The Dictionary of Homophobia (29 page)

Congrégation pour la doctrine de la foi. “Persona humana. Déclaration sur quelques questions d’éthique sexuelle.”
La Documentation catholique
(1976). [Published in English as “Persona Humana: Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics.” By The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, The Roman Curia (1975).]

———. “Au sujet des propositions de loi sur la non-discrimination des personnes homosexuelles.”
La Documentation catholique,
no. 2056 (1992). [Published in English as “Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Legislative Proposals on Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons.” By The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, The Roman Curia (July 23, 1992).]

Furey, Pat, and Jeanine Grammick, eds.
The Vatican and Homosexuality
. New York: Crossroad, 1988.

Marinelli, Luigi.
Le Vatican mis à nu
. Paris: Robert Laffont, 2000.

Melton, Gordon.
The Churches Speak on Homosexuality
. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991.
Osservatore romano,
Official Vatican newspaper.

Sarfati, Georges-Elia.
Le Vatican et la Shoah ou comment l’Eglise s’absout de son passé
. Paris: Berg International, 2000.

Weigel, Georges.
Jean-Paul II, témoin de l’espérance
. Paris: Jean-Claude Lattes, 1999.

—Abnormal; Against Nature; Damien, Peter; Family; Heresy; Inquisition; Marriage; Paul (of Tarsus); Sodom and Gomorrah; Theology.

CENSORSHIP

In his preface to Bernard Sergent’s book,
Homosexuality in Greek Myth
, Georges Dumézil reminisces about his studies as a young Hellenic scholar:

It was 1916, at the Sorbonne, and the illustrious scholar Emile Bourguet, renowned expert on ancient and modern Greece, was explaining
Symposium
to his students. Upon reaching the section which Victor Cousin had nobly titled “Socrates declines Alcibiades’ gifts,” he warned us all to “not go imagining anything.” To which Dumézil exclaimed, “Imagine? One has only to read!”

This quote illustrates the fact that, on the subject of homosexuality, censorship has long been a tradition among learned scholars, who expand upon its usual definition, i.e. the control exerted by a government over the press and the public. Three types of homophobic censorship can be identified: intellectual, institutional, and self-censorship.

Intellectual censorship applies to all sorts of alterations made to texts by translators, commentators, and others. Historically, this was the first type of censorship, and appears to have been perpetrated most often by medieval Christian authors working on the
corpus
of Greek and Latin works. They employed three methods of censorship: travesty, reinterpretation, or omission. Travesty was both the simplest and the most common method—when confronted with a text describing a relationship between two men, one of the names was changed to a feminine one. Take, as an example, the couple of Socrates and Alcibiades, the latter of whom was often presented as the female companion of Socrates. In Rémi d’Auxelle’s commentary on Boethius’s
Consolation of Philosophy
, Alcibiades is presented as “a woman famed for her beauty, said to be the mother of Hercules.” And in the sixteenth century, Michelangelo’s masculine sonnets were modified by his great-nephew. Or more recently, in his 1955 screen adaptation of the novel
Les Diaboliques
, Henri-Georges Clouzot turns the lesbian couple into the wife and mistress of the same man, of whom they are both victims and murderers.

The reinterpretative method of censorship is just as intellectually dishonest, whereby the original homosexual meaning of a text is warped to make it heterosexual. For example, in one of the books making up Ovid’s
The Art of Love
, a phrase correctly translated as “That is why boys please me but little” was amended by some moralist to become “That is why boys do not attract me at all,” and even included a footnote informing the reader: “You can see that Ovid was not a sodomite” (cf. Domenico Camparetti,
Virgilio nel Medio Evo
[Livourne: 1872], p. 115). This preoccupation with reinterpreting or disguising text pertaining to homosexuality sometimes led translators to introduce concepts that did not exist at all. For example, Robert Graves once “translated” a phrase by Suetonius that was not present in the original text which suggested the existence of a law prohibiting homosexual practices.

Straightforward omission is the most radical of these methods of intellectual censorship, in which, during the translation or transmission of a text, homosexual characteristics are removed outright. This can range from the omission of a single word (which identified a character’s gender, for example) to the removal of an entire volume of work (such as Pseudo-Lucian’s
Amores
[
Affairs of the Heart
], which Thomas Francklin deliberately left out of his 1781 edition of
The Works of Lucian
because it debated the issue of which gender is better for a man to love). He unabashedly explained his decision: “[A]s this is a point which, at least in this nation, has been long since determined in favor of the ladies, it stands in need of no further discussion: the Dialogue is therefore, for this, as well as some other still more material reasons, which will occur to those who are acquainted with the original, entirely omitted.” This brand of intellectual censorship remained in vogue for a long time; for example, it was not until 1993, the centennial anniversary of French poet Paul Verlaine’s death, that his homosexual-themed poetry from the 1891 collection
Hombres
(Men) was finally published in his
Complete Works
by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Institutional censorship, a recent phenomenon, is more powerful than intellectual censorship; it requires an authority that possesses both the will and the power to exert control over the expression of ideas. The Christian church long filled this role in the western world, but its censorship of homosexuality has been far from constant or virulent (as indicated by John Boswell in his 1980 book
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
). In the chapter entitled “The Triumph of Ganymede: Gay Literature of the High Middle Ages,” he even identified signs of what he called a “gay subculture” appearing between 1050 and 1150 in the writings of high-ranking clergymen Anselm of Canterbury and Baudri of Bourgeuil. Despite the fact that Boswell’s analyses have been challenged since first being published (most notably in France by Jean-François Cottier), it can be concluded at least that between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the church did not practice homophobic censorship. This was not only because the church had other priorities at the time (such as converting the last western pagans, Christianizing
marriage
and asserting its spiritual authority over laymen), but also because it did not yet have the means to exact this kind of censorship. Boswell also pointed out that if there appeared to be a turning point in Christian intolerance toward homosexuals after the Third Council of the Lateran in 1179, it was because homosexuals were lumped together with heretics. It is striking to note that, in all the great accusations of
heresy
that occurred at the end of the Middle Ages, from the Cathars to the Hussites, and including the trial of the Knights Templar in France, concurrent accusations of sodomy were made time and again. Now enacted regularly by secular authorities, religious censorship of the
bougres
was in full swing, involving coercion, torture, burning at the stake, and the like.

Challenged by Protestantism during the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church found renewed moral vigor, and it is interesting to note that it is within this climate of anti-Reformation that homophobic censorship developed in reaction to libertine poets. The chief characteristic of libertine philosophy is to be as heterodox in habit as in religion. Herein lies the collusion between homosexuality and heresy that was assumed during the Middle Ages, notably in the libertine theory that Jesus Christ and St John the Baptist were lovers. This statement figured among the charges laid against libertine Francesco Calcagno in 1550, and again in 1593, among charges brought against Christopher Marlowe, who was accused of stating that “St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, and that he used him as the sinners of
Sodom
.”

In 1623, French poet Théophile de Viau was the subject of homophobic censorship.
Viau
was known for his impious subject matter, as well as his masculine loves, notably with poet Jacques Valée des Barreaux.
Le Parnasse satyrique
was published in 1622, a work in which he lambasted the censors and the devout of his era, who promptly went on the attack. The Jesuit Father Garasse published
La Doctrine curieuse
in 1623 (a book which earned the subtitle of “anti-Théophile”), in which he called into question the poet’s Catholic devotion, given that Viau was a recent convert who had renounced
Protestantism
, and in the process, accused him of homosexuality. The
procureur général
of the Parliament of Paris, Mathieu Molé (a supporter of the Jesuits), led the campaign against Viau beginning in April 1623 by gathering up copies of
Le Parnasse satyrique
, then ordering the poet’s arrest in July. Taken in for questioning near St-Quentin in September,Viau was incarcerated in Paris’s
Conciergerie
(in the same cell as Henri IV’s murderer François Ravaillac), where he waited two years for his trial. While imprisoned, he wrote, attempting to clear himself of the accusations made against him, most notably producing
L’Apologie de Théophile
, in which he responded to Father Garasse concerning the “sodomite sonnets” he had composed:

For one who is vowed to chastity and having taken on the sacred title of Jesuit, you have without a doubt gone against the nature of your profession in the great care taken to fabricate these verses of sodomy, and also publicly teaching this enormous
vice
under the guise of denouncing it…. Composing verses of sodomy does not make a man guilty of the act: poet and pederast are two different qualities.

In September 1625,Viau was banished from France by an act of Parliament and died a year later at the age of thirty-six. His case is a textbook example of modern homophobic censorship, as it involved a contentious work that was seized, and included the intervention of the state (in this case, the Parliament of Paris).

In the modern era, the growth of civil institutions (at the expense of religious ones) has meant that they are now the most likely to resort to censorship to maintain order. Examples of homophobic censorship at its peak can be found in totalitarian regimes, such as the Nazis in Germany, who in 1933, destroyed German physician Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research and burned all its contents; or in
communist
regimes, where homosexuality was frequently equated with a bourgeois
vice
, thus leading to the radical censorship of all forms of its expression.

Even in those democracies where freedom of expression is considered a fundamental right, forms of homophobic censorship can still be found. In France, the case of homosexual media is a good example. In the early decades of the twentieth century, attempts to publish homosexual magazines were thwarted based on grounds of their being “an offense against good values” as written in the penal code (for example, the magazine
Inversions
in 1924); and as of 1949, the law pertaining to publications aimed at youth, which banned the display of “offensive” magazines as a result, forced many gay publications out of business (with the exception of
Arcadie
, which managed to survive solely through subscriptions from 1955–75). Publications which fell victim to this law included
Futur
and
Juventus
in the 1950s and 60s, and those published by FHAR (Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire) and other gay liberation groups in the 70s; they were regularly prosecuted, including Pierre Guénin, a pioneer in gay men’s publications in France.

Even the well-known magazine
Gai-Pied
had its share of confrontations with French authorities over censorship. Miraculously escaping the censors during its first years of existence (mostly thanks to the support of the intelligentsia, which was earned through publishing articles and interviews with the likes of Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre), the magazine was targeted for banning in March 1987 by the Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua. In response,
Gai-Pied
received as much support from journalists (seeing the threat as an attack on freedom of the press), as from politicians; with regard to the latter, sympathizers not only came from the left (such as Jack Lang of the Socialist Party, who was seen at the Paris Book Fair with a copy of
Gai-Pied
under his arm) but also from the right, such as Minister of Culture François Léotard (who by doing so provided another example of the great
tolerance
of the “liberal” right, which had the effect of rupturing government solidarity). What is interesting about the
Gai-Pied
affair is the anachronistic nature of its proposed censorship. Only a dozen years earlier, a similar ban would have been met with a quasi-general indifference; now, it was widely considered inappropriate, and a thing of the past, clearly demonstrating that censorship requires the cooperation of both state and society. If the latter applies sufficient pressure, the former has no choice but to concede.

Self-censorship is by its nature more subtle than intellectual or institutional censorship. Carried out by homosexual authors, this type of censorship comes from internal, not external, pressures, and can be the result of numerous circumstances: for example, the inner turmoil of one who is uncomfortable with his or her homosexuality, or the internalization of dominant social norms. Self-censorship could also be a preventative or precautionary mechanism to shield one from criticism, or even a strategy aimed at deceiving external censors. It has been said that Nobel Prize-winning author Roger Martin du Gard would not let his novel
Le Lieutenant-colonel de Maumort
be published until after his death (it was finally published in 1983, twenty-five years after he died), which some have construed as an example of self-censorship. But what can be said about André
Gide
(who was Gard’s longtime friend) and his long hesitations before finally publishing
Corydon
, against the advice of others, which resulted in a veritable
scandal
over its content? Further, there has been little that has not been said about Marcel Proust and the meanderings in his work on the subject of homosexuality. Who really is Albertine of
La Recherche du temps perdu
(
In Search of Lost Time
), an obvious object of Proust’s desire, and whose point of view is Proust’s, that of the narrator, or the character of Charlus? And what is one to take from the terrible passages devoted to “women-men” at the beginning of
Sodome et Gomorrhe
(
Cities of Pain
/
Sodom and Gomorrah
) (Vol. 2), the indulgent account of the sexual encounter between Jupien and Charlus in
Le Côté de Guermantes
(
The Guermantes Way
) or the bordello for men in
Temps retrouvé
(
The Past Recaptured
/
Time Regained
)?