The Dictionary of Homophobia (19 page)

But the taboo against homosexuality remains particularly ingrained in the French Foreign Legion where, since its creation in 1831, rumors suggest not only that homosexual acts among personnel took place, but also that homosexual relationships between Legionnaires existed. These relationships appear to have been numerous at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the garrisons of southern Oran (Algeria), where younger Legionnaires or
girons
submitted to their elders. Numerous elements contributed to this fact: the uprooting and imposed celibacy of new recruits, the continuous physical training and the cult of the virile male, the harsh discipline, the importance of non-verbal communication between men who do not share a common language, and even a marching song that could be considered a confession: “And what do I care of all those girls that I never loved, yes, never knew how to love.” It is known that in the first decade of the twentieth century, large numbers of homosexuals (“musicians”) joined the French Foreign Legion, and that between the wars, it attracted a certain type of gay male: young, virile, and at odds with society (Jean Genet joined at the age of nineteen, though he deserted quickly enough). That being said, Legion authorities disapproved of homosexual relations between their men (which they saw as leading to poor attitudes, jealousy, and suicide) and they forbade personnel from publicly disclosing their homosexuality: any Legionnaire accused of “
proselytism
” of this sort was expelled (as was the case with Jean-Claude Poulet- Dachary, who later became a cabinet director for the mayor of Toulon and was assassinated in 1995). When filmmaker Claire Denis announced she would direct a movie about relationships between Legionnaires (
Beau Travail
, 1999), she came up against hostility from military authorities and Legionnaires themselves, who refused to be compromised in a “film about queers.” As far as Denis was concerned, those responsible clearly acted as if “homosexuality was the most important danger faced by Legionnaires.” This was not a new phenomenon, as in the nineteenth century, the growing of a beard was required by the Legion in order to prevent the development of “unnatural morals” (which were believed to develop as a result of confusion between the feminine and masculine physique). Tolerance toward the acquisition of
congaï
(girlfriends) in Indochina and, in the years between wars, to the introduction of MCBs (military-controlled bordellos) in Algeria followed the same type of logic. It is known that military authorities knowingly constructed a myth exalting the absolute heterosexuality of the Legionnaire (to which Edith Piaf even paid tribute in one of her famous songs of the 1930s). Nonetheless, this construct can be taken down in an instant, as demonstrated in 1987 when French singer Serge Gainsbourg humorously reinterpreted Piaf’s song without changing a single word.

In the homosexualized environment of the military, homophobia is expressed in its most perverted and violent form in what may be called “gay rape” (almost always committed in “self-denial” mode by the aggressor, especially when part of a group). French security forces have dealt with many incidents of this kind, which have more or less been officially covered up, but which, in cases where suicide results, have come to the attention of the public and the media. However, it is in the former USSR that the phenomenon took on importance from 1967 to 1991. When young Soviet conscripts first arrived at the barracks, older conscripts would await them, and in a manner resembling the hierarchy in British private schools, the young “fags” were forced to serve the
stariki
or
ded
(“grandfathers”): they had to obey them, becoming their personal slaves, wash their clothes, wax their boots, allow themselves to be insulted, beaten with belts and, in many cases, raped. This extremely violent form of hazing (called
dedovchtchina
) was a major contributing factor to the demoralization of the Soviet army in the 1980s. It was in fact the reason for the creation of an independent association made up of the mothers of Soviet military personnel, which testified to the widespread social violence linked to Stalinism and the
gulags
.
—
Pierre Albertini

Bech, Henning.
When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity
. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1997.

Bérubé, Allan.
Coming Out Under Fire: Lesbian and Gay Americans and the Military During World War II
. New York: The Free Press, 1989.

———. “Marching to a Different Drummer: Lesbian and Gay GIs in World War II.” In
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
. Edited by George Chauncey, Martin Duberman, and Martha Vicinus. New York: New American Library, 1989.

Dover, Kenneth.
Homosexualité grecque
. Paris: La Pensée Sauvage, 1982. [Published in the US as
Greek Homosexuality
. New edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989.]

Fromaget, Georges.
Les Mesures de protection à l’égard des pervers qui s’engagent dans l’armée
. Lyon: Bosc Frères, 1935.

Grau, Günther:
Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933–1945
. London: Cassell & Cie, 1995.

Gury, Christian.
L’Honneur perdu d’un capitaine homosexuel en 1880
. Paris: Kimé, 1999.

Halley, Janet E.
Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military’s Anti-Gay Policy
: Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1999.

Hyam, Ronald.
Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience
. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990.

Odom, William E.
The Corpse of the Soviet Military
. New Haven, CT/London: Yale Univ. Press, 1998.

Porch, Douglas.
La Légion étrangère 1831–1962
. Paris: Fayard, 1994. [Published in the US as
The French Foreign Legion
. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.]

Roynette, Odile.
“Bons pour le service,” l’expérience de la caserne en France à la fin du XIX siècle
. Paris: Belin, 2000.

Williams, Colin and Martin Weinberg.
Homosexuals and the Military: A Study of Less than Honorable Discharge
. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

—Contagion; Custine, Astolphe de; Fascism; Heterosexism; Himmler, Heinrich; Pétain, Philippe; Police; Symbolic Order; Treason; Violence.

ARMY.
See
Armed Forces

ART

This entry does not claim to be exhaustive and covers only certain periods in Western art, seeking to offer a number of ideas by way of a few examples. In fact, it is notable that homophobia as such has never been an artistic issue. Unlike Nazi or colonial art, there has never been a homophobic art form whose formal expression coincided with the will to propagate a certain ideology. At most, we find, throughout history, particular homophobic works or, for more recent periods, works that touch on the issue of homophobia. Of course, we could make a list. Although, the work involved would be considerable; it would eventually identify a permanence in homophobic impulses and perhaps establish a timeline of homophobia that would confirm, or shed light on, the nuances of the historical moments (underlined by recent gay and lesbian studies) when
tolerance
of homosexuals permitted the birth of homophile art. Nonetheless, apart from the contemporary period, this list would still come up against a major obstacle: because of existing sources and the inherently mutable nature of
insults
and of mockery, it is often difficult to ascertain the real homophobic character of the works in question. A few examples allow us to illustrate this fact.

The first concerns the representation of male couples in certain Christian paintings of the Renaissance. In an article that appeared in 1989, historian Joseph Manca cited many examples, among them the famous
Miracles of Saint Vincent Ferrier
, painted around 1470 by Ercole de Roberti, and now in the Vatican Museum. These same-sex couples would have been painted in order to symbolize the perversity of the pagan world, before the coming of Christ. If this is a plausible explanation of homophobia, it is also important to note certain sacred images that, during the same period, represent similar pagans, such as Michelangelo’s
Tondo Doni
in which two beautiful, naked young men appear behind the Holy Family, and upon whom the artist does not seem to have heaped opprobrium.

The second example also refers to the Italian Renaissance. Images and texts appear to mock Borso d’Esté, the Duke of Ferrara, representing him as unmasculine and preferring the company of young, pretty male prostitutes who took themselves for the Three Graces. In a well documented article, Werner Gundersheimer demonstrates that this effeminacy is not homophobic, for it served the interests of Borso d’Esté, who sought to differentiate himself from his brutal predecessor in the Ferrara court.

Thus, the search for specific, presupposed homophobic works is even more problematic because the conditions under which they were produced and received often remain hermetic. For example, a drawing by Italian painter Marco Zoppo, dating from 1460 and preserved at the British Museum in London, shows numerous traits that converge to define it as homophobic: in the background, two men embrace, the older of the two firmly holding the pommel of his sword, a phallic symbol at the time; in the foreground, cherubs are at play, one shoving a bellows into the other’s posterior. Nevertheless, the drawing’s obvious private character and our inability to reproduce the artist’s motivations and the objective he intended for his work make it impossible to determine the piece’s homophobic character; it may simply reveal a secret, a preference for young men that Marco Zoppo and his eventual patron may have shared. This is also the case with certain paintings, and certain satirical sonnets mocking homosexuality by Bronzino. These works can hardly be defined as homophobic as everything leads us to believe that Bronzino as well as the intended audience for his sonnets were gay.

Although it is often difficult to confirm the eventual homophobic character of works of art, or even
caricatures
, homophobia can be more easily found in the arguments of art historians and in institutionalized
censorship
, as well as in public opprobrium. Statements by historian Louis Réau are symptomatic of a certain homophobia that has long prevailed in this field. Expressing himself in a reference manual on the iconography of St Sebastian, Réau notes that “all that remains (for St Sebastian) is the compromising and shameful patronage of sodomites or homosexuals, seduced by his beautiful apollonian nudity, glorified by the Sodoma.” This argument reveals a common theory that postulates that art—as an inspiration to beauty, to the sublime, to transcendence—cannot be suspected of
vice
, and that all perversity exists only in the eyes of the ill-intentioned spectator. It is not the painting representing St Sebastian that is erogenous, it is the troubled look from the homosexual that is at fault.

This approach prevailed as early as the sixteenth century, when art history, as a discipline, was born. For a long time, it forbade the use of homosexuality as one of the parameters that governed the creation of artworks and their posterity, even though heterosexual desire largely served as an explanatory undercurrent. This attitude is particularly sensitive in the historiographical posterity of the three geniuses of the Renaissance: Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. Raphael’s heterosexuality allowed for his sensitivities to be largely taken into consideration when analyzing his works. In contrast, no effort was spared to deny or hide the assumed homosexuality of Michelangelo or da Vinci in order to defend their works from any and all “dishonor.” Thus, Michelangelo’s first critics protested his innocence and, in 1623, editing the artist’s sonnets and madrigals for the first time, his great-great-nephew modified them in order to give the impression that they were addressed to a woman and not, as was the case for most of them, to his lover Tommaso Cavalieri (this edition was considered the philological standard until 1897, when Karl Frey, referring to the manuscripts, reestablished the original texts). Finally, in order to account for Michelangelo’s glorification of the male body, Florentine Neo-Platonism had always been privileged, which had long allowed the question of homosexuality—viewed as trivial—to be avoided. The fate reserved for Leonardo da Vinci was different. Nineteenth-century historiography constructed around him, the myth of the melancholic, sexless artist whose proclaimed love for young men was purely intellectual. This myth has been demolished by recent research which restored Leonardo’s hedonistic character and thus permitted the reevaluation of the sensuality of his work.

Finally, it must be noted that the greatest mark of homophobia on the arts lies with the general intolerance in which these artists worked and lived. Certainly, the prevailing talent and marginality of the artistic life being expected, gay artists, under the pretext of their penchants, were rarely prevented from practicing their art. For example, neither Perugino, Botticelli, nor Leonardo da Vinci, each one accused of sodomy in the opinion of a particular jurisdiction, were stopped from working for the greatest patrons of their time. Even during the first years of photography, there was a public that both purchased and encouraged the works of Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden or Fred Holland Day. However, these artists were also frustrated by their inability to express their love for men in their work. In fact, censorship and opprobrium, which were for so long the iron fist of homophobia, created an atmosphere in which artists were forced to be either self-censoring—the love of men being misrepresented or suppressed—or clandestine—Baron von Gloeden’s photos were only in circulation in underground networks and have only been passed down in posterity by way of collectors who purchased them in secret (the original plates having been destroyed by Italy’s Fascist regime). The refusal of self-censorship or clandestineness implied risk, a risk that was taken by American painter Thomas Eakins (1844–1916). Although Eakin’s work was widely recognized and held an eminent academic position, he was undermined from the moment he set out to exhibit a certain part of his work that was openly homophile. As a result, his teaching, based on the study of the nude, and in particular the male nude, criticized and suspected of being nothing more than an intellectual cover for his excesses, he was forced to resign.