The Dictionary of Homophobia (101 page)

Erlanger, Philippe.
Monsieur, frère de Louis XIV
[1953]. Paris: Perrin, 1981.

Godard, Didier.
Le Goût de Monsieur, l’homosexualité masculine au XVIIe siècle
. Montblanc: H & O Editions, 2002.

Princesse Palatine.
Lettres de Madame, duchesse d’Orléans
. Paris: Mercure de France, 1981.

—Against Nature; Debauchery; Favorites; France; Henri III.

MORALITY.
See
Abnormal; Debauchery; Philosophy; Theology; Vice

MULTICULTURALISM.
See
Communitarianism

MUSIC

The study of homophobia in music is not without difficultie; the novelty of the problematic and the scarcity of studies available prevent any clear synthesis of ideas. More specifically, the art of music is often resistant to the transmission of signification. Despite this, homophobia in music will be discussed here in a wide number of subject areas, including texts put to music, opera plots, public attitudes, and the positions of musical historiography.

Like all other social groups, composers were victims in their time of the different forms that homophobia could take through the centuries. Here are some symbolic examples.

In
Ancient Greece
, where relations between active adults and passive young boys were valorized, the dramatist and musician Agathon was caricatured by Aristophanes in his
Thesmophoriazusae
: it is the feminine aspect of a mature man that is stigmatized. In reverse, in the Christian world, particularly in the exclusively masculine one of masters charged with sacred music in churches, “affairs of morality” between teenagers and adults were repressed. In seventeenth-century France, Jean-Baptiste Lully, director of the king’s music and a notorious homosexual, was regularly the target of hurtful lampoons. Songwriters erupted against him in 1685, at the moment when Louis XIV, incited by the Jesuit Louis Bourdaloue to take severe action against sodomites, had Lully’s page Brunet arrested, whipped, and jailed because he was sharing the musician’s bed. As a sign of the inequality of punishment according to social hierarchy, Lully only received royal disgrace.
Songs
directed against the musician linked his homosexuality to his obscure extraction (“Jean-Baptiste is the son of a miller / He could not deny it / He only rides as a miller / Always on the back of it”), as well as his foreign origin, i.e. “Italian
vice
” (“Lully, this great musician / Still greater Italian / Chose by adventure / An unnatural musical note”) and even the supposed behavior of the Jesuits, his persecutors (“La Chaise said to Bourdaloue, / Father, why are we suffering / That this naughty Baptiste / Acts as a Jesuit”). For Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, the homophobia of his social milieu seems to have been fatal. His death, which was attributed to cholera, is now widely believed to have been a
suicide
to avoid the
scandal
which would have been provoked by the revelation of his liaison with a young man of high society. On a less tragic tone, in the twentieth century, one must attribute the self-censorship of composers such as England’s Ethel Smyth, who hid her lesbianism in her autobiographical writings, to the heterosexist social context at the time.

Homophobia directed against gay composers was not only expressed in the
violence
that they sometimes had to endure: it was also present in writings on the period. Sometimes the sentiment was pure hatred, such as
Une Hi
s
toire de la musique
(A history of music) by Lucien Rebatet, published in 1969; the composer Reynaldo Hahn was introduced this way: “Born in Venezuela with a German Jewish father, he never hid his penchant, and remained to his final days the stunning figure of an old invert with wig, monocle, and corset. He was no less reactionary in his taste; his catalogue, with the exception of Mozart, was the worst and dullest music that one could have made in a century and a half.”

The majority of music biographers wishing to present their gay subjects sympathetically, however, were nonetheless influenced by a heterosexist distortion of reality, in order to disguise or euphemize the composer’s personal life. While deliberate in the case of Tchaikovsky, this distortion sometimes appeared to be unconscious. In his 1933 monograph on Arcangelo Corelli, Marc Pincherle stressed that in 1682, when Corelli was twenty-nine, “Matteo Fornari, his student and friend, appeared at his side as second violin, and who in the future would virtually never leave him.” Pincherle made it clear that Fornari lived with Corelli, who bequeathed him his musical instrument and charged him with publishing his
Opus 6
after his death. Pincherle concluded by being amazed by the absence of women in the musician’s life: “Music, painting and friendship seem to have completed his life.”

For a composer as important as Handel, such an illusion could not be maintained for long. Cutting the conclusions of some researchers (such as Gary C. Thomas) short, Jonathan Keats affirmed: “The hypothesis that makes [Handel’s] definitive celibacy a proof of homosexuality is unsustainable in the context of the eighteenth century, where the itinerant life of so many musicians made marriage an obvious interference.” That the “context” in question was made up of renowned homosexual circles, such as those of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome or the Count of Burlington in England, does not seem to become apparent to Keats, nor the fact that numerous homosexuals were married, such as Lully. More amazingly, Keats founded his conviction of Handel’s heterosexuality on “the music of his operas, cantatas, oratorios, that express love with a maturity and complexity worthy of competing with Mozart and Wagner.”

Interpreters and, in particular, singers, whose bodily instrument was made a spectacle for the public, were especially vulnerable to heterosexist violence. Women, who were not numerous and were made invisible in the world of musical creation, were at the forefront in this regard. Female opera singers, in the same way as actresses, were simultaneously adulated and scorned, considered as artists and relegated to prostitutes. The mixture of voyeurism and hypocritical moral reprobation in the stories of their love lives was particularly flagrant in the case of Sophie Arnould, the great interpreter of Rameau in the eighteenth century, whose bisexual adventures were the delight of the readers of
Correspondance littéraire
or
Mémoires secrets
, which were newsletters detailing the personal lives of writers and artists in eighteenth-century Paris.

With regard to male singers, the castrati were principally stigmatized. It was less a case of detailing the private adventures of a
musico
than crying out in indignation over the temptations of these accomplished virtuosi who often possessed an androgynous beauty. Montesquieu, in his
Voyages
, noted that “in Rome, women do not play in theater; they are castrati dressed as women. This has a very bad effect for moral behavior: as nothing (that I know of) inspires more philosophical love for Romans.” In an
Essay on the Operas
dated in 1706, the English critic John Dennis became indignant: “When I affirm that an opera in the Italian fashion is monstrous, I cannot exaggerate; I even add that it is so prodigiously unnatural that it could not be born from any other country, except the one reputed throughout the world to prefer monstrous and abominable pleasures to those which are in accordance with nature.”

Old musical works rarely treated homosexuality in a direct way. Let’s quote the polyphonic song by Clément Janequin, published in 1540, which evoked with certain benevolence the margins of normative sexuality: “The hermaphrodite is strange in figure / Wanting to make use of man and woman. / But the one that we will call loathsome / Who is missing one or the other nature.” In general, homosexual subjects appeared in the lesser known repertoires which evaded
censorship
, such as songs of the street. A homophobic attack against a person of prestige was often a political weapon, frequently endorsed by those in higher authority. For example, Cardinal Mazarin was accused not only of sodomy but also adultery, with Anne of Austria, and
pedophilia
with young Louis XIV: “Sire, you are but only a child / And they steal from you with impunity; / The Cardinal fucks your mother / Lère la, Lère lan lère, / Lère la, Lère lan la. / Even it is said that he protested / That he fucks your majesty / Just as Monsieur his brother / Lère la, Lère lan lère, / Lère la, Lère lan la.” There was also rambling about Marie Antoinette’s bisexuality: “This lady, gentlemen / Was worth it: / She was the princess of Henin; / As she is a lesbian and hustler / She was chosen as the queen.”

Opera was the privileged place for the depiction of amorous expressions. The heterosexist standard was the norm (Charles Gounod’s Sappho is heterosexual, and Bedrich Smetana’s Dalibor became heterosexual over the course of the opera), even if examples of virile friendship (Gluck’s
Iphigénie en Tauride
, Bizet’s
Les Pêcheurs de perles
[
The Pearl Fishers
]) are recurrent. The expression of homosexuality, even muted, was rare; there is evidence of it in the eighteenth century, however, in the tragedies of Jesuit colleges that excluded love and valorized masculine friendships (Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s
David et Jonathas
) or among the baroque fantasies of Venetian opera: in
La Calisto
by Francesco Cavalli, the reference to Diana’s lesbian behavior was explicit, but heterosexual morality was safe, since it was Jupiter, under the disguise of the goddess, whom we see receiving the caresses of a young nymph. In the twentieth century, English composer Benjamin Britten wrote numerous operas in which gay characters appeared. While they were often worrisome (
The Turn of the Screw
) or destined to a tragic fate (
Billy Budd, Death in Venice
), Britten at least knew how to powerfully evoke the homophobia of the hostile crowd (
Peter Grimes, Albert Herring
).

The common thread of impersonations in opera plots resulted in ambiguous effects. In
Fidelio
by Beethoven, Leonore is constantly dressed as a male prison guard; based on this appearance, she is loved by Marzelline (one first sees them as a man and a woman, but understand them as two women), then frees her husband Florestan (whom one first sees as two men, but understands them as a man and a woman). On the other hand, the tradition that demanded that the roles of young men be played by female singers and, in the baroque era, old women by tenors, also allowed the presentation of same-sex couples, if not part of the plot, then at least on the stage. But the resulting effect, highly dissymmetrical, shed light on the sexism at work in this kind of representation: the female couple was a sensuous source of intrigue for male audiences (
Le Chevalier à la Rose
by Strauss) whereas the male couple could only be comical (
Platée
by Rameau). To this, we must ask, what of the roles of the castrati in baroque opera given to female singers? The distribution that was almost exclusively feminine (
Alcina
by Handel,
Orfeo ed Eridice
by Gluck), and the lesbian atmosphere that arose from it, evidently embarrassed some critics, who demanded male counter-tenors in such roles, to be more “realistic.”

During the last half-century, homosexuality and homophobia were expressed more openly in the musical field. Singers were frequently victims of homophobic legislation, like Charles Trenet, jailed for one month in 1963 for “corruption” of minors (specifically, four nineteen-year-old males). Conversely, singer Anita
Bryant
in the United States launched a crusade in the 1970s against gay and lesbian rights. But mostly, many songs clearly evoked the subject of homosexuality. French singers in particular became more overt in their homophobia, such as Maurice Chevalier, who imitated fellow singer Félix Mayol with cruelty, or Michel Sardou who, in “J’accuse” (lyrics by Pierre Delanoë, 1976), blamed homosexuals for every ill (“I accuse men of believing hypocrites / Half fags, half hermaphrodites / Who pretend to be rough to dig in butter / And kneel as soon as they are scared”); previously, he attacked homosexuality in the army or boarding school (“Le Rire du sergent” [The Sergeant’s laughter], “Le Surveillant général”). While in 1972, Charles Aznavour preached
tolerance
in “Comme ils dissent” (known in English as “What Makes a Man a Man”) (“None has the right in truth / To blame me, to judge me / And I spell it out / That it is truly nature which / Is the only guilty if / I am a man, eh / As they say”); the image he projected of the homosexual was nonetheless a wretched caricature.

With the advent of numerous rock stars with an androgynous stage presence beginning in the early 70s (such as Mick Jagger, Prince, David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop), their most often heterosexual lyrics contrasted with the cultivated ambiguity of their physical appearance (costumes, makeup) that was more challenging than demanding. Let us cite, however, openly gay singer Elton John’s strong position against homophobia (his song “American Triangle” was about the murder of Matthew
Shepard
in Wyoming in 1998), which made his defense of rapper Eminem, who has been accused of homophobia, that much more striking. However, homophobic violence is part of Eminem’s image, and the debates over it effectively contribute to his media coverage.

Speaking of rap, its tendency for misogyny and casual violence, which helps to construct the virile posture of the malcontent, makes it ripe for homophobia as well, as demonstrated by the French rapper Rohff in “Rap de barbares”: “From what they say most rappers think they are bad boys / For my part I do not mix strings with underwear / It is not shitty rap, I am not queer / I rap for those that try hard, I bugger the cops” (
Mission suicide,
2001). For Passi, another French rapper, homosexuals represent Western society’s drift: “The old ones have Viagra, whores want social security, pedophiles are still at work / In the street your son sees two gays kissing” (
Genèse,
2000). The machismo and homophobia that appear in ragga, under the influence of rap, are presented as a reaction against the more humanist reggae discourse, and as resistance to commercial recuperation. One has to stress finally that, in these collections, only male homosexuality is questioned. Lesbians are once again invisible and women are only presented as desired and hated objects, without an autonomous sexual life.