I. Mapping the forest
Damn braces. Bless relaxes.
WILLIAM BLAKE
In the middle of the third century B.C., the Cyrene poet Callimachus undertook the task of cataloguing the half-million volumes housed in the famous Library of Alexandria. The task was prodigious, not only because of the number of books to be inspected, dusted, and shelved, but because it entailed the conception of a literary order that was supposed somehow to reflect the vaster order of the universe. In attributing a certain book to a certain shelf—Homer to “Poetry” or Herodotus to “History,” for example—Callimachus had first to determine that all writing could be divided into a specific number of categories or, as he called them, pinakes, “tables”; and then he had to decide to which category each of the thousands of unlabeled books belonged. Callimachus divided the colossal library into eight “tables,” which were to contain every possible fact, conjecture, thought, imagination ever scrawled on a sheet of papyrus; future librarians would multiply this modest number to infinity. Jorge Luis Borges recalled that in the numeric system of the Institut Bibliographique in Brussels, number 231 corresponded to God.
No reader who has ever derived pleasure from a book has much confidence in these cataloguing methods. Subject indexes, literary genres, schools of thought and style, literatures classified by nationality or race, chronological compendiums and thematic anthologies suggest to the reader merely one of a multitude of points of view, none comprehensive, none even grazing the breadth and depth of a mysterious piece of writing. Books refuse to sit quietly on shelves: Gulliver’s Travels jumps from “Chronicles” to “Social Satire” to “Children’s Literature,” and will not be faithful to any of these labels. Our reading, much like our sexuality, is multifaceted and fluid. “I am large,” wrote Walt Whitman, “I contain multitudes.”
The notion of “gay literature” is guilty on three counts: first, because it implies a narrow literary category based on the sexuality of either its authors or its characters; second, because it implies a narrow sexual category that has somehow found its definition in a literary form; third, because it implies a narrow political category that defends a restricted set of human rights for a specific sexual group. And yet the notion of “gay literature,” albeit recent, doubtlessly exists in the public mind. Certain bookstores have “gay literature” shelves, certain publishers publish “gay literature” series, and there are magazines and papers that regularly bring out stories and poems under the rubric of “gay literature.”
What then is this “gay literature”?
At the risk of committing a tautology, what is in general understood by “gay literature” is literature concerned with gay subjects. This can swing from obscure hints about “the love that dare not speak its name,” in Lord Alfred Douglas’s self-silencing phrase, apparent in some nineteenth-century writing, to explicit chronicles of gay life in our time by authors who may or may not be gay. Sometimes books dealing with non-gay subjects by gay writers (E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for instance) are put on the same “gay literature” shelf as books with an explicitly gay content—Marguerite Yourcenar’s Alexis or Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman—as if the critic, editor, or bookseller were deliberately attempting to catalogue the person, not the person’s work. Certain writers refuse to have their work labelled “gay” (Patrick Gale, Timothy Findley) and refer to it as “books by a writer who happens to be gay.” As usual with this kind of labelling, the exceptions to any proposed definition make the process finally useless, so that every time the label is applied it must be redefined.
Claude J. Summers, in his collection of essays Gay Fictions, defines his subject as “the fictional representation of male homosexuals by gay male and lesbian writers.” This leaves out a fair number of works by non-gay writers, which are thus excluded simply by reason of their authors’ sexuality. A writer’s sexual preferences probably colour the text, but a reader does not require careful study of the National Enquirer to be able to read literature. Being told that D. H. Lawrence was attracted to older women may or may not inform the enjoyment of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but is in no way essential for reading that too-famous novel. A study of Melville’s life might shed light on homoerotic elements in Moby-Dick, but is such a study essential in order to discover those same elements? And is a short story by William Faulkner on a gay subject readable only if we have proof of his experience in this field? Doesn’t the word “fiction” imply the creation of an imagined rather than a physically experienced world? And if knowledge of the author’s inclinations is essential to the understanding of a text, wouldn’t reading anonymous literature (and so much erotic literature is anonymous) be ultimately impossible?
II. Paths through the forest
The fairy way of writing which depends only upon the force of imagination.
JOHN DRYDEN, King Arthur
Borges said that “every writer creates his own precursors.” The same is true for genres or types. Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story, and in doing so allowed us to include in the definition tales as old as the Bible. The label “gay literature” is a recent creation, probably no older than the founding of the gay magazine Christopher Street in 1975, but it now includes much earlier work. An anthology of English-language gay poetry would feature many names from the traditional canon, from Shakespeare to Lord Byron; examples of English-language gay fiction are not as venerably old, perhaps because poetry lends itself more readily to an ambiguous reading and (as is the case in many spurious explanations of Shakespeare’s homo-erotic sonnets) to a bigoted interpretation, while prose can be less easily subverted for the sake of social decorum. Thomas Hardy suggested that a writer could “get away with things in verse that would have a hundred Mrs. Grundys on your back if said in prose.”
A chronological list of gay fiction in English might begin with obscure novels such as Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend (1871) or Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreme (1876), or with better-known works such as Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (a short story written circa 1890); it might continue with Henry James’s almost too subtle depiction of a gay infatuation, “The Pupil” (1891), E. M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice (finished in 1914), D. H. Lawrence’s “The Prussian Officer” (also 1914), and Ronald Firbank’s Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), up to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest mainstream fictional accounts of gay life, published in 1948—the year that also saw the publication of two other gay classics: Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and Tennessee Williams’s collection One Arm and Other Stories. Similar lists could be made in the literature of other languages.
By 1950, two main trends in English-language gay literature had been established: one apologetically addressing a “straight” audience, trying to justify and atone for the fact of being gay; the other unabashedly celebrating another, equally vital sexuality, and speaking mainly to an enlightened reader. The City and the Pillar, which follows both trends to some degree, is the first novel to make use of an important device (suggested perhaps by André Gide’s Si le grain ne meurt of 1926) evident in almost all the gay fiction that follows it: the autobiographical voice. Edmund White, himself the author of one of the most influential gay autobiographical fictions in North America, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), has remarked that “since no one is brought up to be gay, the moment he recognizes the difference he must account for it.” Non-gays learn about their sexual mores (mostly from conservative, sexist sources) in hundreds of different places: home, school, workplace, television, film, print. Gays are, by and large, deprived of any such geography. They grow up feeling invisible, and must go through the apprenticeship of adolescence almost invariably alone. Gay fiction—especially autobiographical gay fiction—therefore serves as a guide that both reflects and allows comparison with the reader’s own experience.
Much of this factual prose is illuminating and
encouraging (something much needed in the age of AIDS), and allows the reader to admit the fact of being gay as part of everyday life. Camille Paglia has commented that most gays, unlike other minority groups, do not reproduce themselves, and therefore, like artists everywhere, “their only continuity is through culture, which they have been instrumental in building.” Authors such as Christopher Isherwood (A Single Man), David Leavitt (The Lost Language of Cranes), and Armistead Maupin (in his soap-opera saga Tales of the City) make this “continuity through culture” explicit: they place their gay characters in the midst of a multifaceted society, so that their reality is not “other” but “another,” part of a historical cultural whole, with no reigning central entity determining what is normal according to his own image.
Because of the instructional use to which gay literature can be put, gay stories that bow to prejudice, implicitly accepting the patriarchal verdict about the wages of sin, commit literary terrorism and deserve to be housed on the same shelf as moralistic Victorian fables. A number of good writers fall into this category: Dennis Cooper, for instance, whose fiction depicts necro-homoerotic longings and explores the aesthetics of sickness and decay, with death as the inevitable end; and at times the timorous Gide, who believed that homosexuality was “an error of biology,” and whose heroes are so terribly ridden by Catholic angst.
Because it needs to instruct, because it needs to bear witness, because it needs to affirm the right to exist of a group that the power-holding majority of society wishes to ignore or eliminate, most gay literature has been staunchly realistic. Lagging behind the rights demanded and partly achieved by other oppressed groups, gay men are depicted in a literature that is still largely at an informative or documentary stage. Women’s literature can produce fantasies, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion; black literature can invent ghost stories, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved; with one or two superb exceptions (Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers come immediately to mind) gay literature has no fantastic stories, no imaginary worlds. Instead, its strength lies in the subversive possibilities of its language.
Appropriating everyday language, undermining the bureaucratic use of common words, using the guerrilla tactics of the surrealists to fill the commonplace with a sense of danger—these are the things gay literature, like any literature of the oppressed, can do best. Jean Genet, the French poet, playwright and novelist who died in 1985, created, better than any other gay writer in any language, a literary voice to explore the gay experience. Genet understood that no concession should be made to the oppressor. In a hypocritical society that condemns gay sexuality but condones the exploitation of women, arrests pickpockets but rewards robber barons, hangs murderers but decorates torturers, Genet became a male prostitute and a thief, and then proceeded to describe the outcast’s vision of our world as a sensual hallucination. This vision was so unsettling that when Jean Cocteau showed Paul Valéry the manuscript of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Valéry’s response was “Burn it.” In English, Oscar Wilde, Joe Orton, William Burroughs—all forced or voluntary outsiders of society—set social language against its overlords.
Perhaps the literature of all segregated groups goes through similar stages: apologetic, self-descriptive and instructive, political and testimonial, iconoclastic and outrageous. If that is the case, then the next stage, which I think can be recognized in certain novels by Alan Gurganus or Alan Hollinghurst, introduces characters who happen to be gay but whose circumstances are defined well beyond their sexuality, which is once again seen as part of a complex and omnivorous world.
III. Marking the trees
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age,
More fortunate, alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.
MATTHEW ARNOLD,
“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”
Naked except for a fur-trimmed gauze negligée and waddling about in bare feet, Cary Grant announced to an enquiring May Robson that he was thus attired because he had gone “gay.” With this pronouncement in the 1939 film Bringing Up Baby, the word “gay,” meaning “male homosexual,” publicly entered the English language of North America.
It was not an auspicious beginning. Cary Grant’s usage reflected a stereotype: that being “gay” somehow involves dressing up in women’s clothing, wishing to be the other sex, and consequently becoming an involuntary parody of a woman. No doubt some gay men dress up in drag, but all transvestites are not homosexual, and all homosexuals are certainly not transvestites. Society, for the majority of Cary Grant’s audience, appeared to be an immutable reality in which men and women fulfilled certain specific roles, dressed in specific ways, and reacted in a specific manner, and the questioning of the necessity of these roles and styles was seen as deviant—and therefore wrong. Today, some of these perceptions have changed but the changes have been mostly superficial. Beneath the apparently tolerant manners of Cary Grant’s new audiences, the same traditional standards continue to rule and the same old discomfort continues to be felt.
The historical origins of this meaning of the word “gay” are somewhat dubious. Gai savoir meant “poetry” in thirteenth-century Provençal, and as some troubadour poems were explicitly homosexual, it is possible that the word came to designate this particular aspect of their repertoire. Other inquisitive etymologists have traced its origins to Old English, where one of the meanings of the word gal was “lustful,” as in modern German geil. Whatever the sources, by the early twentieth century “gay” was commonly used in English homosexual subculture as a password or code. Nowadays, “gay” or gai is the usual term for “male homosexual” in French, Dutch, Danish, Japanese, Swedish, and Catalan.
“Gay” is reserved for male homosexuality. Female homosexuality—lesbianism, to use the term still ignored in the 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary—has a vocabulary and career of its own. In spite of the prejudice that views all unconventional sexualities as part of the same herd of sinners, and in spite of the common political force that results from being the object of such a prejudice, male and female homosexualities differ in their public image, their vocabularies, and their histories. Lesbianism, for instance, is empowered by its association with feminism—gay males have no such support from any equivalent male group—and lesbian acts are ignored in certain heterosexual codes of law; Britain’s notorious anti-homosexual laws of the past century were designed exclusively for males, as Queen Victoria (tradition has it) refused to believe “that women did such things.” In most countries, female couples are considered “respectable” while male couples are unthinkable except as an abomination, perhaps because in the heterosexual male imagination that dominates most societies, two women living together do so only because they haven’t been able to acquire a man, and are either to be pitied for this shortcoming, or to be praised for undertaking, on their own, tasks that are normally a man’s responsibility. Similarly, lesbian images are accepted—in fact, encouraged—in heterosexual male pornography, the fantasy being that these women are making love among themselves in expectation of the male to come. The heterosexual male code of honour is thereby preserved.
A person not complying with these pre-set codes seemingly threatens the received identity of the individuals who uphold these codes in their society. In order to dismiss the transgressor with greater ease, it is best to caricature him (as the success of such pap as La Cage aux Folles seems to prove), thereby creating the myth of the Good Homosexual. The Good Homosexual, as in Harvey Fierstein’s Torchsong Trilogy, is the man who deep down inside wants to be like his mother—have a husband, have a child, putter around the house—and is prevented from doing these things by a quirk of nature. Underlying the myth of the Good Homosexual is the conviction (upheld by the American Psychological Association until 1973) that a homosexual is a heterosexual gone wrong: that with an extra gene or so, a little
more testosterone, a dash of tea and sympathy, the homosexual will be cured, become normal. And if this cannot be achieved (because in some cases the malady is too far advanced), then the best thing for the creature to do is assume the other, lesser role designed by society in its binary plan: that of an ersatz woman. I remember a psychological test set for my all-boys class by a school counsellor concerned with “particular friendships.” A previous class had warned us that, if we drew a female figure, the counsellor would assume that our fantasy was to be a woman; if we drew a male figure, that we were attracted to a man. In either case we would be lectured on the terrors of deviancy. Deviants, the counsellor had told the other class, always ended up murdered by sailors on the dock-side. When my turn came, I drew the figure of a monkey.
IV. The forest in history
… and warming his hands to the fire exclaimed,
“Now where would we be without faggots?”
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.”
Into the Looking-Glass Wood Page 3
