The Encyclopedia of Homosexuality

TACITUS (BORN CA. A.D. 55–56)

Roman historian and ethnographer. Tacitus had a public career which ended in service as proconsul in Asia circa 112–113, but even earlier he had begun to compose the works on which his later fame rests.

The Germania was published in all likelihood in 98, but contains material from sources of earlier decades; it is the most extensive source that has survived from classical antiquity on the customs and beliefs of the Germanic barbarians who lived east of the Roman province of Gaul. The text that is most often quoted as evidence for the attitude of the pagan Germanic tribes toward homosexuality is in the twelfth chapter: “Penalties are proportional to the gravity of the offense; traitors and deserters they hang on a tree, the slothful and cowardly and sexually infamous (ignavos et imbelles et corpore infames) they drown in mud and swamps with a wicker basket placed over their heads.” This passage has been interpreted as expressing an intolerance of homosexual behavior that preceded any contact with the Christianity of the Mediterranean world, but in fact the three Latin words express a single Germanic one, corresponding to Old Norse argr, which is a designation for the male who is in general passive, cowardly, and effeminate; the penalty named is for cowardice and lack of manliness on the battlefield, not for sexual activity per se. However, right wing circles in twentieth-century Germany conceived on the basis of this text the notion that their pagan ancestors punished homosexuals by drowning them.

The Histories and the Annals are Tacitus’ great contribution to Roman history. Composed in an exceedingly refined and concise style, they are informed by the ideology of the Senatorial aristocracy and its resentment of the power of the imperial regime that had supplanted the Roman republic. These works include occasional references to homosexual matters, such as that under Tiberius men were forbidden to wear thin silk clothing of the sort in which handsome slave boys were appareled (Annals, 2:33). He mentions that Nero had sexual connections with his stepbrother Britannicus—whom he poisoned shortly after coming to power—(Annals, 13:17), with the actor Paris, and with boys of free birth, thus using freemen for his own gratification as if they were slaves. Tacitus also describes Nero’s “marriage” with a male favorite whose name is given as Pythagoras or Sporus, and says that he went in disguise to participate in lewd revels in the city of Rome, accompanied by other men who robbed and assaulted those who crossed their path (Annals, 13:25). Another story (Annals, 14:42) tells how Pedanius Secundus, the prefect of Rome, was murdered by one of his slaves, either because he had been refused the liberty that he had purchased or because he was in love with a youth and could not bear to be supplanted by his master. When all the slaves living under the same roof were to be executed as retribution, a mass meeting called to protest this excessive penalty turned into a riot. This incident, like others, shows that homosexual attachments in no way diminished the esteem which even a slave could enjoy in antiquity. Tacitus also recounts (Annals, 16:18) the life and death of Nero’s favorite Petronius, the probable author of the Satyricon which, even preserved as it is in a fragmentary form, still affords a panorama of the sexual life of first-century Rome. Thus while Tacitus does not describe the homosexuality of that period in as much detail as do Suetonius and Martial, his work is a valuable supplement to other contemporary portrayals of Roman eroticism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, London: Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul, 1934; Ronald H. Martin, Tacitus, London: Batsford, 1981.

Warren Johansson

TALMUD

A collection of 67 treatises, the Talmud interprets and elaborates the commandments of the Torah and the narratives of the Old Testament; the legal portion is known as halakhah, the folklore is called agadah. There are two redactions of the Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. Both have as their core the Mishnah, the decisions of the sages of the preceding three centuries that was edited by Rabbi Judah the Prince in 193. Written in late Hebrew, it served as the basis for subsequent teaching and interpretation that lasted from the first half of the third century to the year 499. These secondary deliberations, not in the Mishnah and assembled in the Gemara, were mainly conducted in Aramaic, the spoken language of the Jews of Palestine and Babylonia (each with its own dialect). The final process of redaction probably began before the end of the fifth century and lasted into the seventh. The editio princeps of the Babylonian Talmud is that of Venice: Daniel Bomberg, 1520–23, the numbering of whose folios is the basis for later citation; the standard modem edition is that of Vilnius: Romm, 1922, with the classic commentary in Rabbinic Hebrew of Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes (1040–1105) and numerous minor glosses.

The largest part of the material relative to homosexuality in the Talmud is in the treatise Sanhedrin, which deals with the capital crimes adjudicated by the Beth Din, the high court of the Jewish religious community. In Sanhedrin 53a it is stated that death by stoning is the penalty for two groups of offenses, the first of which constitute violations of the patria potestas—the authority of the head of the patriachal extended family—the second the propagation or practice of idolatry or magic:

incest with mother	blasphemy
father’s sexual intercourse with daughter in law	idolatry
intercourse with another male or with a beast	giving one’s seed to Molech
cursing one’s father or mother	necromancy or divination
adultery with a betrothed maiden	incitement to idolatry
a wayward and rebellious son	sorcery

In Sanhedrin 54a-55a the Gemara elaborates this prescription as follows: In Leviticus 20:13 “if a man also lie with mankind” means “a man” not a minor, “mankind” both adult and minor; “their blood shall be upon them” is by analogy with Leviticus 20:27 (the penalty for one who “hath a familar spirit” or “is a wizard” is interpreted to ordain death by stoning). Leviticus 18:22 is taken to apply to the active partner, Deuteronomy 23:18 to the passive, proving that the kadesh mentioned in the latter verse was the sacred prostitute who served the male worshipper in the Ishtar-Tammuz cult; but Rabbi Akiba derived both prohibitions from the former by reading the consonantal text as both tishkabh, “thou shalt lie” and tishshakebh, “thou shalt be lain with.” Legal responsibility commenced at the age of nine years and a day, which was also the lower limit for the emancipation of the child from the patria potestas in sexual matters in later Islamic law.

In Niddah 13b, the tractate that deals with menstrual impurity in women, there is the curious statement that “those who play with children delay the coming of the Messiah.” While the assertion is not interpreted solely to refer to pederasty, the underlying notion is that the Messiah will not come until all the unborn souls contained in Guph (literally “body”) have been disposed of. This is the probable source of the thirteenth-century Christian accretion to the account of the Nativity which maintained that because of the “crime against nature” the Son of Man repeatedly postponed his incarnation, and even thought of abandoning the project altogether.

Sanhedrin 70a interprets the passage in Genesis 9:22 “And Ham … saw the nakedness of his father” as meaning that Ham sodomized Noah, while the alternative explanation is that he castrated him. The allusion is to the legal language of Leviticus 18:7 “The nakedness of thy father… thou shalt not uncover,” which prohibited homosexual incest with the male parent, an indirect proof that the generalized taboo of Leviticus 18:22 is a later insertion into the Holiness Code.

On the subject of Sodom, Sanhedrin 109a-b relates that the “men of Sodom were wicked and sinners” (Genesis 13:23), “wicked” meaning “with their bodies” and “sinners” with their money, hence both depraved and uncharitable. In their prosperity the Sodomites resolved to abrogate the laws which protected the stranger and the traveler, and further inverted the principles of justice so that if someone wounded his neighbor he was ordered to pay the fee for bleeding; if someone crossed the river by ferry he had to pay four zuzim, if on foot he had to pay eight. A particular tale of their inhospitality concerned a maiden who gave a poor man some bread hidden in a pitcher. When the Sodomites discovered this, they smeared her body with honey and exposed her on the city wall so that the bees would come and devour her.

The decisions and pronouncements of the sages were later codified, first by Musaibn Maimun (Maimonides) in the thirteenth century in the Mishneh Torah, then by Joseph Karo in the sixteenth in the Shulhan Arukh. The latter remains the fundamental code of morality and religious observance for the Orthodox Jew to the present day, and authorizes the fierce opposition of some Orthodox groups in large American cities to the enactment of gay rights legislation. On this issue they can form alliances with conservative Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants, even though they refuse, unlike the Conservative and Reform wings of Judaism, to join the contemporary ecumenical dialogue on public policy and social justice with the Christian denominations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Immanuel Jacobovits, “Homosexuality,” Encyclopedia Judaica, 8 (1971), 961–62; Barry Dov Schwartz, The Jewish Tradition and Homosexuality, New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1979 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation).

Warren Johansson

TASTE

Traditionally one of the five senses, taste is used in an extended sense to denote critical judgment, discernment, or appreciation. In this broader sense it has played a major role in the history of aesthetics. In addition, sociologists hold that taste preferences characterize specific social groups or classes.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a reign of “good taste.” While most agreed that this taste was formed through experience and cultivation, it proved difficult to determine what its actual defining characteristics were. For some, good taste was unitary and identifiable with classic norms, including such qualities as balance, restraint, and ideal beauty; for others, there were several tastes, each valid in its own sphere. In the latter approach, one might acquire a taste for the sublime, the romantic, or the Gothic, as distinct from the classic. During the later decades of the eighteenth century, the concept of taste meshed with the novel idea of sensibility, viewed as a matter of subtle intuition, of attunement to a kind of unheard melody, rather than a simple assimilation of rules. The notion that tastes are personal and variable is sometimes summed up in the Latin proverb De gustibus non disputandum est, “There is no arguing about tastes.” If, in principle, a plurality of tastes is generally recognized today, it is still possible to speak of, say, a bawdy joke as being “in poor taste.”

The idea that sexual interests are appetites probably lies at the root of the concept of homosexuality as itself a taste, though the expression has also had its appeal as a euphemism. In a passage in The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), Tobias Smollett spoke of Petronius’ (homosexual) “taste in love.” The notion is probably more common in French, where older writers spoke of sodomy as le goût contre nature, “the unnatural taste.” In his great novel A la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust rang many changes on the word goût with relation to homosexuality. French also records an expression goût florentin, “Florentine taste,” for homosexuality; technically, this is an ethnophaulism, an ascription of a disprized behavior to a foreign group.

A different topic is that of homosexuals as tastemakers. As far as can be determined, this role emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. The presiding genius of this period was the archeologist Johann Joachim Winckel-mann (1717–1768), whose interpretations of Greek art (which was filtered through his homoerotic appreciation of male beauty) had a formative influence on the course of neo-Classicism in the visual arts throughout Europe. His efforts were reinforced by a noble gadfly, Count Francesco Algarotti (1712–1764), a close friend of Frederick the Great of Prussia. It is a curious fact that the rise of the opposing current of romanticism was also promoted by homosexuals, especially the poet Thomas Gray (1716–1771), whose 1751 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a major harbinger of the new sensibility, and Horace Walpole (1717–1797), whose villa at Strawberry Hill near London counts as one of the first monuments of the Gothic revival.

The bisexual poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), had an incalculable influence over romanticism throughout Europe. None of the romantic critics, with the possible exception of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), seem to have been homosexual. In a lesser realm, Edward Lear (1812–1888), with his limericks and other nonsense writings, helped to define the characteristically English genre of humor. On the continent French artists and writers, such as Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), took an interest in Islam, its art and culture, noting that sexual norms in Arab countries (moeurs arabes, moeurs levantines) differed from those of the Christian Occident.

Through his Russian Ballet, Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) not only changed attitudes about dance but, through his patronage, was able to promote avant-garde music and painting as well. Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), a friend of Picasso and Matisse, played a major role in the introduction of modern art into the United States. The New York poet Frank O’Hara (1926—1966) was one of the chief advocates and definers of Abstract Expressionist painting. On a less exalted level of cultural achievement many modern couturiers, whose sensibilities determine the changing tides of women’s fashions, are homosexual. The prominence of gay people in the fashion industry has led hostile observers (such as the late Edmund Bergler, a Freudian psychoanalyst) to denounce their influence as perverse and conspiratorial.

In conclusion it is perhaps appropriate to advance some speculative suggestions as to why homosexuals, in some periods at least, have felt a special calling as tastemakers. Participation in a different (but justifiable) mode of sexuality may sensitize one to different (also justifiable) artistic modes. Then the well known affinity of homosexuals for travel, and for partners of other races, allows them to immerse themselves in the aesthetic theory and practice of “exotic” peoples, and then to return with these discoveries to their own lands. Finally, the stereotypical ascription of aesthetic sensitivity to male homosexuals may operate—as stereotypes generally do—to lure some members of the affected group into the general field. From the host society they have absorbed the idea that they must be “sensitive,” and some are impelled to achieve this quality.

Wayne R. Dynes

TELEOLOGY

Teleology (from Greek, telos “end”) is the character attributed to nature or natural processes of being directed toward an end or shaped by a purpose. As such, the concept has been deployed as a criterion of the morality of sexual acts.

Classical Thought. Teleology was a favorite concern of the Greeks. The pivotal discussion is Aristotle’s treatment of final cause, “that for the sake of which a thing exists” (De generatione animalium). According to those belonging to the school of Aristotle (the Lyceum) or philosophical sects based on his teaching, each object had an end or purpose at which naturally it should aim. Nature designed the sexual organs, they maintained, for procreation upon which the future of the race depended. To direct the penis to other orifices than the human vagina, its predestined container, was to act against nature.

Another strand derives from Plato. Although Aristotle recognized that some individuals were homosexual “by nature,” that is congenitally, while others acquired that sexual orientation through experience and practice, on the whole his numerous and often contradictory writings argued that homosexuality was something to be explained, and therefore not clearly a part of the given, of the world of nature in the ordinary sense. In the work of Plato, however, the concept of nature was more clearly evaluative. In the Laws, his last dialogue, the old Plato—whose earlier dialogues had praised pederasty as inciting love of truth and beauty—condemned homosexual acts as against nature.

While a minority of Greeks observed homosexual behavior among animals, those who denied it there argued that its absence was proof that such conduct was at best artificial, rather than natural. Although some argued that what made man superior to animals was exactly his improvement over nature, the majority of later Greek thinkers felt that it was best to act in accord with nature. This doctrine typified the Stoics, who dominated ancient philosophy during the late Republic and the first two centuries of the Roman Empire. Most but not all teachers of the “Second Stoa,” centered in Rome and catering to old Roman disapproval of pederasty as a Greek import, decried homosexuality as against nature: Seneca, Musonius Rufus, and Epictetus.

Judeo-Christian Attitudes. Philo Judaeus of Alexandria combined the Greek doctrine that homosexuality was unnatural with the peremptory injunction preserved in Leviticus that Judaism had taken from Zoroastrianism, the Persian state religion. St. Paul merely echoed this ban in the first chapter of Romans, citing the Flood and the destruction of Sodom as proof of divine disapproval of unnatural sexual conduct. William Benjamin Smith (1850–1934) speculated that this Pauline passage, which makes no mention of Christ or Christianity, is a self-contained essay on the revelation of God’s wrath taken from an anonymous Jewish source. St. Clement of Alexandria, an assiduous student of Greek philosophy, held that “one must follow nature herself when she forbade [pederastic] excesses through the disposition she gave the organs, having given virility to man not to receive seed but to eject it” (Paedagogus, X, 87, 3).

Constantius and Constans, the sons of the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, inscribed the condemnation in Roman law. In a tortuously worded edict of 342, they first decreed death for homosexual offenses and forbade sexual relations between man and wife in any fashion that did not involve penetration of the vagina by the penis. Theodosius the Great resumed this tradition, followed most horribly by Justinian, who proclaimed that sodomites if unpunished brought famines, earthquakes, and pestilences on society.

Medieval and Modem Times. Medieval theologians continued and developed this Patristic approach, which the Scholastics Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas greatly strengthened in accord with the new reverence for Aristotle’s teleological system. Aquinas claimed that even rape was preferable to sodomy, because it was, after all, a penis-to-vagina act. The revival of Roman law, as interpreted by Christian jurisconsults in the twelfth century, stressed the idea of nature. Curiously, it was the early Middle Ages, and not classical antiquity, that elevated Nature to the status of a goddess, and her supposed decrees were adduced in the condemnations of homosexuality of Alan of Lille and Jean de Meun.

Even apart from the peremptory condemnation in the Mosaic law and the legend of the destruction of Sodom deriving from Genesis 19, the ascetic motif in Christian morality, which sets Christianity apart from the other Abrahamic religions—Judaism and Islam—that have no such ideal of an asexual humanity, would alone have sufficed to render all non-reproductive sexual activity immoral. Dual-istic and gnostic thought imbued Pauline Christianity with an intense pathological rejection of the body and its erotic functions, conditioned by the proximity of the sexual and the excretory organs that made disgust an inescapable component of the Christian attitude toward sexuality and especially toward homosexual activity. The fantasies of Scholastic writers in Latin Christendom bear witness to this irrational hatred of homoerotic feeling and behavior. A legal author of the fourteenth century, Luca da Penne (ca. 1320-ca. 1390), went so far as to call the sodomite worse than a murderer, because he aimed at destroying not just a single human being but the entire human race, and declared that if such a culprit had been executed and could be brought back to life several times, each time he should be punished more severely than the preceding one. Paradoxically enough, such views were maintained alongside the glorification of virginity, which if it became universal would effect the end of the human race just as surely as any form of non-procreative sexuality. Other legal writers held that God could wreak vengeance on an entire community for the crime of a single individual, so branding the sodomite as an enemy of society to be blamed for every manner of collective misfortune.

Modem Critiques of Teleology. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the popularity of the “argument from design” as a proof of the existence of God. Even deists like Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), himself possibly homophile, argued that the perfect mechanism of the universe required a clockmaker—a “prime mover” as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had supposed. The things of the world manifest such order, so it was claimed, that they could only have reached their present state through the purposeful guidance of a creator who endowed each thing with its own specific character, which man should not seek to alter. Hence the penis is suited only for placement in a vagina, not in an anus or mouth. The argument oddly neglects the point that the penis has a dual function: it serves to urinate (presumably not in the vagina) as well as emit semen. If it can have two distinct types of emissions, why must it have only one proper vessel? Conversely, if God had been opposed to putting the penis in the mouth or anus, could he not have shaped these latter organs in such a way as to make penetration difficult? Voltaire ridiculed the argument from design because by it one could demonstrate that God had foreseen ships, since he provided harbors for them, and eyeglasses, since he gave noses a bridge.

Of course modem biologists recognize purpose in the world, in the limited sense that birds build nests in which to hatch and raise their young and spiders weave webs to trap insects. What they generally do not hold, however, is that some cosmic mind has predetermined the purposes of all living things.

Even today, however, Aristotle’s discarded model of a grand teleology ruling nature inspires Roman Catholic and much other Christian doctrine. In spite of all subsequent criticism and the repudiation by the physical and biological sciences of the concept of “Nature” as a personified feminine principle whose intentions are somehow frustrated by non-procreative sexual activity, these religious thinkers persist in their antiquated views. Though scarcely metaphysicians and unwilling to discuss how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, Hitler and Stalin were as convinced as any Roman pope or Southern Baptist that homosexuality is unnatural. The most recent pronouncements of the Roman Catholic church still teach that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered because they lack finality,” which is to say that they are immoral because they cannot lead to procreation—as if any good would result if every sexual act did have procreative consequences. The prospects for world population densities would be horrifying. In the twentieth century the increasing longevity of the population and the need to maintain the proper equilibrium with available resources has forced heterosexuals to adopt birth control techniques ranging from periods of abstinence and the use of the condom to abortion to keep the procreative consequences of their own sexual activity within bounds. Yet even most of those branches of Protestantism which do not completely reject birth control and other forms of non-procreative sex (as the Catholics and Orthodox do), still tend to condemn homosexuality as against the law of God and nature. It is incumbent on thinkers not beholden to a revealed religion to expose such positions as inconsistent, and above all to affirm that they embody no inherent logic sufficient to compel a secular, pluralistic society to adopt them.

William A. Percy

TELEVISION

Although the technology on which it is based came into existence as early as 1923, it was only in the early 1950s that television became a fixture of American domestic life, gradually elbowing the Hollywood film out of its primacy in the entertainment field. Establishing itself in Europe at the same time, television eventually spread throughout the globe, even to the poorest Third World countries. While in America most television stations are commercially owned, in many countries the medium (like radio) is a government monopoly. It is uncertain, however, whether the exigencies of censorship in state systems are more restrictive than the “tyranny of the ratings” in the United States. The spread of cable TV and increased use of satellite transmissions in the 1970s reduced the stranglehold of the major networks. In a few cities gay people were even able to secure their own programs, thanks to public access legislation. In the 1980s the widespread use of VCRs (recording equipment operating through television sets) further promoted diversity, and users could, if they wished, rent a wide variety of porno films to be shown through their home sets. The new field of video emerged as a means for minority artists to create individualized works which could be shown on television screens.

Gay Men and Lesbians in Television. From the beginning children formed a large portion of the TV audience. Commercial advertisers were sensitive to campaigns by pressure groups. These factors excluded sex of any kind from the small screen, and reduced controversy to a minimum. Only in the news services, which were to some extent insulated from the rest of programming, was some discussion of issues possible. In the view of many, the early decades of television justified the claim of Federal Communications Commission commissioner Newton Minow that television was a “vast wasteland.”

The fledgling industry inherited many practices and trends from Hollywood—among them self-censorship. However, Hollywood had created a genre of “sissy” character, a figure with veiled gay traits. This type occasionally appeared, in even more disguised form, in such early situation comedy series as “Mr. Peepers,” with Wally Cox. When motion pictures that contained references to homosexuality were shown, even on late-night television, the offending sections were ruthlessly edited out, a practice that continues to this day. For this reason many now prefer to buy or rent uncensored versions to play on home VCR equipment.

In the 1960s the civil rights movement, and increasingly the women’s movement, were big news. This opened the way for some rare excursions into the realm of homosexuality. Mike Wallace’s CBS Report, “The Homosexuals,” aired nationwide on March 7, 1967, was something of a landmark, but it had been preceded in England by BBC-TV’s “One in Twenty” (1966), based on more thorough research by Brian McGee. Occasional discussions on local stations were generally dominated by the judgmental views of psychiatrists.

After the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 coverage increased somewhat, and gay activists appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show,” “Jack Paar Tonight,” and “The David Susskind Show.” In 1972 ABC’s “Movie of the Week” aired a sensitive portrayal of a gay-male couple in the San Francisco Bay Area, “That Certain Summer,” featuring Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen. Situation comedy series produced by Norman Lear (“All in the Family” and “Maude”) occasionally showed nonstereotypical homosexuals. In the 1980s, primetime series such as “Cagney & Lacey,” “Designing Women,” and “L.A. Law” treated the subject. Such popular series as “Brothers” (a cable series), “Dynasty” (with its “sensitive son,” Steven Carrington), “Hooperman,” “Love, Sidney,” and “Soap” have included gay and lesbian characters. A few long and lavish British series based on literary classics have provided portraits of gay people in the round (“Brides-head Revisited,” 1980, and “The Jewel in the Crown,” 1984), but these have reached only elite audiences. When all is said and done, however, after forty years of the hegemony of network television, gay people have had good reason to feel that they are woefully underrepresented.

Gay Influence over Television. It was to be expected that from the first, television, recruiting much of its talent from Hollywood and Broadway, had many gay and lesbian participants, especially in such behind-the-scenes work as makeup and costuming. Yet an unwritten law (itself inherited from Hollywood) held that the actors who appeared on the screen must be heavily closeted. The revelation of Rock Hudson’s homosexuality, after he had appeared in several television dramas, sent shock waves through the industry. Symptomatic of the prejudice that exists is the fact that open membership organizations to defend the rights of gay people in television have never really gotten off the ground, and homosexuals have had to rely on informal groups of friends. Fear of loss of work—even blacklisting—continues to be a powerful deterrent to speaking out.

Following the pattern of Jewish and black organizations fighting stereotyping in the media, gay “pressure groups” have had some success in reducing blatant expressions of prejudice on television screens. A 1974 episode of “Police Woman” called “Flowers of Evil,” about three lesbians who murder patients in an oldage home, provoked justified outrage. Soon afterward, the National Gay Task Force induced the Television Review Board of the National Association of Broadcasters to issue a directive stating that the Television Code’s injunction that “material with sexual connotations shall not be treated exploitatively or irresponsibly” applied to homosexuals. In Los Angeles Newton Deiter, a gay psychologist and activist, successfully ran the Gay Media Task Force (GMTF). He and his associates were able to monitor scripts for the networks, and to obtain frank meetings with producers. GMTF was particularly alert for lisping, limp-wristed mannerisms for gay men and truck-driver characterizations of lesbians. Such offensive words as faggot and queer were taken out.

In the 1980s these lobbying efforts seemed to falter. However, gay news papers publicized writing campaigns against offensive programs, and new civil rights groups, such as New York’s Gay and Lesbianc Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) organized their own efforts.

AIDS and Television. When the AIDS crisis appeared in 1981 mainstream newspapers were the main vehicle of information for the general public. Eventually, through news programs and specials, television made a contribution, though its insensivity sometimes fueled a climate of panic that could have been avoided or at least reduced. In 1983 the hospital series “St. Elsewhere” introduced an AIDS story line, while the made-for-TV film “An Early Frost,” about the effect of knowledge of the disease on a middle-class homosexual’s family, garnered an Emmy (American television’s highest award) in 1985.

Although Hollywood stars lent their support to campaigns to raise money in the fight against AIDS, many felt that a silent backlash was taking place. In the late 1970s several major performers seemed on the verge of “coming out,” but the atmosphere shifted radically. Even heterosexual actors who had portrayed gays found that it was hard to get work. If kissing scenes were involved, actresses demanded to be able to veto leading men who were gay. Those in the industry who did contract the disease felt the need to conceal it in order to retain benefits, and to avoid “incriminating” friends.

All in all, the AIDS crisis revealed the inadequacy of television’s feeble efforts to mend its ways. Much work remains to be done by activists, but even so it is unlikely that mass-market television will ever be a true friend of gay men and lesbians. Rather, hope lies in the spread of new technologies which will cut the commercial networks down to size by making communications accessible to a full range of viewpoints, not just those that a few opportunistic and amoral TV executives judge appropriate.

TENNYSON, ALFRED, LORD (1809–1892)

English poet laureate. The son of a country rector, Tennyson began writing poetry at the age of eight. In 1830 he published his first significant book, Poems Chiefly Lyrical. Three years later occurred what was probably the most important event of his life: the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam in Vienna. They had met at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1828, and had taken two continental trips together, which had deeply impressed the poet. Tennyson’s continual and intense brooding over the loss yielded many manuscript drafts, which he finally combined in his major poetic sequence, In Memoriam, published anonymously in 1850. Later he gained fame for a number of individual shorter poems, as well as for the Arthurian cycle, The Idylls of the King (1859). Profiting from the innovations of the romantic poets, Tennyson enjoyed a superb ear, and was able to combine color and richness of imagery with ethical statement. By no means the apologist for Victorian beliefs that he is sometimes taken to be, Tennyson found the way to capture some of the chief moral dilemmas of his age in verse of matchless eloquence.

From the first, In Memoriam puzzled and disconcerted many of Tennyson’s admirers. It is difficult to avoid the challenge of a prolonged expostulation to a dead friend that speaks of “A spectral doubt which makes me cold,/ that I shall be thy mate no more.” For Tennyson, Hallam had once been “the centre of a world’s desire,” its “central warmth diffusing bliss.” The years had only brought more depth of feeling: “My love involves the love before;/ my love is vaster passion now;/ tho’ mixed with God and Nature thou,/1 seem to love thee more and more.”

In a contemporary review of In Memoriam, Charles Kingsley found the poetic sequence a descendant of “the old tales of David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his nameless friend, of ‘love passing the love of woman.’” Benjamin Jowett, wondering whether it was manly or natural to linger in such a mood, excused the poems by speaking vaguely of their “Hellenism.” For a century and a quarter after the publication critics twisted and turned to avoid directly addressing the disturbing implications of this pivotal work. To be sure, Tennyson complicated matters by conflating the love of his dead comrade with the love of Christ. Probably in his own mind the poet laureate was never sure what the meaning of the whole searing experience was. It is significant that he was able to marry his cousin Emily Sellwood, as he had long planned, only after the final publication of In Memoriam.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Christopher Craft, “’Descend and Touch and Enter’: Tennyson’s Strange Manner of Address,” Genders, 1 (1988), 83–101; Alan Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.

Wayne R. Dynes

TESLA, NIKOLA (1856–1943)

Serbian-American scientist and inventor. Born the son of an Orthodox priest in the village of Smiljan in the province of Lik, he received his higher education at the Technische Hochschule in Graz and at the Charles University in Prague. In 1882 he worked for the telephone company in Budapest and invented the amplifier, and in February of that year discovered the phenomenon of the reverse magnetic pole. Between 1882 and 1884 he worked in Paris and Strasbourg, rebuilding the Edison dynamos. Then he came to America and worked with Edison himself for a time. In 1886 he invented the arc lamp for lighting city streets, and in April 1887 he founded the Tesla Electric Company. He also built the first high-efficiency multiphasic current machines and motors. In November and December 1887 he applied for patents for the Tesla induction coil and other inventions. In 1888–89 he worked for West inghouse in Pittsburgh, applied for a patent for the transmission of alternating current, and built the first high-frequency generators, and in 1890 he discovered high-frequency currents. In 1892 he patented a transformer to increase oscillating currents to high potentials, and began his work on wireless telegraphy. Between then and 1899 he pioneered in the development of radio communication and in the transmission of electricity without wires, which he realized at a distance of more than 1000 kilometers. This marked the end of his creative period, though he continued to be an active inventor for more than twenty years afterward. He became an American citizen and lived in New York until his death in 1943.

Tesla never married; no woman, with the exception of his mother and his sisters, ever shared the smallest fraction of his life. He believed that he had inherited his abilities as an inventor from his mother. As a young man he was not unattractive, though too tall and slender to be an ideal masculine type; he was handsome of face and wore clothes well. He idealized women, yet planned his own life in a coldly objective manner that excluded women entirely. Only the highest type of woman could win his friendship; the remainder of the sex had no attraction for him whatever. In 1924 he gave an interview published in Collier’s magazine in which he asserted: “The struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end up in a new sex order, with the females superior. … The female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated.… Women will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.”

Tesla tried to convince the world that he had succeeded in eliminating love and romance from his life, but he merely drew a veil over the secret chapter of his life which an intolerant world had no right to know. The mystery of his devotion to science is one of those episodes in the annals of invention and discovery that are illuminated by insight into the androgynous character of genius.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time, New York: Laurel, 1983; John J. O’Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla, New York: Ives Washburn, 1944.

Warren Johansson

THAILAND

Previously known as Siam, in 1939 the country was officially renamed Prathet Thai, or Thailand—literally, “the land of the free.” The change of name closely followed a change in the country’s form of government, from the previous absolute monarchy to the modem constitutional monarchy with a representative legislature. With some fifty-two million citizens, Thailand occupies a key position in the rapidly developing Asian economic sphere, and aspires to join Taiwan and Korea as a world-wide economic force.

An ethnically and linguistically diverse nation, Thailand began to assume its present shape only within the last thousand years, and many key elements of Thai culture reached their present form in the relatively recent past. The formation of the nation began with the arrival in Thailand of members of a linguistic and cultural group designated by the term “Tai.” (Some important members of this group are the Siamese, the Lao, and the Shans of northeastern Burma; altogether the “Tai” comprise about 70 million persons in southeast Asia.) The modem Thai may be a descendant of the incoming Tai, but he may also come from the indigenous Mon and Khmer groups whom the Tai joined, or from much later Chinese and Indian immigrants to Thailand. The modem Thai is not so much a member of a race as a person claiming fealty to the state of Thailand; secondarily, a Thai is identified by his language (“a speaker of Thai”).

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Thailand managed to avoid colonization by any European power: the primary foreign influence was British, and later influence came from the United States, but the Thai always retained their independence. King Rama VI (reigned 1910–25), a poet and translator of Shakespeare, was reputed to be homosexual. During the 1930s the Thai government hired the libertarian French sexologist Renè Guyon as an advisor, and he may have had a hand in the Thai retention of their sexual freedom.

Thailand remains well over ninety percent Buddhist. Thai Buddha figures are frequently effeminate, especially the so-called “Walking Buddha.”

Thai insistence on personal freedom carries with it a logically necessary corollary: a strong tolerance of eccentricities in other people. One result is that Thailand is one of the few countries on earth where homosexuality is not condemned or treated in any special way. During the 1970s, for example, the Minister of Defense won the national Thai contest for best female dresser. The combination was not perceived as dreadful, but as sanuk, a key Thai concept which roughly translates as “fun” or “pleasure.” The toleration of homosexuality is not a modern development. Somerset Maugham remarked long ago that “the Siamese were the only people on earth with ah intelligent attitude about such matters.” Two recent Thai prime ministers have been reported to be gay.

One result of viewing sexual pleasure as a domain with little moral content is that prostitution is not a highly stigmatized activity. In fact, Bangkok is renowned for its thriving “sex industry,” which horrifies many Westerners (who are, of course, simultaneously tempted by all the perceived depravity).

The male prostitute is not highly stigmatized; it is perfectly possible to make a transition from a year as a Buddhist monk to a year of working as an “off-boy” in Bangkok, without abandoning any of the religion one has absorbed and without losing self-esteem. (The “off-boy” is a young man employed at a gay bar who may be taken home by clients; the term is British.) The suburbs of Bangkok also have “off-boy” establishments which cater almost entirely to Thai customers, and which are more polite as a result. The misbehavior of foreign tourists has caused some of these Thai institutions to bar foreigners, beginning in 1988. Thai culture is inherently nonconfrontational, and the Thai would never think of trying to correct a foreigner’s rude, loud, or stingy behavior. The only way out is a generic ban on the offending parties. As one owner explained: “The foreigners were scaring the boys.” Bangkok also has discos, saunas, and clubs where gay men can meet on a noncommercial or free-lance basis.

While Thai society is generally lacking in homophobia, and also has little antipathy to age-graded relationships, an age of consent for males was first established (with little publicity) in 1987, at 15.

Thai society lacks Western concepts of homosexuality as a distinct identity, though this situation may be changing. Traditionally, the Thai conceptualization of male homosexuality is similar to the Mediterranean model: the penetrator is considered a “complete male,” and any normal male may find himself in this role; his opposite is the “katoey,” a term which embraces transvestism, transsexuality, hermaphroditism, and effeminacy. The katoey is expected to remain sexually passive and submissive, and to have no interest in women. While not discriminated against as homosexuals, the katoey suffer from the limited position of women in the male-dominated Thai culture. Not all males who take passive roles are katoey, however, and reciprocity in sex is not unknown.

To these traditional concepts is now being added a more flexible concept, imported from the West, of a “gay” (the term itself is borrowed into the Thai language, which has no counterpart).

Thai homosexuality is seldom discussed in public, although changes in this area are noticeable in the emergence of five homoerotic or bisexual publications, led by Mithuna (bi), Mithuna, Jr. (gay), and Neon (gay), a regular radio program broadcast from Bangkok, and the beginnings of gay literary output in the form of novels and short stories.

Attitudes on homosexuality show marked differences by class, relating to power positions. While there appears to be no “queerbashing” violence directed against homosexuality, there seems to be a considerable amount of coercion, abuse of authority positions, and rape of males. Peter Jackson comments that “the lessened resistance to having sex with a man means that male rape or sexual attacks on men appear to be significantly more common than in the West.” As in other cultures, however, rape of males is a taboo subject and is not reported to authorities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Eric Allyn and John P. Collins, The Men of Thailand, San Francisco and Bangkok: Bua Luang, 1987; Peter A. Jackson, Male Homosexuality in Thailand, New York: Global Academic Publishers, 1989.

Geoff Puterbaugh

THEATRE AND DRAMA

As public performance, accessible to a wide range of spectators, the theatre has been more subject to the constraints of censorship than any other long-established art. It is expected to confirm and endorse standard social values and to present the heterodox or the taboo in a manner which will incite either derision or revulsion. Consequently, homosexual sentiments, behavior and concerns have, until recently, rarely appeared on stage; when they have, their presentation has often been skewed to the expectations and sensibilities of convention-bound playgoers.

At the same time, the practicing theatre, in its gregariousness, its opportunities for artistic creativity, and its relative tolerance, has been, at least from the sixteenth century, both in Western and Eastern cultures, an arena where talented homosexuals have flourished. From the ancient Romans until very recently, performers were distrusted as outcasts, misfits in the scheme of things: the outlaw actor and the sexual heretic were often the same individual (and some psychiatrists are fond of equating the actor’s egoist exhibitionism with an alleged homosexual love of display).

As homosexuality has become more conspicuous in everyday life, the stage, traditionally regarded as the mirror of life, has portrayed it more openly, both as a subject worthy of dramatic treatment and as an attitude that informs the production.

Ancient Greek Theatre. Greek classical theatre developed in a culture saturated with homoerotic attitudes and behaviors, but owing, perhaps, to deliberate excision by Byzantine and monastic librarians, there is little surviving evidence of these aspects in drama. Lost tragedies include Aeschylus’ Laius (467 b.c.), about the man thought by the Greeks to have invented pederasty; Niobe, which displayed the love-life of Niobe’s sons; and Myrmidons, concerning Achilles’ grief at the death of his lover Patroclus. This last was a favorite of Aristophanes, who quoted it frequently. Other lost plays on the Myrmidon theme were written by Philemon (436/5–379 b.c.) and Strattis (409–375 B.C.). Sophocles, too, wrote Lovers of Achilles, whose surviving fragment describes the intricate workings of passion. The oft-dramatized tragedy of the house of Labdacus was, in the earlier myths, triggered by Laius’ lust-motivated abduction of the son of his host during his foreign exile. Sophocles eschewed this episode, but it was the subject of Euripides’ lost Chrysippus (ca. 409 B.C.), apparently created as a vehicle for his own male favorite Agathon (447–400/399 b.c.), who was noted for his “aesthetic” way of life. (Another lost Chrysippus was composed by Strattis.) Euripides’ masterpiece The Bacchae (405 b.c.) depicts the androgynous god Dionysus unsexing and demeriting his antagonist and kinsman Pentheus, before he sends him to his doom.

But whereas the love and lust of man for man was considered worthy of tragic treatment, effeminate manners were the stuff of comedy: Gnesippus was ridiculed for inappropriately using a tragic chorus of effeminates. The successful comic poet Eupolis (445-ca. 415 b.c.) was attracted to this theme; his Those Who Dye Their Hair (Baptaij 416/15 b.c.) satirized members of the circle of Alcibiades, who was rumored to have had him drowned for it. Surviving fragments suggest that they were ritual transvestites who spoke an obscene lingo of their own in ceremonies worshipping the goddess Cotytto. Eupolis’ The Flatterers (Kolakes) (431 b.c.), a satire on parasitism with sidelights on compliant sexuality, won first prize over Aristophanes’ Peace.

The comedies of Aristophanes teem with references to pederasty and cross-dressing. Although his earthy heroes have no hesitation in declaring what fun it is to watch naked boys at the gymnasium and to fondle their scrotums, the effeminate (euryproktos or “broad-ass”) is mercilessly mocked. In The Clouds (423 b.c.), for instance, Right Reason rhapsodizes on the “moisture and down” that bloom on a youth’s genitals “as on quinces” and wins his argument. Yet Cleisthenes is regularly made a laughingstock for his lady-like carrying-on, and the central device of the Women’s Festival (Thesmo-phohazousai) (411 b.c.) is to have the protagonist disguise himself as a woman, under Cleisthenes’ instruction, thus running the danger of being buggered when captured and bound.

Roman Theatre. Buggery on compulsion remained a standard comic topos in the Mediterranean basin. In Roman comedy, Plautus’ characters mistake one another for eunuchs and effeminates; his Casina (ca. 190–180 b.c.), in particular, is packed with jokes, puns and equivocations on the theme. Sodomy frequently crops up in the farcical fabula togata, especially those of Lucius Afranius (fl. later second century of our era), credited to have introduced homosexuality into the genre. Among the later Greeks, actors were respected as artists (Mary Renault’s novel The Mask of Apollo offers a persuasive recreation); but in Rome, they were legally classified as “infamous,” even if popularly regarded as desirable sexual catches. The Emperors Caligula, Nero, and Trajan often took their male bedmates from the ranks of actors, dancers, and mimes; the last became notorious for the indecency of their performances. To increase the eroticism of their shows, the mimes introduced women on stage in what had hitherto been an exclusively male preserve.

The Orient. In the Oriental theatre, women were frequently banned from the stage, either for religious or moralistic reasons; the resultant professional female impersonator, the tan of China’s Peking Opera, introduced in the reign of Ch’ien Lung (1735–1796), and the onnagata of Japan’s Kabuki theatre, replacing boy players after 1652, exercised a pseudo-female allure. In China actors, no matter what they played, were frequently prostitutes, sought after by statesmen and scholars: among the most famous of these actor-favorites were Chin Feng (fl. 1590), Wei Ch’ang-sheng (fl. 1780), and Ch’en Yinkuan (fl. 1790). The boy acting-troupes of nineteenth-century China were often equated with male brothels, and certainly the boys’ looks were regarded as more important than their talent. But these pedophilic passions were never reflected in the Chinese dramatic repertory. On the Kabuki stage, on the other hand, a bisexual love affair is the pivot of Tsuwamono Tongen Sogo (1697), and a homosexual one comprises a subplot in Asakusa Reigenki.

The Middle Ages and Beginnings of the Modem Theatre in Europe. Christianity was antagonistic to the theatre, partly on grounds of immorality; Clement of Alexandria specifically rebuked the obscenity of mimes who brought cinaedia or male prostitution on stage. When the theatre in Europe was reborn from the Church, the religious teleology of the drama precluded treatment of illicit love, except in imitation of the classics. Nor was the burning of Sodom ever treated by the mystery plays, although Jesuit school-drama in the Baroque age would dramatize it with accompanying fireworks, as in Cornelius a Marca’s Bustum Sodomae (Ghent, 1615). The Renaissance revived the comic treatment of homosexuality, first in ribald farces by Bolognese students, mocking burghers and clergy: one of these is Ugolino Pisani’s Philogenia (after 1435), wherein the boy hustler Epifebo deploys his charms to snare the venal priest Prodigio.

Sexual ambiguity is the basis of “gender-confusion” comedy in which a male or female character disguises him/herself as the opposite sex and attracts the amorous attentions of the “wrong” sex. The archetype is Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena’s (1470–1520) bawdy La Calandria (1513), but it was a common device in commedia dell’arte as well as in commedia erudita. Involuntary buggery remained a basic joke: in Niccolò Machiavelli’s (1469–1527) La Clizia (1525), old Nicomaco is sodomized in his sleep by his servant Siro. Pietro Aretino’s Il Marescalco (1526/7) features a pederastic hero, a chief groom of the stables who is obliged by his master to marry a woman only to find to his great relief that the bride is a boy (this served as a source of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, 1609).

Although Spanish Golden Age drama dropped the homosexual references when it adapted Italian comedy, it often featured the mujer varonil, a woman in men’s clothes who takes on the aggressive role in the love-chase; farcical transvestism was not uncommon, as in Lope de Vega’s (1562–1635) El mesòn de la corte (The Inn of the Court, 1583?) and Monroy y Silva’s El caballero-dama (The Lady Cavalier), in which two men in drag are tricked into bed together. Intense Platonic relationships between single-sex couples are often depicted, as in the anonymous El crotalon (ca. 1553), but in a society where sodomites were burned at the stake during the Inquisition, orthodox sexuality always prevailed by the play’s ending.

The Elizabethan Stage. The Elizabethan gender-confusion drama was complicated by the fact that women were played by boy actors, a development from school drama. Thus, in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599/1600), there is the intricate enigma of a boy actor playing a girl disguising herself as a youth who acts as a woman to aid his/her wooer. The practice also required adjustments in performance convention: nowhere in Antony and Cleopatra (1607) do the passionate lovers kiss. This aspect of the stage fueled condemnation by Puritans and reformers, who damned it as a hotbed of sodomy; there is scant hard evidence of homosexual activity amongplayers and playwrights, but the imputation is not without foundation. Clear cases can be made for Nicholas Udall (1505–1556), headmaster of Eton and author of Ralph Roister Doister (between 1534 and 1541), who admitted to “buggery” with one of his students; and for Christopher Marlowe, whose own predilections found their way into his work: the grand amour of the king and his favorite Piers Gaveston in Edward II (1593), the court of Henri III in The Massacre at Paris (1593), and the scene between Ganymede and Jupiter in Dido Queen of Carthage(1594). Whatever the homosexual component of his sonnets, Shakespeare only occasionally portrayed the love of one man for another in his dramatic works: when he did it was as a consuming, unspoken passion that expressed itself in deeds: Antonio’s sacrifice for Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice (1594 or 1596); the sea-captain Antonio’s protection of Sebastian in Twelfth Night (1600); and Achilles’ avenging of Patroclus in Troilus and Cres-sida (1602/3).

Further Developments in England. Tudor Morality plays packed with Protestant propaganda had displayed allegorical characters named Sodomy to stand for corrupt, courtly, and Catholic manners (as in John Bale’s Three Laws, 1538). Throughout the Jacobean and Caroline periods, pederasty continued to be associated on stage with (usually Italian) luxury and high life, a character called Sodome appearing in Cosmo Manuche’s The Loyal Lovers as late as 1652. John Marston’s The Turk (1610) contains an outspoken scene between the erotic tourist Bordello and his page Pantofle. In William Davenant’s Albovine (1629), the Lombard hero has a minion, and in his The Cruel Brother (1630), the Duke of Siena cherishes a favorite who in his love …/ He holdeth thus in his Armes, in fearfull care/ Not to bruse you with his deere embracements.”

After the Restoration of the Stuarts and the introduction of actresses on the English stage, the heterosexual ingredient became more realistic in comedy, more idealistic in tragedy, though without entirely ousting the competition. Montague Summers typically overstates the case when he refers to “the prevalence of uranianism in the theatre” of the time; it must be noted that fops, although mocked for such Frenchified behavior as the exchange of kisses in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), long to bed down women exclusively. (Despite their names, for instance, Sir Gaylove and Sir Butterfly in Newburgh Hamilton’s The Doating Lovers [1715] are both inveterate womanizers.) Pederasty is associated not with effeminates, but with decadent foreign courts or decayed rakes who need a new stimulus: in Edward Howard’s The Usurper (1664), the comments of Damocles and Hugo de Petra concerning a page are openly pedophilic, and in Aphra Behn’s The Amorous Prince (1671), Lorenzo tries to seduce the boy Philibert who, however, turns out to be a girl in disguise. In Thomas Otway’s The Soldier’s Fortune (1681), an elderly fool is delighted to discover—or so he thinks—that a girl he is tumbling is a boy. The rhymed extravaganza Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery (1684?), attributed to the Earl of Rochester, which partly hymns the superiority of buggery to “normal” practices, was never performed.

The matchmaker Coupler is the only blatant “queen” in Restoration drama; in John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1696) “old Sodom” as he is known requests the hero’s sexual favors as a reward for his complicity. He represents a new trend, for in the eighteenth century the flamboyant fop character, like the audience itself, underwent a process of embourgeoisement. The fop was shown as an overreaching member of the middle class, usually a simpering “m olly,” more distinctly a denizen of a subculture than his predecessors. The molly’s first stage appearance may be the “nice fellow” Maiden “who values himself upon his Effeminacies,” in Thomas Baker’s comedy Tunbridge-Walks; or, The Yeoman of Kent (1703), believed by his contemporaries to be a portrait of the author’s former behavior. Other examples are Varnish and Bardach in Kensington Gardens (1720) by the actor John Leigh; the much-imitated Fribble in David Garrick’s A Miss in Her Teens (1747); “The Daffodils” in Garrick’s The Male-Coquette (1757); and Jessamy in Isaac Bickerstaffe’s Lionel and Clarissa (1768). A spate of pamphlets and articles about similar “soft gentlemen” suggest that these types did not exaggerate real life models by much. Within the theatrical community, a number of homosexual figures were conspicuous, among them Leigh (1689–1726) himself. Of the boy-actors who continued to play women into the Restoration period, Edward Kynaston (1643–1712) was accused by Dryden of being the Duke of Buckingham’s catamite; and James Nokes (d. 1696), who played the title role in The Maid of the Mill (1660) and later kept a toyshop, was castigated in the Satyr on the Players as “This B[ugger] Nokes, whose unwieldy T[arse]/ Weeps to be buryed in his Foreman’s A[rse].” Later, the popular comedian Samuel Foote (1720–1777), who often played old women, was tried and acquitted for sodomy with his man-servant. In the Regency period, a post-mortem revealed the actress and prostitute Eliza Edwards (1814–1833) to have been a male transvestite.

French Theatre. When Mme. de Maintenon, the morganatic wife of Louis XIV, requested the archbishop of Paris to follow the example of Cromwell’s parliament and order the closing of the French theatres, he resisted by pointing out that the stage, with its heterosexual concerns, prevented the spread of “unnatural vice.” Under the French Regency (1715–23), a number of private pornographic theatres were maintained by the noblesse, but homosexual activities were rarely showman exception was the private theatre of the Duchesse de Villeroi, where lesbian comedies performed by Opera dancers ended in orgies. One of the erotic authors, Charles Colle (1709–1783), planned a vaudeville based on “those gentlemen,” but gave it up allegedly because he could find no rhyme for bougre. In La Comtesse d’Olonne, attributed to Bussy-Rabutin, Le Comte de Guice, described as a “gentilhomme de la manchette” is finally converted to heterosexuality; similarly, in Les Plaisirs du cloître, sapphic flagellation gives way to ordinary love-making. A later parody of these works, Les Esprits des moeurs au XVIII • siècle, attributed to Charles de Nerciat, presents a graphic scene of lesbian lovemaking. The French acting profession harbored many deviants: the great tragedienne Fran^oise Raucourt presided over a lesbian secret society, the Anandrynes; the harlequin Carlo Bertinazzi (1713–1783), admired by Garrick for his eloquent back, had a liaison with the married actor Favart. The handsome young actor Fleury (Abraham-Joseph Benard, 1750–1822), was said to be kept by the Venetian ambassador at an annual pension of eight thousand pounds; he had a declared admirer in Prince Henry of Prussia, Frederick the Great’s homosexual brother.

Europe from the End of the Old Regime to World War I. From its inception, the most prominent figures in the German theatre were unabashed pederasts, starting with the classical actors August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) and Wilhelm Kunst (Kunze, 1799–1859), both much valued by Goethe. Some of the greatest German dramatists are believed to have had similar propensities which nourished their works: Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) left behind an unfinished play, Die Malteser (The Knights of Malta, 1794–1803), whose Crequi and St. Priest exhibit homophilic feelings; August von Kotzebue’s (1761–1819) tendency to lachrymose sentimentality rather than sensuality in his portrayal of love may be attributed to his nature. The tastes of Heinrich von Kleist and the Austrian Franz Grill-parzer (1791–1872), on the other hand, are not demonstrated in their dramatic works. In Vogtland, a workers’ neighborhood in northern Berlin, the Nationaltheater was known before it burned in 1883 as the playhouse of homosexuals, who included its manager, the “last romantic” star Hermann Hendrichs (1809–1871), the tragediennes Clara Ziegler (1844–1909) and Felicita Vestvali (Anne Marie Stegemann, 1829–1880), both of whom played Romeo, and, among the patrons, Prince Georg of Prussia and J. B. Schweitzer, president of the All-German Workers’ Union. Later, the Viktoriatheater rightfully inherited its reputation. Josef Kainz (1858–1910), the great leading man of Wilhelmine classical theatre, was, at the age of 27, the final favorite of Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Simon Karlinsky has argued convincingly for the homosexuality of Russian playwrights Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol (1809–1852), whose fear of women perspires through his comedies, and Vladislav Aleksandrovich Ozerov (1770–1816), whose verse tragedy Dmitrij Don skoj (Dmitry of the Don) (1807) has as a subplot the fervent devotion of a page for his knight. Homophilic sentiment also motivates Balzac’s melodrama Vautrin (1840), banned not for its content but for the political satire in its costuming.

Homosexuality, as it came to be defined and recognized in the nineteenth century, was not unveiled on stage until the fin-de-siècle cult of decadence made it modish. A leading star of the Parisian theatre of that period was the flamboyant Romanian Edouard de Max (1869–1925) who, according to Gide, nursed a lifelong desire to play Nero, Henri ID, and Heliogabalus; a play about him was written by Andre Boussac de Saint-Marc: Sardanapale (1926).

Oscar Wilde’s aphoristic comedies can be seen as manifestations of a camp sensibility, and some critics have speculated that the Bunburying of the heroes of The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) stands for sub rosa excursions into the gay demi-monde. Lytton Strachey interpreted the main character of A Woman of No Importance (1893) as “a wicked Lord, staying in a country house, who has made up his mind to bugger one of the other guests—a handsome young man of twenty.” Wilde’s Salome (1893, prod. 1896) had an influence on the usually reticent Andre Gide; Saul(1903, prod. 1922), set in the Biblical time of David and Jonathan, was his only theatrical paean to an older man’s passion for a younger.

Scandinavia’s most illustrious homosexual author, the Danish novelist Herman Bang (1857–1912), though deeply involved in the theatre, was not an outstanding dramatist. He founded the first Norwegian artistic cabaret (in Christiania, now Oslo, 1892), worked in Paris at the experimental Theatre de l’Oeuvre in 1894 as “scenic instructor,” and was director at the Folketheater, Copenhagen, 1898–1901. Despite his insignificance as a playwright, his intimacy with drama deeply influenced the prose style of his outsider novels. The Swede August Strindberg (1849–1912) at the outset of his illustrious career was led by his complex misogyny to introduce evil lesbians as psychic vampire figures into his writings. In Comrades (1888), a mannish female artist seduces the hero’s wife into a bohemian career; the heroine of Miss Julie (1889) is doomed because her mother raised her as a boy and thus undermined her feminine intuition for survival; and the two-woman one-act The Stronger (1889) reflected the author’s own insecurities about his wife’s women-friends. Strindberg’s later historical dramas about Queen Christina (1901) and Gustav IE (1902) touch glancingly on their protagonists’ sexual nature, the Queen shown to be repelled by the idea of marriage (a common enough distaste in Strindberg). The modem Swedish play Night of the Tribades (1975) by Per Olof Enquist (b. 1934) caused a sensation by exploring Strindberg’s tortured awareness that his first wife was having an affair with another woman.

A lyrical treatment of the male eros was proffered by the Russian poet Mikhail Afanasievich Kuzmin; several of his plays, including A Dangerous Precaution (1907) and The Venetian Madcaps (1912), vaunt the love of two men over that of a man and a woman. The first professed contemporary gay protagonist in drama is the title character of Armory-D auriac’s comedy Le Monsieur aux chrysanthèemes (1908; the title parodies La Dame aux camellias), which satirized the popularity of elegant homosexuals in society. Deviant characters crop up occasionally in modernist Italian and Spanish drama—Lorenzaccio in Sem Benelli’s La Maschera di Bruto (The Mask of Brutus, 1908) and the King in Antonio Buero-Vallejo’s Isabela, reina de corazones (Isabel, Queen of Hearts). Sholem Asch’s Yiddish melodrama Gott fun Nekoma (God of Vengeance, prod. 1907), with its saving love between a lesbian prostitute and a brothel-keeper’s innocent daughter, created no great frisson when produced in Europe, but raised a howl of execration in New York in 1922.

Germany was perhaps the first European nation to treat homosexuality frankly, though as a psychic catastrophe, on the modern stage. Usually historic subject matter justified its introduction, in plays about Hadrian (Frederiksen, Paul Heyse), Saul (Wolfskehl), and Frederick the Great (Burchard), or else the play was based on ancient myth (Elisàr von Kupffer's Narkissos) or on stage convention (Karl von Levetzow's pantomime Die beiden Pierrots [The Two Pierrots]). As a “problem” of modern society, homosexuality appears disguised as the decadent clown Edi in Hermann Bahr's Die Mutter (The Mother, 1891) and undisguised as the tormented youth Rudolf in Ludwig Dilsner’s Jasminblüthen (Jasmine Blossoms, 1899), who is one of the first of many to find his way out of the dilemma by shooting himself. As early as 1902, the critic Hanns Fuchs was complaining that the denouements of such plays depended too much on the state of the laws: “the ideal homosexual drama, depicting the conflicts in an individual soul and their influence on its action and conception of life of homosexuals, is still to be written.” He suggested a dreamer like Grillparzer or a strong-man like Michelangelo as models.

Fuchs' wish went unanswered. Herbert Hirschberg's Fehler (Faults, 1906) also belonged to the school of problem drama. In his “tragedy of sex” Frühlingserwachen (Spring's Awakening, 1891, prod. 1906), Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) included a vignette of teenage homoeroticism amid his spectrum of pubescent anxieties, but again the play's catastrophe was the result of social attitudes. He came closer to offering an inner conflict with the Countess Geschwitz, a full-length portrait of an obsessed tribade in Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1898, prod. 1902) and Die Bűchse der Pandoras (Pandora's Box, 1904, prod. 1906).

After World War I. The liberation from Victorian values felt after World War I was reflected in the theatre as well. Expressionist drama often used adolescent homosexuality as a metaphor for youthful rebellion, morbidity, and confusion, as in Arnolt Bronnen's Vatermord (Parricide, 1922), Klaus Mann's Anja und Esther (1925), and Ferdinand Bruckner's Krankheit der Jugend (The Disease of Youth, 1926). Bruckner's Die Verbrecher (Criminals, 1928) included an attack on the infamous Paragraph 175 of the penal code. Bertolt Brecht's early plays, Baal (1922), Im Dickicht der Städte (In the Jungle of Cities, 1924), Edward II(1924), and even Die Dreigroschen Oper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928), are filled with erotic male-bonding, partly derived from Rimbaud. An amateur group, the Theater des Eros, existed between 1921 and 1924 to perform outspoken homosexual liberation dramas in private homes.

Christa Winsloe's Gestern und Heute (Mädchen in Uniform, 1930), filmed and widely revived outside Germany, presented a girls'-school crush in a tragic light, but put the blame squarely on old-fashioned values. Throughout the 1920s, in fact, tragedy was the standard dramatic mode for lesbianism. In France, Edouard Bourdet (1887–1945) treated upper -class gay males comically in La Fleur de pois (The Upper Crust, 1932), but imbued lesbian attraction with dire consequences in La Prisonnière (The Captive, 1926). (Its plot had a foreruner in Catulle Mendès' Protectrices, a pale epigone in Roger Martin du Gard's Tacitume, 1931, and a German counterpart in Hermann Sudermann's Die Freundin, 1913/14.)

Federico García Lorca may have channeled his own predilections into the repressed sexuality of his major tragedies, for he puts his praise of masculine beauty in the mouths of his trammelled heroines. More explicit are his early poetic drama Diálogo del Amargo (The Bitter One's Dialogue), in which a young man with a death wish is seduced by the horseman Muerte who offers him his highly symbolic knives; and the suppressed surrealistic play El público (The Audience, 1930; not published until 1976).

This convention that passion was tragic, but behavioral characteristics comic, was maintained in the United States. The very first American drama of homophilic despair, Henry Blake Fuller's “closet” (in both senses) one-act At Saint Judas's (1896), ends with the suicide of the best man reviled by the beloved (straight) bridegroom. Mae West's The Drag (1927), which devoted a whole act to a transvestite ball, and Pleasure Man (1928), which filled the stage with hilarious dishing queens, both had tragic endings tacked on. These plays were prosecuted and banned, whereas Lillian Heilman's ambivalent melodrama of calumny and suppressed desire, The Children's Hour (1934), won critical acclaim. The leading dramatic actresses of the New York stage, Eva Le Gallienne (b. 1889), Katharine Cornell (1893–1974), and Lynn Fontanne (1887–1983), were known privately for the intimacy of their female friendships; the last two married gay men, Guthrie McClintic (1893–1961) and Alfred Lunt (1893–1977), respectively.

Broadway was somewhat hamstrung by police censorship, which was less consistent in its bans than was the Lord Chamberlain's Office in London; still, British drama managed to sneak in the occasional reference. Precious chamber plays like Ronald Firbank's The Princess Zoubaroff (1920) circulated only among the cognoscenti; but in 1925, Arnold Bennett could find the opening scene of Frederick Lonsdale's Spring Cleaning, a gathering of homosexuals at a cocktail party, the only genuine thing in the play. That same year, a sentimental attachment formed in a prison-camp was made central to J. R. Ackerley's The Prisoners of War; and token homosexuals also made an appearance in Ronald Mackenzie's Musical Chairs (1931). The Green Bay Tree (1933) by Mordaunt Shairp (1887–1939), a melodrama about an epicene older man's hold on a languid youth, made a success, repeated, with some changes, on Broadway. Schoolboy crushes, familiar to much of the audience, surfaced in The Hidden Years (1948) by Travers Otway and Quaint Honour (1949) by Roger Gellert in more or less covert form. It is typical that England's two favorite authors of comedies and musicals, Noel Coward (1899–1973) and Ivor Novello (Daniel Davies, 1893–1951), whose sexual orientation was common knowledge in theatrical circles, remained closeted to the general public; the campiness of their works was put down to “sophistication.” The same held true for such important playwrights and actors as Somerset Maugham, Terence Rattigan (1911–1977), Michael Redgrave (1908–1985), Charles Laughton (1899–1962), Emlyn Williams (1905–1987), Esme Percy (1887–1957), Ernest Milton (1890–1974), Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies (b. 1896), and John Gielgud (b. 1904) (even after Gielgud had been arrested for public indecency), as well as for the powerful producer Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont (1908–1973) and the influential critic James Agate (1877–1942). At the end of his career, Coward, who had put a chorus of “pretty boys, witty boys” wearing green carnations into Bitter Sweet (1929) and hinted at a bisexual triangle in Design for Living (1933), ventured a bit more frankness in A Song at Twilight (1966), ostensibly based on Maugham and Max Beer-bohm; Rattigan also made the exploitation of a pederast central to his late play Man and Boy (1963). William Douglas Home (b. 1912) is a mainstream playwright who has been willing to deal with the taboo subject throughout his career, from his prison play Now Barrabbas (1947), to his comedy about a transsexual, Aunt Edwina (1960), to his drama David and Jonathan (1984).

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, the leading man Adolf Wohlbruck (1900–1966) had to flee to England, where he became known as Anton Walbrook; so did Conrad Veidt, who eventually wound up in Hollywood. Less lucky colleagues perished in the camps. The immensely popular Gustav Gründgens (1899–1963) was forced to marry and suppress his propensities to retain the favor of his masters; after the wàr, he persisted as the leading director and classical actor in West Germany, but his survival tactics were attacked by his former friend Klaus Mann in the novel Mephisto.

After World War II. During the post-war period, the French theatre was dominated by Jean Cocteau's circle, including the stage designer Christian Bérard (1902–1949) and the actor Jean Marais (b. 1913); the bisexual Gérard Philipe (1922–1959) was everyone's favorite leading man. The foremost members of the ComéDie Française, such as Jean Weber and Jacques Charon (1920–1975), were familiar faces at gay salons. Julien Green's monumental Sud (South, 1953) clothed his doomed love story in Civil War garb and veiled suggestion; the agony of unrequited affection went even deeper in Henry de Montherlant's La Ville dont le Prince est un Enfant (The City Whose Prince Is a Child, 1951), set in a Catholic school where an obsessive priest roots out the special friendships of the students. Typically, the secretive and suicidal Montherlant considered it unsuitable for public performance by boys.

New Openness in the Sixties. The drag-ball scene in John Osborne's play about the Austrian spy Alfred Redl, A Patriot for Me (1965), proved one of the nails in the coffin of official British censorship, whose demands for cuts showed up its absurdity. Joe Orton was another strain on it, for, like Wilde, his sense of paradox and sly verbal innuendo informed all his work, making it not so easy to cut offending passages: Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), with its bisexual protagonist, the amoral male couple in Loot (1966), and the polymorphous perversity of the entire cast of What the Butler Saw (1969) could not be neutralized by excision. His camp sensibility led him to include arcane references within standard farce set-ups, couched in impeccably elegant utterance; and his successes emboldened him, in rewriting his radio play The Ruffian on the Stair for the stage in 1967, to strengthen the sexual bond between the two male characters.

Three plays of the 1966/67 season continued the tradition of homosexual as lonely outsider: Frank Marcus' (b. 1928) cruel lesbian comedy The Killing of Sister Georg, Charles Dyer's (b. 1928) bleak duet Staircase, and Christopher Hampton's (b. 1946) examination of adolescent alienation, When Did You Last See My Mother? Hampton's next play, Total Eclipse (1968), was a skillful exploration of the Rimbaud/Verlaine relationship. At least one homosexual was to be found as local color in performances by Joan Littlewood's group (A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney and The Hostage by Brendan Behan, both 1958). The plays of Peter Shaffer (b. 1926), beginning with Five Finger Exercise (1958), generally concern the uneasy relationship between an older man and a younger; and Simon Gray (b. 1936) played with pathetic same-sex desires in Wise Child (1967) and Spoiled (1968) before presenting a witty bisexual protagonist (but one who is abandoned at the end) in Butley (1971). Alan Bennett's (b. 1934) plays have been both more open and more fun.

In the United States, Tea and Sympathy (1953) by Robert Anderson (b. 1917) encapsulates a prevalent American attitude: the sensitive hero could be cured of his reputation as a sissy by the love of a good woman. The stage image of the homosexual as outrageous fairy or doomed psychotic was challenged by Ruth and Augustus Goetz' adaptation of Gide's The Immorahst (1954); imperfect in its reasoning, it nevertheless presented a man with homophilic tendencies as intelligent and sympathetic. It was, however, less significant than the prominence of Tennessee Williams in the American theatre. In Williams' early drama, explicit homosexuality remained marginal; the flashback into Blanche's marriage in Streetcar Named Desire (1947), the Baron de Charlus episode in Camino Real (1953), and the lesbian undercurrent in Something Unspoken (1958). It became more crucial as the hidden motivation in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and the central secret in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), but in a standard mode: the protagonists are both victims, of desires suppressed and expressed, respectively. In later plays like Small Craft Warnings (1972) with its transvestite husband, and Vieux Carré (1977), the types are grotesque but the motives are somewhat less disguised.

Such themes remained covert in William Inge (The Boy in the Basement, 1962, Natural Affection, 1963) and Edward Albee (although The Zoo Story, 1959, is cryptic only to those who cannot spot one of its two characters). This did not stop hostile critics from declaring that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) was really about two gay male couples. Albee's savage hostility to the nuclear family struck them as symptomatic of a perverted imagination; they were outraged by the musky and enigmatic eroticism of Tiny Alice (which one claimed was gay slang for the rectum). Albee's choice of fiction to dramatize——Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café (1963) and James Purdy's Malcolm (1966)——also seemed intent on glorifying the freakish outsider. As homosexual characters proliferated on the Broadway stage, this critical hostility grew until, in the mid- and late 1960s, such widely read pundits as Stanley Kauffmann, Walter Kerr, and Robert Brustein were positing a homosexual conspiracy in the American theatre, which “often poisons what you see and hear.” They argued that homosexual playwrights camouflaged their concerns in the guise of heterosexual relationships; also implicit was the fear that show business was in the hands of perverts, from costumers and choreographers to producers. A decade later this paranoia was echoed in Canada, where the actor John Colicos complained “the faggots have taken over.”

Canada was the breeding-ground for John Herbert's (b. 1926) harsh play of prison life, Fortune and Men's Eyes (1967), which pivots on the sexual politics of the cell-block; and the Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay (b. 1942), with his drag-queen soap operas La duchesse de Langeais (1969) and Hosanna (1973). Tremblay, a master of local patois, was also influenced by the French thief-tumed-prose-stylist Jean Genet, whose dramas, although they explore the mysteries of personality, are less explicitly homoerotic than his novels. His first play, Les Bonnes (The Maids, 1947), did not get the all-male cast Genet desired in its premiere production, but since then the two sister-maids and their mistress have frequently been played by men. Similarly, Herbert's play may owe something to Genet's Haute Surveillance (Death Watch, 1949), a more oblique and lyrical treatment of sexual subservience in confinement.

The American critics' demand for homosexual honesty in packaging was answered by Mart Crowley's (b. 1935) The Boys in the Band (1968); drenched in self-pity, predictable in its stereotypes, carrying on the tradition of the deviant as victim of his own deviance, it nevertheless presented a half-world independent of heterosexual concerns. Its commercial success, which opened the flood-gates to similar confessional dramas, was due in part to its confirming the general public in the view that such a life was emotionally barren. Although Boys in the Band did include a campy sissy in its roster, at least it eschewed the drag queen who remained a constant in drama of this period (Lanford Wilson's Madness of Lady Bright, 1964; Frederick Combs' The Children's Mass, 1973). A rash of commercial farces erupted, using the homosexual as a trendy type in the hackneyed comic situations; in the West End, Spitting Image (1966) by Colin Spencer (b. 1933) presented a gay couple about to have a baby; in New York, Norman, Is That You? (1972) by Ron Clark (b. 1933) and Sam Bobrick (b. 1932) and Steambath (1971) by Bruce Jay Friedman (b. 1930) exploited coming-out and cruising areas for their crude cartoons. (The British critic Kenneth Tynan noted that Broadway humor derived exclusively from Jews and homosexuals.)

The “Liberated” Seventies. In Paris, the phenomenally successful La Cage aux Folles (Cage of Queens, 1972) by Jean Poirier ran for four years, its popularity also due to its reinforcing misconceptions with broad caricatures of glamor drag queens, ghettoized in a showbiz setting. (When the actor Michel Serrault was asked how he dared go on in net stockings and ostrich-boa at his age, he explained that he put a spot of red on his nose, and so was not playing a homosexual but a clown in drag.)

Gay dramatists attempted to infuse the boulevard farce with insider knowledge, as in A. J. Kronengold's Tub Strip (1973), James Kirkwood's (1930–1989) P.S. Your Cat Is Dead (1975), and Terrence McNally's (b. 1939) The Ritz (1975). But the drag queen remained the favored protagonist, cropping up again in Torch Song Trilogy (1983), three plays by Harvey Fierstein which were evolved in a gay theatre and then transferred successfully to Broadway to win a Tony Award. Significantly, Fierstein's only popular success since was his libretto for Jerry Herman's (b. 1933) musical comedy version of La Cage aux Folles (1983), which coarsened an already simplistic sitcom to suit the tired businessman.

Heterosexual playwrights like David Rabe and David Mamet seemed unable to get beyond the notion that same-sex affection spelled doom, a collapse of personality. Meanwhile, homosexual dramatists were moving beyond such clichés. It is noteworthy that Robert Patrick and Lanford Wilson (both b. 1937) first gained recognition on the New York stage in 1964 with oppressed characters: the obsessed older man in Patrick's The Haunted Host and the suicidal drag queen in Wilson's The Madness of Lady Bright. After treating other themes for more than a decade, they then took a less hysterical approach to the subject: Patrick in Kennedy's Children (1973) offered a homosexual as a type of his times, and by 1983 was writing specifically for gay audiences in such plays as Blue Is for Boys. Wilson matured to present homosexual relationships and characters as natural features of the American landscape in The Fifth of July (1978) and Burn This (1987). Similarly, Albert Innaurato (b. 1948) could balance his obese and pathetic freak in The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie (1977) with a humorous, boy-next-door seduction in Gemini (1977).

It was the “worthiness” and remoteness of the subject and the familiarity of its treatment which dictated how the general public would react to plays about gay life. Bent (1978) by Martin Sherman, an overwrought picture of persecution in Nazi Germany, couched in the prose of Masterpiece Theatre, was acclaimed; Forty-Deuce (1981) by Alan Bowne, a much more authentic and original piece of work concerning the teenaged hustlers and their johns who hang out around Times Square, was reviled. Black American playwrights tended to define homosexuality as a decadent white threat to their virility. The work of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones, b. 1934) grew more homophobic as his political radicalism increased: The Toilet (1964), a self-styled “play about love,” seems to sanction the embrace of the white “queer” and the black youth, yet Baraka's public statements have attacked homosexuals violently. James Baldwin (1924–1987), excoriated by the radical black community for “collaboration,” never ventured on a theatrical equivalent of Giovanni’s Room. Ed Bullins (b. 1935), who portrayed a stereotypical “bull dyke” in Clara's Ole Man (1965), boasted that his directors were not “twisted and trying to find the latest fad that the faggots are trying to make a new Hair out of.”

The reference was to the “hippie” musical Hair (1967), which, with the pseudo-sophisticated revue Oh! Calcutta! (1969), presented unorthodox sexual practices as natural variants; but the notion of homosexual as villain persisted even in a counter-culture phenomenon like the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar (by Andrew Lloyd Webber, 1971): the disciple who loves Christ most ardently turned out to be Judas, and Herod is played as a sequined screamer. Exclusively gay musicals could not redress the balance: A1 Carmines' (b. 1936) The Faggot (1973), meant as a populist and ecumenical plea for love, was scorned by activists for stereotyping, and the novelties Boy Meets Boy (by Bill Solly and Donald Ward, 1975) and Lovers (1975) enjoyed no particular shelf-life. However, The Rocky Horror Show (1973) by Richard O’Brien, especially in its cult film avatar, revealed how familiar psychopathia sexualis had become to a youthful mass public.

More vital was the explosion of “low camp” transvestitic theatre that emerged from New York's underground, in tandem with Andy Warhol's Factory. Characteristically, the earliest of these playwrights were Warhol hangers-on: the transvestite actor Jackie Curtis (b. 1947) with Glamour, Glory and Gold: The Life of Nola Noonan, Goddess and Star (1967), and the scenarist Ronald Tavel (b. 1941) with the jungle extravaganza Gorilla Queen (1966). An important hothouse was John Vaccaro's Theater of the Ridiculous, which forged one major talent in the person of Charles Ludlam (1940–1987). The basic technique of the Ridiculous style was pastiche, trashing Western civilization by mingling high culture and popular totems, and lacing it all with genital humor and gender switches. Ludlam's plays, beginning with When Queens Collide (1967), and culminating in his own Ridiculous Theatrical Company (Bluebeard, 1970; The Grand Tarot, 1971; Camille, 1973; Stage Blood, 1974, etc.) were virtual palimpsests, shrewdly inlaying classical allusions and quotations into pop art. A consummate comedian, best known for his portrayals of Marguerite Gautier and Galas (a monster diva based on Callas), Ludlam was surrounded by lesser talents whose ineptitude made its own comment on the aspirations of the professional theatre. His influence is strong on such an epigone as Charles Busch (b. 1955), whose Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1985) and Psycho Beach Party (1987) are less cultured, less threatening, and therefore more accessible than Ludlam's work.

In the wake of the political events of 1968, feminist and gay liberation politics gave rise to a number of agitprop groups, and by the mid-1970s, theatre collectives and “coming-out” plays burgeoned. In London, Gay Sweatshop, organized by Ed Berman in 1975, staged lunchtime bills of short plays dealing with identity, censorship, and relationships; the actors were professionals, many of whom, such as Simon Callow and Anthony Sher (both b. 1949), were to become highly articulate luminaries of the establishment stage. In 1977, the Sweatshop divided into men's and women's groups, the latter tending to revue-like formats. In Holland, the Rooie Flikkers (or The Softies) became prominent.

New York counterparts likes TOSOS (The Other Side of the Stage, New York, 1972–77) and the Stonewall Theater were both more polemical and less professional in their achievements; they developed their own playwrights, such as Doric Wilson (b. 1939), William M. Hoffman (b. 1939), Philip Blackwell and Arch Brown, who preached to the converted, but provided a sense of cultural solidarity. Jonathan Katz' docudrama Coming Out! (1975) supplied a useful history lesson for the newly aware. The Glines Theater (founded 1976) nurtured talents like Fierstein, whose early work, such as Flatbush Tosca (1975), made comment through reductive comedy; and the gifted Jane Chambers (1937–1983), whose Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980) has become a staple in lesbian theatre. The proliferation of similar groups in other cities led to the creation of a Gay Theater Alliance in 1978 to provide a network. Gender-fuck troupes like The Cockettes and the Angels of Light in San Francisco and Centola and the Hot Peaches, another Warhol-sponsored enterprise, in New York, combined shock tactics, high camp, glitter rock, and reverse glamor to achieve their effects. They have been succeeded by less strident, more recondite performance artists like Tim Miller and Holly Hughes.

Lesbian Troupes. A score of lesbian ensembles quickly sprang up in the wake of feminist theatre groups, among them the Lavender Cellar in Minneapolis (founded 1973), the Red Dyke Theater in Atlanta (founded 1974), and the Lesbian-Feminist Theater Collective of Pittsburgh (founded 1977). Although they produced plays by Chambers, Pat Surcicle (Prisons, 1973), and the poetic imagist Joan Schenkar, their repertories, as in England, emphasized satiric revue. This was especially the case at the WOW Cafe in New York's East Village, founded by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw in 1982; Alice Forrester's subversive parody Heart of the Scorpion and Holly Hughes' self-regarding satire The Well of Horniness (both 1985) were typical offerings.

Developments in World Theatre. Australia, perhaps because of its willfully macho image, tended to dramatize homosexual life in transvestite terms, equating the gay male with the drag queen. The best-known examples are Peter Kenna's (b. 1930) Mates (1975), whose catalytic character is yet another depressed and depressive nightclub performer; and Steve J. Spears' (b. 1951) The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (1976), a one-character tragi-comedy of a middle-aged cross-dresser who gets too close to a student and ends up all but lobotomized. A Gay Theater Company was formed in Sydney in 1979 to present a more balanced picture of the varieties of homosexual experience.

Outside the English-speaking world, homosexuality has not played a pre-eminent part in mainstream drama. Even Mishima (1925–1970) did not choose to treat it, although his own sado-masochistic penchants surface in his Kabuki play The Drawn-Bow Moon (1969), in which a naked samurai is tortured on stage. In Germany, Martin Sperr's (b. 1941) Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern (Hunting Scenes from Lower Bavaria, 1966), showing a young mechanic destroyed by his narrow-minded provincial community, created a stir and was filmed. The German-language theatre, on the whole, seemed to equate homosexuality with violence. The Austrian dramatist Wolfgang Bauer (b. 1941) in Magic Afternoon (1968) had two layabouts indulge in kissing to torment a young woman, and in Change (1969) a gay art-dealer has his face shoved in broken glass. In Bodo Strauss' Der Park (The Park, 1985), Cyprian, the type of the creative artist, is brutally murdered by the black park-attendant he fancies. Rainer Fassbinder used his films more than his plays to express his concepts of social and interpersonal exploitation.

Although Parisian audiences flocked to a boulevard farce like La Cage aux Folles, a more select public has appreciated the absurdist plays of Argentinian-born Copi: he has played in his own works, such as Lehomosexuel ou La difficulté de s’exprimer (The Homosexual or The Difficulty of Self-Expression, 1971) and Le Frigo (The Fridge, 1983). The Soviet theatre, reflecting its society, has diligently avoided the subject; productions of Williams' Streetcar and Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, for instance, cut all allusions to homosexuality. In Italy, on the other hand, the fashionable theatre and opera have been dominated by elegant director—designers like Luchino Visconti and his disciple Franco Zeffirelli (b. 1923). They were responsible for introducing Williams and Albee to Italy, but their flamboyant wielding of high style was often vitiated by a penchant for garish melodrama and maudlin sentimentality.

The AIDS crisis has spawned a number of nonce dramas, modern versions of the problem play, where the message is more important than the medium: Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, William M. Hoffman's As Is, Rebecca Ranson's Warren, Robert Chesley's Night Sweat, and the Theater Rhinoceros' dramatic collage The AIDS Show (all 1985). They affected the audiences that sought them out, but when they entered the repertory of regional theatres, subscribers often stayed away, refusing to confront the problem of “others.” AIDS also had an impact on the theatre by decimating its ranks, its victims including Ludlam and the director-choreographer Michael Bennett (1943–1987), along with dozens of rank-and-file members of the profession. The glaring gaps left in the performing arts by these deaths reveal how dependent they have been on homosexual talent.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Stefan Brecht, Queer Theatre, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978; Kaier Curtin, ‘We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians‘: The Emergence of Lesbians and Cay Men on the American Stage, Boston: Alyson, 1987; Terry Helbing, Gay Theater Alliance Directory of Gay Plays, New York: JH Press, 1980.

Laurence Senelick

THEBES

Site of the Mycenean citadel of Cadmus (legendary personification of the Semitic peoples of the East), Thebes was the capital of Boeotia in central Greece in classical times.

The Theban cycle, celebrated by Sophocles and other writers, offers several salient erotic themes. Cadmus' descendant Laius, warned by an oracle that his son would slay him, forwent sex with his wife Jocasta. Unaware of the danger and frustrated, she got him drunk, had intercourse with him, and in nine months produced the infant Oedipus, whom he ordered to be exposed. Laius was then exiled to the Peloponnesus. Exclaiming “nature compels me,” he then raped Chrysippus, his host's 12-year old son, causing a curse to follow him to his Thebes when he returned. Oedipus, saved by a shepherd, grew to manhood, slew his father whom he did not recognize in distant parts, and came to Thebes. Here he ended the plague, married the widowed Jocasta, and sired children by her to begin a new round of tragedies including the execution of his daughter Antigone by her uncle Creon for burying her rebel brother.

After Crete and Sparta, from which institutionalized pederasty was imported about 600 B.C., Thebes became the place Greeks most often named as the locus for the formal type of pederasty. In Plato's Laws, the Athenian declares that in Elis and Boeotia (including Thebes) they practiced pederasty uninhibitedly, each adult male living together with the boy he loved. The greatest pederastic poet, Pindar, resided in Thebes. When Alexander the Great destroyed the rebel city, he left Pindar's house standing to demonstrate his love of culture. After Sparta and Athens exhausted each other in the great Peloponnesian War, Pelopidas and Epaminondas, in exile in Athens, formed an aristocratic conspiracy to liberate their city.

Bravely surprising the Spartan garrison, they organized the Sacred Band (later copied by the Carthaginians) of 300 pairs of lovers, which defeated Sparta at Leuctra (371 B.C.) and Mantinea (362 B.C.) and liberated Messenia, ending Spartan hegemony. Epaminondas was slain at Mantinea with his second eromenos (beloved) bravely falling at his side. During the three-cornered struggle that ensued between a leaderless Thebes, a crippled Sparta, and an Athens that had not fully recovered from the Peloponnesian War, Persians interfered and Macedonians encroached. The Creeks were defeated at Chaeronea in 338 B.C., when the Sacred Band died fighting to the last man, and even Philip of Macedonia, the victor, paid tribute to their valor: “Let no man speak evil of such heroes.”

Plutarch, a hereditary Theban noble who held a priesthood at Delphi, recorded the careers of notable pederasts in his Parallel Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans, and his Dialogues on Love debated the relative merits of women and boys.

The ancient city of Thebes possessed two gymnasia, one dedicated to Heracles, the other to Iolaus, often regarded in classic times as his eromenos. At the latter place pairs of male lovers were accustomed to pledge their troth. About three miles outside the city lay the Kabeirion, the shrine of a mystery cult revolving around the god Kabeiros and his Pais (“boy”); here modem archeologists have found votive offerings depicting a man and a boy, who is often portrayed holding an animal——a traditional courtship gift.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Nancy H. Demand, Thebes in the Fifth Century, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.

William A. Percy

THEOCRITUS (CA. 301-CA. 260 B.C.)

Hellenistic philologist and poet. A native of Syracuse, he sojourned in southern Italy and Cos, but having failed to win the patronage of Hiero of Syracuse, he finally won that of Ptolemy II, the founder of the Museum and Library that together with his munificent patronage made Alexandria the intellectual center of the Hellenistic monarchies. In the famous controversy about the Argonauts, he sided with Callimachus against Apollonius of Rhodes, both of whom resided in Alexandria and sang of pederasty.

Though set in Sicily, his bucolic poems were written after he moved to the east, perhaps while he tarried on Cos. He composed his mimes mostly in Alexandria. Like most other Hellenistic poets, he preferred short, polished, erudite, contrived poems. He often chose exotic or at least novel themes and made fresh observations and descriptions. Besides pastoral heterosexual love, he dramatized the love of Heracles for Hylas. Eight of his thirty Idylls, the authorship of two of which is uncertain, treat boy love exclusively.

Theocritus used two archaic terms: for lover eispnelas (inspirer), employed in Aleman, and for beloved the non-Dorian Thessalian aites, (inspired), employed by Aleman to mean “pretty girl” in the feminine. The idyll on Hylas (XIII), Heracles' beloved, gave Theocritus an opportunity to express his personal feelings on boy-love. It is not just mortals, but the immortals as well, who suffer the pangs of love. Heracles is determined to educate the curly-haired boy with whom he is enamoured, to make a brave and renowned man of him, and to bring him up as a father would his son.

In Idyll XXIX Theocritus gives advice to a boy that follows strictly the lines earlier drawn by Theognis: the youth is urged to be faithful to his lover, not to play the coquette or exploit his admirer in a venal manner. Youth is fleeting, but with manhood love will yield to a solid and enduring friendship. Idyll XXX depicts a man who has reached the age that disqualifies him for conquests in love, but cannot suppress the passion that he feels for a boy who, while not particualrly handsome, has undeniable personal charm. This piece may well contain genuine autobiographical elements.

The two idylls in which shepherds and goatherds compete in song about their pederastic loves differ: in VII it is poets disguised as shepherds who display their rival skill, in V the speech belongs to genuine rustics, direct and even slightly coarse. Idyll VIII, which may not belong to Theocritus, presents two youths at the very onset of puberty, one in love with a boy, the other with a girl. This poem therefore treats homosexual love between early adolescent agemates, which in the eyes of at least some Greeks was perfectly legitimate. Inspired by the poetic tradition of male love begun by Ibycus, Anacreon, and Pindar, Theocritus' work proves that the old motifs and values of paiderasteia remained alive, at least in literature, into the Hellenistic era.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Félix Buffiére, Eros adolescent; la pédérastie dans la Gréce antique, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1980; Hans Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932.

William A. Percy

TILDEN, WILLIAM T., II (1893–1953)

American tennis player. Also known as Big Bill and Gentleman Bill Tilden, he was voted the most outstanding athlete of the first half of the twentieth century by the National Sports Writers Association, ahead of such notables as Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Johnny Weissmuller. He was the first American to win at Wimbleton and during the 1920s he remained undefeated in any major match for seven years. He revolutionized the game of tennis and some of his writing on the subject (The Art of Tennis) is still considered to be authoritative. Tilden was known as a theatrical tennis player and was very popular with spectators.

He had a great interest in the arts and wrote a novel, Glory’s Net, many short stories, a silent film, Hands of Hope, and an autobiography, My Story. He had an intense interest in the theatre and made frequent unsuccessful attempts at acting, often producing his own shows, starring himself.

He was well known for living a lavish life, driving expensive cars, staying in elegant hotels and socializing with the rich and the famous——he was a good friend of Charlie Chaplin. He often traveled with an entourage of handsome teenaged male tennis protégés. When his homosexuality became better known, he was ostracized from the tennis world and was banned from the most prestigious tennis courts. Eventually, he was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and sent to jail in 1947. Although it was clear that the young man with whom he was caught having sex had no objection to the sexual relations, the court decided to make an example of the famous tennis player. He served six months of a one-year sentence. Tilden died of a heart attack, impoverished, in relative obscurity six years later.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Frank Deford, Big Bill Tilden: The Triumphs and the Tragedy, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975; Arthur Voss, Tilden and Tennis in the Twenties, Troy, NY: Whitson, 1985.

Brian Pronger

TOILET SEX

Most men who patronize public toilets view them as repellent places that are to be utilized and left as quickly as possible. Yet urination requires the taking out of the penis and lingering is sometimes a legitimate aspect of answering the call of nature (or can be made to appear so), so that it is not surprising that sexual activities might occur there. A common pattern is for one man to stand for a time at a urinal and show his erect penis; another will then touch it, an implicit contract is accepted——usually wordlessly——and the sexual act is expeditiously completed. Others prefer the somewhat more private toilet stalls, though here it may be somewhat harder to lure others to join in the action. Some of the more commonly used places have the institution of the “watch queen,” who through a cough or some other clear signal will indicate the approaching presence of outsiders who may be offended.

The notion, found in some popular books on sex, that gay men are inveterate cruisers of toilets is an overstatement; many homosexuals report a pronounced distaste for undertaking any sexual activity in such places. In fact, Laud Humphreys' classic monograph showed that the overwhelming majority of the sexual customers of the Illinois toilet he studied were bisexuals leading outwardly “normal” heterosexual lives. Such men may be reluctant to frequent gay bars or saunas, but do not regard public toilets as gay-identified social space. No equivalent lesbian practice is known.

Toilets that are known for their sexual activities are described colloquially as “;tea rooms.” In England the practice of visiting these establishments is termed “cottaging.” Some are found on university campuses, in train and bus stations, and at highway rest stops. Appropriate graffiti may signal the possibility of sexual activity, so that someone visiting during an off hour may be alerted to return. Such graffiti may also alert isolated homosexuals to the existence of others, previously unsuspected. Occasionally, overcrowding may cause legitimate complaints on the part of straight patrons, but often a single scandalized visitor will demand police action. Regrettably, many toilet visitors, some caught by enticement methods initiated by members of the police force, have had their careers ruined through being detected in the process of “tea-room trade.” Insignificant as the offense may have been, the publicity attending the arrest and eventual trial, and the inclusion of the offender’s name in centralized files of “known sex deviates,” were enough to stigmatize the individual for life. Sometimes the authorities attempt to discourage sex in toilets by removing the stall doors or modifying the structures architecturally so that privacy will be reduced.

A special adaptation of toilets for sexual purposes is often found in the form of “glory holes,” openings surreptitiously drilled or carved into the partitions separating the stalls. These serve for the insertion of the erect penis which is then fellated by the occupant of the other booth. This practice combines anonymity, a sense of concentration on the affected organ, and an element of danger that goes even beyond the usual one of employing the public john for sexual purposes. The problem of being unpleasantly surprised was obviated in the glory-hole clubs, commercial establishments that enjoyed some popularity in the late 1970s. With the rising awareness of the need for safe sex, these clubs have largely faded away. Not so, however, the do-it-yourself glory holes in public toilets: despite an often relentless campaign by custodians to close these apertures, they mysteriously keep reappearing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edward W. Delph, The Silent Community: Public Homosexual Encounters, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1978; Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, Chicago: Aldine, 1970.

Ward Houser

TRADE

As a term of gay slang, this word is the modem parallel of ancient Greek, Latin, and Old Norse terms for a male who remains strictly in the active role of penetrator, and who usually considers himself heterosexual or bisexual, an attitude which also perpetuates archaic concepts under which only the receiver or pathic was considered to be departing from gender norms of appropriate sexual behavior. The modem slang usage probably derives from the association with young male prostitutes, engaged in “the sex trade,” who are only available in the penetrator role. Trade is generally a term which is not self-applied, but only used by the receptive partner or by uninvolved homosexuals.

The prevalence of trade behavior is usually underestimated since its adherents seldom write books, join organizations, or fill out survey questionnaires. Nevertheless, it may well be that, from a global perspective that includes Mediterranean, shamanistic, pederastic, and Asian patterns, there are more “trade” men than reciprocating homosexuals, and even in advanced western societies this may be the case for members of the working class, where the sense that only the passive partner is homosexual is best preserved. Certainly there are extensive areas of sexual encounter outside prostitution in which trade behavior is not only common in western industrial societies, but expected by the receptive partner: cruising military men, seafarers, truck drivers, hitchhikers, teenagers, patrons of toilets frequented by the general public, frequenters of interstate highway rest areas, those involved in interracial sex, and men in jail or prison.

The trade pattern seems to serve as an intermediate stage of coming out often enough to have engendered the widespread homosexual saying “Today’s trade is tomorrow’s competition,” but it would be a mistake to draw too broad a conclusion from this saying, which may also reflect the tendency which causes some homosexuals to label anyone and everyone a queen. It is not a saying with much currency among those homosexuals who prefer trade for various reasons and who are perhaps more knowledgeable about their patterns. Those who are familiar with scenes in which “situational” trade homosexuality can be observed over a longer period of time (prisons, military areas, boarding schools) do not see much evidence to support the validity of the saying; if anything, they would report that “today's trade is tomorrow's married heterosexual.”

“Rough trade” is a term denoting a potentially dangerous or ruffian male, virtually always self-defined as heterosexual, and who often demonstrates feelings of guilt or remorse after ejaculation which can erupt into violence directed at his partner. Nevertheless, there are not a few homosexuals who find rough trade particularly appealing. Many professional male prostitutes are termed “rough trade” because of their image as “tough guys” even though their actual potential for violence is low, a few highly publicized exceptions notwithstanding.

Research on homosexuality in this century has tended to avoid role analysis and focused instead on self-defined homosexuals rather than occasional participants. Clearly, the trade phenomenon needs a great deal more research before investigators can contemplate closing the books on the phenomenon of same-sex relations.

Stephen Donaldson

TRANSSEXUALISM

Transsexualism is the wish for change of sex. This longing may be defined as a gender identity disorder characterized by the subject's intense desire for transformation by hormonal or surgical means, or both, into the gender opposite his original one at birth. This insistence is grounded in complete identification with the gender role of the opposite sex. The transsexual is thus the ultimate form of what has come to be known as the gender dysphoria syndrome.

Such individuals seek to deny and reverse their original biological gender and cross over into the role of the opposite gender. Transsexuals emulate the characteristics of the opposite gender in behavior, dress, attitude, and sexual orientation, and aspire to attain the anatomical structure of the genitalia of the opposite sex. The request for the so-called sex-change operation becomes the obsessive goal of the transsexual's life and brings him to the door of the physician, but in their request for sex reassignment surgery (SRS) they present themselves to the surgeon, not the psychiatrist. They reject the implication that psychiatric referral is required, since they do not conceive their dilemma in psychiatric terms but as a consequence of having been bom into the wrong body. In a sense, transsexualism may be considered iatrogenic, in that advances in surgical technique and hormonal therapy now permit the realization of longings for sexual metamorphosis that once belonged to the realm of mythology and fairy tales.

History. This fact became known to the public after the famous Jorgensen case in 1952, in which the reporting endocrinologist received letters from hundreds of individuals requesting SRS. A former sergeant in the American army was transformed from a male into an externally functioning female by a Danish plastic surgeon, Paul Fogh-Andersen, in Copenhagen, and Christine Jorgensen, as the individual was subsequently named, made headlines throughout the world. Controversy and criticism erupted almost at once and have continued to the present day, as some psychiatrists branded the whole procedure as medical malpractice.

However sensationalized the case may have been, it called public attention to the fact that surgical relief was available to the sufferer from gender dysphoria, and thousands of such individuals came forward to demand the sex change operation. Many of these individuals were referred to Harry Benjamin (1885–1987), who promoted the term transsexualism in an article published in the International Journal of Sexology in 1953, and continued to provide evaluation, hormone treatment, and referral to medical centers in the United States who would perform SRS. He culminated his years of research and therapy with gender dysphoric patients with the publication of a landmark monograph on the subject, The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966), and to pursue his work the Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association was founded. Between 1969 and 1985 nine international gender dysphoria symposia were held, at which some 150 investigators from a variety of disciplines met to share their findings. Apparently the term transsexual, in its modem meaning, was introduced by the popular editor David O. Cauldwell in 1950.

Psychological Aspects. The relationship between homosexuality and gender dysphoria, particularly in the extreme form of transsexualism, requires clarification. Most homosexuals are satisfied with their sexual orientation and lifestyle, and like normal heterosexuals they have no wish to lose their genitalia. For both male and female homosexuals their genitalia are a source of intense pleasure. However, there are some whose primary homosexuality is so unacceptable to their egos that they cannot bear this sexual orientation. The transsexual frequently states his strong aversion to homosexuality and resents such an identification. Such a self-stigmatized, ego-alien, homosexually oriented gender dysphoric subject sees sex reassignment as the way out of his dilemma. SRS is more ego-integral to such an individual, and the surgeon treating him, than is homosexuality. Some 30–35 percent of those requesting SRS fall into this category.

By contrast, there are also gender dysphoric individuals who demonstrate a fixed and consistent cross-gender identification. Such patients establish themselves as primary transsexuals and successfully pass the “real life” test of cross-gender living and hormonal therapy for one to two years. Some are actively engaged in psychotherapy before and after this trial period, but all undergo an evaluation process by a professional in the mental health field. Only then is it appropriate to recommend the patient to an experienced surgeon for SRS. Even after this careful screening process, some 10–15 percent of operated patients are thought to have an unsatisfactory outcome from SRS. Most of these probably had an unsatisfactory surgical reconstruction or were improperly selected. Interestingly enough, none of the female transsexuals who were rejected as candidates renounced their gender dysphoria or their pursuit of SRS; they are a more homogeneous diagnostic group than their male counterparts and generally better candidates for SRS.

Medical Aspects. The surgical procedure involves the removal of the penis, scrotum, and testicles, and the creation of a functional neovagina. A successful psychological outcome is largely dependent upon a good functional result, which includes the ability to engage in sexual intercourse without pain or discomfort. The breast enlargement secondary to estrogen therapy is usually not sufficient to preclude breast augmentation mammoplasty, while other forms of plastic surgery are occasionally requested to improve the feminine appearance.

For female-to-male transsexuals the surgical techniques are not so well developed. It is easy enough to remove the breasts by mastectomy, while in the genital area total hysterectomy, salpingooophorectomy, and vaginectomy may be performed initially. The creation of an artificial penis is a very complicated and multistaged procedure, which may not allow for functioning that includes penetration. The difficulties inherent in the surgical construction of a penis have not yet been overcome.

Conclusion. Transsexualism remains an object of controversy within the segment of the medical profession that is concerned with the problem. Some clinics now uniformly refer the patient to psychotherapy in the belief that the desire for change of sex is intrinsically pathological, while others maintain that SRS is the treatment of choice for carefully evaluated, genuine, primary transsexuals. The broader dimensions of the problem lead into the question of gender identity and the manner in which it is defined by a particular society and experienced by the individual suffering from gender dysphoria.

TRANSVESTISM (CROSS-DRESSING)

Most human societies recognize a basic polarity in clothing that is deemed appropriate for men and women. In some tribal cultures the distinction takes the form of the material used for the garments: animal products for men, plant fibers for women. Modem industrial societies have adopted a paradigm stemming from the early Middle Ages in Europe in which men wear trousers while women wear dresses. These distinctions are not always rigidly applied so that, after initial disapproval, the adoption of some types of trousers by women in contemporary society has been taken as a matter of course. As a cultural symbol transvestism, sometimes termed cross-dressing, becomes effective only when it is recognized that a norm is being transgressed. In our society, male transvestites are more “marked” than female, and thus more likely to encounter censure.

Psychosocial Aspects. A popular opinion identifies transvestism with homosexual orientation. This perception reflects the stereotype that homosexuals are driven to adopt the conduct and sensibilities of the opposite sex (“inversion”). Yet modem sociological studies have determined that many——perhaps even a majority——of men who engage in crossdressing are heterosexual. There are married men who insist on wearing female undergarments. Other men join clubs where they can dress in full drag, basking in the company and approval of like-minded fellows. Both forms are relatively private, contrasting with the public display of the more flamboyant drag queen. Although the dynamic of heterosexual transvestism is not yet fully understood, it surely reflects in part a fetishistic attachment to the garments characteristically worn by women, whom the cross-dresser idolizes.

Transvestism, especially when found among male homosexuals (drag queens), is often confused with transsexualism or change of sex. Of course many preoperative transsexuals adopt women's dress as a way of gradually acculturating themselves to the identity they are to assume. Yet most homosexual transvestites have no desire to change their sex: the cross-dressing is an end in itself. Not all transvestites strive to achieve a perfect mimicry of the attire of the opposite sex. Some don only some components of the other gender's garments and make up, in modes that range from gentle mockery to the harsh parody of gender roles known as “gender fuck.” In the view of some feminists, male transvestism stems from hatred of women, but most men who engage in full transvestism would affirm that they admire women, and that they are trying to bring forth the woman within themselves. Drag queens, who stand at the opposite end of the spectrum from leather adepts and the macho clones, have also evoked some hostility from non-cross-dressing gay men.

Terminology. The word transvestism (which became the standard term in contrast with Havelock Ellis's preference for “eonism”) was introduced by the German sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910. Until then investigators of sexual deviation had classified the transvestites who came under their observation as homosexuals. Among his 7000 homosexual subjects Hirschfeld found 19 who had the urge to cross-dress while remaining heterosexually oriented, and on this basis he concluded that transvestism is a separate condition distinct from homosexuality.

Perhaps because it is sometimes confused with transsexualism and because of its clinical sound, the term transvestism is rejected by some in favor of “cross-dressing.” The latter term was first proposed by Edward Carpenter in 1911.

Historical Development. Among some tribal peoples, their exists an intermediate gender category filled by men who dress as women. These transvestite men do women's work, and sometimes have priestly and medical powers. They often, though not invariably, engage in homosexual activity with “full men.” Among the peoples of eastern Siberia these individuals are known as shamans, in North America as berdaches, and in the Polynesian cultures of the Pacific as mahu.

In ancient Athens the festival of the Cotyttia was celebrated by men in women’s clothing; in its later form it was characterized by homosexual orgies. Other cross-dressing festivals were celebrated at Argos, Sparta, and other places. Greek mythology knows figures who change their sex, and similar traditions are found in India and Africa. During the Roman empire men were sometimes forced to wear women's clothing as a form of humiliation. Before their martyrdom in 303 the soldier-saints Sergius and Bacchus were required to don women's clothing by the emperor. The purpose of this punishment seems to have been as a reprisal for their perceived violation of the requirements of military valor, and not for homosexuality, as one modern scholar has claimed.

The adoption of Christianity introduced an element of religious disapproval of transvestism, as seen in Deuteronomy 22:5: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment; for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God.” Despite this prohibition medieval men and women still continued to cross-dress, though such activities tended to be restricted into such zones of licence as Mardi Gras or Carnival, when the “world was turned upside down.” Over the centuries women travelers have often donned men's clothing for convenience and protection. Thus Sts. Pelagia and Marina assumed men's clothing, and even entered monasteries.

In the theatre throughout early modem Europe women's parts were taken by boys. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century the lavish clothing styles of the upper class seem to have stimulated desire for unusual clothing, so that men, not necessarily homosexual, could affect women's clothing as “fancy dress.” The French nobleman Francois Timoleon de Choisy (1644–1724) began dressing in female attire as a boy; in adult life, though heterosexual, he often appeared at parties as a woman. The diplomat Charles d'Eon de Beaumont (1728–1810) found dressing as a woman an asset to his career as a spy. In North America Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, who was governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 to 1708, was a heterosexual transvestite.

From eighteenth-century England come a number of reports of women who cross-dressed as men, in most instances to practice trades or enter the army. Henry Fielding's The Female Husband (1746) is a fictionalized account of the case of Mary Hamilton, who was convicted of fraud for posing as a man and subsequently marrying a woman. In the nineteenth century several women cross-dressed in order to become physicians. The woman known as James Barry (1795–1865); not apparently a lesbian, rose to become senior Inspector-General of the British Army Medical Department. As these examples and other instances suggest, care is needed in assessing the sexual orientation of such individuals, who should not be assumed to be homosexual or lesbian without further evidence.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cross-dressers have taken their cue from popular entertainment, including vaudeville, pantomime, nightclub entertainers, and television “impressionists.” At certain points particular types of transvestism may engage the public's attention——as the “mannish lesbian”; of the 1920s——and the publicity thus engendered may be picked up by gay men and lesbians and incorporated into their sense of self-presentation. That is to say, some gay people take up cross-dressing because that is the way they assume “they are supposed to be.”

At its best, transvestism is a form of ludic behavior that causes society to take a fresh look at gender conventions. In the 1980s, when a whole branch of inquiry known as “gender studies,” has emerged, the role of transvestism has been evaluated in new perspectives that point to a more complex understanding of the phenomenon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Peter Ackroyd, Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979; Vem L. Bullough, “Transvestism in the Middle Ages: A Sociological Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology, 79 (1974), 1381–94; Rudolf M. Decker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modem Europe, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989; Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. Ill, part 2, New York: Random House, 1936, pp. 1–110; Deborah Heller Feinbloom, Transvestites and Transsexuals, New York: Dell, 1976; Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Transvestiten, Berlin: Alfred Pulvermacher, 1910; Julia Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness, London: Pandora, 1988; Annie Woodhouse, Fantastic Women: Sex, Gender, and Transvestism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Wayne R. Dynes

TRANSVESTISM, THEATRICAL

The androgynous shaman or berdache who, in primitive cultures, serves an important function as intermediary with the numinous, is considered by some scholars to be sublimated, in civilized societies, into the actor. The shape-changing powers of the shaman include sexual alternation as “celestial spouse,” and it has been suggested that fear of this magic resides in the lingering prejudice against the “drag queen.” The intermediate between shaman and drag queen was the performer: the German term Schwuchtel (“queen,” “fairy”) originally meant a player of comic dame roles, and the cultural historian Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenburg links it with the Latin vetula, a frivolous music maker. Among the Taosug people of the South Philippines of the Pacific, most musicians are bantut or homosexuals, expected to take the female role in courtship repartee; this association of performance and gender reversal implies a shamanistic origin, and confirms the close link between effeminate behavior and a special caste of performers.

Historical Origins. The origins of theatre in religious cults meant that women were barred from performance, a prohibition sustained by social sanctions against their public exhibition in general. Therefore, in Europe, before the seventeenth century, and in Asia, before the twentieth, female impersonation was the standard way to portray women on stage, and was considered far more normal than females playing females. The Greek theatre, devoted to the cross-dressing god Dionysus, was virtually transvestite by definition . Modem feminist theory argues that this usurpation of the female role by men was an act of suppression, which allowed a patriarchal society to transmit a false image of Woman. However, the Russian classicist Vyacheslav Ivanov, as far back as 1912, considered that the exclusion of the ecstatic maenad from the stage, by diminishing energy, enabled the necessary shift from rite to performance. (It has also been noted that, later, the entrance of women on the French stage under Henri IV and the English stage under Charles II signaled a descent in drama from the epic mode to the domestic or social mode.)

The Roman theatre accepted the convention, and scandal arose only when an emperor lost caste by becoming a performer. Suetonius tells us that Nero enacted the incestuous sister in the mime-drama Macaris and Canace, giving birth on stage to a baby that was then flung to the hounds; according to Aelius Lampridius, Heliogabalus played Venus in The Judgment of Paris with his naked body depilated.

In the Oriental theatre, the transvestite actor, as Roland Barthes has said, “does not copy woman but signifies her ....Femininity is presented to be read, not to be seen.” Most Southeast Asian dance and drama forms kept the sexes apart in performance, allowing a certain amount of cross-sexual casting; what was to be impersonated had as much to do with aesthetic distinctions between coarseness and refinement as with physical or social gender definitions, so that women often played elegant young princes and men played abusive old women. In Bali, the powerful witch Rangda was always impersonated by a man, because only a man's strength could present and contain her dangerous and religiously empowered magic. These categories have become somewhat blurred in our time, with the admission of women into hitherto closed spheres of activity. By the 1920s, women had taken over the Indonesian dance opera Aria, but audiences still prefer all males in the operatic form Anja. Similarly, boys dance their own versions of the highly feminine seduction dances, inciting male audiences to caress them after the performance. In popular Javanese drama ludruk, the transvestite, who off the stage may be a male prostitute, is an important figure, related to the androgynous priesthood of the past. He classifies himself as a woman, presenting not a realistic but a stylized portrait.

China. As early as A.D. 661, Chinese actors were segregated into exclusively male or female companies. Ch'en Wei-sung's love poems to a boy actor in the seventeenth century are well known. The tan or female impersonator of Chinese opera, instituted ostensibly for moral reasons in the reign of Chi'en Lung (1735–1796), received a seven- to ten-year training and had to be an exceptionally graceful dancer, adept at manipulating his long sleeves. The emploi is sub-divided into ching i or cheng tan (virtuous woman); hua tan (seductive woman); lao tan (old woman), the most realistic, and wu tan (military woman). The great Mei Lan-fang (He Ming, 1894–1961), voted the most popular actor in China in 1924, combined virtuous and seductive elements in his portrayals; although he married and fathered a family, in his youth Mei had been the lover of powerful warlords. The clapper operas featuring tan had been, from their inception by Wei Ch'ang-cheng in the 1780s, considered by some a danger to public morals; but the first serious ban was imposed in 1963, instigated in part by Mao Tse-tung's wife Chiang Ching. When the Cultural Revolution ended, the tan returned, but no more were to be trained. A curious footnote is the liaison between the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and the opera dancer Shi Pei Pu, in 1964, which produced a child; in 1983, it was discovered that the dancer was a male spy and the diplomat had been truly hoodwinked in their darkened bedroom. As M. Butterfly (1988), this incident was wrought into a successful Broadway play.

Japan. In Japanese No drama, although all the actors are male, sexual differences are not stressed, the same voice being used whether the role is masculine or feminine. In Kabuki, however, the onnagata (female impersonator) or oyama (literally, chief courtesan) is an extremely important line of business, with its sharply defined conventions. Originally, Kabuki was played by female prostitutes who often burlesqued men, particularly foreigners; in 1629 women were banned from the stage for reasons of morality. They were soon replaced by boys between eleven and fifteen (wakashu) who dressed like courtesans and were particularly beloved for their bangs; they acted out homosexual love affairs or methods of purchasing prostitutes. The increase in sexual relations between the boys and their admirers led to a new ban in 1652, and mature men with shaven foreheads had to take over the female roles. Although this brought about a more refined art, it did not alter the ambience: in the 1680–90s, 80 to 90 percent of the onnagata sprang from the ranks of catamites at the iroko or sex-boy teahouses. Despite the formalized grace and abstract femininity of the onnagata, an inherent characteristic of Kabuki has remained, as Donald Shively points out, “the peculiar eroticism with its homosexual overtones.”

The Ayamegusa of Yoshizawa Ayame (1673–1729), the standard handbook, insisted that female impersonators behave as women in daily life, and blush if their wives are mentioned. Even a modem, married actor, Tomoemon, has declared, “One must be the woman, or else it is merely disguise.” This helped maintain the homosexual tradition; boys in training often had relations with one another, while the actors, although lowest on the social scale, were much in demand as lovers (Minanojo, in particular, was the pederasts’ beau idéal). Women sought to imitate the ideal of femininity they incarnated, and the beauties depicted in classical woodcuts are often onnagata. A dramatic genre known as hengemaro or the costume-change piece was created around 1697 to showcase their skills and perhaps nourish the clothing-fetishism that is a feature of Japanese culture. Lewdness in love scenes intensified between 1800 and 1840. With the Westernization of Japan, onnagata played in Ibsen and other modem dramas, but after World War II actors stopped being exclusive and played both male and female roles in Kabuki, the great exception being Nakamura Utaemon VI (b. 1917). Bando Tamasaburo (b. 1950) is one of the great cultural heroes of modem Japan; well-known as a homosexual who has had affairs with his leading men, he has extended his repertory to Lady Macbeth and Desdemona.

In 1914, a railway magnate founded the Takarazuka Revue Company outside Osaka to attract tourists; soon four troupes, made up entirely of unmarried girls, were performing in repertoire and touring the Pacific. Fifty girls are accepted annually after examinations in diction, singing, Japanese and western dancing, and then subjected to rigorous training; if they marry, they must leave the troupe. Their shows include both Western musicals and traditional folk plays, and their audiences are over 70 percent female; the otokoyaku or male impersonator is the star and idol of schoolgirls, who avidly read the fan magazines. The Takarazuka's popularity gave rise to the all-female Shochiku Revue, which resembles a lavish Las Vegas lounge act. Although the Takarazuka prides itself on its purity, in 1988 two of its graduates were involved in a failed love-suicide pact.

Transvestism in the West. Men dressing as women, particularly obstreperous women, was a tradition of saturnalia, Feasts of Fools, and medieval New Year’s celebrations, and came to be used in political protest, allowing them to abnegate masculine responsibility and invest themselves with feminine instinct. Crossdressing is a common accompaniment of carnival time, when norms are turned upside down; men giving birth was enacted at some Hindu festivals, and even Arlecchino in the late commedia dell’ arte was shown birthing and breast feeding his infant.

But Christianity, from its inception, could not countenance such letting-off steam (John Chrysostom condemned cross-dressing in his Easter sermon of a.d. 399), and Western civilization has remained distrustful. By the nineteenth century most large European and American cities had enacted laws making crossdressing a misdemeanor.

Early English Theatre. Gender confusion drama was brought to England from Italy. One of the earliest and most intriguing examples was John Lyly’s Ga-lathea (1585), in which two girls disguised as boys fall in love with one another, and Venus promises to transform one into a male, to implement their romance. This was complicated by the fact that both girls were played by boys. Just as the Catholic church attacked unruly carnivals and mardi gras celebrations, Protestant clerics and Puritans censured the “sodomitical” custom of the boy-player on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. William Prynne in Histriomastix (1633) condemned the practice as “an inducement to sodomy.” Boy companies dominated the English theatre until 1580; tradition has it that Portia was created by James Bryston, Lady Macbeth by Robert Goffe, Rosalind by Joseph Taylor, Juliet by Richard Robinson, Ophelia by Ned Alleyn, and Desdemona by Nathaniel Field, who was coached by Ben Jonson. Edward Kynaston (1640?-l 706) was the last of the line, playing well into the Restoration when Pepys noted in his diary (1659): “Kynaston as Olympia made the loveliest lady that I ever saw in my life.” At the same time in France, Louis XTV had no qualms about appearing in court masques as a bacchante (1651) and the goddess Ceres (1661).

The tradition of the boy actor had arisen in schools, and enjoyed a resurgence in the nineteenth century. The Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard (founded 1844), the Princeton Triangle Club, and the Mask and Wig in Philadelphia still thrive, even though the gender assumptions that inform them no longer obtain. Cambridge had organized an all-male dramatic society in 1855, Oxford in 1879; when Cambridge’s Footlights company tried to insert women into its comic revues, a storm of protest forced them to revert to their original practice.

Comedy. Women were members of commedia dell’arte troupes from the 16th century, but the comic characters occasionally donned petticoats to the delight of audiences, and this travesty aspect (already present in Aristophanes) grew more important as actresses gained popularity. If beauty and sex appeal were to be projected from the stage by a real woman, the post-menopausal woman could as easily be played by a comic actor; parts like Mme. Pernelle in Moliere’s Tartuffe and the nanny Yeremeevna in Fonvizin’s The Minor were conceived as male roles, and Nestroy’s mid-nineteenth-century farces contain several of these “dame” parts. The theatre historians Mander and Mitchenson have even suggested that “to camp” derives from Lord Campley, who disguises himself as a lady’s maid in Richard Steele’s The Funeral (1701). The comic dame had become a fixture of English pantomime by the Regency period, and the great music-hall comedian Dan Leno was responsible for the dame elbowing out Clown as the chief comic performer in panto, opening the way for George Robey, George Graves and others to flourish. Some performers like George Lacy and Rex Jamieson (“Mrs. Shufflewick,” 1928–1984) played nothing but dames. A similar tradition was upheld in American popular plays by Neil Burgess (1846–1910) as Widow Bedotte, Gilbert Sarony (d. 1910) as the Giddy Gusher, the Russell Brothers as clumsy Irish maids in vaudeville, George K. Fortescue (1846?—1914) as a flirtatious fat girl in several burlesques, and George W. Monroe (d. 1932) as an Irish biddy in a number of musical comedies. In France, Offenbach’s operetta Mesdames de la Halle (1858) created three roles of market-women to be sung by men.

The Circus. In the circus crossdressing was a means of enhancing the seeming danger of stunts: the Franconis in an equestrian version of Madame Angot were allegedly the first to do so in the Napoleonic period. The American equestrian Ella Zoyara (Omar Kingsley, 1840–1879) and the English trapezist Lulu (El Nino Farini, b. 1855) were celebrated Victorian examples. Kingsley’s personal sexuality is questionable. There is no question about Emil Mario Vacano (1840–1892), Austria’s most important and prolific writer on the circus, who had appeared as an equestrienne under the names Miss Corinna and Signora Sanguineta, and was the lover of Count Emmerich Sta-dion (1839–1900). The Texan aerialist Barbette (Vander Clyde, 1904–1973), who performed a species of striptease on trapeze, ending his act with a dewigging, became the toast of Paris, and was taken up by Jean Cocteau.

Such performers were said to be “in drag,” a term from thieves’ cant that compared the train of a gown to the drag or brake on a coach, and entered the theatrical parlance from homosexual slang around 1870. “Draggingup” provides the central plot device in Brandon Thomas’ Charley’s Aunt (1892), William Douglas Home’s sex-change play Aunt Edwina (1959), and Simon Gray’s Wise Child (1968). The German equivalents were Theodor Korner’s Vetter aus Bremen and Die Gou-vemante (both 1834). A comedy which created a scandal in New York in 1896 was A Florida Enchantment by Archibald Clavering Gunter, in which a magic seed turns a young woman (played by a woman) into a man and a man (played by a man) into a woman; what shocked was the woman’s masculine amorous propensities displayed while under the influence of the seed.

Female Transvestism. For unlike female impersonation in the theatre, women dressing as men had little sanction from ancient religion or folk traditions; it has usually been condemned as a wanton assumption of male prerogative. But when women first came on the Western stage, costuming them in men’s garb was simply a means to show off their limbs and provide freedom of movement. This was certainly the case during the Restoration, when Pepys remarked of an actress in knee-breeches “she had the best legs that ever I saw, and I was well pleased by it.” Between 1660 and 1700, eighty-nine plays presented opportunities for women in men’s clothes. Nell Gwyn, Moll Davis, and others took advantage of these “breeches roles,” but few could, like Anne Bracegirdle, give a convincing portrayal of a male. Often the part travestied was that of a young rake—Sir Harry Wildair in The Constant Couple and Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera—the pseudo-lesbian overtones of the plot’s situation providing a minor thrill.

After the French Revolution, there was a passing fad for historic dramas about women who went to war as men, usually to aid their husbands or lovers. These dramas included Pixerecourt’s Charles le Temeraire, ou le Siege de Nancy (1814), Duperche’s Jeanne Hachette, ou l’Herome de Beauvais (1822) and a few about Joan of Arc; Mile. Bourgeois who specialized in such roles was praised for her “masculine energy.” The leading English “breeches” actresses of the early nineteenth century, Mme. Vestris and Mrs. Keeley were, on the other hand, noted for their delicacy, and made an impression less mannish than boyish. It was said of Vestris in her best part, in Giovanni in London, or The Libertine Reclaimed (1817), “that the number of male hearts she caused to ache, during her charming performance of the character… would far exceed all the female tender ones Byron boasts that Don Juan caused to break during the whole of his career.”

The first “principal boys” in English pantomime were slender women, but became more ample in flesh throughout the Victorian period, no real effort made to pretend they were men. Jennie Hill on the music halls and Jennie Lee as Jo in various adaptations of Bleak House, Vemet in Paris and Josephine Dora and Hansi Niese in Vienna, represented the proletarian waif, a pathetic or cocky adolescent, not a mature male. But the Viennese folk-singer Josefine Schmeer always wore men’s clothes off-stage as well. Peter Pan (1904), incarnated from its premiere by a series of outstanding actresses including Pauline Chase, Maude Adams, and Mary Martin, benefitted in the National Theatre revival of 1981 from being played by a young man.

Another aspect of male impersonation is the assumption of Shakespearean men’s roles by actresses. It was long a practice to cast women as children and fairies. More ambitious was the usurpation of leading parts, with Kitty Clive alleged to be the first female Hamlet. The powerful American actress Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876) played Romeo to her sister’s Juliet and later aspired to Cardinal Wolsey; her Romeo was viewed as “a living, breathing, animated, ardent human being,” distinct from most ranting Montagus. Women have undertaken Falstaff and Shylock on occasion, but Hamlet has proven to be irresistible. The most distinguished female Dane was Sarah Bernhardt, who, according to Mounet-Sully, lacked only the buttons to her fly; but, according to Max Beerbohm, came off tres grande dame. (Sarah had a penchant for male roles, also playing Lorenzaccio and L’Aiglon.) In our time, Dame Judith Anderson and Frances de la Tour have tried the experiment, but it has proven unacceptable to contemporary audiences.

Glamour Drag. A new development arose in nineteenth-century variety with the glamorous female impersonator and the “butch” male impersonator. The former might be a comedian who was dressed and made up to resemble a woman of taste, beauty, and chic. Glamour drag had originated in the minstrel show, where the “wench” role was usually invested in a good-looking youth. The foremost “wenches” like Francis Leon (Patrick Francis Classey, b. ca. 1840) and Eugene (D’Ameli, 1836–1870) maintained elaborate wardrobes and were regarded as models. The first white glamour drag performer appears to be Ernest Byne, who, as Ernest Boulton (b. 1848), had featured in a sensational trial for soliciting while dressed in women’s clothing.

Male impersonation was first introduced on the American variety stage by the Englishwoman Annie Hindle (b. ca. 1847) and her imitator Ella Wesner (1841–1917), both lesbians, in the guise of “fast” young men, swaggering, cigarsmoking, and coarse. They performed in the English music-hall as well, but there a toned-down portrayal aimed at a more genteel audience was affected by Bessie Bonehill (d. 1902). With her mezzo-soprano voice, she blended the coarsegrained fast man with the principal boy into a type that could be admired for its lack of vulgarity. Her example was matched by the celebrated Vesta Tilley (Matilda Alice Powles, 1864–1952), whose soprano voice never really fooled any listener; her epicene young-men-about-town were ideal types for the 1890s, sexually ambiguous without being threatening. Even so, at the Royal Command Performance of 1912, Queen Mary turned her back on Tilley’s act.

These minstrel and music-hall traditions lasted longest in black American vaudeville, where the performers’ private lives often matched their impersonations. Female impersonators included Lawrence A. Chenault (b. 1877), who played “Golden Hair Nell,” and Andrew Tribble (d. 1935), who created “Ophelia Snow.” The best-known male impersonator in Harlem was Gladys Bentley, aka Gladys Ferguson and Bobbie Minton (1907–1960), alleged to have had an affair with Bessie Smith; later in life, she married and publicly repented her lesbian past.

Musical Comedy. Critics objected when glampur drag entered musical comedy, but succumbed to the success of Julian Eltinge (William Dalton, 1882–1941). The large-boned baritone usually selected vehicles that allowed him quick wardrobe as well as sex-changes; this “ambisextrous comedian,” as Percy Hammond called him, wore costumes that rivaled those of female fashion-plates. Better liked by female than by male audiences, Eltinge worked at a butch image, regularly picking fights with insulters and announcing his coming marriage. But his sexual preferences remain a mystery, despite rumors of an affair with a sports writer.

Bert Savoy (Everett Mackenzie, 1888–1923) introduced an outrageous red-haired caricature, garish and brassy, gossipping about her absent girlfriend Margie and launching such catch-phrases as “You mussst come over” and “You don’t know the half of it, dearie.” His arch camping, performed with his effeminate partner Jay Brennan, influenced Mae West. Francis Renault (Anthony Oriema, d. 1956), billed as “The Slave of Fashion” and “Camofleur,” sang in a clear soprano and appeared in Broadway revue; Karyl Norman (George Podezzi, 1897–1947), “The Creole Fashion-plate,” switched from baritone to soprano voice, alternating sexes in his act.

Modern Male Impersonators. With the radical changes in dress and manners that followed World War I, the male impersonator became a relic, although the tradition persisted in Ella Shields (“Burlington Bertie from Bow”) and Hettie King. Ironically, contemporary feminist theatre groups have revived the type for political reasons, as in Eve Merriam’s revue The Club (1976), Timber-lake Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies (ICA Theatre, 1981), and German ensembles like Bruhwarm. The economic necessity of wearing male dress was the motive force of Simone Benmussa’s The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, whose heroine must live as a waiter, both masculine and subservient, and of Manfred Karge’s Man to Man (l987), in which a widow adopts her husband’s identity to keep his job as a crane operator.

In a work like Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979), sexual cross-casting is an important aspect of the play’s inquiry into gender roles. Lily Tomlin, in her one-woman show, has created a male lounge singer, Tommy Velour, plausible even to the hair on his chest.

Postwar Revues. During World War II, all-male drag revues were popular in the armed services and, in the postwar U.K., survived as Soldiers in Skirts and Forces Showboats. Despite the military titles, these were havens for homosexual transvestites, and, perhaps in reaction to wartime austerity, perhaps in nostalgia for a wartime stag atmosphere, the postwar period burgeoned with clubs and revues specializing in glamour drag. In fact it had been the rise of the nightclub in the 1920s which gave female impersonation its reputation as a primarily homosexual art-form.

In the United States, the Jewel Box revue, founded in Miami in 1938 by Danny Brown and Doc Brenner, enjoyed an eight-year run in the postwar period and launched a number of major talents before folding in 1973; its “male” m.c. was the black female cross-dresser Storme De-Larverie. Similar enterprises include Finocchio’s in San Francisco, Club 82 in New York, My-Oh-My in New Orleans and the Ha Ha Club in Hollywood, Florida; in Paris, Chez Madame Arthur and Le Carrousel; in West Berlin, Chez Nous and Chez Romy Haag; and in Havana, the Mon Martre Club. In London, licensing laws forced professional drag into after-hours clubs and amateur drag into local pubs, just as local interference by the Catholic Church and witch-hunting town councils legislated many of the smaller American clubs out of existence. Club transvestites were often eager to be taken for women: a Parisian star, the Bardot clone Coccinelle (Jacques-Charles Dufresnoy), pioneered with a sex-change operation and legal maneuvers to be accepted as a woman.

Many gay bars or pubs provided at least a token stage, and the female impersonator became almost exclusively what Esther Newton calls “performing homosexuals and homosexual performers,” a relatively young, overt member of a distinct subculture. But the show-business ambience could often neutralize the sexuality for a mixed or heterosexual audience. One of the most successful means of “passing” with such a public is to give impressions of female super-stars, usually including such gay icons as Mae West, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, and Judy Garland. T. C. Jones (1920–1971), a veteran of the Jewel Box, was introduced to a general public in New Faces of 1956 and toured his own revue.

Craig Russell (b. 1948) has been both the most widely known and the most versatile in this crowded trade, although Charles Pierce’s impersonations make up in vitriol what they lack in accuracy. Many of these performers disdain the appellation “impersonator”: Pierce and Lynn Carter (1925–1985) preferred to be known as “impressionists,” Jim Bailey as a “singer-illusionist,” Russell as a “character actor,” and Jimmy James (James Johnson, b. 1961) insists that his heavily researched replication of Marilyn Monroe is a kind of possession. (More original and unnerving is the Dead Marilyn, created by former Cockette Peter Stack, aka Stakula.)

The mid-60s to 70s saw a resurgence of female impersonation as an article of theatrical faith. Danny La Rue’s (Daniel Carroll, b. 1928) club in Hanover Square (1964–70) was a resort of fashion, and he became a major star of popular entertainment; despite a homosexual lifestyle well known within the show biz community, he still promotes an aggressively “normal” image. Drag mimes, lipsyncing to tapes, became ubiquitous and reached an elegant apotheosis in Paris’ La Grande Eugene. But the “radical drag queens” Bloolips (founded in London in 1970) sent up this forced glamor and other cliches of variety entertainment to make wide-sweeping political statements about social misconceptions of gender.

“Gender-fuck” and Glitter Rock. More anarchic uses of “gender-fuck” resulted from the emergence of gay liberation from the West Coast hippy scene. The Cockettes and the Angels of Light of San Francisco were among the first to use campy pastiches of popular culture for radical ends; the Cycle Sluts and, later, the street-theatre group, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, parodied traditional drag by mixing the macho of beards, leather, and hairy chests with their spangles, false eyelashes, and net-stockings. Despite the flaunted faggotry of these groups, the outrageousness appealed to heterosexual rock musicians as a new means of assault; the extreme makeups and outfits were adopted by Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, and Kiss, among others, a school which came to be known as “glitter rock” and “gender-bending.” English society, with its own more delicate tradition, gave rise to David Bowie, who presented an androgynous allure. This approach reached a logical terminus in Boy George, whose early publicity touted him as asexual or tamely bisexual.

Drama. Although Goethe preferred to see a young man as Goldoni’s Locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn), for fear lest a woman be as forward as the role demanded, female impersonation did not return to serious drama for a long time. The Russian actor Boris Glagolin (1878–1948) did attempt to play Joan of Arc in St. Petersburg. But in modem times cross-dressing became a serious aesthetic principle in the interpretation of classic texts with both the Lindsay Kemp company and the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. Kemp (b. 1940?), an original dancer and mime, won an international reputation with Flowers, an homage to Jean Genet and his versions of Salome and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, amalgams of camp sensibility with oneiric imagery. (One Kemp follower who went off on his own was Michael Matou [1947–1987], the Australian dancer and designer, who founded the Sideshow Burlesco in Sydney in 1979.) The Citizens Theatre, under the leadership of Giles Havergal, Robert David Macdonald and Philip Prowse, cast men as Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Marguerite Gautier (in Camino Real), and so forth, to stress the irreality of gender identification and the conventionality of the theatre form; they were the first to introduce a male Lady Bracknell, an innovation which has since become endemic. Less adventurous was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s all-male As You Like It, since it cautiously avoided casting adolescents in the leading parts.

Dame Comedy. Before the war, dame comedy had been sophisticated by Douglas Byng (1893–1988), who performed in London supper clubs, cabarets and in revue. Comedy persisted in clowns like Pudgy Roberts who appeared in glamour drag revues, in the all-male Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (founded 1974) and the Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet, and their operatic equivalent the Gran Scena Opera Co., founded by Ira Siff in 1982, with men singing the soprano roles. Formidable dames carry on: Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage and piano-entertainers Hinge &. Brackett (George Logan and Patrick Fyffe). In the 1980s, “alternative drag performance” could be seen at clubs and pubs in Britain: standard glamour drag was trashed by such as Ivan the Terrible and The Joan Collins Fan Club (Julian Clary and his dog Fanny), who combined self-abuse with attacks on audience expectation.

Drag has also become a component of contemporary performance art, as in John Epperson’s Ballet of the Dolls (La MaMa, New York, 1988), a confrontation of pulp fiction with the cliches of romantic ballet. This trend has its roots in the “Ridiculous Theatre” movements of the 1970s, which launched Charles Ludlam, and the Andy Warhol Factory which housed Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn. The 300-lb. underground film star Divine (Glen Milstead, d. 1988) was featured in a number of off-off-Broadway plays, most memorably as the prison matron in Tom Eyen’s Women Behind Bars. A leading exponent is Ethyl (né Roy) Eichelberger (b. 1945), whose one-man Tempest and Jocasta, or Boy-Crazy are in both the minstrel-vaudeville tradition and the shamanistic current (he sports a tattoo to assert his masculinity whatever his attire). Gender confusion is also the main theme of Los Angeles comedian John Fleck (b. 1953) (I Got the He-Be She-Be’s, 1986; Psycho Opera, 1987).

Breeches in Opera. In early baroque opera, a favorite plot was the legend of Achilles disguising himself as a maiden on the island of Scyros to avoid involvement in the Trojan war; in this equivocal disguise he was wooed by the king and wooed the princess. The subject was treated seriously by thirty-two operas between 1663 and 1837, and comically by John Gay (Achilles, 1732) and Thomas Arne (Achilles in Petticoats, 1793), and survived as dramatic material as late as Robert Bridges’ Achilles in Scyros (1890). Both as a legacy from eighteenth-century castrato singing and for reasons of vocal balance, breeches parts have persisted in opera, and it takes little time for an audience to adjust to sopranos impersonating libidinous youths like Cherubino and Octavian. Musical comedy has utilized the male-female disguise gimmick at least from Franz von Suppé’s Fatinitza (1878), but without adding anything of distinction to it, at least not since Eltinge. Danny LaRue’s appearance as Dolly Levi in a West End production of Hello, Dolly! coarsened an already coarse creation. Sugar by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill (1972) was simply an overblown remake of Some Like It Hot, just as La Cage aux Folles by Fierstein and Herman tarted up the French farce for the Broadway marketplace.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Roger Baker, Drag: A History of Female Impersonation, London: Triton, 1968; Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, Der Weibmann, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984; A. Holtmont, Die Hosenrolle, Munich: Meyer & lessen, 1925; Kris Kirk and Ed Heath, Men in Frocks, London: Gay Men’s Press, 1984; Laurence Senelick, “The Evolution of the Male Impersonator on the 19th Century Popular Stage,” Essays in Theatre, 1:1 (1982), 31–4.

Laurence Senelick

TRAVEL AND EXPLORATION

In this context, the literature of travel and exploration refers to books written by Europeans or Americans about what came to be known as the “Third World”—Asia, Africa, the islands of the Pacific, and to a certain extent the Americas (as relating to Amerindians). It would not include work in the field of anthropology. This literature of travel and exploration (and conquest) begins around the time of Columbus and goes onward until the early twentieth century, when tourism began to make the whole world a replica of the West and nothing was left to be explored.

Travel Literature. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it was possible to write about “sodomie” with some frankness. Accordingly, there are numerous candid references to homosexuality in the various writings of travelers which were collected in massive multivolume anthologies by Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas, and John Pinkerton. Purchas (the source of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”) even has a unique reference to the homosexuality of the Emperor Jahangir of India. Many other travel books during this period not collected by any later editor also contain data of this kind.

As the eighteenth century drew to a close, a slow tidal wave of puritanism and prudery rolled over the West, and by 1835 it had ceased to be safe to make open references to homosexuality in books intended for general use. Here and there in France and Germany, scholars during the nineteenth century were able to write articles or even books about homosexuality, or to mention it in passing, but in the English-speaking world there was an almost absolute taboo against mentioning such an “unspeakable” subject at all. Travelers therefore either simply did not mention what they saw in foreign lands with regard to homosexual behavior, or else they mentioned it in veiled phrases (“vice against nature,” “abominable vice,” “unnatural propensities,” and similar expressions). This sort of nonsense went on until the veil was rudely lifted by Arminius Vambery and Sir Richard Burton in the late nineteenth century, Vambery being a Hungarian traveler who had visited the court of the pederastic Amir of Bukhara in Central Asia, and Burton being the notorious explorer of Asia and Africa who wrote a whole essay on pederasty, which provoked howls of “moral” outrage. But the Oscar Wilde trials in 1895 put the lid back on until after World War I, and even to a certain extent until after World War II.

Another problem was that the Asians and Africans themselves—and this is a problem faced also by anthropologists—realized that the Western travelers were hostile to homosexuality, and therefore kept it out of their sight as much as possible. The Japanese after the beginnings of modernization in the late nineteenth century are a case in point. One need only look back to the clandestine nature of homosexual society in the United States up until the 1960s to realize how easy it is to hide a flourishing homosexual subculture from the general public, much more so from passing tourists.

The present writer can attest that homosexuality, so widespread in Morocco, remains totally out of the view of tourists who are not looking for it. Nonetheless, there have been some travelers who were allowed to see homosexual behavior going on right in front of them. In the 1950s, Wilfred Thesiger and Gavin Maxwell visited the tribes in the marshlands of southern Iraq (since, alas, ravaged by war), where the young boys were all stark naked, and there were dancing-boys who act as prostitutes. The Arabs made no secret of this to Thesiger and Maxwell, but whether they would have made a secret of it to other visitors is hard to say. The fact that Maxwell was a pederast may have made a difference.

Homosexual Questers. There is a second aspect of travel, namely the travels of homosexual men (rarely lesbians) in search of some place on earth where the taboos of the Christian West have no validity. As Kipling put it, “Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments, and a man can have a thirst.” The idea that somewhere “east of Suez” there was a paradise where “a man can have a thirst” for the forbidden is a powerful myth that took over the imagination of many homosexual men. How many explorers were actually, deep in the recesses of their minds, looking for this paradise? The wanderlust of many an explorer and traveler doubtlessly had been inspired by cravings that they hardly dare admit even to themselves. The fact that travel and exploration generally involve being in the company of other men, to the total exclusion of women, and requiring the company of friendly local boys as guides and servants, is bound to have a much stronger appeal to homosexual than to heterosexual men. Even in paradises famous for their women of easy virtue, such as Polynesia, it was homosexual men like Herman Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard who led the way, and in Bali, an island famous for its bare-breasted women, there was a colony of European homosexuals in the 1930s (driven out by the Dutch).

Some homosexual (usually pederastic) men have practically made a career out of wandering around the globe in search of exotic boys: Walter B. Harris, Michael Davidson, and Roland Raven-Hart, to name a few. If one was not too adventurous, a simple trip to France or Italy (Venice, Capri, Sicily) would suffice, and there has long flourished a homosexual colony in Tangier, exotic but near to Europe.

In the 1970s there were several Asian nations whose great poverty caused a sharp rise in the prostitution of young boys (and girls), but a public outcry forced the otherwise amoral police to crack down, or pretend to crack down, on the numerous tourists who came in just to patronize the local boys. This sort of prostitution was flourishing in Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Thailand, and the Philippines, where the town of Pagsanjan turned pederasty into its main industry. As far back as 1903, General Hector Macdonald, a hero of the British Army, had committed suicide after having sexual relations with boys in Ceylon.

The fondness for travel among modem homosexuals has led to the publication of various “gay guides,” the most complete one being the Spartacus Interna-tional Gay Guide (Berlin: Bruno Gmunder Verlag, 1989). The idea that “the grass is greener on the other side” has helped to send thousands of homosexual men in search of sexual freedom or gratification in foreign lands. To a certain extent, this is a glorified version of the sexual encounters that the heterosexual businessman has on trips to other cities—he dare not risk exposure in his home town, but nobody knows him in the other city, he is anonymous.

Local Attitudes and Foreign Myths. The question of whether the people of Asia and Africa are more liberal about sex remains to be answered. Islam is more puritanical than Christianity, but its customary sexual segregation provokes widespread homosexuality, at least of the situational sort that flourishes in boarding schools or prisons if not the “real” sort. And poverty creates the desperate amorality that breeds prostitution of all kinds. These are not the best bases for a sexual paradise, even if sexual freedom is more widespread under such conditions. But a lot of men don’t care. Hence the sexual “Meccas”—how totally unlike the purity of Mecca!—of the East.

In a sense, the sexual bazaars of the East are an artificially created response to the “east of Suez” image that many Westerners are looking for, and the supply is created to meet the demand. Thus, the image creates its own realization. The modem situation is totally unlike the earlier one because the invention of jet airplanes increased the number of tourists to Asia. In the 1930s, a slow boat to Shanghai to taste the vices of the mysterious Orient was no easy matter, but now one can fly to Asia in one day. The availability of sex and the liberalism of sexual attitudes can often be seen in amusing and ironic comparisons made by people who think that “here” it is hard but “there” it is easy. Some Americans think that Rio de Janeiro is a sexual paradise compared to the United States—the sex more available and the attitudes more liberal—while the Brazilians are thinking that their own country is puritanical and that America is the sexual paradise! But the myth keeps provoking people to travel to other countries in search of better sexual hunting grounds. (This myth also applies to the American image of Scandinavia.) Not long ago, East Baltimore was the Pagsanjan of America, but people continue to think in terms of paradises being far away.

Perhaps in the future, when wealthy Asians are common and the ADDS crisis will have been solved, one can expect the United States to be visited by homosexual tourists from Japan in search of the large and virile Western male of the cowboy and detective films they see at home.

TRIBADE

The Greek term for lesbian, tribas—from the verb tribein, “to rub”—implies that the women so designated derived their sexual pleasure from friction against one another’s bodies. Male imagination supplied further embellishments. Friedrich Karl Forberg, in his commentary on classical sexual mores entitled De figuiis Veneris (1824), asserted that “the tribades… are women in whom that part of the genital apparatus which is called the clitoris attains such dimensions that they can use it as a penis, either for fornication or for pedication …In tribades, either by a freak of nature or in consequence of frequent use, it attains immoderate dimensions. The tribade can get it into erection, enter a vulva or anus, enjoy a delicious voluptuousness, and procure if not a complete realization of cohabitation, at least something very close to it, to the woman who takes the passive role.” He adds that the term was “also applied to women who in default of a real penis make use of their finger or of a leather contrivance [dildo] which they insert into their vulva and so attain a fictitious titillation.” According to some ancient sources, a pet garden snake could also double for the virile member.

The word tribas appears comparatively late in Greek, in astrological authors and satirists of the second century of our era, yet its occurrence in the work of the Roman poet Martial at the end of the first century shows that it must have existed in vulgar speech, if not in literature, well before that time. Phaedrus (IV, 14) even equates tribades with molles mares (effeminate males = homosexuals) as individuals exhibiting disharmony between their genitalia and the direction of their sexual desires. The Latin language formed its own word frictrix or fricatrix from fricare “to rub” on the model of the Greek expression. Preserved by the texts of classical authors whose manuscripts survived into the Renaissance, the word tribade found its way into the modern languages, for example in Henri Estienne’s Apologie pour Hérodote (1566), where it remained the usual term for lesbian well into the nineteenth century. The author of the satiric poem entitled The Toast, in Latin and in English, described it as giving an account of “the progress of tribadism in England,” and Forberg mentions colleges of tribades called “Alexandrian colleges” in late eighteenth-century London.

Beginning in French in the midnineteenth century, the term lesbian gradually supplanted tribade (and sapphist) in learned and popular usage, so that today the word occurs but rarely as a deliberate archaism or classical allusion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Friedrich Karl Forberg, Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris), New York: Grove Press, 1966.

Warren Johansson

TSVETAEVA, MARINA (1892–1941)

Russian poet. The daughter of a professor of art history at the University of Moscow and founder of the first museum of the fine arts in Russia, Marina Tsvetaeva was educated both at home and then in boarding schools in Switzerland and Germany. Her poetic talent was instinctive and precocious; she began to write at the age of six, and the first book of her collected juvenilia, Evening Album (1910), earned the notice of some of the most important Russian poets of the day, one of whom, Max Voloshin, introduced her to literary circles. In the spring of 1911, at Voloshin’s celebrated home in Koktebel on the Crimean coast, she met her future husband, Sergei Efron, whom she saw as a high-minded and noble man of action. Among her constant heroes were strong and virile characters, men and women with romantic ideals and the will to act on them—Napoleon, Goethe, Rostand, Sarah Bernhardt, Maria Bashkirtseva.

In 1916 the poet Osip Mandelstam fell in love with her and followed her across Russia in an unsuccessful campaign to win her—an event both celebrated in their poetry. In Moscow in 1917, she witnessed the Bolshevik seizure of power. Her husband joined the White army as an officer, while she was stranded in the capital and did not see him for five years. Her sympathies were on “the other side,” and she composed at this time a cycle of poems entitled The Demesne of the Swans, glorifying the Tsar and the white forces.

With the war at an end, Tsvetaeva decided to emigrate in order to rejoin her husband, and headed for Prague (a Russian émigré center in the interwar years) by way of Berlin. The literary life of the first emigration, as it is now called, was exceptionally active, and Tsvetaeva had many plans of her own. Even though she had left the Soviet Union, the frontier was not yet closed, and her most famous collection, Mileposts I, was published there in 1922. For three years the couple resided happily in Prague, then in 1925 she moved to Paris—another émigré center—and lived there for fourteen years, taking an active and welcome part in the cultural life of the Russian community. However, unknown to her, her husband had been converted to communism and was working for the Soviet secret police. Now rejected and ostracized by the other émigrés, Tsvetaevaresolved to return to the Soviet Union in the wake of her husband, but when she arrived there in June 1939, she was even more hopelessly out of place. To boot, her husband was arrested and shot as an enemy of the people—because he knew too much. Evacuated to Elabuga in the Tatar Autonomous Republic, she committed suicide by hanging herself on August 31, 1941.

It was in Paris at the end of the twenties that Tsvetaeva was introduced to Natalie Clifford Barney and invited to Barney’s celebrated literary salon at 20, rue Jacob. A model for lesbian characters in almost every novel of the first three decades of the century, Barney (1876–1972) kept one of the most elegant salons in Paris, where the Russian poetess, impoverished, shabbily dressed, and unknown to English and French readers, must have cut a strange figure. The nickname Amazon had been given to Barney by her male admirer, Remy de Gourmont, and she appropriated it for the title of her book Pensées d’une Amazone (1920), to which Tsvetaeva replied in turn in her essay “Letter to an Amazon,” written in November and December of 1932 and revised at the end of 1934. Part essay and part narrative, it sets forth Tsvetaeva’s thoughts on lesbian love based on her personal experiences at various moments in her life.

Love between two women is beautiful and rewarding; God is not opposed to it, but Nature rejects it in the interest of perpetuating the species. A typical lesbian affair—between an experienced older women and a younger partner whom she seduces and initiates—runs onto the rocks when the younger woman feels the maternal instinct and abandons the older one to pursue her biological destiny in the embrace of a man who can give her children. The two part company, and the older partner searches vainly for someone to replace her lost love, but the younger one has become indifferent and is unmoved by the news, years later, of her death. This scenario parallels Tsvetaeva’s own liaison with Sofia Pamok. The piece is a poetic and often moving prose rhapsody about a dimension of sexual experience which the poetess could not reconcile with the rest of her erotic personality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Simon Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World and Her Poetry, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985; S. Poliakova, Tsvetaeva i Parnok, Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982.

Evelyn Gettone

TURING, ALAN (1912–1954)

British scientist. Alan Turing was bom into a social rank just between the British commercial classes and the landed gentry; his father served in the Indian Civil Service and Alan spent much of his childhood separated from his parents. He showed an early talent for science, and maintained this interest through his career in the British public school system, where science was simply referred to as “Stinks.”

He seems to have been a brilliant, awkward boy whose latent genius went unnoticed by all his teachers; he also had no friends until his very last years at Sherborne. Then he fell in love with a fellow science enthusiast, Christopher Morcom: the Platonic friendship was returned , and Alan Turing was for the first time in his life a happy young man. He had dreams of joining Christopher at Trinity, to pursue science together; unfortunately, Christopher Morcom suddenly died (from a much earlier infection with bovine tuberculosis). The effect on the young Turing was shattering.

He went up to Kings College, Cambridge, and embarked on a brilliant mathematical career; his first substantial contribution was his important article on the computable numbers, which contained a description of what is still known as the “Turing machine.” He was made a Fellow of Kings at the very young age of twenty-two.

Turing spent two years in America, at Princeton University, and, on his return to Britain, was drafted into British cryptanalysis for the war effort. Turing was already unusual among mathematicians for his interest in machinery; it was not an interest in applied mathematics so much as something which did not really have a name yet—”applied logic.” His contribution to the design of code-breaking machines during the war led him deeper and deeper into the field of what would now be called computer programming, except that neither concept existed at the time. He and a colleague named Welshman designed the Bombe machines which were to prove decisive in breaking the main German Enigma ciphers. For his contribution to the Allied victory in World War II Turing was named an Officer of the British Empire (O.B.E.) in 1946.

He also possessed one of the many brilliant minds of his era which independently conceived of the computer—to be precise, of the automatic electronic digital computer with internal program storage (the original “Turing machine” was a predecessor). The earliest inventor of such a device was the eccentric nineteenth-century Charles Babbage, who could not obtain the necessary hardware to implement his ideas. But in the 1940s the idea became feasible, and the “real” inventor of the computer was an international network of mathematicians and engineers which included John von Neumann and Alan Turing, among many others.

In the post-war era, Turing became fascinated with the concept of artificial intelligence, and was a pioneer in exploring this new domain. (The “Turing test” is still a current phrase among computer scientists.) He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951.

A lifelong homosexual, Turing’s life took a bad turn when he reported a burglary to the police. The officers were quick to sniff out the possibility of an “offense against morals” which soon preempted the burglary investigation; Turing gladly described what he had done with a young man in his bed, thinking that a commission was currently sitting to “legalize it.” He was brought to trial and sentenced to a year’s probation under the care of a psychiatrist, who proceeded to administer doses of female hormone to his patient, this being the current “wonder-therapy” which replaced castration as an attempt to kill the sexual instinct. For the entire year, Turing underwent the humiliation of femininization (“I’m growing breasts!” he confided to a friend), but emerged seemingly intact from the public ordeal. He committed suicide in 1954, by eating an apple he had laced with cyanide.

Turing did little or no theorizing about homosexuality, and his life accomplishments had nothing to do with the question. He does stand out as an example of a gay man whose talents were clearly “masculine” in nature. His love of young men was as simple and unpretentious as the rest of his life. If there is an object lesson in his career, it is perhaps this: this harmless English homosexual atheist mathematician made a huge contribution to winning World War II, and his reward was to be hounded into suicide by the forces of British prudery within eight years of that victory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.

Geoff Puterbaugh

TURKEY

The history of same-sex love is almost coterminous with the Turkish state. At the Seljuk court of Konya there flourished the great Sufi poet Jelal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273), whose life was decisively marked by his passion for the youth Shams al-Din of Tabriz. Not himself ethnic Turkish, Rumi prepared a path for many other figures who were. Sufism, which continues to flourish in Turkey, incorporates a tradition of the beautiful youth or Beloved as the channel of Divine Love. The cultivated school of divan poetry, which includes such masters as Kadi Burhanettin (1344–1398), §eyhi (d. ca. 1430), Nedim (1681–1730), and §eyh Galib (1757–1799), stems from this source, though sometimes inflecting it in secular directions.

Quite early in Turkish history, its rulers discovered the pleasures of sensual boy-love, and Bayezid I (1360–1403) sent his soldiers to comb the conquered areas to find the most delightful boys for his harem. His example caused the practice of taking boys for sexual purposes to spread in the army, among government officials, and through the nobility. During their wars of conquest the Turkish sovereigns did not fail to renew their supply of slaves—especially beautiful, highly desired European youths. This levy as much as anything else contributed to European hatred of the Turks.

Mehmed II, who captured Constantinople in 1453 and made it the capital of the Ottoman Empire, is described as a notorious boy-lover. To rouse his troops to assault the city he painted a glowing picture of the booty that awaited them—especially the gentle, beautiful, aristocratic boys, enough for all. The historical accounts of the fall of the city abound in tales of rape and atrocity, as the Greek nobles were murdered and their children enslaved, with the 200 most handsome going to the Sultan’s harem. At the battle of Mohacsin 1526, the Turkish victory caused the entire Balkan Peninsula to fall under Ottoman rule. The Croatian Bartolomej Durdevic has left an eloquent description of the boys enslaved after such conquests and sold as catamites or male prostitutes.

The boys chosen for the service of the ruler ranged in age from 8 to 16; they received a geisha-like training to make them both entertainers and skilled bed partners. When the Turkish Empire ceased to expand, the Sultan imposed an infamous “child tax.” Every four years the Sultan’s agents would visit each village in European Turkey to select the most handsome boys between 7 and 9 for the army corps, the palace pages’ school, and the labor corps. European boys were typically not castrated, but feminized in training, manners, and costume “to serve the lusts of lecherous masters.” Much has been written on boy-love in the court of Ali Pasha, the Turkish governor of Ioannina in Greece, whose agents roamed the dominion in search of beautiful children, even killing parents who refused their sons to the governor. Ali and his son are said to have engaged in sadomasochistic practices reminiscent of the writings of the Marquis de Sade, both torturing the boys and presenting them with gifts.

Even after Mehmed IV (1641–1691) abolished the “child tribute,” the supply of boys was maintained by an active slave traffic into the Turkish Empire. In the 1850s Circassian slave dealers supplied large numbers of children—often sold into slavery by their own parents. Again in 1894, large numbers of the handsomest Armenian boys were taken for sexual purposes. Perhaps no city has ever been so famous for its boy brothels as Istanbul, where boys of various nationalities were once available as freely as girls. The anonymous English poem Don Leon falsely attributed to Byron (1836) tells of “seeking a brothel where… The black-eyed boy his trade unblushing plies/’ To the extent that this tradition survives in modem Turkey, the brothels have preserved the arts cultivated to their peak in the Sultans’ harems.

Yet even with their excesses—which were in fact exaggerated by hostile European commentators propagating the stereotype of the “cruel and lustful Turk”—the Ottomans were also capable of man-boy love, and European boys were all the more desirable because of their capacity for affection and erotic response which the more familiar Near Eastern boys were thought to lack. The boy used for sexual purposes could graduate from his master’s bed to become the manager of an estate, the steward of a household, even a general, court official or governor if his protector were powerful enough. Since the homoerotic side of Turkish life was omnipresent and inevitable, those who could take advantage of the opportunity thrived and climbed the social ladder.

Modem Turkey has actually suffered from Europeanization in that the Christian attitudes became part of the political mentality of the Republic, with the familiar practice of raiding gay bars, arresting the patrons, and subjecting them to humiliation and even torture. Yet despite this, the Istanbul of today is thought to have nearly half a million homosexuals, who concentrate in the Beyoğlu (Pera) district, especially the Cihangir quarter. A majority must still conceal their homosexuality from their families and colleagues at work. Arslan Yüzgün’s study of 223 homosexual men in Istanbul showed that 56.1 percent are both active and passive, 30.9 percent are passive only and 13 percent are active only. On the whole they are more educated than the average of the Turkish population. However, the traditional stigmatization of the passive as opposed to the active homosexual lingers. The active homosexual is esteemed and can even boast of his ways, the passive homosexual is despised and persecuted by the police even in the absence of laws against his behavior.

The Western gay rights movement has finally reached Turkey, and in April 1987 the terror tactics employed by the police in Istanbul sparked a resistance movement in which eighteen homosexuals sued the police as a group for the first time, submitted a petition to the Attorney General, and later staged a hunger strike in Taksim Square. Thus another segment of the international gay community has achieved the stage of political consciousness that enables it to organize and fight for its human rights.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jonathan Drake, “’Le Vice’ in Turkey,” International Journal of Greek Love, 1:2 (1966), 13–27; Nermin Menemcioglu and Fahir Iz, eds., The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse, London: Penguin, 1978; Arslan Yuzgiin, “The Fact of Homosexuality in Turkey and the Problems Confronting Turkish Homosexuals,” Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? Amsterdam: Vrij Universiteit, 1987, 181–91 [summarizes some of the findings of his Türkiye’de E§cinsellik (Dün, Bugün), Istanbul: Hüür-Yüz Yayincilik, 1986].

Warren Johansson

TWILIGHT MEN

In Kenilworth Bruce’s 1933 novel, Goldie, the hero joins a prototypical (and fictional) gay rights organization, The Twilight League. This reflects the title of André Tellier’s popular homosexual novel, Twilight Men (1931). It is doubtful whether the term enjoyed much real currency, but images of shadows and of darkness were common in the fiction of the period—and, given the obligatory tragic ending, all too appropriate.

In the nineteenth century the adjective “crepuscular” enjoyed some vogue to designate a declining civilization, because of the allegory of civilization following a quasi-solar course of ascent, zenith, afternoon fullness, and then descent into twilight; hence crepuscular trenches with fin-de-siècle and decadent. Richard Wagner’s 1874 opera, Die Gotterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), was very popular in this period.

Recently, the term “midnight cowboy,” from James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 book and the subsequent film, has had some currency. (For reasons not altogether clear, much homosexual social life begins only after ten or eleven in the evening.) Presumably real cowboys have to be up too early in the morning to be out until midnight.

TYPOLOGY OF HOMOSEXUALITY

A valuable conceptual tool in seeking to understand a wide-ranging phenomenon or related group of phenomena which show both commonality and diversity, typology is the arrangement or classification of the elements under study so as to highlight both points of similarity and points of difference. Typology traces its roots back to the biologist’s taxonomy, or classification of species, a practice which stems ultimately from Aristotle and his school.

In 1922 the great sociologist Max Weber applied the notion of “ideal types” to social behavior. These types were characterized as hypothetical constructs made up of the salient features or elements of a social phenomenon, or generalized concept, in order to facilitate comparison and classification of what is found in operation. Psychology, linguistics, anthropology, the history of science, comparative religion, and other disciplines have since made considerable use of such tools, often called “models” or “paradigms.”

Once a typology has been constructed, it becomes an aid in the interpretation of a variety of concrete phenomena, but it can be misused to distort reality, as the features selected to compose them may acquire a distorted importance or concreteness, leading to the neglect of other factors. Hence typologies must be continually subjected to reexamination as new data become available, and revised as the understanding of the phenomena becomes more sophisticated.

Typologies are most helpful in preventing the ascription of traits in one subgroup of the phenomena under study to other subgroups where they may not belong, and in underlining points of commonality which may disclose historical influences or causal factors that otherwise might not have suggested themselves to the investigator.

In natural science, the term “paradigm” has been used since Thomas S. Kuhn’s widely read book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to designate the prevailing system of understanding phenomena which guides scientific theorization and experimentation, and which is held to be the most useful way of explaining the universe, or a part of it, until that paradigm is eventually overthrown by new data and replaced by a newer paradigm. As Kuhn has pointed out, paradigms may function without the conscious adhesion of those who employ them, and in the broadest sense they often form part of the unvoiced inner structure of human existence.

In the field of homosexuality, such popularly adopted typologies or paradigms have become extraordinarily powerful, though seldom of universal application. One of the great issues remaining in the study of homosexuality is how such popular paradigms are adopted by a culture and how they are lost or overthrown. A puzzling historical example is the paradigm shift in England and other industrializing Western countries which occurred from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, such that male homosexual relations came to be seen as usually involving two adults rather than an adult and a boy. A current example is the emergence in countries like Japan and Thailand and in much of Latin America of a new paradigm (mutual androphilia or relationships between two adults, both male-identified) to compete with traditional paradigms such as pederasty and the model of “norm al” males pairing with effeminate surrogate females.

Earlier Attempts to Create Scientific Paradigms of Homosexual Behavior and Relationships. In classical antiquity a major division was drawn emphasizing an active-passive contrast in sexual behavior, with the active (penetrating) partners considered “manly” and the passive (penetrated) role reserved for boys, slaves, foreigners, those vanquished in battle, and so forth. Beyond this simple dichotomy, little thought was given to typology.

Those, like K. H. Ulrichs and K. M. Kertbeny, who initiated serious comparative scholarship on homosexuality in the nineteenth century tended to view all homosexual behavior in essentially monolithic terms. They were largely unaware of the degree to which same-sex activity in other times and climes differed from that with which they were familiar. This tendency to assimilate all homosexual conduct to a single model has survived into the present day in what is sometimes called “naive essentialism,” evident in the tendency to speak of ancient personalities such as Plato and Alexander the Great, or even mythical figures such as Hylas and Ganymede, as “gay,” thus (in this instance) obscuring the difference between ancient pederasty and modem mutual androphilia.

An advance occurred with the more detailed research published by many scholars in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1899–1923) under the editorship of Magnus Hirschfeld. In his own comprehensive work Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914), Hirschfeld outlined a typology based on the age of the love object of the homosexual subject: pedophiles, who are attracted to pre-pubic children; ephebophiles, whose love object is from 14 to 21 (in current usage, from 17 to 21); androphiles, who prefer those from maturity to the beginning of old age; and gerontophiles, who like older people. Equivalent terms for lesbian relationships given by Hirschfeld were korophile, parthenophile, gynecophile, and graophile.

In addition to these schemes, which reflect object choice, Hirschfeld drew up a typology of homosexual acts which distinguished four major categories: manual, oral, intracrural, and anal.

Hirschfeld’s older contemporary Richard von Krafft-Ebing advanced a typology based on the time of life of homosexual activity, thereby emphasizing adolescent experimentation, “temporary” (situational) homosexuality, and late-blooming homosexuality; this latter concept relates to the notion of “latent homosexuality.”

In 1913 Hans Blüher, who was influenced by Sigmund Freud, distinguished three basic types: the “heroic-male” form, characterized by individuals who are markedly masculine and not outwardly distinguishable from heterosexuals (and may in fact be bisexual); the type of the effeminate invert; and latent inversion, in which the longing for one’s own sex is unconscious, rising to the surface only on particular occasions or not at all.

In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey and his associates developed a sevenfold scale of sexual orientation, but this was not a true typology since there were no clear criteria dividing, say, those in group II from those in group HL In fact, Kinsey viewed this fluidity as an advantage since he opposed what he regarded as overrigid classifications.

Toward a Contemporary Typology. None of these writers sought to develop a more global typology which might encompass the full range of cultures and time periods, in part because they had no access to or were not inclined to deal with ethnological and other data regarding societies apart from their own. As gay studies began to expand horizons, however, the need for more comprehensive typologies which included a wider range of popular paradigms became evident.

One of the major flaws of earlier typologies was their tendency to concentrate on a single linear axis, producing two-dimensional structures. Inevitably, these schemes left out major lines of differentiation and similarity. More sophisticated new typologies might be drawn on three or even more axes, making them difficult to state simply in words (though sometimes more easily in diagrams), but probably more realistic. One must, of course, stop somewhere, or one ends up with the 687,375 types posited by the Dutch writer L.S.A.M. von Römer in 1904. (Most of these are theoretical, von R6mer admitted, with only a tenth of them really viable. But even restricting oneself to male homosexuality as such, one would have more than 11,000 types.)

For their part, anthropologists have ascertained, during the first half of the twentieth century, that there are some 3,000 living cultures. The rapid progress of acculturation will probably prevent anthropologists from learning the native organization of homosexuality in the majority of them. Records of the past, however, permit one to add data from many cultures that are now dead, but are sufficiently known for their systems of sexual organization to be catalogued. If there truly were 11,000 same-sex types available for distribution, each culture could have one of its very own—a conclusion no doubt pleasing to the social constructionists, who believe that cultural differentiation inevitably produces differentiation of the forms of homosexual behavior. John J. Winkler has claimed that “almost any imaginable configuration of pleasure can be institutionalized as conventional and perceived by its participants as natural.” Empirical research has not borne out this universal-polymorphous hypothesis, for there are only a handful of basic types. The conclusion is inescapable: since cultures are legion but sexual arrangements are few, there can be no one-to-one correlation of culture and sexual-orientation typing.

As Stephen O. Murray notes, “There is diversity, intraculturally as well as cross-culturally, but there is not unlimited variation in social organization and categorization of sexuality. Despite pervasive intracultural variability which is highlighted by [the] anthropological tradition of seeking exotic variance, relatively few of the imaginable mappings of cognitive space are recurrently used by diverse cultures.” (Social Theory, Homosexual Realities, New York, 1984, p. 45).

Why such a limited repertory of types? Although progress in this realm is probably linked to the still-unsolved riddle of the biological and constitutional underpinnings of homosexual behavior, some conclusions may be offered.

A Triaxial Typology. Keeping in mind the wealth of data now available, and the necessity for clear and simple principles governing the definition of ideal types or paradigms, can one construct a useful typology of transcultural and transhist orical homosexual relationships?

Yes, but only along multiple axes. One of these needs to acknowledge that there is more than one gender, and moreover that homosexuality does not always exist in strict isolation from heterosexuality. At one end of the “gender axis” both partners are exclusively male homosexual. Moving toward the middle, at least one of the males also relates heterosexually, then both also relate heterosexually. At the other end of the gender axis one finds two exclusively homosexual/lesbian females, with intervening positions for one or both of the females also to relate heterosexually. In the middle, so to speak, one could place an exclusively heterosexual relationship, but with that position one is no longer concerned. Drawn out, the gender axis might look like this:

A second dimension, the “role axis,” can account for the major division between relationships which are role-oriented (generally along active-passive, penetrator-penetratee lines of sexual activity) and those which are significantly sexually reciprocal (with the partners exchanging sexual roles frequently if not customarily). The role axis would have gender-differentiated relationships at one end, followed by age-graded relationships; at the other (reciprocal) end is mutual androphilia. In between but still on the role-oriented side are to be found most forms of situational homosexuality; near the middle and tending to straddle the line are adolescent sexual experimentation (which can be mutual or one-sided) and ephebophilia (which shows many role characteristics but can be sexually reciprocal).

A third dimension, the “time axis,” needs to be added to show the major division between those homosexual relationships which are necessarily temporary, or time-limited, and those which have at least the potential for relative permanence. On this axis one finds gender-differentiated and androphile relationships at the “permanent” end; situational and adolescent experimentation at the “temporary” end (some might add one-night stands and anonymous encounters here), with ephebophilia and age-differentiated relationships also on the “temporary” side. A graph combining these two axes looks like this:

Features of the Types Noted. Some basic features of these paradigms merit notice, bearing in mind that variations of a relatively minor nature can easily be found.

In the age-differentiated type, as seen in ancient Greek and in Islamic pederasty, Spartan korophilia, pedophilia, Japanese Samurai, the apprentices of the Middle Ages, and perhaps the initiatory homosexuality of tribal Melanesia, the older partner has something, namely adulthood and the knowledge that goes with it, that the younger is seeking to acquire. Accordingly, there is a sense of passage of power from the one to the other, aptly symbolized by the fact that the older is the penetrator and the younger the receiver. This state of inferiority that the protege finds himself in is, however, only temporary, since he will pass to adulthood and penetrator status. The modem term ”intergenerational sex” is misleading, since in many societies only a difference of a half or a third of a generation is typically found. The adult in this relationship may often relate to opposite-sex adults or children as well.

The gender-differentiated type is seen among the berdache of the North American Indians, the shamans of Siberia, the mahu of the South Pacific, the butchfem lesbian pair, the Indian hajira, the homosexual transvestite, the Thail katoey, the kadesh sacred prostitutes, the argr of medieval Scandinavia, and the “straight trade” who goes with “queens,” and can be found in many Mediterranean-derived cultures today. In these cultures the penetrated partner in male relationships relinquishes his male identity and the prerogatives of manhood for various compensations, which range from relative freedom of dress and manners to the magical powers of shamans. It is not necessary that the passive partner be reclassified as a full woman, though this sometimes occurs; he may be termed “not man” or some approximation to “third sex.” What is important is that he is not considered to be of the same gender as his partner. Berdachehood means lifelong commitment to the role; it is not a career stage, as occurs in the age-differentiated type. The other, penetrating partner is in the gender-differentiated model considered to be a normal or typical male who might as easily bond with a female. Female counterparts found in the Amazon type relinquish feminine identity and sometimes become warriors, perhaps marrying a “true” female. The “masculine” partner in a male relationship or “fern” partner in a lesbian one will usually relate to the opposite sex also, though the “changed gender” partner does not, leaving two spaces open on the gender axis.

In both of the above models, the gender- and age-differentiated, two distinct roles are assumed, with virtually no overlap or reciprocity; the two partners are also viewed as distinctly unequal, if complementarity so. Mutual androphilia, the third major type, is relatively recent, found as a widespread model only in the industrialized societies of Western Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (though it was probably a marginal practice in many earlier complex societies). In mutual androphilia both partners are adults and neither relinquishes his manhood or her womanhood. Sexual reciprocation and sexual role reversal are generally honored if not universally practiced, and in theory the partners are equal. However, the relationship is only relatively egalitarian, since other differentials, such as those of race or class, may play a part.

Adolescent sexual experimentation usually does not lead to an adult homosexual relationship. It may be either reciprocal, especially in the form of mutual masturbation, or it may be role-oriented, depending on the power relationship preexisting between the youths concerned; generally the horny adolescent male seems to prefer to maintain a dominant role but may accept reciprocation if he is unable to persuade or coerce his partner into a submissive role. The teen-age girl, however, seems more willing to reciprocate in experimental play.

Ephebophilia shows characteristics that relate it in some respects to age-differentiated relationships, such as age difference itself, social role differences, and transfer of knowledge, while in other respects it reveals marked contrasts. The ephebe concerned, rather than being penetrated, may take the “male” role as “trade,” considering his older partner to be “less than male,” or there may be reciprocity as in androphilia.

Perhaps the most amorphous type in this schema is situational, a category which frequently shows some overlap with the gender-differentiated because the heterosexually identified participants apply the heterosexual paradigm known to them to the previously unfamiliar homosexual experience. In situations such as prison life, this is particularly marked. Because situational homosexuality usually takes place where access to the opposite sex is denied (on shipboard, in army camps and barracks, harems, and boarding schools), there may be no actualized relationship to the opposite sex, though heterosexual feelings are often expressed. Male slaves and prisoners of war as well as victims of rape and those subjected to sexual forms of enforcing dominance find the role orientation to be emphasized; these victims commonly relate to the opposite sex as much as their penetrators. Still other instances of situational homosexuality involve initiations and rituals, usually emphasizing both role and transience.

Male prostitution should not be seen as a unitary phenomenon, but it is occasionally situational (in which cases it is usually role-oriented and highly transient), and in the case of transvestites is clearly gender-differentiated. Most commonly it seems to follow the ephebophilic model.

Conclusion. The triaxial schema presented above seeks to accommodate the current state of knowledge, but doubtless it will be subject to criticism—no typology being able to account for the great diversity of human sexuality—and, as knowledge deepens, will eventually be revised. Nevertheless, it should be helpful in making clear not only the diversity of paradigms encountered in any comprehensive study of homosexuality, but also the limited number of lines or axes of difference which serve as the main features delimiting one model from another.

Stephen Donaldson and Wayne R. Dynes

T

TACITUS (BORN CA. A.D. 55–56)

TALMUD

TASTE

TCHAIKOVSKY, PETER IL’YICH (1840–1893)

TEAROOMS

TELEOLOGY

TELEPHONE

TELEVISION

TEMPLARS

TENNYSON, ALFRED, LORD (1809–1892)

TESLA, NIKOLA (1856–1943)

THAILAND

THEATRE AND DRAMA

THEBES

THEOCRITUS (CA. 301-CA. 260 B.C.)

THEOGNIS (F.L. C.A, 544–541 B.C.)

THIRD SEX

TIBULLUS, ALBIUS (50–17 B.C.)

TILDEN, WILLIAM T., II (1893–1953)

TOILET SEX

TRADE

TRAGEDY

TRANSSEXUALISM

TRANSVESTISM (CROSS-DRESSING)

TRANSVESTISM, THEATRICAL

TRAVEL AND EXPLORATION

TRIBADE

TRICK

TSVETAEVA, MARINA (1892–1941)

TURING, ALAN (1912–1954)

TURKEY

TWILIGHT MEN

TWIN STUDIES

TYPOLOGY OF HOMOSEXUALITY