He ran all the way [from a meeting with his ex-lover] back to Sutherland’s apartment, where he found Sutherland in a black Norell standing beside the baby grand piano and singing in a velvet voice: “This time we almost made the pieces fit, didn’t we?” [Sutherland] held out his long-gloved arm to Malone and said: “Were you a model of propriety? Did you conduct yourself with dignity?” And then, seeing Malone was distraught, he took off his long gloves, made him a cup of tea, and sat with him on the sofa and listened to his tale of regret and loss until it was time to go to the White Party.
—Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance. There’s something about those questions that’s so humiliating, I truly love it—there are all these times in life when the word “you” seems to sharpen, to become an exposing scalpel….
Creatures, ahoy! Just three book notes this time.
Dancer from the Dance, Andrew Holleran. A lush, camp, high-tragic tale of gay life in the disco years. The high aspect of the tragedy always undercuts its misery, always suggests some door into either happiness or mysticism, and Holleran leans harder on the second possibility than the first, God bless him, I bet he was an altar boy. Gorgeously written, full of votives and poppers, gossip and longing.
The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution, by Niklas Frykman. A look at the ideas and practices of mutinous sailors in roughly the 18th century. Some nations’ navies have more complete records than others, and I also struggled at times to follow the timeline. But this book offers vivid portrayals of desperate working-class struggle. It explores the political complexity (Frykman hints, impossibility) of class-based solidarity within a colonial structure—the sailors, themselves of many races and nations, often had to figure out whether they should ally with less-racist colonial rulers or the more-racist white working class, and the colonial rulers frequently used those divisions to defeat the sailors’ efforts. And it’s a tacit reflection on the nature of modernity.
One of Frykman’s theses is that the mutinies revived premodern shipboard traditions of democratic governance and shared responsibility, which in the modern era had been replaced by strict hierarchy: rules, enforced by shocking violence, replaced personal loyalty enforced by the captain’s charisma. Revolution followed, as an equally-impersonal or philosophical response to the “philosophical” rationalization and brutalization of hierarchy. This account will, of course, thrill the hearts of all the anti-moderns in my readership, you gleeful little undermining moles, you.
Anyway you’ll also get horrifying descriptions of the misery of shipboard life, and the ferocious measures different governments used to get sailors. But also descriptions of the specific philosophical foundations of different forms of mutiny, and the specific political structures the sailors put into place, contra the stereotype that they were simply too crude to sustain decent political life without the firm hand of their betters.
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century, Graham Robb. A delightfully-written, polemical history. Robb has a few theses here, and he knows that he’s pounding the table a bit for all of them.
The first is an attack on Foucault’s idea of the invention of homosexuality. Robb wants to prove that the idea of a kind of person who seeks love and sex with the same sex existed well before Foucault’s preferred date for the Nativity of the Homosexual. Robb implies heavily that the idea of this kind of person has always been available, as vs. a constellation of same-sex sexual acts which can be attached to a person in various complex ways and which only sometimes overlap with love. I wrote about this a bit in Tenderness and my basic position is that it’s sort of true but not super true. There are scattered bits of evidence that people could conceive of their lives in a way we’d recognize—the fable of the round people in The Symposium is the most obvious—but those hints and possibilities only coalesce into communities and subcultures in like mid-modernity, the very late 18th through the 19th centuries. So that happens after (this is important imho) the loss of forms of publicly-honored same-sex love.
It’s obviously possible that I only think this because of gaps in the historical record. And Robb definitely discovers self-conscious subcultures and communities, who understood themselves as something we’d recognize as gay, well before the term “homosexual” was coined. He also does persuasive spadework on his other theses, e.g. although the evidence available to us often frames its subject as crime or disease, we can see that people were able to love their lovers—homosexual love always gleams within the history of homosexual sex. He argues that the 19th century was not as brutal toward gay people as the 20th, a thesis he doesn’t quite prove imho but he does offer good corrections to the conventional wisdom. For me, what stood out here was the difference between diagnosis, in which homosexuals themselves participated and which they/we shaped, and cure, which rose to prominence in the 20th century and provoked so much cruelty and despair.
I was, maybe predictably, least-satisfied by the chapter on Christian religion; for this subject I’d still recommend Frederick S. Roden’s Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (somebody PLEASE reprint this). I do see the overlaps between gay heresy and gay attempted obedience—we are still siblings, we share many longings—but, you know, the differences mattered a lot to the people Robb profiles. I’m not sure you respect the spirituality of either Walt Whitman or Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins if you treat their relationship to queer eros as basically the same. (Also like, Fr. Hopkins is identified as an Anglican churchman when he was already Catholic. Another situation where the differences matter a lot, despite the similarities!) Moreover, attempts to recruit Biblical figures as models of sexual freedom get sordid pretty fast—there are lots of reasons not to suggest that Jesus had sex, let’s really not turn Christ into Zeus here. It’s not cute.
But mostly I just loved this book for its stories, and for Robb’s humor, which is often laced with delight or fury: “Any doctor who had peered into a thousand anuses looking for the physiological signs of ‘inversion’ was unlikely to conclude that his theory had led him down a cul-de-sac.” The glorious “actress with modern views” personals ad on page 147 needs to be a movie. There are also plenty of insightful lines: “The idea that homosexuals were constitutional liars was usually set aside when they claimed to be cured.” In the 19th century, “[s]ex was reincarnated as the sphinx which could tell the final truth about a human being.” There’s a fun little catalog of queer poetic forms—including the “arse-in-the-air sonnet”!
And you get to watch how fast friendship becomes a suspicious category, as the distinction collapses between same-sex love and gay sex. Quoting a Frenchman who “lived quite openly with his friend”: “Any friendship that lasts more than thirty years eventually becomes respectable.” Like… why was it not respectable? Because modernity, read The Friend, etc etc….
I also read Carmen Maria Machado’s experimental memoir of lesbian domestic abuse, In the Dream House. It was truly excellent, and I’ll be writing about it in the next Rogation Dragon, but wanted to tell you all to pick it up asap.
icymi: I reviewed Germany’s Oscar entry, Great Freedom, which presses many of the same bruises as Robb’s book.
Now Playing: Morrissey, “Picadilly Palare.”
Men holding hands via PxHere under a Creative Commons license.