The Dictionary of Homophobia (92 page)

However, Proust himself, and Gide most assuredly, made homosexuality fashionable in the world of letters. In fact, in 1926, Eugène Montfort, in the French periodical
Les Marges,
launched an investigation into the preoccupation with homosexual themes in literature. Writers who were questioned on the subject— Henri Barbusse, François Mauriac, and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, among others—noted with disdain an increase in interest in this topic in contemporary novels. In order to fight it, it was determined that it was no longer sufficient to merely unmask homosexuality, given that it dared to show itself spontaneously and without any modesty; what had to be done was just the opposite.

… to Philological Homophobia
Hiding homosexuality is the other great recourse of homophobia in general. Rather than condemn it outright, certain opponents of homosexuality used subtle yet no less effective means related to philology to deal with its appearance in literature, including reforming pagan works of the literary pantheon long after they were written: those Greek and Roman authors, renowned and consecrated, who wrote immodestly about same-sex relationships.

Concealment of texts was the first technique. The most troubling ones were often hidden away in oubliettes; unless some miraculous exhumation occurs, we will never see them. We can at the most dream of those lost treasures that time’s furor has very often destroyed. The second technique: mutilation; usually the original versions of texts, which were then censored. This is how the works of
Sappho
, Anacreon, Pindar, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Martial were sanitized in order to be made more acceptable (i.e. heterosexual). The third technique: falsification, in which the text was not maimed but rather modified in order to remove any implications of homosexuality, a task that was often as simple as changing pronouns from “he” to “she.”

This is the manner in which Michelangelo’s poems were treated. For sixty years, his heirs hid his manuscripts; finally, the texts were published, but the love sonnets addressed to his lover Tommaso dei Cavalieri were either censored outright, or the identity of the person addressed was neutralized or feminized. This is how the line “I am prisoner of an armed rider” became “I am prisoner of a heart armed with virtue.” It was only in 1897 that a German scholar, Karl Frey, finally restored the original text. Michelangelo’s work was thus concealed, mutilated,
and
falsified.

These techniques serve to heterosexualize both the text and the author. On a subtler level, however, it is sometimes possible to obtain just as effective a result by using hermeneutic tools (methods that seek to interpret the true final essence of the text) instead: it suffices to interpret, and to alter not the text so much as the judgment of the future readers. Published in 1609, Shakespeare’s
Sonnets
constitute an enlightening example of this; the first 126 love poems are addressed to a young man, and the twenty-four which follow are addressed to the mysterious and somber “Dark Lady.
”
In 1640, John Benson published a new edition of the
Sonnets
in which he transformed
he
and
his
into
she
and
her
. But inasmuch as the original text was already accessible to the public, his awkward philological intervention risked attracting attention to the same-sex phenomenon that he hoped to conceal. More slyly, similar literary revisionists in the century that followed explained to readers that Shakespeare’s odd use of pronouns was a peculiar verbal usage of the Elizabethan era. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was more embarrassed by the
Sonnets
than anything else, at first affirmed that the poems indeed evoked a young man, but that it was without real love; then he declared the contrary, that they were about love, but were not
really
addressed to a young man; Shakespeare had used the masculine pronouns in order to mislead readers! As for François-Victor Hugo—who also took a turn at translating the poems—he imagined that the pieces addressing the young man were written by a weeping female lover, of whom we see no trace in the work.

Evidently, these
Sonnets
caused problems not because they were about gay love (which would have been sufficient cause to throw them into the bowels of the libraries), but because their author was William Shakespeare. To suggest that the Great Shakespeare could be a sodomite was nearly blasphemous, given that he was already regarded as the most important man of letters. Those in agreement with this perspective, seized by a strong
heterosexist
will, subsequently tried to restore his reputation and integrate him by force into the community of “good people,” using inventive and imaginative techniques.

This example is far from being an isolated one. The diverse practices of concealment, mutilation, falsification, and reinterpretation were often used to heterosexualize writers long after their death. We would also be wrong to believe that such techniques belong to another era; although they are increasingly untenable, evidence of similar homophobic attempts at literary revisionism appeared throughout the twentieth century. But today, the most current means is without doubt euphemization. In this way, the numerous lesbian aspects of Colette’s work, not only in
Le Pur et l’Impur
(
The Pure and the Impure
) but in the
Claudine
novels as well, are only vaguely evoked, at least in France. Even with Proust’s critics, homosexuality was often made relative: it was determined to be only a marginal theme, and not a very interesting one, either. (One critic claimed that Proust was “heterosexual in his soul”!)

But euphemization is still derived from hermeneutics. So nowadays, those who still insist on this homophobic effort will rely less on such coarse interpretive tools; they will employ more political arguments instead. For example, when a writer’s homosexuality is mentioned to clarify his or her work, they will try to smother the discourse by providing suspect objections (“Isn’t this gay or lesbian
communitarianism
?”; “Should we not respect the author’s
privacy
?”) on the other hand, the private lives of heterosexual authors are almost always taken into account when explaining their oeuvre.

Thomas Mann’s reticence in discussing his homosexuality might legitimize the reticence of critics after his death. But considering the author of
Death in Venice
ordered that his diaries not be opened until twenty years after his death, claims that Mann’s closetedness was a reason to
not
read his work as homosexual seems more like an avoidance strategy, especially given this biographical “detail” does indeed shed light on certain of Mann’s works. Similarly, the posthumous publication of Roland Barthes’
Incidents
raised earnest critiques where people saw a kind of post-mortem
outing
. But in reality, this text was a revelation for no one: his earlier
Fragments d’un discours amoureux
(
A Lover’s Discourse
), in spite of its sensual and poetic abstraction, succeeded in deceiving only a few, while in
Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes
(
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
)
,
the author clearly revealed himself, albeit with some reservations.

Viewed generally, instances of homophobia in the world of letters might seem infrequent. This false impression is in fact due to its means of expression; it essentially acts by working negatively and subtly, which makes it invisible and thus that much more effective: self-censorship and prudence have led numerous authors over the years to abandon or refuse to publish works featuring homosexual content. One only has to think of E. M. Forster’s
Maurice
(written in 1913–14 but finally published in 1971, a year after Forster’s death), Federico García Lorca’s
Sonetos del amor oscuro
(Sonnets of dark love), Umberto Saba’s
Ernesto,
Jean Cocteau’s
Le Livre blanc
(
The White Book
), or Roger Martin du Gard’s
Lieutenant-colonel de Maumort
. And when other homosexual-tinged works were brought into the world, they were often concealed, mutilated, falsified, and otherwise ignored. Under these conditions, the literary space as constituted could seem surprisingly neutral and seemingly exempt from homophobia (in addition to being exempt from homosexuality). Rarefied from then on, depictions of homosexuality were relegated to moral satires or science-based discourses, insofar as they were able to present the subject as unfavorably as possible.

Starting with the twentieth century but particularly in the last few decades, political and social conditions have allowed the emergence of a homosexual literature in which allusion, euphemism, and paraphrasing are no longer mandatory. Heroes of such works are no longer necessarily condemned to misfortune (Julien Green’s
Sud
), delinquency (Jean Genet’s
Journal du voleur
) or to
suicide
(Roger Martin du Gard’s
Un taciturne
[The silent one]). Further lesbian literature is finally starting to assert itself and be recognized for what it is. In such works, homosexuality not only appears without apology, a certain number of them in fact attempt to vigorously oppose homophobia. This was the intention of Gide’s
Corydon,
his “defense” of homosexuality published in 1924; it is also the goal of an anthology of poems edited by Scott Gibson entitled
Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew
Shepard
. But what seems true, or at least possible, in most Western countries is certainly not the case in the rest of the world. In these regions, the freedom to write on the subject, as on many others, remains a distant horizon.
—Louis-Georges Tin

Bristow, Joseph.
Sexual Sameness: Sexual Difference in Gay and Lesbian Writing
. London: Routledge, 1992.

Dollimore, Jonathan.
Sex, Literature and Censorship
. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001.

Jay, Karla, and Joanne Glasgow, eds.
Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions
. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1990.

Larrivière, Michel.
Les Amours masculines, l’homosexualité dans la littérature
. Paris: Lieu commun, 1984.

Marks, Elain, and George Stambolian.
Homosexualities and French Literature
. Ithaca, New York/London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979.

Laurent, Emile.
La Poésie décadente devant la science psychiatrique
. Paris: Maloine, 1897.

———.
Les Marges
35, no. 141 (March 1926). New edition edited by Patrick Cardon in
Cahiers GayKitschCamp,
no. 19. Lille: 1993.

McFarlane, Cameron.
The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, 1660–1750
. New York: Colombia Univ. Press, 1997.

Munt, Daily, ed.
New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Reading
. London: Harvester, 1992.

Robinson, Christopher.
Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth Century French Literature
. London: Cassel, 1995.

Rosario,Vernon. “Inversion’s Histories/History’s Inversions. Novelizing Fin-de-Siècle Homosexuality.” In
Science and Homosexualities
. New York/London: Routledge, 1997.

Salducci, Pierre, ed.
Ecrire gai
. Québec: Stanké, 1999.

Tin, Louis-Georges. “La Littérature homosexuelle en question.” In
Homosexualités: expression/répression
. Paris: Stock, 2000.

Woods, Gregory.
A History of Gay Literature, the Male Tradition
. New Haven, CT/London: Yale Univ. Press, 1998.

—Arenas, Reinaldo; Art; Comic Books; Censorship; Cinema; Dance; Duras, Marguerite; Gide, André; Humor; Leduc, Violette; Music; Pasolini, Pier Paolo; Radclyffe Hall, Marguerite; School; Song; Viau, Théophile de; Villon, François; Wilde, Oscar.

LOBBY

The word “lobby” is often invoked in France in a homophobic context when it is used to criticize the actions of the so-called “gay lobby.” For example, a March 16, 1999 article on the subject of gay
parenting
entitled “La Contre-attaque du lobby homosexuel” (The counterattack of the homosexual lobby) published in the French Catholic newspaper
Présent
was accompanied by an illustration of two men welcoming a small child by saying, “Don’t be afraid, you can see we’re welcoming you with open … sheets.”

Unfortunately, the homophobic use of the expression “gay lobby” is not limited to the
far right
. During the heated debates in France on the
PaCS
(Pacte civil de solidarité; Civil Solidarity Pact) proposal, it was often heard coming from the mouths of French members of parliament. For example, Guy Teissier, a Liberal Democrat, declared that PaCS “was invented by a gay MP to satisfy the demands of the gay lobby and to honor an electoral promise made to the gay community” (September 10, 1998). In a free bimonthly distributed in the 8th and 9th arrondissements of Paris, MP Pierre Lellouche of the RPR (Rally for the Republic) wrote: “PaCS is a string pulled by a lobby, taken up by the Left, and which, little by little, is being wound into an uncontrollable ball:
family,
society as a whole, the role of the state, solidarity, personal property and welfare…. The most scandalous fact is that this text, which is a tragedy for the well-being of our society, is presented as being modern.” Similarly, in a widely distributed flyer, the French association Avenir de la culture (Future of the Culture) stated with regard to PaCS that “it’s obvious that the offensive by the gay lobby will spearhead the destruction of the essential principles of our civilization.”

Just like the concept of the gay “
ghetto
,” the homophobic accusations of gay lobbying are premised on the idea that gay and lesbian
associations
work on the basis of
communitarianism
. On the other hand, contrary to the “ghetto” argument, lobbying is also premised on describing the gay and lesbian movement as a special interest group whose demands are detrimental to the greater public interest, whose aim is to influence society. The word is frequently used to refute the legitimacy of the associative or militant action surrounding an issue, which implies that gay associations achieve certain goals by bribing politicians or through other underhanded methods. This strategy is very close to that used historically against the Jews and the Freemasons, making use of the
rhetoric
of conspiracy. Just as the Jews were accused of plotting (as exemplified by “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a 1903 Russian article detailing a Jewish plan to achieve world domination that was later revealed to be an anti-semitic literary forgery), homosexuals are depicted as gathering in secret in order to plan the destruction of society and civilization, as demonstrated by a pamphlet entitled
The Gay Manifesto
, widely distributed in 1999 by the Miami-Dade chapter of the Christian Coalition in the United States, which revealed this alleged conspiracy as hatched by gays and lesbians.