Two Books
By Douglas Blair Turnbaug 

Gay Life and Culture: A World History
Edited by Robert Aldrich
Universe Publishing/Rizoli, 384 pp, 257 illus
$50

A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality
By Dominique Fernandez
Prestel, 319 pp, 262 illus
$75

Kees van Dongen
Untitled (Portrait of a Young Arab), 110
Oil on canvas
(from Gay Life and Culture: A World History as noted above)

Someone has remarked that there was never meant to be gay history. Everything from benign neglect to vicious censorship has been and is employed to make it invisible. It was almost never recorded in writing, except in criminal cases prosecuted in court. Where is does appear in other than court documents it is usually encoded as sex-free friendships, no matter how passionate—see David and Jonathan in Hebrew texts. There are astonishing ex-
ceptions, for example as in Gilgamesh, where a king meets a man whom he comes to "love as his wife," and this dates from 1700 B.C. In our times, reference to same-sex love is explained away by homophobic scholars with such statements as, "Men expressed affection differently in those less self-conscious, pre-Freudian days." Was Walt Whitman gay? Hello! Fortunately for gay historian-archeologists, gay presence can be found in ancient sculpture and painting, as can be seen in these two volumes.

It takes a scandal in the English-speaking world to break through Judeo-Christian taboos against sex and sex education. Joycelyn Elders, Clinton’s Surgeon General, had to be sacked because she remarked of masturbation, “I think it is part of human sexuality and perhaps it should be taught.” Still, we have Clinton to thank for taking the word “fellatio” from its hidden place in noncensored old dictionaries and putting it into the American homeland’s mouth, as well as giving contemporary slang the “monica.”

At the moment (mid-October 2006) we have the spectacle of nonliterate and/or unscrupulous journalists, as well as his self-righteous former friends, calling former Congressman Mark Foley a “deranged pedophile” for “engaging in lubricious instant messaging with male former Congressional pages,” as Katha Pollitt wrote in The Nation. “You’d think he was raping 5 year olds, not exchanging dirty IMs with high school seniors who could, after all, just log off or not reply,” Pollitt wrote. She noted that, “by law Senate pages must be 16 years old or more, and that 16 is the legal age in Washington (and most states).” (Did you know that? I was astonished!) Therefore to call Mr. Foley a child molester and child predator “seems a bit severe.” She also observed from the transcripts that some of the young persons seemed willing to play. So it would seem Mr. Foley didn’t break any laws. A victimless non-crime brought him down. That this farce fuels evangelical homophobia is the tragedy.

All this is to note the obvious, which is that we live in an insane environment. Rage on behalf of its victims is a valid but impotent response. Just to ask “How did we get here?”, to try to understand our history, must be a step in the right direction out of the madhouse. If there is any hope, it is perhaps in the calm and patient work of rational historians and researchers, free of the virus of “beliefs,” who can demonstrate that throughout history gay people have participated in every aspect of human life, enriching it by their presence.

The task is daunting. Even language is a barrier. If even the meaning of “gay” is an issue, what can we call the variety of love between males and males, the love between females and females, or other non-normative love? As well as squabbles over semantics, contemporary scholars bring their own prejudices (for example, must our ancestors be considered degenerate because they didn’t have any concept of age of consent?). Was Zeus a child-molester? Depends on which artist is painting his portrait.

Gay Life and Culture: A World History, edited by Robert Aldrich (the author of the splendid, Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art, and Homosexual Fantasy) is a tremendous achievement. Robert Aldrich’s wide-ranging erudition is presented in a marvelously lucid style, scholarly, with academic jargon, a pleasure to read. He must be a marvelous teacher. He is of course making an argument against prejudice and ignorance, but his common-sense presentation is not argumentative: it simply makes sense. He has chosen colleagues of similar qualifications, all specialists in their own fields, to contribute to this great cosmopolitan volume. The contents include insightful articles on the search for gay history, Greece, Rome, Middle Ages, Early Modern Europe, Enlightment and Revolution, Lesbians in Early Modern Europe, Colonial Times in America, Gay Politics, the Middle East and North Africa, Same-sex Intimacies in Asia, among others.

To my dismay, the book does not have a practical bibliography. It has notes and bibliographies for each of the fourteen chapters, with books cited there, which is dead useless as bibliography. For example, if you want to find names of books by Prof. Puff (a contributor to this book) you must scan through fourteen pages of small print to make sure you haven’t missed something. There is no simple alphabetical listing.

For anyone intimidated by the idea of a “scholarly” tome, just begin by looking at the fabulous illustrations. These will lure you into the text for explication, and you will be gratified by the insight provided by the authors. I will buy a book if there is just one image in it which I must have. In this book, my favorite find was Kees van Dongen’s portrait of a young Arab. I can only quote from the jacket flap, which says “Gay Life and Culture is an important contribution to understanding what makes gay life and culture universal throughout human culture and across time.”

What might be called a luxurious companion volume is, A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality, by Dominique Fernandez, a distinguished French essayist and novelist (The Rape of Ganymede), whose work has won the prix Medicis and the prix Goncourt. He covers from a different perspective, perhaps more philosophical than Aldrich’s, the same vast historical scope. His first chapter is “The Language of Symbols,” and others are “Modern Exploitation of Greek Myths,” “The Biblical World,” “The Dictators,” etc. Sorry to say this book’s bibliography is not alphabetical, but work is cited by chapters (I did find one of my books cited, so I don’t care). “Art" is after all in the title, and this book is rich in gorgeous illustrations, with details of some of them enlarged, giving another dimension to the pleasure of viewing these masterpieces. The title of the French edition is L’amour qui ose dire son nom, which in a refreshing twist translates as “the love that dares to speak its name.” About time.

Douglas Blair Turnbaugh, a frequent contributor to The Archive, is an author, filmmaker, and artist. His publications include, Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group; Private: The Erotic Art of Duncan Grant; Strip Show: Paintings by Patrick Angus; Patrick Angus: Los Angeles Drawings; and Beat It: 28 Drawings. He is creator of the film, Ballets Russes (2005), and is working on the upcoming documentary film, Mia Slavenska: A Dancer’s Odyssey.