of contacts that occupied a prominent site near the centre of modern life. It may have started as a joke, but it was taken all too seriously by those whom it infuriated. |
| What exactly was the Homintern? Was it any more than a loose web of similar vested interests? Were parts of it ever distinct communities or subcultures? To what extent was influence used by homosexual powerbrokers (Diaghilev in the Ballets Russes, Hugh Beaumont in London’s West End theatres, David Geffen in Hollywood) to further the careers of other homosexuals? Were they defensive formations, created by the attacks of influential heterosexuals? In short, how far is the existence of the Homintern true, how far a myth? | What exactly was the Homintern? Was it any more than a loose web of similar vested interests? Were parts of it ever distinct communities or subcultures? To what extent was influence used by homosexual powerbrokers (Diaghilev in the Ballets Russes, Hugh Beaumont in London’s West End theatres, David Geffen in Hollywood) to further the careers of other homosexuals? Were they defensive formations, created by the attacks of influential heterosexuals? In short, how far is the existence of the Homintern true, how far a myth? |
| The great Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness noted in 1925 that Reykjavik had finally acquired all the accoutrements of modernity: “not only a university and a movie theatre, but also football and homosexuality”. During a discussion in 1949, when the architect Frank Lloyd Wright said that “this movement which we call modern art and painting has been greatly, or is greatly, in debt to homosexualism”, he was trying to present modernism as unacceptable; but on the same occasion Marcel Duchamp identified lesbians and gay men as being largely responsible for the healthy state of the arts: “I believe the homosexual public has shown more interest [in] or curiosity for modern art than the heterosexual.” | The great Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness noted in 1925 that Reykjavik had finally acquired all the accoutrements of modernity: “not only a university and a movie theatre, but also football and homosexuality”. During a discussion in 1949, when the architect Frank Lloyd Wright said that “this movement which we call modern art and painting has been greatly, or is greatly, in debt to homosexualism”, he was trying to present modernism as unacceptable; but on the same occasion Marcel Duchamp identified lesbians and gay men as being largely responsible for the healthy state of the arts: “I believe the homosexual public has shown more interest [in] or curiosity for modern art than the heterosexual.” |
| The prolific biographer Jeffrey Meyers has argued that the homosexual writer in the 20th century was analogous to the Romantic notion of the tubercular artist in the 18th and 19th centuries. You could say that acceptance of homosexuality became one of the key measures of modernity long before societies like ours in Britain condescended to update their anti-gay structures. | The prolific biographer Jeffrey Meyers has argued that the homosexual writer in the 20th century was analogous to the Romantic notion of the tubercular artist in the 18th and 19th centuries. You could say that acceptance of homosexuality became one of the key measures of modernity long before societies like ours in Britain condescended to update their anti-gay structures. |
| In 1869, Friedrich Engels had already noticed, as he put it in a letter to Karl Marx, that “the pederasts are beginning to count themselves”, speculating half jokingly that they might one day amount to “a power in the state”. Over the next century or so the question would be whether this was a good thing (equality and all that) or a bad (moral decline and all that). Engels had been reading the pioneering sexual theorist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, just one of many European scientists working on sexuality at the time. In most of these men’s work, the defining of new sexual types was followed by an estimation of numbers, often shockingly high. | In 1869, Friedrich Engels had already noticed, as he put it in a letter to Karl Marx, that “the pederasts are beginning to count themselves”, speculating half jokingly that they might one day amount to “a power in the state”. Over the next century or so the question would be whether this was a good thing (equality and all that) or a bad (moral decline and all that). Engels had been reading the pioneering sexual theorist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, just one of many European scientists working on sexuality at the time. In most of these men’s work, the defining of new sexual types was followed by an estimation of numbers, often shockingly high. |
| A succession of scandals was reported in the press. Prominent cultural figures were tried and imprisoned: Oscar Wilde in England (1895), the poet Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen in France (1903), the artist Nils Santesson in Sweden (1907). Works of art were subjected to similar public scrutiny: witness the attempted prosecution of Maud Allen for her performance in Wilde’s play Salomé and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). Press coverage brought the existence of homosexuality to the forefront of the collective consciousness in a way that turned out to be both threatening and enabling to homosexuals: threatening because scandal could happen to any of them, but enabling because it gave them access to information about the homosexual community in a world where it was rarely discussed. | A succession of scandals was reported in the press. Prominent cultural figures were tried and imprisoned: Oscar Wilde in England (1895), the poet Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen in France (1903), the artist Nils Santesson in Sweden (1907). Works of art were subjected to similar public scrutiny: witness the attempted prosecution of Maud Allen for her performance in Wilde’s play Salomé and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). Press coverage brought the existence of homosexuality to the forefront of the collective consciousness in a way that turned out to be both threatening and enabling to homosexuals: threatening because scandal could happen to any of them, but enabling because it gave them access to information about the homosexual community in a world where it was rarely discussed. |
| One outcome of this sense that homosexual people existed in large numbers while still remaining more or less invisible to the naked eye was the suspicion that when they got together they were likely to engage in something more, something even worse than the indulging of a perversion. Notoriously, the networks of homosexuality seemed to transcend many more formal social and political boundaries, reifying crossovers not only between national and ethnic cultures, but between high society and the demi-mondes of bohemian artists, and so forth. The Homintern certainly helped cross-fertilise the arts. | One outcome of this sense that homosexual people existed in large numbers while still remaining more or less invisible to the naked eye was the suspicion that when they got together they were likely to engage in something more, something even worse than the indulging of a perversion. Notoriously, the networks of homosexuality seemed to transcend many more formal social and political boundaries, reifying crossovers not only between national and ethnic cultures, but between high society and the demi-mondes of bohemian artists, and so forth. The Homintern certainly helped cross-fertilise the arts. |
| The history of cafes and bars in Europe and Latin America is full of artistic groups whose drinking and smoking oiled the wheels of conversation, helping to integrate gay men into mainstream cultural development. In the 1920s alone, the Rinconcillo group flourished in Granada, Antinous in Moscow, the Contemporáneos in Mexico City, Pod Picadorem in Warsaw. Most modelled their activities on the left bank in Paris, where every cafe was supposedly a hotbed of literary inventiveness. Paris and Berlin were the two main cities in the Homintern mythology. Largely because of economic collapse, the gay scene in Berlin was the more frantic, although it didn’t mean much to lesbians. Of the “divine decadence” celebrated by the post-Isherwood Cabaret incarnation of Sally Bowles, there was little on offer. Some nightclubs may have been full of glamorous crossdressers, but this was more a performance than a way of life. In general, gay visitors were no less agog and aghast than the straight out-of-towners who made up the rest of the audience. | The history of cafes and bars in Europe and Latin America is full of artistic groups whose drinking and smoking oiled the wheels of conversation, helping to integrate gay men into mainstream cultural development. In the 1920s alone, the Rinconcillo group flourished in Granada, Antinous in Moscow, the Contemporáneos in Mexico City, Pod Picadorem in Warsaw. Most modelled their activities on the left bank in Paris, where every cafe was supposedly a hotbed of literary inventiveness. Paris and Berlin were the two main cities in the Homintern mythology. Largely because of economic collapse, the gay scene in Berlin was the more frantic, although it didn’t mean much to lesbians. Of the “divine decadence” celebrated by the post-Isherwood Cabaret incarnation of Sally Bowles, there was little on offer. Some nightclubs may have been full of glamorous crossdressers, but this was more a performance than a way of life. In general, gay visitors were no less agog and aghast than the straight out-of-towners who made up the rest of the audience. |
| For women, the possibilities were less public. Lesbians were more likely to meet in private houses than in public bars. The most famous of their groups was hosted in Paris by the poet Natalie Barney, a self-styled Amazon and feminist, in whose home at 20 Rue Jacob both women and men met on Friday evenings from four till eight. Many men attended her salons (André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Esra Pound, TS Eliot, F Scott Fitzgerald, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rabindranath Tagore) but the real glory of her guest list was its women: Colette, Mata Hari, Isadora Duncan, Nancy Cunard, Greta Garbo, Peggy Guggenheim, Edna St Vincent Millay, Janet Flanner, Françoise Sagan. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva read there on a brief visit to Paris, but was not a success: not only was she unfashionably dressed, but the work she read was also old fashioned, representing lesbian love, in the manner of the 1890s, as a kind of vampirism. | For women, the possibilities were less public. Lesbians were more likely to meet in private houses than in public bars. The most famous of their groups was hosted in Paris by the poet Natalie Barney, a self-styled Amazon and feminist, in whose home at 20 Rue Jacob both women and men met on Friday evenings from four till eight. Many men attended her salons (André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Esra Pound, TS Eliot, F Scott Fitzgerald, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rabindranath Tagore) but the real glory of her guest list was its women: Colette, Mata Hari, Isadora Duncan, Nancy Cunard, Greta Garbo, Peggy Guggenheim, Edna St Vincent Millay, Janet Flanner, Françoise Sagan. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva read there on a brief visit to Paris, but was not a success: not only was she unfashionably dressed, but the work she read was also old fashioned, representing lesbian love, in the manner of the 1890s, as a kind of vampirism. |
| Gertrude Stein was a different species of Parisian hostess altogether, professionally male-centred, keen to compete with men on their own terms. As a hostess, she was determined to showcase her own opinions for her male guests. Her lover Alice Toklas would sit aside with the wives. One woman who went to both Barney’s and Stein’s salons but had plenty going on at her own base, the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, was Sylvia Beach, who numbered among her great achievements the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Her lover was Adrienne Monnier, who also had a bookshop “of one’s own”. During the German occupation, Beach was imprisoned for refusing to dismiss a Jewish girl who worked for her. Whether in wartime or at peace, where support was not forthcoming from the male world, it was often available from other women. The shipping heiress Winifred Ellerman, who wrote under the pseudonym Bryher, gave money to writers including Djuna Barnes, Dorothy Richardson and Edith Sitwell, as well as to Beach and others. | Gertrude Stein was a different species of Parisian hostess altogether, professionally male-centred, keen to compete with men on their own terms. As a hostess, she was determined to showcase her own opinions for her male guests. Her lover Alice Toklas would sit aside with the wives. One woman who went to both Barney’s and Stein’s salons but had plenty going on at her own base, the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, was Sylvia Beach, who numbered among her great achievements the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Her lover was Adrienne Monnier, who also had a bookshop “of one’s own”. During the German occupation, Beach was imprisoned for refusing to dismiss a Jewish girl who worked for her. Whether in wartime or at peace, where support was not forthcoming from the male world, it was often available from other women. The shipping heiress Winifred Ellerman, who wrote under the pseudonym Bryher, gave money to writers including Djuna Barnes, Dorothy Richardson and Edith Sitwell, as well as to Beach and others. |
| In England, partly because of strict laws against male-male sex and the discretion imposed by the aftershock of the Wilde scandal, but also simply because of the lack of a continental cafe culture, the most flamboyant goings-on happened in the protective environment of private houses and institutions such as universities. Alan Pryce-Jones, one-time editor of the Times Literary Supplement, once said of 1920s Oxford that “it was chic to be queer, rather as it was chic to know something about the 12-tone scale and about Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.” The gay aesthetes in Evelyn Waugh’s novels all have close connections with international modernism: Ambrose Silk, in Put Out More Flags, is nostalgic for “the days of Diaghilev” and has “frequented” Cocteau and Stein in Paris; Anthony Blanche, in Brideshead Revisited, has dined with Proust and Gide, been even closer to Cocteau and Diaghilev, and received copies of the novels of Ronald Firbank “with fervent inscriptions”. Similarly advanced fictional characters include Nancy Mitford’s Cedric Hampton (in Love in a Cold Climate), Jocelyn Brooke’s Hew Dallas (in A Mine of Serpents) and Esmé Wilkinson (in The Goose Cathedral), and Reginald in Saki’s short stories. | In England, partly because of strict laws against male-male sex and the discretion imposed by the aftershock of the Wilde scandal, but also simply because of the lack of a continental cafe culture, the most flamboyant goings-on happened in the protective environment of private houses and institutions such as universities. Alan Pryce-Jones, one-time editor of the Times Literary Supplement, once said of 1920s Oxford that “it was chic to be queer, rather as it was chic to know something about the 12-tone scale and about Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.” The gay aesthetes in Evelyn Waugh’s novels all have close connections with international modernism: Ambrose Silk, in Put Out More Flags, is nostalgic for “the days of Diaghilev” and has “frequented” Cocteau and Stein in Paris; Anthony Blanche, in Brideshead Revisited, has dined with Proust and Gide, been even closer to Cocteau and Diaghilev, and received copies of the novels of Ronald Firbank “with fervent inscriptions”. Similarly advanced fictional characters include Nancy Mitford’s Cedric Hampton (in Love in a Cold Climate), Jocelyn Brooke’s Hew Dallas (in A Mine of Serpents) and Esmé Wilkinson (in The Goose Cathedral), and Reginald in Saki’s short stories. |
| Wilfully unnatural, beholden only to the demands of his own artifice, the Wildean dandy cloned himself everywhere, in both his person and the books he wrote. In her famous 1964 essay “Notes on Camp”, Susan Sontag wrote that “homosexual aestheticism and irony” had been one of the two “pioneering forces of modern sensibility” (the other being “Jewish moral seriousness”). She was right. You can follow the glittering trail of camp from Bow Street magistrates court to Moscow, from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to Cinecittà, from Monte Carlo to Montevideo, from Broadway to Hollywood. | Wilfully unnatural, beholden only to the demands of his own artifice, the Wildean dandy cloned himself everywhere, in both his person and the books he wrote. In her famous 1964 essay “Notes on Camp”, Susan Sontag wrote that “homosexual aestheticism and irony” had been one of the two “pioneering forces of modern sensibility” (the other being “Jewish moral seriousness”). She was right. You can follow the glittering trail of camp from Bow Street magistrates court to Moscow, from the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to Cinecittà, from Monte Carlo to Montevideo, from Broadway to Hollywood. |
| Indeed, Hollywood became a special case, profusely and pervasively camp, yet hostile to the idea that it might ever seem so. Then as now, the popular audience was assumed to be heterosexual and homophobic. So the studios made sure that those who appeared on screen could not be perceived as gay, marrying them off in a whirl of publicity if necessary. When the talkies first came in, leading men with effeminate voices lost their careers. Boys who could get away with being camp in the chorus lines of the Broadway theatres were much too visible when blown up on the silver screen. The voluntary Hays Code – a set of industry moral guidelines – ensured that the topic of homosexuality was never so much as mentioned on screen: “Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.” | Indeed, Hollywood became a special case, profusely and pervasively camp, yet hostile to the idea that it might ever seem so. Then as now, the popular audience was assumed to be heterosexual and homophobic. So the studios made sure that those who appeared on screen could not be perceived as gay, marrying them off in a whirl of publicity if necessary. When the talkies first came in, leading men with effeminate voices lost their careers. Boys who could get away with being camp in the chorus lines of the Broadway theatres were much too visible when blown up on the silver screen. The voluntary Hays Code – a set of industry moral guidelines – ensured that the topic of homosexuality was never so much as mentioned on screen: “Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.” |
| Yet there were plenty of openly gay people behind the scenes, notably divided by gender along recognisable lines: lots of lesbian technicians, lots of gay male designers and choreographers. Between them, they contributed an incalculable amount to the high camp of the movies themselves. Many of the great icons of femininity were shaped or designed by gay men: Joan Crawford by William Haynes, Marlene Dietrich by Travis Banton, Greta Garbo by Adrian, Judy Garland by Roger Edens, Marilyn Monroe by Jack Cole. Conversely, Rudolph Valentino was tweaked to his peak by the lesbian couple Alla Nazimova and Natacha Rambova, the latter of whom happened to be his wife. | Yet there were plenty of openly gay people behind the scenes, notably divided by gender along recognisable lines: lots of lesbian technicians, lots of gay male designers and choreographers. Between them, they contributed an incalculable amount to the high camp of the movies themselves. Many of the great icons of femininity were shaped or designed by gay men: Joan Crawford by William Haynes, Marlene Dietrich by Travis Banton, Greta Garbo by Adrian, Judy Garland by Roger Edens, Marilyn Monroe by Jack Cole. Conversely, Rudolph Valentino was tweaked to his peak by the lesbian couple Alla Nazimova and Natacha Rambova, the latter of whom happened to be his wife. |
| Because of the aesthete-queen’s high visibility, the arts could be a difficult option for less confident men. The composer Charles Ives, for instance, spent his whole career in a sort of cringe, fearfully anticipating the accusation that to make music was a “sissy” activity. This seems to have been a particular problem for American men in the years after the first world war: they all had fathers to appease. Many a straight man had to pose himself even straighter so that his artistic activities would not seem suspect. Ernest Hemingway is the key performer in this charade, his characterisation of Stein as “a woman who isn’t a woman” a crude mirroring of his own gender fears. | Because of the aesthete-queen’s high visibility, the arts could be a difficult option for less confident men. The composer Charles Ives, for instance, spent his whole career in a sort of cringe, fearfully anticipating the accusation that to make music was a “sissy” activity. This seems to have been a particular problem for American men in the years after the first world war: they all had fathers to appease. Many a straight man had to pose himself even straighter so that his artistic activities would not seem suspect. Ernest Hemingway is the key performer in this charade, his characterisation of Stein as “a woman who isn’t a woman” a crude mirroring of his own gender fears. |
| It follows that the cultural history of homosexuality is everywhere shadowed by that of homophobia. For every “coterie” of Audens, Spenders and Isherwoods, there is a chorus of George Orwells, Roy Campbells and Dylan Thomases, spitting vitriol. The group around Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears was resented and therefore ridiculed by the group around William Walton. The coincidental success of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and William Inge on the Broadway stage in the 1950s was followed by a backlash of attacks, mainly from straight male critics deploring their supposed sexism: their women characters were distortions, either because they were “really” men or because, as women, they were hated by their misogynistic homosexual authors. Dramatists as successful as John Osborne and Simon Gray would regularly complain that you had to be queer if you wanted to get on in the English theatre. It is a catch-22 familiar to many subordinate groups: to protect yourself against discrimination you gather together for mutual support, whereupon you’re accused of discriminating against the discriminators. Gay people were tolerated in the arts, but then accused of taking over. The end position of this tendency is that, while gay people may be wonderfully artistic, their involvement ruins the arts. | It follows that the cultural history of homosexuality is everywhere shadowed by that of homophobia. For every “coterie” of Audens, Spenders and Isherwoods, there is a chorus of George Orwells, Roy Campbells and Dylan Thomases, spitting vitriol. The group around Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears was resented and therefore ridiculed by the group around William Walton. The coincidental success of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and William Inge on the Broadway stage in the 1950s was followed by a backlash of attacks, mainly from straight male critics deploring their supposed sexism: their women characters were distortions, either because they were “really” men or because, as women, they were hated by their misogynistic homosexual authors. Dramatists as successful as John Osborne and Simon Gray would regularly complain that you had to be queer if you wanted to get on in the English theatre. It is a catch-22 familiar to many subordinate groups: to protect yourself against discrimination you gather together for mutual support, whereupon you’re accused of discriminating against the discriminators. Gay people were tolerated in the arts, but then accused of taking over. The end position of this tendency is that, while gay people may be wonderfully artistic, their involvement ruins the arts. |
| The “-intern” half of the Homintern is crucial. It was the aspect most often objected to by nationalist politicians and bureaucrats. New modes of transport sped people away from home – often away from repressive climates towards more liberal ones, or merely from cold climates to hot ones. Many individuals had to leave home in order to flourish. Colonies of both transient visitors and permanent exiles developed in places such as Capri, Taormina and Tangier. You didn’t even have to arrive to meet interesting people: you could encounter them on the way, on the transatlantic liners (Noël Coward and Sergei Eisenstein were placed at the same table on one crossing) or the Train Bleu down to the Riviera, or the Orient Express. | The “-intern” half of the Homintern is crucial. It was the aspect most often objected to by nationalist politicians and bureaucrats. New modes of transport sped people away from home – often away from repressive climates towards more liberal ones, or merely from cold climates to hot ones. Many individuals had to leave home in order to flourish. Colonies of both transient visitors and permanent exiles developed in places such as Capri, Taormina and Tangier. You didn’t even have to arrive to meet interesting people: you could encounter them on the way, on the transatlantic liners (Noël Coward and Sergei Eisenstein were placed at the same table on one crossing) or the Train Bleu down to the Riviera, or the Orient Express. |
| Gay ubiquity began to make it seem difficult for homophobes to travel anywhere interesting without encountering their bugbear. Interwar Paris was marred for Henry Miller by the fact that, as he put it, “The populace had grown so hardened to artists that gruff-voiced Lesbians in corduroy breeches and young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the streets without attracting a glance” – or anybody’s glance but his. In 1949, Saul Bellow went to a cocktail party hosted by Cyril Connolly, and found his preconceptions of literary England being undermined: “Although I don’t judge the inverted with harshness, still it is rather difficult to go to London thinking of Dickens and Hardy to say nothing of Milton and Marx and land in the midst of fairies.” | Gay ubiquity began to make it seem difficult for homophobes to travel anywhere interesting without encountering their bugbear. Interwar Paris was marred for Henry Miller by the fact that, as he put it, “The populace had grown so hardened to artists that gruff-voiced Lesbians in corduroy breeches and young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the streets without attracting a glance” – or anybody’s glance but his. In 1949, Saul Bellow went to a cocktail party hosted by Cyril Connolly, and found his preconceptions of literary England being undermined: “Although I don’t judge the inverted with harshness, still it is rather difficult to go to London thinking of Dickens and Hardy to say nothing of Milton and Marx and land in the midst of fairies.” |
| Most of the people I’ve mentioned were living their lives more or less openly. The more-or-lessness is the point: they lived as if they had louvre blinds of managed discretion around themselves, which could be closed or opened at will. The secret of their homosexuality might be open to a social circle but a secret from family, or open to friends and family but a secret from work, or even, in some cases, known to both private and public worlds, but never openly spoken of. | Most of the people I’ve mentioned were living their lives more or less openly. The more-or-lessness is the point: they lived as if they had louvre blinds of managed discretion around themselves, which could be closed or opened at will. The secret of their homosexuality might be open to a social circle but a secret from family, or open to friends and family but a secret from work, or even, in some cases, known to both private and public worlds, but never openly spoken of. |
| Patricia Highsmith once inadvertently revealed she was a lesbian at a literary party in New York, and was disgusted by the amount of salacious interest she received from fellow guests. She later said, “Do you think anyone at a cocktail party in Paris or Rome would ever mention something like that? How vulgar!” Some of the most devil-may-care in their sexual pursuits and indiscreet in conversation still operated strict rules of behaviour of which a younger generation might be ignorant. Although invited to take his lover along to a dinner party chez Rudolf Nureyev, the young dancer Michael Clark made the mistake of imagining this gave him licence to kiss him in front of the other guests – but their host was furious. | Patricia Highsmith once inadvertently revealed she was a lesbian at a literary party in New York, and was disgusted by the amount of salacious interest she received from fellow guests. She later said, “Do you think anyone at a cocktail party in Paris or Rome would ever mention something like that? How vulgar!” Some of the most devil-may-care in their sexual pursuits and indiscreet in conversation still operated strict rules of behaviour of which a younger generation might be ignorant. Although invited to take his lover along to a dinner party chez Rudolf Nureyev, the young dancer Michael Clark made the mistake of imagining this gave him licence to kiss him in front of the other guests – but their host was furious. |
| Quite a few lived in the protective custody of mariages blancs, or what Hollywood called the “twilight tandem” – couples such as Edmond de Polignac and Winnaretta Singer, the sewing-machine heiress; actors Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor; writers Paul and Jane Bowles. These marriages might be celibate, or dynastic formalities for the production of a new generation, while allowing for outside interests: Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West are a case in point. In many more instances, gay men married and had children, and ignored their families to an entirely conventional extent, indistinguishable from their straight confrères, pursuing their more urgent emotional and professional interests in male-centred spaces outside the home. Negligent they may have been, but few subjected their families to such obvious risk as Oscar Wilde had. | Quite a few lived in the protective custody of mariages blancs, or what Hollywood called the “twilight tandem” – couples such as Edmond de Polignac and Winnaretta Singer, the sewing-machine heiress; actors Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor; writers Paul and Jane Bowles. These marriages might be celibate, or dynastic formalities for the production of a new generation, while allowing for outside interests: Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West are a case in point. In many more instances, gay men married and had children, and ignored their families to an entirely conventional extent, indistinguishable from their straight confrères, pursuing their more urgent emotional and professional interests in male-centred spaces outside the home. Negligent they may have been, but few subjected their families to such obvious risk as Oscar Wilde had. |
| Notwithstanding the new sexual definitions of the era, many of the individuals in question did not identify as homosexual at all, or even bisexual, but merely went about their lives without taking the contingencies of desire as an identifying factor. What elements determined the choice between “the closet” and the relative indiscretion of the “open secret”? How did the latter so often operate with impunity in a context of homophobic laws and social conventions? Discretion was expected – and then suspected: you were required to be discreet, whereupon you were accused of being secretive. In this context, how on earth was a man like Liberace even possible? He was not so much hiding in plain sight – nothing was “plain” where he was concerned – as turning the whole ecology of self-presentation inside out. Everything he did was too gay to be gay. | Notwithstanding the new sexual definitions of the era, many of the individuals in question did not identify as homosexual at all, or even bisexual, but merely went about their lives without taking the contingencies of desire as an identifying factor. What elements determined the choice between “the closet” and the relative indiscretion of the “open secret”? How did the latter so often operate with impunity in a context of homophobic laws and social conventions? Discretion was expected – and then suspected: you were required to be discreet, whereupon you were accused of being secretive. In this context, how on earth was a man like Liberace even possible? He was not so much hiding in plain sight – nothing was “plain” where he was concerned – as turning the whole ecology of self-presentation inside out. Everything he did was too gay to be gay. |
| Even in 1950s America, when anyone identified as deviant might also be suspected of spying, it was possible to survive being, in both senses, queer. The era’s paranoia was merely more extreme than before and since. Even then, the pederasts whose counting had been overheard by Engels were making steady progress. There’s a moment in Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye, when the writer Roger Wade voices a common fear as an established fact. It’s not easy to catch his exact tone. In part he’s joking; but he also believes it, voicing a half-concealed resentment. Anyway, his claim is not original: it has the ring of an echo. Others will have suspected the same thing, and said so. And who is to say they are wrong? Wade says to Philip Marlowe: “The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum. The pervert is the top guy now.” | Even in 1950s America, when anyone identified as deviant might also be suspected of spying, it was possible to survive being, in both senses, queer. The era’s paranoia was merely more extreme than before and since. Even then, the pederasts whose counting had been overheard by Engels were making steady progress. There’s a moment in Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye, when the writer Roger Wade voices a common fear as an established fact. It’s not easy to catch his exact tone. In part he’s joking; but he also believes it, voicing a half-concealed resentment. Anyway, his claim is not original: it has the ring of an echo. Others will have suspected the same thing, and said so. And who is to say they are wrong? Wade says to Philip Marlowe: “The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum. The pervert is the top guy now.” |
| • Gregory Woods is the author of Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World and The Myth of the Last Taboo: Queer Subcultural Studies. | • Gregory Woods is the author of Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World and The Myth of the Last Taboo: Queer Subcultural Studies. |