In 1891, Oscar Wilde’s star was on the rise. For a decade he had been the talk of London, a literary wit who pioneered the fashion and philosophy of aestheticism. He had successfully published works of prose and collections of poetry, and was preparing his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, for publication, a masterful account of a Faustian bargain dripping with desire, vanity, and corruption. England regarded this sparkling Irishman with a combination of fascination, admiration, and horror, but no one could deny he was becoming a titan of the national culture. Yet within five years, Wilde’s reputation, and his health, were destroyed. Sentenced to two years of backbreaking hard labour, Wilde was spat at by strangers as he was transported via train to jail. Upon release, he fled into exile, living in penury under an assumed name. Nobody wanted to be known as his friend. Less than a decade after he had reached the heights of literary stardom, Wilde was dead.
It’s right and proper that we remember the role Wilde played within an otherwise staid and repressive Victorian culture, as well as the important, pioneering work he did describing, in public, a form of same-sex desire that otherwise lay hidden and criminalised on the margins. Wilde was one of the first men in British society to give a creative form to a sexuality that barely yet understood itself, let alone was understood or discussed by straight people. For that, conservative forces succeeded in destroying him. But at the core of Wilde’s story is his love for a terrible young man, a love that drove him close to madness and sparked the wildfire of events that led to his ruin.
That boy, a petulant and cruel son of the British aristocracy, was Lord Alfred Douglas, known by his affectionate nickname ‘Bosie’. Wilde and Bosie first met in 1891, when Bosie was a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at Wilde’s alma mater, Magdalen College, Oxford. Bosie was an archetypal twink, popular and athletic, who cared more about his writing and activities in the new ‘Uranian poetry’ movement, which idolized pederastic relationships between older and younger men, than his studies, which he never completed. In Wilde he found his ideal older lover and benefactor, whose work and plays he had already praised in Uranian journals.
Their tempestuous affair pushed Wilde’s homosexuality from the realm of flirtatious literary innuendo into that of reckless public identity. Besotted with the young poet, Wilde fell in with Bosie’s lifestyle and indulged his demands. The two lovers drank and partied together and became the subject of scurrilous rumours. They began to host wild sex parties with young working-class men, who they paid to fuck (or get fucked by). Wilde’s public image – an educated and charming raconteur, married with children – clashed with his private life, and while the conflict could hold for a few years, it wasn’t long before the inevitable happened. Wilde was expecting it. In a letter to Bosie after his release from jail, he wrote:
It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement. I used to feel as the snake-charmer must feel when he lures the cobra. They were to me the brightest of gilded snakes. Their poison was part of their perfection.1
After clashing with Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queens-berry, Wilde was left a calling card from the Marquess accusing him of being a sodomite. Queensberry, having two homosexual sons whom he regarded as having been corrupted by ‘snob queers’ such as Wilde and then–prime minister Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, was obsessed with homosexuality. Wilde’s friends told him to leave the case well alone, but, pushed by an impetuous and jealous Bosie, who hated his father, Wilde sued. There was a fatal hole in Wilde’s case – he was a sodomite, and Queensberry could prove it. The civil trial not only humiliated Wilde in the eyes of a homophobic Victorian public, but instigated a further criminal trial for gross indecency. Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to hard labour, which, in the end, indirectly killed him.
Wilde’s imprisonment, as awful and scandalous as it was, came at what was both a dangerous and an auspicious time for the new figure of the ‘homosexual’ in Europe. Within certain, albeit small, literary and scientific circles, a new identity was forming. Sexologists described a ‘third sex’ somewhere between male and female. In cities thronging with the new proletarian masses and enriched by colonial plunder, a group of people became the first generation of activists pursuing something we might recognize as ‘gay rights’. They discussed same-sex desire with sensitivity, even respect, calling themselves ‘Uranians’, ‘Urnings’, or even ‘Homosexuals’. For such people, Wilde’s trial was an important moment in the development of what would, in the ensuing decades, become something like a coherent movement. Scandals, after all, brought public attention. The newspapers wrote about the dangerous homosexuals, and more people began to recognize themselves as such and be endangered, and intrigued, by what that recognition might mean.
Wilde’s utopian vision of love between men remains, in Britain and beyond, a creation myth of the public male homosexual identity. Speaking at his trial Wilde launched a passionate defence of homosexual desire:
It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.2
Such a statement can almost be seen as a rallying cry for the century of LGBTQ rights activism that was to follow, and Wilde became one of its first martyrs.
Bosie became a footnote in the story: an embodiment of ‘evil twink energy’, a poisoned apple whose path through life left a wake of destruction that led to the great hero’s downfall. Yet Bosie – the man, his desires, his attitudes, and his foibles – was just as integral to the eruption of homosexuality into the public sphere as was Wilde. Bosie set the trial in motion. Indeed, it was actually Bosie, and not Wilde, who had coined the term ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ in one of his poems. No less than Wilde, Bosie shaped and was shaped by the sexual attitudes and cultures of his time, and Bosie’s later life of far-right political involvement is just as unpleasant and illuminating as his years with Oscar.
After Wilde’s death, Bosie married a bisexual poet named Olive Custance, and when their marriage went downhill he converted to Catholicism and began espousing increasingly anti-Semitic views. He wrote articles for the anti-Semitic magazine Vigilante accusing various people of plots to undermine British masculinity with Jewish homosexuality, and in 1920 co-founded a magazine called Plain English that advertised copies of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, defamed leftists and the Irish, and accused figures as right-wing and conventionally masculine as Winston Churchill of being involved in Jewish conspiracies to undermine the war effort. (Churchill eventually sued, and won). After a period of imprisonment, Bosie died poor and obscure in 1945. Only two people attended his funeral.3
For years, gay people have remembered Oscar as one of their own, but neglected Bosie as someone who has anything to tell us about how homosexuality came to be. Why do we choose to remember the witty and glamorous Wilde, and to forget the Machiavellian, anti-
Semitic, and louche Bosie? And more crucially, why do we assume that Wilde’s life and attitudes shaped the track record of the project of homosexuality better than Bosie’s? Bosie was hardly the first gay to become obsessed with far-right and racist politics, or to confuse liberation with the freedom to live out his own desires and elevated class status.
Bad Gays is a book about such characters, a book about the gay people in history who do not flatter us, and whom we cannot make into heroes: the liars, the powerful, the criminal, and the successful. From Alexander the Great to J. Edgar Hoover, our history is littered with them. Unlike our heroes, however – people like Oscar Wilde, Audre Lorde, and Alan Turing – we rarely remember them as gay. And yet their sexuality was just as important an influence on their lives as those whom we celebrate, and their stories have much to tell us about how the sexual identities we understand today came to exist.
Over the course of this book we will profile these evil and complicated queers from our history. Among their ranks are emperors and criminals, fascist thugs and famous artists, austere puritans and debauched bon viveurs, yet all of them have one thing in common – they engaged in same-sex behaviour that, in the context of today’s society, we might understand as, somehow, gay. By examining the interplay of their lives and their sexualities, this book investigates the failure of homosexuality as an identity and a political project.
‘Failure’ seems like a harsh word, and this assessment, while our primary argument in this book, is of course incomplete. There is indeed hope for queer forms, and our history contains many vital, living histories of struggle, alliance, and solidarity. In the conclusion we will think a bit about how these histories and the darker stories we’ve spent the book telling might exist in productive tension as we think about the future of gay lives in Europe and the United States.4
The failure, however, of mainstream, actually existing white male homosexuality to enact liberation and its embrace instead of full integration into the burning house of the couple-form, the family unit, and what we might hopefully call late-stage capitalism is real, and it is arranged on three primary axes: first, its separation from and fear of gender non-conformity; second, its simultaneous appropriation of the bodies and sexualities of racialized people and denial of those people’s full humanity, political participation, and equality; and third, its incessant focus on the bourgeois project of ‘sexuality’ itself.
The first theme is explored in the scholarly work of people like Susan Stryker, who have pointed out that homosexuality’s project of self-justification has often depended on claiming normalcy at the expense of a gender non-conforming Other: the trans woman, the street queen, the person not respectable enough to ‘pass’.5 The second is examined by people like C. Riley Snorton, Jules Gill-Peterson, Ann Stoler, and Anne McClintock, who have described the ways that the bodies of racialized and colonized people and ideas about their social organization have served as the literal substance of white metropolitan homosexual and transgender subjectivities and identities.6 And the third has been discussed by a variety of queer Marxist scholars, from gay liberationists themselves,7 to classic texts on the emergence of gay identity and its relationship to capitalism,8 to Christopher Chitty’s recent intervention into the correspondence between crises of capitalism and the persecution of poor and working-class sodomites.9 This book aims to explore these themes not through scholarly argument, but through storytelling: by retelling the stories of a set of queer lives that are individually fascinating and horrifying, and that collectively communicate a version – our version – of the story of the evolution and failure of white male homosexual identities.
It can be very easy to assume that the way we think about identities has always been the same. Our race, gender, sexual orientation, or nationality can seem like such an important, intrinsic part of ourselves that we assume they must have been important for people living in the past as well. But identities are, as Stryker has said, ‘where the rubber of larger social and cultural systems hits the road of lived experience’.10 They are constantly changing and being changed by the shifting structural realities of life, by systems of production and exchange, by the ways that we relate to one another.11
Even the idea that people have a specific ‘sexuality’ is remarkably recent – perhaps only 150 years old, emerging out of the rapidly industrializing colonial metropolises of Europe.12 The rigid segmentation of time into separated zones of work and leisure, along with moral panics about ‘backwards’ people intended to justify colonial expansion and incursions into the supposedly immoral private lives of the working classes, inculcated the idea that who you fucked made you who you were.13 Even after the invention of ‘homosexuality’ (and ‘heterosexuality’) in the late nineteenth century, most people who felt same-sex love and desire did not want to convert their feelings into identities, to subscribe to being medicalized and set apart.14
These feelings were, instead, sources of shame, crimes for which they could be punished, and social taboos. As some people began to fight for their recognition and against medicalizing systems, movements began to emerge. The people who led these movements – at least, the ones that have succeeded in winning state recognition – were often not working-class or people of colour, but instead members of the emerging bourgeoisie who sought to assign positive values to their sexual acts within the prevailing value systems of their time.15 And often, as we will see in this book, to bad ends.
At the same time, working-class people, colonized people, and people of colour have consistently lived, fought for, manifested, and expressed forms of social and sexual expression that have challenged both social prejudice towards sexual and gender minorities and the bourgeois politics of the gay elite.16 These challenges have often been bitterly resisted by that elite in their time, while still – owing to their embrace of mass politics and disruptive organizing – having far-reaching effects in our queer lives. Often, after the fact, the queer elite will belatedly acknowledge these people, movements, moments, and struggles in an attempt to incorporate them into the dominant story of what it means to be gay or lesbian or trans, as though the working-class gays and sex workers, drag queens, and trans women of colour at the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s West Village threw bricks at cops in order to win marriage equality for the gay and lesbian donor class.17
It is this process of struggle and contestation that has created the very idea of what being gay or queer is – it has marked the production of queer cultures, the discussion of queer lives, and queer people’s search for historical examples to justify their own acts and identities. Even the term ‘gay’ has changed; fifty years ago, the term had a broader meaning that included queer and bisexual people, transgender people, transvestites, and more: anyone who lived openly outside the heterosexual and cissexist norms of a more conservative society, and suffered as a result. Today, it tends to refer to a more limited idea of same-gender sexual attraction. These definitions, too, are sites of struggle and negotiation.18
It can be difficult, therefore, to find the right terminology to discuss people who might fit into such a category today, when such ideas and identities did not exist in their society. Can you call someone like James VI and I, a man who almost certainly had sex with other men, a homosexual, when that identity did not even exist as a concept at the time? When he was ruling England and Scotland, and beginning his campaigns of colonization in Ireland and America, nobody thought who they fucked had anything to do with who they were. So what does it mean to call James, or the Emperor Hadrian, or any number of nefarious nellies from history, ‘gay’?
We have decided to use that present-day term as a way of putting today’s homosexuality under a microscope and figuring out why it is troubled and incomplete, and why it failed to live up to its utopian promises of liberation. By discussing these people and their shared behaviours in relation to each other, we can begin to draw out characteristics and stories that might shed a light on how a contemporary gay identity came to exist – from ideas of what it means to be ‘a man’, to how same-sex desire has influenced major historical events, to how the dreaded heterosexuals came to exist, to understand themselves as opposed to queers, and to fear, police, and repress us. Our subjects may not have held a ‘gay’ identity, but their lives can tell us so much about why we do.
If ‘gay’ is an imprecise term of convenience, so is ‘bad’. While some of the folks in the book are, without doubt, bad – fascists, murderers, and other such scumbags – many are a bit more complicated. We can start to look at their lives in the context of the times in which they lived, and see how, within that context, their decisions influenced or were influenced by their sex lives.
Many were profoundly traumatized by the guilt they felt as a result of their sexual desires: pushed by society into lives they found themselves unable to lead, they made strange choices, or ended up damaging the world in their efforts to reform it. Nonetheless, the links between their negative actions and their sexual desires are worth exploring, worth expanding upon. For example: can we really understand Roy Cohn’s aggressive political witch-hunting and fear of secret subversion outside the context of his own negative feelings regarding his homosexuality? It’s for these reasons we use the categories of ‘bad’ and ‘gay’ – as provocations to talk more deeply about what we understand both words to mean.
If it is not clear enough that we are not writing as homo-phobes, ask our boyfriends, our lovers, our friends. Both of us are deeply shaped by homosexuality but also deeply unsatisfied by it. This is why we have subtitled this book ‘A Homosexual History’, and we mean that precisely: not (just) that we are homosexuals or that this is (only) a history of homosexuality or homosexual behaviours, but that this book is a dance through homosexuality’s usable and abusable pasts. We learn from the broad spectrum of theory by and about queer and trans people, and write from our position as white gay men, about a series of people whose behaviours, attitudes, and actions can help us understand why and how white male homosexuality, as a political, identitarian, and emancipatory project, has failed.
The Birth of Homosexuality
When we say ‘gays didn’t exist before the nineteenth century’, we do not mean, of course, that men were not getting it on with men, or women with women; or that people were not living or understanding their gender differently from how it was assigned at birth or how their society understood it. In fact, when LGBTQ people in Europe and the US in the twentieth century started searching back through history for their queer antecedents, there was plenty of documentary evidence that same-sex fucking and loving had a long history – mostly from antiquity, from anthropological and ethnographic records from the colonies, and through the records and transcripts of crime and punishment. Sex between men in Europe has been punished for centuries, of course; biblical law lays down explicitly that it is forbidden. But the way people think about it, and what they think is wrong with it, has changed.
In Europe, throughout the Middle Ages sex between two men was known as sodomy. Unlike today, when sodomy means anal sex, for most of the mediaeval period it simply referred to sexual acts which would not or could not result in procreation. In fact, if a woman sucked a man’s dick in mediaeval England, she could be regarded as a sodomite. The reason, therefore, for the prohibition of sodomy was that it was unnatural, against God’s plan for mankind to ‘be fruitful, and multiply’.
Sometimes this can make it difficult to discern whether accusations of sodomy and sinful behaviour thrown at kings or noblemen at the time were supposed to imply they were fucking other men or just fucking around. As this behaviour was a sin, its prosecution was left up to the powerful church courts. In the early mediaeval period sodomy between two men was not singled out as a special sin; like all others, it carried its penance. It was only later in mediaeval Europe that same-sex sex acts accreted a unique stigma. Around the 1300s the Italian city-states began to implement the first civil laws against such behaviour, and in the early fourteenth century Philip of France realised how useful the accusation of sodomy could be in repressing the powerful Knights Templar, to whom he owed a large sum of money he could not pay back. It wasn’t until 1533 that English law had its first anti-sodomy legislation. The public sentiment around sodomy, along with the usefulness of accusations in riling up the masses in the service of reaction, was too great to remain in the hands of the church courts, so it moved into the realm of the civil courts.
With the invention of such civil laws, sodomy stopped simply being just a sin and became a crime as well. With it, a new wave of stigmatization began to emerge around it, one that proved remarkably useful for the monarchs and politicians who could wield the laws in their own favour. For Henry VIII, who implemented the 1533 Buggery Act, the accusation of same-sex behaviour became a useful tool for prosecuting monks and priests who had long been associated, in the public mind, with lewd man-on-man action. Henry VIII’s desire to crush the clergy was not simply about his own sex life; he was also trying to seize their lands and enclose common lands, wrestling power and wealth from the hands of the Church. Therefore, the punishment named in the Buggery Act was not only execution (priests and monks could not even be executed for murder at this time) but also the seizure of their land and property by the monarch. Throughout the early modern period, many people still regarded men sleeping with men, and women with women, to be sinful, but it was also solidified in the popular imagination as a crime. Society was rapidly changing; the enclosures started by Henry continued over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Cities, as a result, exploded in size. When the Buggery Act was passed there were fifty thousand people living in London; within seventy years there were almost a quarter of a million, and by the end of the Victorian era there were over 6 million people living in the largest city the world had ever seen. The increasing urbanisation across Europe was accompanied by worries about just what this new ‘working class’ was getting up to in their sparse free time, living in close quarters and, in the eyes of the emerging bourgeoisie, worryingly lacking in moral scruples.
Alongside wider moral panics about aberrant sexual behaviour and prostitution, the ruling classes in Victorian England became increasingly worried about same-sex sexual acts taking place in their cities. As well as reinforcing anti-sodomy legislation with the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act (which, although removing the rarely implemented death sentence for buggery, introduced a new punishment of ten-years-to-life in penal servitude), in 1885 they also passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, criminalising, for the first time, not just anal sex but all forms of sexual activity between men, including the solicitation of sex, between men. Cruising, kissing, chatting up, slapping arses – all banned. It was with this law that they persecuted Wilde, and Alan Turing too, more than half a century later.
When colonizers first reached the shores of Africa and the Americas, and began to murder the people they found there and steal their land and resources, they encountered societies that tended to have varying social functions for people engaging in behaviour Europeans considered to be ‘same-sex’ or gender-transgressive. These identities were often rooted in the close connection between sex and kinship and sometimes had religious, political, or social-reproductive functions. The presence of people whom colonists could call sodomites and cross-dressers provided a useful religious and political justification for their murder and subjugation.
At the same time, stories of these strange colonial sins (in French, ‘doing it colonial-style’ came to be slang for sodomy) became encoded into the fabric of European discourse, even becoming sources of haunted, deadly inspiration for some European homosexual figures.19 Same-sex sexual activity in France had been decriminalised after the revolution when sodomy laws, as with many other laws regulating the behaviour of the popular classes, were left out of the 1791 penal code; and that principle was imposed in most territories (including the Netherlands and much of pre-unification Germany) that came under French control, although legal harassment and moral opprobrium still often targeted people who engaged in same-sex acts there. (Post-unification, Germany adopted the Prussian legal code of 1870, making sodomy illegal.) Turkey had also decriminalised same-sex behaviour under the Ottoman Empire.
It was in the mid-nineteenth century that, for the first time, groups of doctors, scientists, sociologists, and queer people themselves began to formulate their own theories about what all this sexual desire might be, might mean. As colonialism and race science were beginning to create taxonomies of humans based on traits and behaviours, sex theorists began to conceptualise into life a new type of human – the homosexual.
In Germany the lawyer and writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs acknowledged to his friends and family that he was that way, so to speak, in the 1860s. He began to write a series of pamphlets under the collective title ‘Studies on the Riddle of Male-Male Love’, in which he developed the theory that, rather than same-sex acts being a thing people did, instead the desire to do those things was, in itself, part of some people’s nature. This was a theory not just of sex, but of sexuality. Ulrichs described same-sex-loving men as ‘Urnings’, and women as ‘Dionings’. More than that, he campaigned publicly in his role as a lawyer for the repeal of anti-sodomy legislation in Prussia, and began correspondence with other sexologists interested in his ideas.20
One such man was the Hungarian journalist and campaigner Karl-Maria Kertbeny, who wrote his own texts calling for legal reform arguing that these urges were innate. Claiming solely an ‘anthropological interest’ in the subject (whatever you say, queen), he coined new terms to describe the phenomenon – among them, the term ‘homosexual’. Importantly, he also looked back into history for examples of homosexual men with which to argue that this phenomenon was not new: an early example of a gay history. Sexologists and campaigners such as Ulrichs, Kertbeny and, later, the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing began to popularise the idea that homosexuality should be understood as neither sin nor crime but in clinical terms, as a medical condition some are born into.21
The stage was set for our contemporary understanding of homosexuality. Today, Krafft-Ebing’s psychiatric model is, with some amendments, still regarded by many as a sufficient ‘explanation’ for the gays, while political campaigning and cultural changes have slowly begun to push back the notion that homosexuality is either a sin or a crime. Likewise, the idea of homosexuality as a holistic and inherent part of one’s identity, rather than just a type of sex anyone could have, is now established as a norm. The political model built on the back of it – that, as gays do what they do because it’s who they are, and we can’t help who we are, it would be cruel and illiberal to repress their nature or withhold their civil rights – still holds sway. Indeed, in much of the West the idea that homosexuality is an immutable characteristic is now so ingrained that ‘Born this Way’, once a stigmatizing medical explanation, is now both a rallying cry and pop anthem, rising up in opposition to conservative notions that homosexuality is an acquired deviance that can be ‘cured’ with ‘therapy’.
This binary model of thinking about homosexuality is so deeply internalised that to suggest that one might choose homosexuality as a positive choice, or even be able to have some control over the shaping of your own desires, is regarded as hate speech. Within liberal circles, even when homosexuality is okay, even when it comes with pension rights and military service and a lovely flat with a balcony and a little dog, it’s still an affliction.
Homosexuality’s Career
However, it would take more than the detached, clinical and pejorative analysis of Krafft-Ebing to produce the shift from the crime of sodomy to the identity of homosexuality. Throughout the late nineteenth century, inspired by increasing discussion and organisation around the subject of ‘Urnings’, ‘Uranians’ and ‘homosexuals’, writers such as Wilde, John Addington Symonds, Walt Whitman, and Edward Carpenter helped try to flesh out, with varying degrees of success, the subjectivity of homosexuality – not just what it was, but how it felt, and what it might mean. Meanwhile, in Germany, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, himself a gay man, established the ‘Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’ in 1897 and Institute for Sexual Science in 1919 to help support LGBTQ people and campaign for legal reform and social understanding. Lesbian activists, artists, and writers like Claire Waldoff, Johanna Elberskirchen and Lotte Hahm also thrived. Many transgender people found a refuge in Hirschfeld’s institute; it provided police protection for dressing differently than their assigned gender at birth, and even rudimentary surgical and hormonal gender confirmation treatment – although Hirschfeld also attempted crude anti-trans ‘corrective’ surgeries, as we’ll discuss later in the book.
Thus, from the turn of the century to the Nazi seizure of power, and especially in the time of the Weimar Republic (1919–33) after the end of the First World War, Germany sustained not just a political campaign for reform but a thriving queer social and cultural scene. With an understanding of homosexuality as a political and social identity, a social culture attached to that political understanding, and a variety of organizations – including some mass organizations – fighting for and defending legal rights, Germany during the Weimar years saw the first iteration of what we might call a popular LGBTQ movement. As with many such movements, there were disagreements – between masculinists and feminists, between socialists and anarchists and far-right fascists – but, fascinatingly, virtually all these writers and thinkers emphasized ethnographic records from colonized peoples as central to their understanding of who homosexuals were and what their culture might become.
Weimar-era gay magazines were full of references to colonized people and their supposedly exotic sexualities: from Native Americans to Africans (classified as ‘nature-peoples’ by racist anthropology) to the civilizations of India and China (‘culture-peoples’), these writers thought same-sex activity in these cultures had been natural and socially accepted. It was only in European civilization that it had been outlawed and banned. This worldview combined potentially subversive critiques of European civilization’s supposed superiority with fundamentally racist understandings of the differences between places, peoples, and cultures.
These movements were obliterated by fascism. Approximately one hundred thousand suspected homosexuals were arrested under the Nazi regime, of whom fifty thousand were sent to camps, where thousands died. Many hundreds of thousands more suppressed their lives, and thousands moved into exile. Clubs and bars were closed, and the archives of Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science were among the first thrown into the flames during the infamous book burnings. After the war, in West Germany, things hardly improved: the Nazis’ sharpening of anti-sodomy laws was not repealed by the West German government until 1969, and prison terms served in concentration camps were not considered to have been properly served at all. Gay men were freed from camps and sent directly back to jail, where tens of thousands of newly arrested men joined them.
The gay rights movements re-emerged in the 1950s. Many men and women had experienced same-sex environments for the first time during the Second World War and liked what they found there. Ideas that had been banned in Germany spread through émigrés and refugees. In the United States, as the movements began to emerge, the state also cracked down hard on both the emergent gay rights movement and on homosexuality more generally. As part of a widespread paranoia fabricated by the right, the government associated homosexuality with communism and understood it a national security threat. Thousands of queer men and women mostly living ‘in the closet’ had their private lives investigated and were fired from federal employment and blacklisted from their professions. The gay rights movement, still a largely underground network of small groups and publications, received both a fresh intake of activists and renewed repression. In many organisations, leftists, communists, and community organisers were purged by other LGBTQ activists worried about government infiltration and desperate to remain ‘respectable’. The reverse was also true.
It wasn’t until the late 1960s, after a six-day insurrection at Stonewall by largely working-class LGBTQ people, including many people of colour, that the middle-class, gradualist homo-phile organizations (which had albeit started with a surge of Communist activity in Los Angeles in the 1950s before turning sharply right) were superseded by a new generation of activists. Rather than advocating for incremental civil rights victories achieved by respectable political campaigning, this new movement demanded gay liberation now. Gays (at this time more of an umbrella term covering all manner of sexual and gender identities) would no longer live in the shadows and request toleration – they would ‘come out’ as their true selves and win their rights by being unmistakably themselves.
The huge social movement that followed, driven by a core belief in the value of self-actualization, advanced the idea that to overcome political oppression queer people also had to overcome their personal shame. Within this context, writers, poets, and artists looked back through history to find examples to prove that we had always been here, and that our lives need not be lived cloaked in shame or fear. If Oscar Wilde, Sappho, Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Leonardo da Vinci, Billie Holiday, and Alexander the Great could be gay, and if they could be gay and live their lives to the fullest, then so could you. These people may have had their true selves repressed, both by their peers and by history, but by uncovering it LGBTQ people were building their own histories.
The Death (and Life) of Homosexuality
This was important work, helping people who were raised in fear and self-hatred to live happily, fully, and with pride. But is it not time we also look at those whom the early gay rights pioneers were less keen to claim as family, as one of us? Or the people among those pioneers – the people who helped bake the cake of identity and desire that now defines our lives – who perhaps irreparably harmed the substance of ‘gay’ itself? Within their lives, buffeted by the winds of history and social circumstance, many same-sex-loving and gender non-conforming chose terrible paths and inflicted appalling damage upon others.
If we are to accept that some of the greatest artists, activists, and poets of history were guided and motivated by their sexuality, why not the criminals, despots, and bigots? Within their lives are valuable lessons regarding how we came to understand ourselves, about the challenges LGBTQ people have faced – not always honourably – through history, and how sex, love, and desire have led people to make world-changing decisions. It is not simply that these are fascinating, complex lives that compel us towards understanding homosexuality. They also ask us to pose the question of the whole notion of gay heroes: why do we choose to remember, and why do we choose to forget?
When a gay man becomes a fascist, how does his homosexuality affect his attraction to the politics of venerating the state as though it were a go-go boy dancing on a box? When a king takes young male lovers and is then blackmailed, and when the process of forcing peasants off their land is tied to the same moral opprobrium that threatens the king, what are the transactions of power and influence at play? When a bisexual anthropologist relies on primitivist projections of colonized Others to find answers for how she might live now, in a society that sees her queerness as terrifying and backwards and a threat to the modern, how might her desires have affected the mythic nostalgia of her work and thus the course of twentieth-century anthropological thinking? Why do configurations of identity and desire that seem to have expired continue to hold such power over so many people, including us, the authors? Why can’t we finally kill or abandon homosexuality and do something else, something better, instead?
Ultimately, this book is a project of demystification and an act of love. ‘Gay is good,’ went the old slogan, but it’s no good at all on its own. As you will see, many of the queers with the very worst political goals have wanted to position themselves as heirs to a secret or magical kingdom, as the sons of a long line of heroes. The process of making the movement and the identity has often involved reifying, recreating, and worshipping power and evil in their most brute forms. Maybe it is time that homosexuality itself dies, that we find new and more functional and more appropriate configurations for our politics and desires. Or maybe being queer is just as transitory and incomplete as anything else. Maybe all of us are lost and scared, subject to forces beyond our control, and trying to figure out how to configure our unruly desires and our politics into an ethical way of being in the world.
If there is anything of homosexuality to be saved, it is its reconstruction of the concept of the family. Not born into fixed kin, we get to choose ours. This can be a project of socialization but also of politicization, of understanding to which kind of political ‘we’ we wish to belong. Understanding how we became a ‘we’ in the first place – and interrogating the extent to which that ‘we’ even makes sense, given how different ‘we’ have been from one another and how terribly ‘we’ have often been treated by one another – might help more of us choose better. Then the real work begins.