F


Faggot
This contemptuous slang term for male homosexual carries overtones of effeminacy and cowardice. Inasmuch as its use is widespread and its origins usu­ally misunderstood, it deserves careful consideration.
One of the most persistent myths that have gained a foothold in the gay movement is the belief that "faggot" de­rives from the basic meaning of "bundle of sticks used to light a fire," with the histori­cal commentary that when witches were burned at the stake, "only presumed male homosexuals were considered low enough to help kindle the fires."
The English word has in fact three forms: faggot, attested by the Oxford Eng­lish Dictionary from circa 1300; fadge, attested from 1588; and faggald, which the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue first records from 1375. The first and sec­ond forms have the additional meaning "fat, slovenly woman" which according to the English Dialect Dictionary survived into the nineteenth century in the folk speech of England.
The homosexual sense of the term, unknown in England itself, appears for the first time in America in a vocabu­lary of criminal slang printed in Portland, Oregon in 1914, with the example "All the fagots (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight." The apocopated (clipped) form fag then arose by virtue of the ten­dency of American colloquial speech to create words of one syllable; the first quotation is from the book by Neis Anderson, The Hobo (1923): "Fairies or Fags are men or boys who exploit sex for profit." The short form thus also has no connection with British fag as attested from the nineteenth century (for example, in the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays) in the sense of "public school boy who per­forms menial tasks for an upperclassman."
In American slang faggot/fag usurped the semantic role of bugger in British usage, with its connotations of extreme hostility and contempt bordering on death wishes. In more recent decades it has become the term of abuse par excel­lence in the mouths of heterosexuals, of­ten just as an insult aimed at another male's alleged want of masculinity or courage, rather than implying a sexual role or orientation.
The ultimate origin of the word is a Germanic term represented by the Nor­wegian dialect words fagg, "bundle, heap," alongside bagge, "obese, clumsy creature" (chiefly of animals). From the latter are derived such Romance words as French bagasse and ltalian bagascia, "prostitute," whence the parallel derivative bagascione whose meaning matches that of American English faggot/fag, while Catalan bagassejar signifies to faggot, "to frequent the company of loose women."
The final proof that faggot cannot have originated in the burning of witches at the stake is that in English law both witchcraft and buggery were punishable by hanging, and that in the reign of the homosexual monarch James I the execu­tion of heretics came to an end, so that by the time American English gave the word its new meaning there cannot have been in the popular mind even the faintest remnant of the complex of ideas credited to the term in the contemporary myth. It is purely and simply an Americanism of the twenti­eth century.
Given the fact that the term fag­got cannot refer to burning at the stake, why does the myth continue to enjoy popularity in the gay movement? On the conscious level it serves as a device with which to attack the medieval church, by extension Christianity in toto, and finally all authority. On another level, it may linger as a "myth of origins," a kind of collective masochistic ritual that willingly identifies the homosexual as victim. It should be evident that the word faggot and the ideas that have been mistakenly asso­ciated with it serve no useful function; the sooner both are abandoned, the better.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Warren Johansson, "The Etymology of the Word Faggot," Gay Books Bulletin, 6 (1981), 16-18, 33.
Warzen Johansson

Fairy
The word fairy, derived from the French feerie, the name of the mythical realm of these supernatural beings, was one of the commonest terms for the male homosexual in America in the 1925-1960 period. In an article published in Ameri­can Journal of Psychology in 1896, "The Fairies" of New York are mentioned as a secret organization whose members at­tended coffee-klatsches; dressed in aprons and knitted, gossiped and crocheted; and held balls in which men adopted ladies' evening dress. The spellings faery and fary also appear in the literature. The word designated the more stereotypical or "obvious" sort of street homosexual, with the semantic link supplied by the notion of the delicate and fastidious that had attached itself to the expression, so that it was transferred effortlessly to a dainty and effeminate type of male. The image of the "fairy" in book illustration as a winged creature flitting about the landscape proba­bly contributed to the further evolution of flit as a slang term for homosexual. The semantic development of fairyin this sense began on the east coast and spread to the rest of the country, but not to other Eng­lish-speaking areas of the world. In the 1960s the word yielded to gay as a positive term preferred by the movement, and to faggot or fag as the vulgar term of abuse.
In the late 1970s a quasi-religious movement began on the west coast of the United States under the rubric of fairy spirituality. Inspired by the ideas of gay pioneer Harry Hay, this trend emphasized the concept that male homosexuals who will acknowledge their difference ("fair­ies" or "faeries") have special insights and gifts for interpersonal relations. It looked to the supposed homoerotic element in shamanism as a prehistoric archetype. Fairy retreats held at remote country sites, with neopagan rituals, serve to affirm solidarity among the fairies. This movement, combining counterculture survivals with elements of the hermetic tradition, is part of a larger complex of New Age religious phenomena that are characteristic of the western United States, though they also enjoy some following elsewhere.

Falla, Manuel de (1876-1946)
Spanish composer. Falla ranks as a key figure in both the renovation of Spanish classical music and the flowering of Andalusian culture in the early twenti­eth century. His homosexuality is not known directly, but the circles in which he moved in both Paris and Granada, his friendships, style of life, and enthusiasm for the Andalusian past, enthusiasm which was frequently associated in Spain with homosexuality, permit it to be inferred.
Falla was born in the ancient Andalusian city of Cadiz. As his composi­tions were received with indifference in Madrid, in 1907Falla moved to Paris, where he was successful. He left that city at the outbreak of World War I, and influenced by his librettist Gregorio Martinez Sierra, author of Granada, gula emocional (1911), made his home in Granada from 1919 to 1939.
Andalusian civilization was al­ready of considerable interest to Falla; Granada was the setting of his opera La vida breve (Life is Short; 1904-05), and his very successful Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1916) is an evocation of the van­ished sensual and erotic world of Islamic Spain. He was the key figure in the effort to conserve, through a festival and competi­tion in 1922, the dying cante jondo song of Andalusia's past. The festival, for reasons which are not public, marks a turning point in Falla's work, which became pro­gressively less Andalusian and more Catho­lic in inspiration. His Retablo de maese Pedro (Master Peter Puppet's Show; 1923), based on an episode from Don Quixote, and the Harpsichord Concerto (1927), both masterpieces, were the last major compo­sitions he would complete. He declined to set to music a one-act libretto, El calesero (The Coachman), written for him by Fed­erico García Lo rea, although, strongly urged by friends, he did set Góngora's "Sonnet to Córdoba" - Córdoba was the capital of Andalusia at its peak - to music for the tercentenary of that author in 1927.
In 1927 Falla began a composi­tion ideologically opposed to his Andalusian-themed works, an operatic setting of Verdaguer's epic poem L'Atlántida. In it, Catalonia and Falla's native Cádiz are fulfilled through the discovery of America by Columbus. Falla never completed his Atlántida, which was completed after his death by his only student, Ernesto Halff ter. It has been indifferently received.
Falla was disturbed and depressed by the anti-Catholic violence of Spain of the early 1930s. Isolated and silent during the Civil War, in 1939 he fled to Argentina, where he died.
BIBLIOGRAPHY, f. B. Trend, Manuel de Falla and Spanish Music, New York: Knopf, 1934.
Daniel Eisenberg

Famous Homosexuals, Lists of
It seems that every disadvantaged social group has a need to find distin­guished individuals of the past with whom it can identify. This need is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the case of the homosexual minority in modern society. Even in the era when sexual activity be­tween members of the same sex was branded as a "crime against nature," then-conduct was extenuated by the fact that figures celebrated in the annals of war, politics, and literature had loved their own sex.
In "l'Amour nommé Socratique," an article in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), Voltaire gives one of the earliest of such lists, based largely on his knowledge of Greco-Roman pederasty. The anonymous author of Don Leon (ca. 1836) has the poet Byron say:
When young Alexis claimed a
Virgil's sigh,He told the world his
choice; and may not I?...
Say, why, when great Epaminondas
died,
Was Cephidorus buried by his side? Or why should Plutarch with eulogiums cite
That chieftain's love for young catamite,
And we be forced his doctrine to decry,
Or drink the bitter cup of infamy?.. Look, how infected with this rank disease
Were those who held St. Peter's holy keys,...
How many captains, famed for deeds of arms,
Have found their solace in a minion's arms!
The first serious attempt to draw up a list of notable homosexuals of past centuries was in the second volume of Heinrich Hoessli's Eros: Die Mannerliebe der Griechen (1838). Later in the nineteenth century other lists were assembled by KarlHeinrich Ulrichs and by the British writers Henry Spencer Ashbee, Sir Richard Burton, and Havelock Ellis. An entire volume entitled Berühmte Homosexuelle (Famous Homosexuals) was compiled in 1910 by the pioneer student of homosexu­ality, the Berlin physician Albert Moll. No fewer than 300 names appear in Magnus Hirschfeld's major work synthesizing almost two decades of research, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914). The early phase of the postwar homophile movement produced a 751-page roster in Noel I. Garde's Jon­athan to Gide (1954), which is, however, the high-water mark for the uncritical use of sources (such as including Pontius Pi­late, the Roman prefect of Judea, on the basis of a passing mention in a novel pub­lished in 1932!). The most recent speci­men of this class of literature is Martin Greif's often fanciful The Gay Book of Names (1982).
The need for such writings is motivated by the insult and humiliation heaped upon the homosexual minority by those who defame it. The ability to iden­tify with glorious and universally admired figures in history gives the member of the oppressed minority role models conveying a sense of inner worth. The homosexual attains the conviction that he belongs to a part of mankind with its own achieve­ments, its own traditions, and its own right to a "place in the sun." The tendency can become so marked as to invite parody, as amusingly executed by James Joyce for the counterpart among the Irish in Ulysses (1922). Paradoxically, some homophobes still revere noted figures in the past of their own nation despite the unanimous testi­mony of impartial biographers to their homosexuality. The phenomenon is com­parable to that of anti-Semites who admire Spinoza and Einstein.
Historians of homosexual behav­ior have found that the method of accumu­lating famous names has a number of inadequacies. It tends to assimilate differ­ent types - exclusive homosexuals and bisexuals, pederasts and androphiles - under one rubric, neglecting the historical ambiance of the individual's orientation. Rarely is there a concern with the nexus between homosexual behavior and inter­ests, on the one hand, and creativity, on the other. Use of evidence is often slip­shod, and famous persons are included whose homosexuality is doubtful - even unlikely. Finally, focusing on a small constellation of politicians, writers, and artists obscures the life experience of the great mass of ordinary homosexuals and lesbians. Because of these drawbacks, books containing such lists are now regarded as belonging to the realm of popular culture rather than to that of scholarship.
The term eponym refers to a per­son from whom something, as a tribe, place or activity, takes its name. In this way proper names become common nouns designating any practitioner of the activ­ity in question, such as onanist (from the Biblical Onan), sapphist (from Sappho of Lesbos), sadist (from Donatien-Alphonse-Francois, Marquis de Sade), andmasoc/u'st (from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch), along with such jocular expressions as a Tilden (from the tennis star) and Wildeman (from Oscar Wilde). Similarly, French has the verbs socratiser and engider, both mean­ing "to sodomize." The latter is a nonce coinage createdby the novelist Louis-Ferdi­nand Celine from the name (Andre) Gide. One writer of the early twentieth century commented that to name sexual practices after living persons who embodied them was to invite actions for libel, but it consti­tutes a fascinating intersection between biography and social labeling.
Warren Johansson

Fantasies
Fantasies are mental scenes, pro­duced by the imagination, distinct from the reality in which the person lives. This article concerns those of sexual content.
Everyone fantasizes to a consid­erable extent; thinking and fantasy are inseparable. Every time one sets a goal, makes a plan, or considers the desirability of a course of action, one fantasizes. One of the ways in which human beings differ from animals is that animals, to our knowl­edge, do not have fantasies.
The use of fantasies to produce and enhance sexual excitement is com­mon. Fantasies may contain activities one would like to do or repeat: sex with a highly desirable partner or partners, or under exciting circumstances. These are unproblematic as long as the fantasizer accepts that there are things one would like to do which are impossible or imprac­tical to realize, and takes steps toward the realization of appropriate fantasies. The prospect of realizing sexual fantasies is one of the great stimuli of human activity.
Potentially more stressful are fantasies of activities one might not or definitely would not like to do. These involve every sort of situation depicted in pornography, among them the infliction or suffering of pain, violence, or humili­ation; promiscuous or anonymous sex; unfaithfulness to a partner; the exposure of the body to harm,- and activities which do not conform to one's sexual orientation (gay or straight). Such erotic fantasies are potentially in conflict with one's self-image, and may cause worry and guilt.
If fantasies cause great distress, the assistance of a competent therapist may be helpful. That such fantasies are very widespread, however, suggests that their existence is normal and even healthy; we all have within us atavistic capacities, such as that to inflict pain, which cannot be expressed directly in a civilized society. Fantasies can help discharge tensions rather than increase them. A fantasy does not produce action against one's principles or true wishes. Furthermore, fantasies need not be revealed to anyone, although shar­ing them can be an exciting part of love-making. Lovers with fantasies that dove­tail (the dominant with the submissive, for example) are truly blessed, although this is far less frequent than pornography would suggest. The commercial sex indus­try [pornography, prostitution, phone sex) is primarily devoted to providing fanta­sies.
Daniel Eisenbeig

Fascism
The term fascism derives from fasces, the bundles of rods carried by the lictors of ancient Rome to symbolize the unity of classes in the Republic. Fascism is the authoritarian movement that arose in Italy in the wake of World War I. Although Hitler admired its founder Mussolini and imitated him at first - the term Führer is modeled on Duce - one cannot simply equate his more radical National Socialist movement with the Italian phenomenon, as writers of the left are prone to do. "Fascism " was also applied to related trends in eastern Europe, the Iberian peninsula, and Latin America. Some of these regimes (especially the Horthy dictatorship in Hungary and the Falange in Spain) had pronounced clerical-traditional overtones, which set them apart from the more secu­larist regimes of Italy and Germany. Whether all these political trends consti­tute so many variants of a single genus of fascism, or whether they are only loosely connected, is still earnestly debated by historians.
Italy. Not essentially racist like Nazism or anti-bourgeois like Marxism, Italian fascism, with its corporative bind­ing of workers and employers, has been less consistently hostile to homosexuals. Attracting adherents from anarchism and syndicalism, both of which had been strong in Italy, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) deserted pacifist, gradualist socialism to found fascism after his exhilarating war­time experience of violence. He hence­forth extolled war as purifying, progres­sive, and evolutionary because the strong overcame the weak. He also argued in a discussion of a draft penal code in 1930 that because Italians, being virile, were not homosexuals, Italy needed no law banning homosexual acts, which he be­lieved only degenerate foreigners to prac­tice. A ban would only frighten such tour­ists away, and Italy needed the money they spent to improve its balance of payments and shore up its sagging economy. Napo­leon had promulgated his code, which did not penalize homosexual acts between consenting adults, in northern Italy in 1810, and thus decriminalized sodomy. It had already been decriminalized in Tuscany by Grand Duke Leopold, the enlightened brother of Joseph II. The Albertine Code of 1837 for Piedmont-Sardinia was extended to all its dominions after the House of Savoy created a united Kingdom of Italy, a task completed in 1870. Pervasive was the influence of the jurist Marquis Cesare Beccaria, who argued against cruel and un­usual punishments and against all offenses motivated by religious superstition and fanaticism.
Thus Italy with its age-old "Mediterranean homosexuality" in which women were protected, almost secluded - upper-class girls at least in the South being accompanied in public by dueñas - had like other Latin countries allowed female prostitution and closed its eyes to homo­sexuality. As such it had become the play­ground par excellence during the "grand tour" of the English milords, and also the refuge of exiles and emigres from the crimi­nal sanctions of the Anglo-American common law and the Prussian code. The Prussian Code was extended in 1871-72 to the North and then South German territo­ries incorporated in the Reich, including ones where the Code Napoleon had pre­vailed in the early part of the century. Byron and John Addington Symonds took refuge in Italy, as William Beckford did in Portugal and Oscar Wilde in Paris. Friedrich Alfred Krupp's playground was in Capri, Thomas Mann's in Venice, and Count Adelswárd Fersen's also in Capri.
II Duce's rise to power did not end Italy's welcoming role. Although he em­phasized the virility of Italians and the decadence of foreigners and decried homo­sexuality as a sign of weakness, Mussolini regarded homosexuals either in the old clerical fashion as sodomites given over to vice or in the ancient Roman fashion as effeminates - but not as a threat to the virility of the race. (Personally, Mussolini was somewhat of a sexual acrobat, in that he had a succession of mistresses and often took time out in the office to have sex with one or another of his secretaries.) Like Napoleon HI under the French Second Empire, he preferred to leave same-sex conduct outside the criminal code in order to avoid sensational trials that would expose his nation to ridicule in the foreign press. Rather he decided to exile homo­sexuals to remote areas of Italy where they would provoke no scandal. Believing in military strength through numbers, Mus­solini did more than Hitler to subsidize parents of numerous progeny, thus hoping to increase Italy's population from 40 to 60 million. Although local authorities occa­sionally conducted raids on gay cruising areas and the like, before 1938 he did not persecute homosexuals more than previ­ous regimes had done.
However, after he formed the Rome-Berlin Axis with Hitler in 1936, Mussolini began, under Nazi influence, to persecute homosexuals and to promulgate anti-Semitic decrees in 1938 and 1939, though these were laxly enforced, and permitted exceptions, such as veterans of World War I. New laws were passed penal­izing "offenses against race and the provisions for education of the youth of the Regime." After 1938 homosexuals thus were considered political offenders. Op­pressing homosexuals more than Jews, Mussolini's regime rounded up and im­prisoned a substantial number, a procedure poignantly depicted in Ettore Scola's excellent film A Special Day (1977).
Fascists whose homosexual behavior embarrassed the regime were usually only dismissed from their posts. Notorious : homosexuals without influence were punished merely with short jail sentences. Political opponents received longer sen­tences. Following established Italian fas­cist practice, homosexuals were sent into exile {confino) in remote places (generally islands) where they eked out a meagre existence. The actual enforcement of the laws, and in particular mass roundups of suspected homosexuals, were left to local authorities. But the bulk of Italians in town and country continued under fas­cism, as they had previously, the occa­sional homosexual practices for which Italy had been so famed. Even exclusive homo­sexuals, if they were not unlucky, sur­vived fascism unscathed.
Eastern Europe. In Eastern Eu­rope "clerical fascism" overthrew all the democratic regimes established in the wake of the Allied victory and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, as well as those carved from the territory of the Russian Empire. The only exception was Czechoslovakia. With the encouragement of the clergy and support from the peasantry, gentry, army, and professional and business classes, Admiral Horthy seized control of Hungary from the Communist Béla Kun in 1920 and as "Regent" unleashed a "White Ter­ror" largely directed against Jews, two years before Mussolini marched on Rome with his blackshirts. One by one the other democracies fell. In Poland the tolerant Marshall Pifsudski, who dominated Po­land after seizing Russian and Lithuanian territory, actually decriminalized sodomy when a uniform penal code [Kodeks karny) was adopted for the whole of Poland in 1932. (This perhaps hearkened back to the days of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw when Poles lived under the Code Napoleon, or perhaps to the thwarted project to intro­duce the Code into "Congress Poland" after 1815.)
By contrast, most of the dictators of East Central Europe simply perpetuated the old clerical strictures; by allying with the Catholic or Orthodox Church they stiffened reactionary opposition to liber­alization, just as they encouraged tradi­tional Christian hatred of Jews. In this unfavorable climate none of these coun­tries could develop a sexual reform move­ment of any significance.
Naturally amid such ethnic di­versity and various dates of introduction of the Code Napoléon, differences in sex­ual expression were vast, and even within one country no consistent pattern existed. Fascists were less consistent and more divided among themselves than even Communists or Nazis. After all, they had no sacred text like Das Kapital or Mein Kampf, and further were not ruling only a single powerful country. Many were nev­ertheless influenced by Hitler, himself perhaps in part inspired by his totalitarian rival Stalin's homophobic repression in Soviet Russia beginning in January 1934. Being hostile to classical liberalism with its emphasis on toleration and the rule of law, fascism made homosexuals uneasy. However, it may be doubted whether they suffered more during the 1920s and 1930s in the fascist countries (not counting Nazi Germany) than in France and the Anglo-Saxon democracies, where premature at­tempts to found gay movements were suppressed by police action with no outcry whatsoever from the defenders of civil liberties. Czechoslovakia, the only democ­racy in Central Europe to survive this period, simply continued the Austrian penal code of 1852 that penalized both male and female homosexuality.
Spain and the Falange. The middle-class, ascetic, deeply Catholic Franco, who overthrew the Spanish Re­public in the Civil War of 1936-39, estab­lished one of the harshest of the fascist regimes, executing many of the defeated republicans and jailing others under brutal conditions. The great homosexual poet Federico Garcia Lorca was shot by a death squad near Granada in 1936; it is said that they fired the bullets through his backside to "make the punishment fit the crime." On the other hand, the Falange theoreti­cian José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was killed by the left at the beginning of the Civil War, was widely believed to be homosexual. Even Franco himself, rumor has alleged, had an occasional f ling during his service in Morocco.
More than Mussolini, Franco resisted the theories and pressures of Hitler, whom he regarded as a despicable (and perhaps deranged) upstart. It has been argued that Franco was not a fascist at all and that he actually maintained a pro-Jewish policy, granting asylum to refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe and attempt­ing to protect Sephardic Jews in the Balkan countries. In his last years he in fact liber­alized Spain to a certain extent, allowing among other things a resurgence of gay bars, baths, and culture even before the accession of King Juan Carlos upon his death in 1975. Today Spain is one of the freest countries in Europe.
Latin America. Juan Peron in Argentina and other dictators in Latin America mouthed fascist doctrines with­out even the consistency of Mussolini's Eastern European imitators. Naturally Latins, like Slavs, being considered infe­rior peoples by Hitler, did not in general espouse racism (Hitler had to make the Japanese honorary Aryans to ally with them in the Tripartite Pact of 1937), so they had no reason to think of homosexu­als in his terms. Rather, they looked upon them with amused contempt, in the vein of Latin machismo. This machismo rein­forced clerical prejudice to keep social intolerance the rule in Latin America. As Peron was gaining power in 1943-44, there was some repression, perhaps instigated by the military, but after he consolidated his rule in 1947 there was little.
Conclusion. On the whole, fas­cism was too tradition-minded and lack­ing in innovative will to formulate a co­herent policy regarding such a "modern" phenomenon as homosexuality. The twen­tieth-century demand of homosexuals for justice and equality, the homosexual emancipation movement, which was her­alded in Germany as early as 1864, and was first organized by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1897, elicited a violent and reactionary response from National Socialism and to a lesser extent from the other great totalitar­ian movement, Stalin's Communism. However, in countries where homosexual emancipation did not exist (and no need was felt for it in states that had adopted the Code Napoleon), a campaign of repression simply had no motive in the ideology of the rightist regimes that dominated much of the interwar period.
See also Holocaust; Nationalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Giovanni Dall'Orto, "Le ragioni di una persecuzione," in: Martin Sherman, Bent (Italian trans.), Turin: Edizioni Gruppo Abele, 1984, pp. 101-19; idem, "Per il bene della razza al confino il pederasta," Babilonia (April and May 1986); Walter Laqueur, fascism: A Reader's Guide: Analyses, Interpreta­tions, Bibliography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
William A. Percy

Fascist Perversion, Belief in
Fascism and National Socialism (Nazism) were originally distinct political systems, but their eventual international ties (the "Rome-Berlin axis") led to the use of "fascist" as an umbrella term by Communist writers anxious to avoid the implication that "National Socialism" was a type of socialism. Neither in Italy nor in Spain did the right-authoritarian political movements have a homosexual compo­nent. Rather it was in Weimar Germany that the right-wing paramilitary groups which constituted the nucleus of the later National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) attracted a considerable number of homosexuals whose erotic leanings overlapped with the male bonding of the party. This strong male bonding, in the later judgment of their own leaders, gave the Nazis a crucial advantage in their victory over the rival Social Democratic and Communist formations in the early 1930s.
The most celebrated of the homo­sexuals in the Nazi Party of the 1920s was Ernst Rohm, whose sexual proclivities were openly denounced by left-wing propagan­dists, but this did not deprive him of Hitler's confidence until the putsch of June 30, 1934, in which he and many of his homo­sexual comrades in arms were massacred. Ironically enough it was said that with Rohm the last socialist in the NSDAP died. For Communist writers as early as the mid-1920s homosexuality was an ele­ment of "bourgeois decadence," or of le vice allemand (the German vice), and theorists such as Wilhelm Reich who were opposed to homosexuality could claim that the right-wingyouth were "becoming more homosexual." The victory of National Socialism at the beginning of 1933 then reinforced Communist and emigré propa­gandists in their resort to "fascist perver­sion" as a rhetorical device with which they could abuse and vilify the regime that had defeated and exiled them - and which they hoped would be transient and un­stable.
In particular, the statute by which Stalin restored the criminal sanctions against homosexuality that had been omitted from the penal codes of 1922 and 1926 was officially titled the "Law of March 7, 1934" - a pointed allusion to the anni­versary of the National Socialist consoli­dation of power one year earlier. Maxim Gorky is even supposed to have said "Destroy the homosexuals and with them destroy fascism!" During his exile in the Soviet Union, the leftist German director Gustav von Wangenheim (1895-1975) made a film entitled Bortsy (The Fighters; 1936), in which the Nazis are shown as homosexual. The reaction of the Hitler regime to all this was to enact a new and more stringent version of the notorious Paragraph 175 in the legal novella of June 28,1935. Under its provisions the number of convictions for homosexual activity rose to many times what it had been at the end of the Weimar Republic.
While the subject of homosexual­ity was still largely taboo in the British and American press during World War II, allu­sions to the theme of "fascist perversion" are found in denunciations of Nazi Ger­many, and occasional echoes of the belief recur in left-wing propaganda of the recent decades. In the United States Maoists charged that the gay liberation movement of 1969 and the years following was an example of "bourgeois decadence" that would vanish once the triumph of social­ism was achieved. Communist and Catho­lic organizations in coalitions of the American left have even formed ad hoc alliances for the purpose of excluding "gay rights" from the common program of the umbrella group or of keeping gay speakers off the platform at major rallies. The belief in homosexuality as a "fascist perversion" is one of the Stalinist myths of the 1930s that are belied by the historical facts but still kept alive by uncritical writings on the subject and by artistic treatments such as Luchino Visconti's film The Damned (1970).
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Samuel Igra, Germany's National Vice, London: Quality Press, 1945; John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935), New York: Times Change Press, 1974, pp. 43-45.
Warren Johansson

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner (1945-1982)
West German filmmaker, author, director, and actor. With his "anti-the­atre" troupe in Munich Fassbinder set out to redefine the aesthetic experience on stage. His search quickly brought him (along with the members of this troupe who would often serve as his actors) to film. From his first films in 1969 to his forty-third in 1982, he explored the intri­cate connections between love and ma­nipulation while also charting his vision of the path of German history (especially the periods of the Third Reich and the growth of a West German society he felt to be economically affluent but spiritually impoverished).
Often castigated as someone who expressed a solely subjective view, Fassbinder openly made use of a variety of sources - his own love affairs, Hollywood films, works from German literature - which he then filtered into his own entwinement of the personal and the public spheres. A relatively static camera (espe­cially in his early films), mirrors and frames, layers of sound, a heightened sense of melodrama - these are all elements of a cinematic style which Fassbinder employs in order to speak for those who have been denied a voice.
Those films where homosexual relationships form the main theme clearly demonstrate Fassbinder's concern and his techniques. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Pox and His Friends (1975), and In a Year with Thirteen Moons (1978) all deal with same-sex relationships in which erotic desire becomes a function of the struggle for dominance of one partner over the other. His films of two literary masterpieces, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), a television mini-series, and Quer­elle (based on a novel of Jean Genet; 1982), explore intense homoerotic relationships between men as well as openly homosex­ual ones.
Yet Fassbinder, himself homosex­ual, shows that the failure of the relation­ships he depicts to survive or even to nurture does not stem from the nature of homosexuality itself. Rather, he makes evident that such love cannot succeed in this society under conditions where human beings have lost their ability to form any relationship except one based on objectification and exploitation.
In the end, though, what Fassbin­der presented is not an analysis of the futility of love, be it homosexual or hetero­sexual in nature. By portraying the precari­ous existence of relationships between love and manipulation and by using the fates of individual characters to portray the path of German history and its influence in shap­ing everyday existences, Fassbinder's films open the possibility for change.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Ronald Hayman, Fassbinder: Film Maker, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984; Robert Katz, Life Is Colder Than Death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, New York: Random House, 1987; Tony Rayns, ed., Fassbinder, 2nd ed., London: British Film Institute, 1979 (1st ed., 1976); Rainer Werner Passbinder (Reihe Filmbuch), Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1983.
James W. Jones

Fellatio
See Oral Sex.

Ferenczi, Sandor (1873-1933)
Hungarian psychoanalyst. Bom to a Jewish family in Miskolc in northeastern Hungary, he grew up in his father's book­store and lending library. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1894. Ferenczi met Sigmund Freud for the first time in 1907. He under­went analysis with Freud, and the two passed many summers together. Ferenczi became a central figure in the psychoana­lytic movement and the founder of psy­choanalysis in Hungary, where he played much the same role as did Karl Abraham in Berlin. He translated many of Freud's writings into Hungarian, and under the short-lived Communist regime of Bela Kun he was appointed professor of psychoa­nalysis at the University of Budapest.
Major Contributions. Ferenczi's reputation was established by his Uber die Entwicklungsstufen des Wirklichkeitssinnes (On the Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality), in which he de­scribed the feeling of infantile omnipo­tence. His second major book, Thalassa:
Versuch einer Genitaltheorie (Thalassa, an Essay on the Theory of Genitality) he began to write in 1914 and published in 1924. In it he described the "Thalassal regression," and for the first time used the word bioanalysis. During the same period Ferenczi developed a more active form of psychoanalytic technique, in which direc­tives to the patient were used to provoke increasing tension that would mobilize unconscious material and overcome the patient'sresistances. He urged active inter­ference, role playing, and free expression of love and affection for the patient. While critical of some of his innovations, Freud could later say that Ferenczi "has made us all his pupils."
With Freud's British disciple, Ernest Jones, Ferenczi had an unhappy and ambivalent relationship. Jones underwent a training analysis with Ferenczi in the summer and autumn of 1913, but later composed a negative account of his analyst's last years, saying that an "un­happy deterioration of his mind" had set in and that he suffered from a "very deep layer of mental disturbance." Those who knew Ferenczi at the close of life dismiss Jones' allegations as mythical.
Pubhcations on Homosexuahty. Ferenczi's contribution to the study of homosexuahty took the form of two pa­pers, an early one in Hungarian on "Homosexualitas feminina," published in Gyögyäszat in 1902, and a German article of 1914 entitled "Über die Nosologie der männlichen Homosexualität" (On the Nosology of Male Homosexuality), first delivered at a psychoanalytic congress in 1911. The first article described a lesbian transvestite named Roza K. who because of her sexual interests and manner of dress­ing had been rejected by her family and was in frequent conflict with the police. She led a pitiable existence of wandering between a charitable institution, a prison, a shelter for the homeless, and a psychiat­ric hospital. Ferenczi saw her as posing two problems: a clinical one and a political one; he proposed that "communal hos­pices" be created where homosexual per­sons could find sufficient freedom to work if they chose, and at the same time arefuge from the hostility which they encoun­tered in the outside world. The patient exhibited numerous masculine traits, but also, in his view, stigmata of degeneration, in particular a repellent ugliness. He con­cluded that the abnormality of her sexual drive was nature's infallible way of inhib­iting her reproductive activity.
In the latter article Ferenczi ex­pounded the difference between subject and object homoeroticism, that is to say, he rejected the notion that "homosexual­ity" was a single clinical entity. The "active" homosexual feels himself a man in every respect, is as a rule very energetic and aggressive, and nothing effeminate can be discovered in his physical or mental type. The object of his sexual drive is his own sex, so that he is a homoerotic through transfer of the love object. The "passive" homosexual, whom Ferenczi styles "in­verted," alone exhibits the reversal of the normal secondary and tertiary sexual characteristics. In intercourse with men, and in all relations of life, he feels himself a woman and thus is inverted in respect of his own ego, so that he is a homoerotic through subject inversion. The first type, the object homoerotic, is almost exclu­sively interested in young, delicate boys with a feminine appearance, yet feels pro­nounced antipathy to the adult woman. The second, the subject homoerotic, feels attracted to more mature, powerful men, but can relate to women on terms of equal­ity. The true invert, said Ferenczi, is sel­dom impelled to seek psychoanalytic advice; he accepts the passive role com­pletely, and has no wish other than to be left alone and allowed to pursue the kind of gratification that suits him. The object homoerotic, on the other hand, suffers acute dysphoria, is tormented by the con­sciousness of his abnormality, never satis­fied by his sexual activity, plagued by qualms of conscience, and overestimates the object of his desires as well. It is he who seeks analytic help for his problems, and also is promiscuous because of repeated disappointment with his love object. Sub­ject and object homoeroticism, concluded Ferenczi, are different conditions; the for­mer is a developmental anomaly, a true "sexual intermediate stage," while the second is suffering from an obsessional neurosis.
Besides these articles, in April 1906 Ferenczi presented to the Budapest Medical Association a paper entitled "Sexualis âtmeneti fokozatokrôl" (On Sexual Intermediate Stages), which was his report, as a neuro-psychiatrist, on the 1905 volume of the Jahibuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen which the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Berlin had sent to the Association, asking it to take a stand against the penal sanctions to which homosexuals were subjected. In the re­port, published in Gyôgyâszat the same year, Ferenczi fully endorsed the position of Hirschfeld and his supporters, saying: "I consider the repression of the homosexu­als profoundly unjust and utterly useless, and I think that we should give our firm support to the petition drafted by the Sci­entific-Humanitarian Committee and signed, since the beginning of 1905, by some 2800 German physicians." Thus Ferenczi was one of those who even at the turn of the century spoke out against the archaic penal statutes and in favor of legal and social toleration.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Judith Dupont, éd., The Clinical Diary of Sandor Ferenczi, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988; Sandor Ferenczi, "The Nosology of Male Homosexuality," in The Problem of Homosexuahty in Modern Society, Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, éd., New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963, pp. 3-16; Claude Lorin, éd., Le jeune Ferenczi: Premiers écrits 1899-1906, Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1983; Claude Sabourin, Perenzci: Paladin et Grand Vizir secret, Paris: Editions Universi­taires, 1985.
Warren Johansson

Fetishism
A fetish is an object or, in fact, any focal point which has come to stir irra­tional reverence or obsessive devotion. A sexual fetish, unlike a mere preference, usually amounts to an exclusive demand, in that full arousal cannot occur in the absence of the fetish - be it a black shoe, a particular piece of underwear, or some partner-attribute such as perhaps broad shoulders, narrow or broad hips, large breasts in women or a large penis in men, an extreme presence or absence of fat, an abundance or absence of body hair, and the like.
Fetishistic demands usually stem from an early, particularly pleasurable experience, although it can perhaps never be precisely determined how one person's pleasurable experience is transformed into a lifelong fetishistic requirement, while a similar event for someone else may hardly stand out as exceptional, let alone as an ongoing fetish. And yet the basic mecha­nisms of strong preference-formations are known.
The pre-adolescent male's sexual response tends to be extremely diverse (polymorphous) and easily triggered by virtually any exciting event - anything from fast rides, big fires, and loud noises to being called on in class, seeing animals in coitus, or imagining close bodily contact with other children or adults. The onset of puberty quickly brings a narrowing down of sexual response to a much reduced number of specifically sexual items. The range is narrowed still further by the con­ditioning effects of a person's individual experience and basic disposition, until only a few strong preferences prevail - prefer­ences that tend to become narrowed to ever fewer targets as a person builds up aversion reactions to "opposite" alterna­tives. At the extreme end of this whole conditioning process are the narrow, in­tense fetishistic preferences.
And yet all this work of condi­tioning applies almost exclusively to males. For reasons that are still not fully under­stood, female sexual response is virtually non-conditionable (Kinsey, 1953, p. 642/.). Thus despite local, rewarding sex experi­ences of myriad kinds, women simply do not become "fixated" onto any one par­ticular kind of sex practice or preference in the way that men do. (Nobody on record ever saw a female black-shoe fetishist and probably never will, although this and a host of equivalent male fetishes are com­monplace.)
Male homosexuality affords uniquely useful insights into the whole problem of understanding fetishes. By its very nature, the male-male pairing affords a double chance of seeing a fetishistic demand revved up in intensity by being fed from both sides. By contrast, since fetish­istic responses are very rare among women, they are virtually non-existent among lesbian couples.
In heterosexual couples the fet­ishistic male has to work out a compro­mise acceptable to his female partner; this may call for tact and other forms of inhibi­tion on his part, and a degree of forbearance from her - a compromise on both sides that can greatly obscure the true reactions of each. However, there is no indication that heterosexual men, if given equally responsive partners, would be any less inclined toward fetishism than are homo­sexual men.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948; Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human female, Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953; C. A. Tripp, The Homosexual Matrix, second ed., New York: New American Library, 1987.
C. A. Tripp

Fichte, Hubert (1935-1986)
German writer. One of the major (West) German authors of the postwar period, Fichte is rare among German au­thors in that he not only treated the sub­ject of homosexuahty openly but even made it his starting point and guiding force.
Bom the illegitimate child of a mother who was unable to realize a longed-for career as an actress and a Jewish father who seems to have disappeared after emi­grating to Sweden, Hubert Fichte grew up an "outsider." After a career as a child actor in Hamburg theatres and in the movies (and an ambivalent relationship with Hans Henny Jahnn), Fichte set off for France with a traveling scholarship from the French government. In that country he served for a time as a leader in the camps of Abbe Pierre. Back in North Germany and in Sweden, Fichte devoted himself - and in a completely professional manner - to farming. At the same time he worked on translations (rendering Simplizius Simplizissimus into French, together with Jean Giono), and on his own writings.
His first publications (1959,1961) brought him his first successes: writing fellowships and participation in the con­gresses of the influential Gruppe 47. From 1965 onward his strongly autobiographi­cal novels, beginning with Das Waisen­haus, appeared. In the year in which the last novel in this series, Versuch über die Pubertät, was published (1974), Hubert Fichte began an ambitious project: "The History of Sensibility," planned for 19 volumes, novels and books containing "glosses," on which he labored almost obsessively until his death, and which is now being edited in a fragmentary form by the administrators of his literary heritage. Some of the volumes (so far as can be judged from the extant published work and the plans for publication) derive from the autobiographical world of the earlier novels; an additional section continues a project that Fichte had undertaken along­side his novels. Closely related to the novels is a "poetic anthropology/ethnology" that focuses not just on Afro-American relig­ions - to which two large volumes of text and parallel volumes of illustrations by the photographer Leonore Mau, who had been living and working with Fichte since 1963, are devoted {Xango: Die afroameri­kanischen Religionen: Bahia, Haiti, Trinidad, 1978/84, Petersihe: Die af­roamerikanischen Religionen: Santo Domingo, Venezuela, Miami, Grenada, 1980/84) - but also on traditions and phe­nomena of European culture with the same perspective of the ethnologist and anthro­pologist. In these works high culture (Sappho, Homer, August von Platen, Genet) is treated and depicted with the same attentiveness as the world of the Hamburg "Palais d'Amour." After Fichte's death there appeared Homosexualität und Lit­eratur: Polemiken, vols. 1 and 2 (1987-88).
What is new, different, and re­warding in Hubert Fichte is more than his range. It is stimulating to observe how the new standpoint, which probably even without "gay consciousness," leads to new forms of verbalization and to open forms (even the format of Fichte's novels on the printed page - with much blank space - is open). His use of text collages at the macro and micro level can be read as the reflex of a process "of fragmentation and rebirth." In this process Fichte brought together a broadly conceived interpretation of "pu­berty" and "religion."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Thomas Beckermann, ed., Hubert Pichte: Materialien zu Leben und Werk, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1985; Marita Keilson-Lauritz, "Durch die goldene Harfe gelispelt: Zur George-Rezeption bei Hubert Fichte," Forum Homosexuahtät und Literatur, 2 (1987), 21 - 51; Wolf gang von Wangenheim, Hubert Fichte, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1980.
Marita Keilson-Lauritz

Ficino, Marsilio (1433-1499)
Italian philosopher and human­ist. The son of a physician, he preferred to take up the study of philosophy rather than to follow in his father's footsteps. The arrival in Italy of learned Byzantines fleeing Constantinople after it had fallen to the Turks in 1453 gave Italian human­ists the opportunity of studying Greek works which had been previously unknown to them. In this way the young Ficino discovered Platonism, learning Greek in order to study its texts.
Having gained the favor of the Medici family in Florence, Ficino was protected by them for the rest of his life; they presented him with a precious gift of Greek manuscripts, which he translated. Ficino quickly became a respected person­ality, attracting various pupils in a kind of Platonic Academy. In 1473 he took priestly orders, while continuing his philosophical speculations and taking on the responsi­bility of showing that the philosophy of Plato was in accord with Christian doc­trine, as St. Thomas Aquinas had done earlier with Aristotle.
Amonghis most important works is the Theologia platónica (published in 1482), to which must be added strictly religious works (e.g., his Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul), and philosophical disquisitions (e.g., his Commentary on Plato's Symposium of 1469, in which he revived the form of the Platonic dialogue), as well as an impressive number of trans­lations from the Greek of works of Plato and other ancient Greek thinkers. These translations made available to a scholarly public works that for the most part had been inaccessible up to that time in the West.
Marsilio Ficino is one of the most representative personalities of the Italian Renaissance. His fame is inseparable from his love and painstaking work of rediscov­ery, translation, commentary, and advo­cacy of the works of Plato.
Of special significance in this regard is his resurrection of the Platonic ideal of love, as it is known from the Phaedrus and the Symposium. In the six­teenth century Ficino's version was elaborated in countless treatises on love, be­coming the prototype of a new concept of "courtly love."
Under the rubric of amor socraticus Ficino set forth a paradigm of a profound but highly spiritual love between two men, perhaps linked by their common devotion to the quest for knowledge. According to his statement in the above-mentioned Cotnmentary on Plato's Sym­posium, this love is caused, following Plato's conception, by the vision of beauty vouchsafed by the soul of the other indi­vidual - a beauty that reflects the supernal beauty of God. Through the physical beauty of a young man - women were incapable of inciting this rapture, being more suited to stimulate copulation for the reproduc­tion of the species - the prudent man as­cends to the Beauty which is the arche­typal Idea (in Plato's sense) on which the beauty he sees depends - hence to God himself. Thus contemplating the physical and spiritual beauty of ayoung man through love is a way of contemplating at least a fragment of Divine Beauty, the model of every individual terrestrial beauty.
Ficino practiced this love metaphysic with the young and handsome Giovanni Cavalcanti (ca. 1444-1509), whom he made the principal character in his commentary on the Convivio, and to whom he wrote ardent love letters in Latin, which were published in his Epistulae in 1492. It is an ironic fact that the object of his love always remained [as Ficino him­self laments) in a state of embarrassment.
Apart from these letters there are numerous indications that Ficino's erotic impulses were directed toward men. After his death his biographers had a difficult task in trying to refute those who spoke of his homosexual tendencies.
Fortunately the universal respect enjoyed by Ficino, his sincere and deep faith, as well as his membership in the Catholic clergy, put him outside the reach of gossip and suspicions of sodomy - which, however, such followers as Benedetto Varchi were not spared.
After Ficino's death the ideal of "Socratic love" became a potent instru­ment to justify love between persons of the same sex,- during the high Renaissance many persons were to make use of this protective shield. Yet this use served ulti­mately to discredit the ideal in the eyes of the public, and with the passage of the years it was regarded with increasing dis­trust, until - about 1550 - it became sim­ply identified with sodomy itself. Conse­quently, in order to save it, from the middle of the sixteenth century the ideal was heterosexualized, and in this guise it long survived in love treatises and in Italian and European love literature in general.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Giovanni Dall'Orto, '"Socratic Love' as a Disguise for Same-sex Love in the Italian Renaissance," Journal of Homosexuality, 16(1988), 33-65.
Giovanni Dall'Orto

Fiction
See Novels and Short Fiction.

Fidentian Poetry
This minor genre of Italian poetry originated as a vehicle for homosexual themes that within the larger context of burlesque poetry have given rise to Burchiellesque and Bernesque poetry. The initiator of Fidentian poetry was Camillo Scroffa (1526-1565), a jurisconsult of Vicenza, in his Cantici di Fidenzio pub­lished in 1562 (but composed about 1545-50).
The Cantici, which probably come from Scroffa's student days at Padua, are supposed to have been written by an "amorous pedant," one Fidenzio Glottocrisio Ludomagistro, who is hopelessly in love with the handsome Camillo Strozzi. It is possible that the Cantici began as a student prank at the expense of a pedantic teacher at the University of Padua, Pietro Giunteo Fidenzio da Montagnana.
In fact the author seems to have forgotten this hoax of his youth; he de­cided to prepare an edition only after a series of unauthorized, and often enlarged, published collections had made the mate­rial popular.
The anthology amounts in the main to an anti-Petrarchan pamphlet, poking fun at well-worn conventions of love poetry, while at the same time it is a satire on the excessive preoccupation with classical antiquity into which the human­ists had fallen, both from a linguistic stand-point and in view of their exaltation of the so-called Socratic love.
In fact not only is the fictitious author of the Cantici "Somatically" in love with his pupil "in the ancient man­ner," but he composes love poetry in a language in which immoderate love for the Latin language produces a thoroughgo­ing bastardization of the Italian, which has to bear an endless assault of Latinisms. The effect is comically pompous.
Scroffa's literary astuteness emerges in his having created avery human character, one who is pathetically caught up in the toils of an "impossible" love, set apart from the lives of normal people, and incapable of seeing anything wrong in the overwhelming sentiment he feels for "his" Camillo. The poems are tender and very candid, to the point that, the satire not­withstanding, the reader feels great sym­pathy for the hapless Fidenzio.
What came to be known as Fidentian poetry - which is technically the opposite of macaronic poetry, which mixes vernacular elements into Latin, instead of vice versa - was cultivated even before the first authorized edition of the Cantici in 1562, and lasted until the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Scrofa's first imitators kept close to his homoerotic inspiration. The finest among them are probably the anonymous author of "Tano Argyroglotto" (who also translated an anacreontic poem) and Giambattista Liviera (1565-early seventeenth century).
With the spread of Counterreformation ideas, the tone of the compositions was prudently and prudishly changed from homoerotic to heterosexual. Incapable of maintaining the subtle balance between irony and transgression, which Scroff a had exemplified, later Fidentian poetry became a sterile and repetitive poetic exercise, the equivalent of the mannered poetry which was in fact the original target of the Can­tici di Fidenzio.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Camillo Scroffa, J Cantici di Fidenzio, con appendice di poeti fidenziani, Pietro Trifone, ed., Rome: Salerno, 1981.
Giovanni Dall' Oito

Fiedler Thesis
In a 1948 essay widely circulated in the 1950s ("Come Back on the Raft Ag'in Honey"), the innovative literary critic Leslie Fiedler argued that interracial male homoerotic relationships (not neces­sarily genitally expressed) have occupied a central place in the American psyche. Citing works by Fenimore Cooper, Rich­ard Henry Dana, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, he even spoke of the "sacred marriage of males."
Whatever the ultimate verdict on this thesis may be, it is probably true that male homosexuals - and lesbians - have for a long time been more open to interra­cial contact than the population at large. It has been suggested that racial comple­mentation serves as a surrogate for the absent complementation of gender. Those who hold this view find a similar pattern in relationships that cross class lines. In the case of racial dyads, as seen typically in the "salt-and-pepper couple," the greater frequency may also be facilitated by the fact that no children will be born from the union, a question that heterosexual couples - in view of the lingering racism of our society - cannot ignore. That interra­cial gay relationships have been accompa­nied by some self-consciousness (and hostility on the part of bigoted individuals) transpires from such slang epithets as dinge/chocolate queen, snow queen, rice queen, and taco queen.
In the late 1970s the organization Black and White Men Together appeared in a number of American cities, attracting a good deal of support. In addition to offer­ing social opportunities, the group has sought to explore the subtler aspects of the dynamics of such relationships, as well as to oppose racism. In some cities it is called Men of All Colors Together (MACT).
See also Black Gay Americans; Working Class, Eroticization of.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Leslie Fiedler, An End to Innocence, Boston: Beacon Press, 1952, pp. 142-51; Michael J. Smith, Black Men/White Men: A Cay Anthol­ogy, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1983.

Film
Movie making is both an art and an industry. It has drawn for inspiration on theatre, fiction, biography, history, cur­rent affairs, religion, folklore, and the vis­ual and musical arts. Active in stimulating the fantasy lives of viewers, motion pic­tures also reflect, though in a highly selec­tive and often distorted way, the texture of daily life.
History of Motion Pictures. Al­though the first crude efforts with a proto-movie camera were made in the 1880s, films did not begin to be shown in spe­cially designed cinemas until the begin­ning of the present century. Widely re­garded at the time as disreputable and not suitable for middle-class audiences, the silents were subject to pressure to make them more respectable.
By 1913 Hollywood had emerged as the center of America's film industry, and by the end of the decade it was the world's leader. This commercial success drew additional attention from the "guardi­ans of morality" in the pulpits and the press. In 1922 Hollywood set up an office of self-censorship, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (popularly known as the Hays Office), to head off efforts to install government censorship. However, the Motion Picture Production Code was not promulgated until 1930; four years later, at the behest of religious groups, it was strengthened. In 1927 sound dialogue was introduced (the "talkies"), making possible, inter alia, the inclusion of suggestive dialogue of the Mae West type, though a constant running battle with the guardians of the code was required to retain even the subtlest double entendres.
In its heydey (1930-60) the mo­tion picture industry was dominated by a small number of powerful Hollywood studios cranking out seemingly endless cycles of films based on a few successful exemplars. The focus on the stars, which had begun in the silent era, was continued, some of them now becoming (for reasons that are not always clear) gay icons: Bette Davis, Judy Garland, and James Dean. Anything that did not conform to the code had to be shown in a few "art theatres" in the large cities or in semi-private film clubs such as Cinema 16 in New York; it could find no mass audience.
By the mid-sixties television had begun to call the tune, and some studio lots were given over to producing standard fare for the small screen. Yet motion pic­tures survived and the sixties saw the rise of independent producers, who broke the stranglehold of the big studios. The demo­graphics of the motion picture audience also changed, becoming more segmented, younger and more sophisticated. In this new climate some offbeat themes became realizable, often in films for "special audi­ences" such as counterculture youth and blacks. Even the rise (in the eighties) of videos rented in stores and played on home VCRs did not kill the movie houses. Moreover, the videos proved a boon to film scholars, who were able to reexamine older statements and theories through minute study of the films themselves.
Although the naive observer re­gards movies as a direct transcription of reality, technical and aesthetic considera­tions require transformation of the basic material. Moreover, social pressures - and the basic need to make money that is affected by them - shape choices of what is to be excluded and included. Gay and lesbian scholars have argued that their communities have never been adequately represented in mainstream motion pic­tures, which have been content to serve up brief glimpses and easy stereotypes. Be this as it may, there is much to be learned from a careful study of filmic images - mainstream and experimental, amateur and pornographic - that relate to alterna­tive sexuality.
Beginnings. The first serious homosexual film appears to be Mauritz Stiller's The Wings (1916), based on the novel Mikaél by the Danish gay author Herman Bang. This work is an early ex­ample of the perennial practice (not of course limited to homosexual movies) of basing the story line on a successful novel. In 1919 the German director Richard Oswald produced an educational film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) with the advice and participation of the great sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld. The movie portrays the diffi­culty of establishing a homosexual iden­tity in a hostile environment, the expecta­tion of marriage imposed by relatives, coming out, the tensions within gay rela­tionships, blackmail, and the tragedy of suicide. The stormy reception accorded public showings oí Anders als die Andern tended to discourage the otherwise inno­vative film industry of Weimar Germany from venturing much further into the realm of homosexuality. Probably the first ex­plicit lesbian in film, however, was fea­tured in G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box(1929), based on a play by Frank Wedekind. In 1931 Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uni­form appeared, based on a play by lesbian writer Christa Winsloe. The story, which concerns the love of a sensitive student for her teacher, serves a broader purpose of questioning social rigidity and authori­tarianism. This film, whose intense per­formances held audiences from the begin­ning, is rightly designated a classic.
Constricted by the Hays office, America produced Utile that was compa­rable. An exception is the experimental Lot in Sodom (1933) of James Watson and Melville Webber, which however played upon lingering fin-de-siecle ideas of deca­dence. In France Jean Vigo's Zero de Conduite (1933), set in a boy's school, has homoerotic overtones, but these are not explicit.
Drag Films and Scenes. From the nineteenth-century tradition of theatrical transvestism - male and female imper­sonation - the movies inherited a minor but surprisingly persistent motif. Julian Eltinge, a renowned female impersonator from the vaudeville circuit, was brought to films by Adolph Zukor in 1917. The plots of his popular films generally offered some pretext for his making a transition from male to female attire. Brandon Thomas's theatre staple Charley's Aunt was first filmed as a silent in 1925, to be followed eventually by four sound versions. The plot concerns a young aristocrat at Oxford who comes to the rescue of two fellow students by disguising himself as the Bra­zilian aunt of one of them. In the German musical comedy Viktorund Viktoria (1933,-remade in England in 1935), an aspiring actress gets her chance to replace a major male star by doing his role first as a man and then as a woman - a double disguise. In 1982 Blake Edwards remade this com­edy to great effect starring Julie Andrews. Beginning with Morocco in 1930 Marlene Dietrich essayed a series of male imper­sonations - a device which became virtu­ally her trademark. In the historical drama Queen Christina (1933), rich in homosex­ual and lesbian innuendo, Greta Garbo made a stunning appearance as the mon­arch disguised as a boy. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) featured Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as musicians compelled to disguise themselves as women because they inadvertently witnessed a gangster shootout. Although this film has remained a great favorite among gay men, only the last scene, in which Joe E. Brown insists that he still wants to marry Lemmon even though he is a man, is truly homosexual. The grossly obese transvestite Divine (who died in 1988) appeared in a number of deliberately tacky John Waters films in the 1970s and 80s. After an initially tepid audience response, the musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1976) became the focus of a cult of remarkable longevity in which members of the audience dress up as the characters, doubling the action as the film unfolds. Tim Curry plays a "sweet transvestite," Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who creates a muscle-bound monster for his own delectation. Then the French weighed in with La Cage aux Folies (1979), about two older gay men on the Riviera. This list could be extended for many pages. The point of the drag films is not so much whether they are explicitly homosexual, but their capacity to challenge gender role conventions. Yet the genre is so well en­trenched that, unless specially charged, it has lost most of its power to shock, and thus change thinking.
The Sissy Motif. While contempt for effeminacy is deeply rooted in Western culture (it is already found among the ancient Greeks), the motif took on special coloration in America, where the sissy was identified with effete European cul­ture as contrasted with the frontier-bred he-man. Thus in the film Mollycoddle Douglas Fairbanks is a foppish expatriate living in Europe who must win his way back to his rugged, masculine American heritage. In the comedies of Harold Lloyd, the bespectacled weakling is made to prove his masculinity over and over again.
In the 1930s, as the Hays Office code tightened its stifling hold, the sissy became a camouflage for the male homo­sexual, who could not be presented di­rectly. In Lewis Milestone's 1931 version of The Front Page, a milktoast poet-reporter, played by Edward Everett Horton, is a foil for the tough-guy report­ers. During the 1930s Ernest Truex and Franklin Pangborn made the character virtually their own. With the collapse of censorship in the late 1960s, this subter­fuge became less common, but it is still resorted to occasionally when the filmmakers wish to blur the image of a homosexual character.
Buddy Films. The drag and sissy films featured individuals who were gen­erally isolated and risible, and hence could scarcely be regarded as role models by the general public. It was quite different with the buddy films - a classic example is Beau Geste (1926) - which generally presented dashing specimens of manhood who bonded with others of their ilk. For this reason homoerotic overtones generally had to be more subtle than in the other two genres. Many of these films raise problems of interpretation, in that the homoerotic elements that are detected by gay viewers (and a few homophobes) are often ignored by general audiences. Is it a case of projec­tion (on the one hand) or obtuseness (on the other)? Recent literary criticism has emphasized that each work lends itself to a multiplicity of interpretations as the reader recreates the work. Regardless of whether this principle applies to films in general, it does seem helpful in under­standing the divergent interpretations of buddy films.
An early landmark of the genre is William Wellman's Wings (1928), not to be confused with Stiller's earlier work. As one of the two flyer heroes is dying in the arms of the other, the survivor epitomizes: "There is nothing in the world that means more to me than your friendship." A sinis­ter example is Alfred Hitchcock's Strang­ers on a Train (1951), based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, where two men make a double murder pact. Adolescent aliena­tion was the theme of Rebel without a Cause (1955), in which, however, the deli­cate Sal Mineo character dies so that James Dean can be united with Natalie Wood. In 1964 Becket provided a medieval setting, while the popular Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1974) updated the long tradition of Westerns featuring male he­roes and their "sidekicks" by making Paul Newman and Robert Redford equal part­ners.
The seventies provided a few opportunities for a franker divulgence of the subtext. In the French Going Places [Les valseuses, 1974) Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere even have sex in one scene; the next day Dewaere is remorseful and ashamed, but Depardieu tells him to forget it: it's OK among friends.
Transfers. Novels having gay and lesbian characters have received a variety of treatments. Early on, the gay character is either written out or made straight [Young Man with a Horn, 1950) or the gender is changed (as in Serenade [1956], after James M. Cain's novel, the gay-male impresario is turned into a femme fatale agent, played by Joan Fontaine). Cabaret (1972) made the Isherwood character bi­sexual, but the earlier / am a Camera passed him off as straight. Inside Daisy Clover made the gay movie star (Robert Redford) only bisexual, and then only through the dialogue of other people. In the book Midnight Express the hero ad­mitted to a gay love affair in prison, but in the movie version (1978) he rejects a hand­some fellow inmate's advances. Although William Hurt received an Academy Award in 1986 for his portrayal of a fern prisoner in Kiss of the Spider Woman, many gay viewers - including the book's author, Manuel Puig - found him unconvincing.
In screened plays, especially those of Tennessee Williams, the crucial bits of dialogue are omitted, so that one wonders what the fuss is about with Blanche and her dead friend in Streetcar Nam ed Desire (1951) or the problem that keeps Brick and Maggie apart in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Yet the English Taste of Honey (1961) retained the honesty of Shelagh Delaney's play, providing a rare instance of a sympathetic effeminate gay man.
Screen biographies of gay people have had similar fates. Michelangelo and Cole Porter appear as joyful heterosexuals; Oscar Wilde could not be sanitized, to be sure, but he was presented in a "tasteful" manner (three British versions, two in 1960, one in 1984). Recent screen biographies have been better; the documentary on the painter Paul Cadmus (1980) is open with­out being sensational; Prick Up Your Ears, on the life of Joe Orton, is as frank as one can wish, though it somehow misses the core of his personality. Nik and Murray, while not properly speaking a biography, told the story of dance-world luminaries Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, treat­ing their long-term relationship simply as a matter of fact. Unanswered Prayers: The Life and Times of Truman Capote (1987) pulled few punches, and Gian-Carlo Menotti: The Musical Magician (1986), though it provided no intimate details, did not gloss over the relationship with Samuel Barber.
The European "Art Film." After World War n, as Europe emerged from the stultifying restraints of the Occupation, a greater freedom was sought in many areas, including the erotic. Moral guardians were still very much on the scene, however, and homosexuality had to be presented in aestheticized, "tasteful" guise. Clearly ahead of its time was Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour, about prison homoeroticism and its repression. In The Third Sex (West Germany, 1959) a sophisticated older man has an entourage of teen-aged boys. Although this film purveys dated ideas of homosexuality, it went farther in explicitness than anything that Hollywood was able to do for over a decade. Federico Fellini's celebrated La Dolce Vita (1960) is a multifaceted portrait of eternal deca­dence in chic circles in Rome. The English Victim (1961), which concerns the black­mailing of a young homosexual, is clearly a plea for law reform in the wake of the 1957 Wolfenden Report. Sidney J. Furie's The Leather Boys (1964) portrays a buddy relationship between two motorcyclists, one gay, one straight. In the same year a French director Jean Delannoy even showed (though in highly aestheticized form) love between two schoolboys in Les Amities particuliéres, based on the 1945 novel of Roger Peyrefitte.
The Sixties Thaw in America. The early years of the sixties saw the start of the civil rights movement in the United States, while at the same time a series of court decisions struck down literary cen­sorship, signaling that restriction on films would be relaxed as well. Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent ¡1962) even brought homosexuality to the hallowed halls of the United States Senate, but presented it as a seamy reality far from the conventional lif e of an upright American politician, even though it was based on the suicide of Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming in 1954. This film presented audiences with their first glimpseof agay bar. One breakthrough came in 1967 when the legendary Marlon Brando portrayed a closeted homosexual army officer in John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, a film which drew a "Condemned" rating from the Catholic Church. In The Sergeant (1968) and Sud­denly Last Summer (1969) both protago­nists meet death as the wages of their perversion. The lesbian relationship in 1968's The Fox is also ended through the death of Sandy Dennis. Although it was essentially a buddy movie, Midnight Cow­boy (1969), with Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, offered some revealing glimpses of the Times Square hustling scene, with Voight sympathetically playing a "straight trade" type; one scene has him experienc­ing oral sex in an all-night movie theater.
The Underground Cinema. In 1947 Kenneth Anger, then still a southern California high school student, made Fire­works, a symbol-laden, quasi-surrealist portrayal of a gay sex encounter. Although his career never really took off in the commercial sense, Anger made another innovative film Scorpio Rising in 1963, which foretold Counterculture sexual free­dom and the interest in the occult. Some­what similar was Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), while Gregory Markopoulos achieved a more aestheti­cized and abstract version of the mode. These developments have been termed the "Baudelairean cinema," since they depend on some aspects of the French nineteenth-century decadent sensibility. Their immediate heir, however, was Andy Warhol, who branched out from painting in such deliberately crude films as Blow Job (1963) and My Hustler (1965). Neither was really pornographic but their accep­tance helped speed the fall of censorship barriers.
Breakthough. Only with William Friedkin's Boys in the Band (1970) were audiences confronted with a Hollywood film in which all the characters are stere­otypical homosexuals. The tone remained mocking and hostile, reassuring straight audiences that such people were doomed to unhappiness in "the wasteland of homosexual existence."
Also in 1970 came Michael York's portrayal of a scheming, murderous bisex­ual in Something for Everyone. York again played a bisexual as the male lead Brian in the film version of Cabaret (1972), based on Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Sto­ries. The early seventies were also notable for two films which dealt with male rape, in each case of a heterosexual by a hetero­sexual. The 1971 Canadian film version of John Herbert's play Fortune and Men's Eyes dealt with a prison setting, and in­cluded some rather explicit footage as well as a drag-queen who turns out to be the strongest of the main characters. Burt Reynolds starred in DeMverance (1972), in which a white-water macho buddy trip is disrupted by some hillbillies who take advantage of an opportunity to sodomize one of the buddies at gunpoint.
Against this background, Chris­topher Larkin's A Very Natural Thing (1973) came as a wholly positive portrait of gay relationships. Sidney Lumet's DogDay Afternoon (1975) followed with the real story of a bisexual bankrobber, played by Al Pacino, and his would-be transsexual lover, sympathetically told.
Europe continued to be impor­tant with the emergence of openly gay directors. As early as 1968 Pier Paolo Pasolini had made Teorema, about the visit of a pansexual angel to the household of a Milan industrialist. Not to be outdone, his older colleague Luchino Visconti made The Damned (1969), a somewhat fanciful recreation of the massacre of Captain Rohm and his Nazi storm trooper comrades in the 1934 "night of the long knives," de­picted as a wild orgy of blond German youths suddenly interrupted by subma­chine guns from the rival Nazis of the S.S. Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) made a questionable equation be­tween childhood homosexual experience and Italian fascism. A year later Visconti brought out a more lyrical and successful film, arenderingofThomasMann'snovella Death in Venice. Britain's John Schlesinger depicted a triad of two men and a woman in which one of the men was involved with the other two in 197 l's Sunday Bloody Sunday-, this film was notable for the shock experienced by straight audiences at a kissing scene be­tween Peter Finch and Murray Head. Per­haps the most notorious of the gay direc­tors was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose Fox and His Friends (1975) deals with homosexuality and class struggle. Fassbinder's last film was his controver­sial version of a Genet novel, Querelle (1982). The death of Franco created the possibility of a new openness in Spanish culture, including a number of gay films. Influenced by Luis Bufiuel, Law of Desire (1986) by Pedro Almodovar is surely a masterpiece of comic surrealism.
The Positive Eighties. Homopho­bia in movie-making became a major issue in 1980, when street demonstrations called to protest and disrupt the filming of Cruis­ing proved effective and the movie's show­ings were often targeted for further pro­tests. As the controversial film failed to score big at the box office, Hollywood drew the lesson that blatant homophobia was no longer good business.
In 1982 Hollywood came back with Making Love, a high budget soap opera about two yuppie lovers, in an at­tempt to lure a new market; as the attempt failed, no further such excursions appeared. Also in 1982 came Personal Best, with Mariel Hemingway as a lesbian athlete, and in 1986, the independently produced Desert Hearts, after the novel Desert of the Heart by Jane Rule, but both films showed disappointing box-office receipts. Bill Sherwood's Parting Glances (1986), a sensitive story of two men, one with AIDS, the other not, was not intended to make money. Modest expectations also attended theBritishMy Beautiful Laundrette (1985), featuring an unselfconscious love affair between two teenage boys, one white, the other Pakistani; yet it enjoyed surprisingly long runs. In 1987, however, Maurice, a beautifully detailed recreation of the E. M. Forster novel by the Merchant-Ivory team, showed that excellence, high budget commercial standards, and honesty about homosexuality could be successfully com­bined.
Gay and Lesbian Personalities. While actors are often thought of as homo­sexual or bisexual - and many are - the real gay side of Hollywood is probably to be found in those who do not appear on the screen - agents, costume designers, chore­ographers, and makeup artists. Already in the 1920s some major directors were known to be gay, including the German Friedrich W. Murnau and the Russian Sergei Eisenstein. Dorothy Arzner certainly projected a mannish appearance, whatever her sex life was. The English James Whale went to Hollywood, where he achieved success in directing horror movies. Pasolini, Visconti, and Fassbinder have been mentioned above; the multitalented Franco Zeffirelli (also active in the field of opera) should also be noted.
From an early date Hollywood had promoted the cult of the stars, with their images carefully shaped by studio public relations departments. A curious aspect of star adulation is the preoccupa­tion, amounting almost to identification, of gay men with such heterosexual divas as Joan Crawford and Judy Garland. Of course the gossip mills turned endlessly. While Rudolph Valentino had to undergo (still unsubstantiated) gossip about his homosexuality, his successor Ramon Novarro really did it, as his tragic murder by two hustlers in 1968 finally attested. The screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta claimed to have had affairs with both Garbo and Dietrich. During their lifetimes Char­les Laughton and Montgomery Clift had to suffer fag-baiting taunts from colleagues, while Rock Hudson remained largely untouched by public scandal until his death from AIDS in 1985. Tyrone Power and Cary Grant were decloseted after their deaths. The sexuality of others, such as Errol Flynn and James Dean, remains the subject of argument. In Germany the stage actor and film director Gustav Grundgens managed to work through the Nazi period, even though his homosexuality was known to the regime. In the 1970s, the English actor Dirk Bogarde, in a rare and coura­geous act of candor, went public about his homosexuality.
Gay-Male Porno Films. The ori­gins of this genre are obscure, but one source is the "blue movies" made for stag parties and sold under the counter even before World War II. Another source is the nonexplicit genre of "muscle films" show­ing buddy relationships and wrestling, which were purchased by gay men. In the late 1960s Pat Rocco produced a series of romantic soft-core (not showing acts of sexual penetration) films of virile men in love with one another. In 1969, however, hard-core porno arrived, apparently to stay. Some fifty theatres across the United States specialized in the genre, and where the authorities were willing to turn a blind eye, sexual acts took place there, stimu­lated by the films.
Much of the early production was forgettable, but in 1971, in Boys in the Sand starring Casey Donovan (Cal Cul­ver), the director - producer Wakefield Poole achieved a rare blend of sexual explicitness and cinematographicvalues. For a while New York and Los Angeles vied for supremacy, the eastern city specializing in the seamy side of gay life, whereas the California city featured wholesome west coast boys. Among those who achieved some distinction (or at least commercial success) as directors in Los Angeles are J. Brian, FredHalsted (1940-1989), and Wil­liam Higgins. Other notable American directors include Arch Brown, Jack Deveau, Francis Ellie, Joe Gage, Dave Nesor, and Christopher Rage. The French Jean-Daniel Cadinot showed that one could combine porno with convincing setting and characterization. Although they are not strictly porno, much the same can be said for the films of the late Arthur J. Bresson, who even dared to deal with boy love.
In the later eighties AIDS began to devastate porno-industry workers, gay and straight, and safe sex procedures be­came more rigorous on the set (it should be noted, however, that long before AIDS, by strict convention pornographic film ejacu­lations were always conducted outside the body, so as to be graphically visible; hence film sex was always basically "safe sex"). Video rentals for home use competed with cinema showings, and some of the sleazier houses closed.
Lesbian porno exists only as scenes within films addressed to hetero­sexual males, their being, thus far, no market for full-length lesbian films of this nature. A number of independent lesbian filmmakers have made candid motion pictures about lesbian life, but they are not pornographic.
Documentaries. Perhaps the first is a chapter in the life of openly gay artist David Hockney, A Bigger Splash (1974). Word is Out was a 1977 composite set of interviews providing a remarkable pano­rama of gay and lesbian reality. In 1978 Rosa von Praunheim, a militant German gay director, brought out An Army of Lov­ers, a record of his visits to American gay liberation leaders. Improper Conduct (1984) by Nestor Almendros and Orlando Jimenez featured interviews with gay ex­iles from Castro's Cuba. The Times of Harvey Milk (1985), concerning San Francisco's slain political leader, received an Academy Award in 1986. The availabil­ity of cheaper equipment has made docu­mentaries of important events, such as the 1987 march on Washington, easier, and the video rental system has made them available to those who cannot attend the often brief theatrical engagements. Major cities, such as Amsterdam, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, now have annual film festivals in which gay and lesbian motion pictures of all sorts are showcased.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon II, New York: Dutton, 1984; Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Hollywood Androgyny, New York: Columbia University Press, 1965; Homer Dickens, What a Drag: Men as Women and Women as Men in the Movies, New York: Quill, 1984; Richard Dyer, et al., Gays and Pilm, New York: New York Zoetrope, 1984; Stefanie Hetze, Happy end für wenf Kino und lesbische Frauen, Frankfurt am Main: Tende, 1986; Joan Mellen, Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977; Bertrand Philbert, L'Homosexualité à l'écran, Paris: H. Veyrier, 1984; John W. Rowberry, Gay Video: A Guide to Erotica, San Fran­cisco: G. S. Press, 1987; Carel Rowe, The Baudelairean Cinema: A Trend Within the American Avant-Garde, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982; Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexu­ality in the Movies, New York: Harper and Row, 1981; Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972.
Wayne R. Dynes

Firbank, Ronald (1886-1926)
English novelist and playwright. Firbank, an aesthete and a dandy, was the grandson of a Durham miner, whose Vic­torian rags-to-riches ascent provided the income for his grandson to live indepen­dently and to publish most of his books privately. A delicate child, he was edu­cated mainly by private tutors. He at­tended Trinity College, Cambridge, dur­ing the height of the university's homoerotic period, but never took a degree. In 1907 he was converted to the Roman Catholic church by R. H. Benson, a clos­eted homosexual who had been a patron of Frederick Rolfe ("Baron Corvo"). Shy and retiring, Firbank spent much of his life traveling, writing his novels on the backs of large postcards. He seems to have had no long-term homosexual affairs; as he re­marked with resignation, "I can buy companionship."
Characteristically, the plot of his first novel, Vainglory (1915), which con­cerns the quest of a society woman to have herself memorialized in a stained-glass window, is a slight affair. The interest lies in the social color as expressed in the dialogue, where Firbank leaves out many of the usual narrative markers, including the identity of the speakers, so that the reader is left to construct much of the background for himself. Valmouth (1919) concerns a nursing home for centenarians, while Prancing Nigger (1919) is set on a Caribbean island. In the latter novel, he introduces his own name as that of an orchid: "a dingy lilac blossom of rarity untold." His last novel, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, in which the eponymous cleric chases but never quite succeeds in catching choir boys, was published just after his death in Rome from a pulmonary infection (1926).
Seemingly spun from the stuff of trivial social comedy, Firbank's novels made a significant contribution to literary modernism through their original use of the device of the "reader's share," whereby he left unstated the details of plot and characterization. Firbank's popularity waxes and wanes, but he had a major influence on such younger contemporar­ies as Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Miriam J. Benkovitz, Ronald Fiibank: A Biography, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969; Brigid Brophy, Prancing Novelist, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
Ward Houser

Flanner, Janet ("Genet"; 1892-1978)
American journalist. After set­tling in Paris in the 1920s, Janet Flanner began a series of reports on life in the French capital in The New Yorker. From 1925 onwards she wrote under the pseudo­nym of Genet, and the acuteness of her analyses of politics, diplomacy, and cul­ture made the name an indispensable asset during the magazine's great phase.
Having returned to the United States as the clouds of World War II gath­ered, Flanner met her life companion, Natalia Danesi Murray, in New York in 1940. Of Italian birth, Murray was an edi­tor, publisher, film producer, theatrical and bookstore manager, and Allied propa­gandist for the United States Office of War Information. At the time of their meeting Flanner was 48, Murray 38. The two women, who had both divorced their husbands before they met, remained linked emotionally and intellectually until Planner's death at the age of 86. They were separated physically for much of each year: Flanner returned to live in Paris, while Murray lived in New York and Italy. They both witnessed many important events of the times, knew those who created them, and commented on what they saw in pungent prose. The evidence lies in their letters, which Murray decided to publish when she "realized how unique our rela­tionship was," but "also as a demonstra­tion of how two women surmounted ob­stacles, trying to lead their personal and professional lives with dignity and feel­ing."
In their comments on political events, Flanner and Murray saw male vanity and the persistence of unthinking ideological loyalties as responsible for many difficulties that could have been avoided. Much of their correspondence focuses on their friends: Margaret Ander­son, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Anna Magnani, and Tennessee Williams. Because some aspects of the exchange do not ac­cord with today's social conscience, it attracted mixed reviews in the 1980s. Yet the letters are an invaluable record of over thirty years of a passionate, yet honest relationship of two intensely active women.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Flanner, Janet, Darhnghissima: Letters to a Friend, Natalie Danesi Murray, ed., New York: Random House, 1985.
Evelyn Gettone

Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880)
French novelist. The son of a surgeon, Flaubert grew up in a medical milieu preoccupied with the progress of a science to which he felt himself unequal. From his early years at the lycée onward, he preferred the pen to his father's scalpel, and singlehandedly edited a minor jour­nal, the Colibri, that clumsily but clearly foretold his future talent. In Paris he read law but never took the degree for reasons of health, and there met Maxime Du Camp, with whom he formed a close friendship. Together they traveled through Brittany and Normandy in 1847, bringing back a volume of reminiscences that was to be published only after Flaubert's death [Par les champs et par les grèves, 1885). Be­tween October of 1849 and May of 1851 the two traveled in Egypt and Turkey, and there Flaubert had a number of pédérastie experiences which he related in his letters to Louis Bouilhet.
On his return to France Flaubert shut himself up in his country house at Croisset, near Rouen. Instead of aspiring to self-discovery in the manner of the Romanticists, Flaubert sought to bury his own personality by striving for the goal of art in itself, and he devoted his entire life to the quest for its secrets. His ferocious will to be in his works "like God," every­where and nowhere, explains the nerve-wracking effort that went into each of his novels, in which nothing is left to the free flow of inspiration, nothing is asserted without being verified, nothingis described that has not been seen. This explains the multiple versions that are periodically uncovered of almost every one of his works, with the sole exception of Madame Bovary (1857), which led to his being tried for offending public decency. At the trial he won acquittal but was denied the costs of the proceedings. The novel gains its power from the careful picture of the Norman town and countryside he knew so well, while the lovers with whom Emma Bovary seeks to realize her dreams are as petty as the leaders of the provincial society in which she is trapped.
In 1857 he traveled to Tunisia to collect material for a historical novel set in Carthage after the First Punic War. Salammbô (1862), abundantly docu­mented, is so rich in sadistic scenes, in­cluding one of a mass child-sacrifice, that it horrified some contemporary readers. It was followed in 1869 by L'éducation sen­timentale, which relates the life and the education in love of Frederic Moreau, and although an uneventful tale, perfectly captures a certain period and stratum of French society. In 1874 he published La tentation de saint Antoine, a prose poem of great power and imagination. His last work, Bouvard et Pécuchet (issued post­humously in 1881), is an unfinished study in male bonding.
Flaubert had an interest in homo­sexuality that went beyond mere voyeur­ism. Among his mementoes was the auto­graph confession of a pederast who had killed his lover out of jealousy and was eventually guillotined after confessing every detail of his passion and crime. He was also delighted by the story of a group of men surprised in a homosexual encoun­ter in a pissoir in the Champs-Élysées, among them the son of a former Governor of the Bank of France. But it was in Cairo, in the winter of 1849-50, that Flaubert experienced homosexuality in its Oriental guise. A letter to Bouilhet mentions the bardaches (passive homosexuals): "Sod­omy is a subject of conversation at table. You can deny it at times, but everyone starts ribbing you and you end up spilling the beans. Traveling for our own informa­tion and entrusted with a mission by the government, we regarded it as our duty to abandon ourselves to this manner of ej aculation. The occasion has not yet presented itself, but we are looking for one. The Turkish baths are where it is practiced. One rents the bath for 5 fr., including the masseurs, pipe, coffee, and linen, and takes one's urchin into one of the rooms. - You should know that all the bath attendants are bardaches." Then he relates his disap­pointment at not obtaining the masseur of his choice. In another letter he writes in Greek characters that "Máxime [Du Camp] tried to sodomize a bardache in Jeremiah's cave. - It's untrue!" Then he adds: "No! No! It's true." The experiences of the two travelers parallel in a way Sir Richard Burton's adventures while on government service in India; in the exotic setting they felt free to experiment with pleasures tabooed in their home countries. Although the major themes of Flaubert's work would always be heterosexual, it is interesting that he was not repelled by "the other love," but pursued it with nonchalance and with some evident curiosity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Enid Starkie, Plaubezt the Master: A Critical and Biographical Study (1856-1880), New York: Atheneum, 1971.
Warren Johansson

Florence
This city in central Italy, the capital of Tuscany, is famous as the native or adoptive home of many of the chief artistic and cultural figures of the Italian Renaissance, and for its art treasures.
Historical Background. Of Etrus­can origins, it was a Roman town, but declined with the barbarian invasions until the Carolingian period (eighth century). An economic renewal took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, causing the city gradually to detach itself from its feudal overlords, while adding to its own territory. A merchant and manufacturing city-state, it underwent a complex politi­cal development, punctuated by interne­cine strife. The continuing turbulence gave the commercial Medici family the oppor­tunity gradually to impose its domination (from 1434). Under Lorenzo de' Medici, known as "the Magnificent" (1448-1492) Florence reached the zenith of its artistic, cultural, and political development - though not in the economic realm, which had its apogee in the previous century.
After various conflicts - which saw the Medici twice expelled - the fam­ily prevailed in 1530, and in 1569 Pope Pius V named them grand-dukes of Tus­cany, a title reflecting the extension of their rule over most of the province. The seventeenth and eighteenth were centu­ries of decline. Only with the reign of Peter Leopold of Habsburg-Lorraine (1765-1790) did Florence begin to recover culturally ' and economically.
Having revolted in 1859, in the following year Florence joined the new Kingdom of Italy, serving as capital from 1865 to 1871. Through the nineteenth and a large part of the twentieth century Florence was one of Italy's most important cultural centers, dense in literary, artistic, and publishing activities. Industrial devel­opment was centered in nearby Prato, permitting the historic center of Florence to be preserved.
Homosexuality in Repute and in Law. More than Venice, which has at­tracted many historians today, it was Florence that enjoyed the reputation, both in Italy and abroad, of being excessively "tolerant" of homosexual conduct. This renown is attested by the Middle High German verb florenzen, "to sodomize." And St. Bernardino of Siena ¡1380-1444), preaching on May 23, 1425 against sod­omy, lamented that "You cannot leave Tuscany without being reproached twelve times a day that here we never punish such a vice."
In reality Florentine laws (begin­ning with that of 1325) severely punished sodomy, but in practice the authorities imposed the death penalty reluctantly, preferring fines or corporal punishments of other types (including castration). Capi­tal punishment, as far as present knowl­edge goes, was reserved for cases of special gravity, such as rape, seduction of a small child, or public scandal.
How much the death penalty was viewed as excessive by the Florentines can be seen in a proposal advanced in a pam­phlet of 1496 of Domenico Cecchi (ca. 1445-after 1514), who says that to make harsher the penalty against sodomites one should amputate one testicle for each of the first two offenses; on the third occa­sion the culprit should be locked up in a madhouse.
Nonetheless, Florence had a spe­cial court, that of theliffiziali di Notte (the "Officers of the Night"), which was charged with the task of monitoring and punishing homosexual acts. Exploration of the enormous quantity of material contained in the Florentine state archives has only just begun. Nonetheless, some of the docu­ments of the Uffiziali di Notte have been studied by the American scholar Michael Rocke. This research shows that most of the penalties exacted were fines. The rela­tive mildness of Florentine justice helped to assure the denunciation of notorious sodomites, since the accuser knew that he was unlikely to cause a person's death.
In this way one can see how in "tolerant" Florence the accusations amounted to several thousand. Thanks to this option of mild, but systematic repres­sion (instead of severe, but sporadic), Flor­entine society succeeded in keeping homosexual behavior under control, despite the existence of a popular culture that re­garded it indulgently, especially if the culprits were adolescents. Among the names of famous persons accused of sod­omy under this system were Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Benvenuto Cellini (who was twice condemned).
The Homosexual Subculture of the Renaissance. The existence of a real subculture, and not simply of isolated acts, is confirmed by numerous sermons preached by the above mentioned Bernar­dino of Siena in the years 1424 - 27. In these texts Bernardino mentions various privi­leged places where sodomites met, espe­cially taverns and pastry shops, noting the hours of the night preferred by the sodo­mites, those "wild pigs," in their search for sexual partners.
Niccoló Machiavelli, in a letter of February 25,1514, to his friend Francesco Vettori, amused himself by recalling street by street the path of a common friend in nocturnal quest of a boy. Among the lo­cales noted are Borgo Santo Apostólo, Calimala Francesca, and II Tetto de' Pisani.
The prevailing pattern of this subculture is the same as that known for other Italian cities of the period: the sodo­mite couple consists of an adult, who takes the role of the insertor, and an adolescent, who is the insertee. The availability of adolescents for prostitution was decisive for maintaining the subculture; Rocke has calculated that in the period ca. 1478-83 ten percent of all Florentine boys had to appear before the authorities charged with sodomy. The same author notes also that those accused of sodomy included a con­spicuous number of bachelors and recidi­vists, whom it is probably correct to de­scribe as having a "deviant lifestyle."
This phase of relative tolerance saw also the flowering of a notable amount of literature on the homosexual theme, authored by both homosexuals and hetero­sexuals, and written either in standard Italian or in Burchiellesque jargon. With Marsilio Ficino there was also an ideal­ized, socially acceptable (though chaste) version of the love between two men.
Post-Renaissance Developments. The period following the Renaissance, in which Florence fell into decline, has not yet been the object of special study. Cer­tainly the Counter-Reformation and the definitive return to power of the Medici dynasty fostered an atmosphere of gloomy moralism and puritanism, which discour­aged writing about homosexuality so that there is a "blackout" in the written rec­ords of almost two centuries.
Still, indirect light is shed on this period by biographical gossip concerning the last two rulers of the Medici house compiled by Luca Ombrosi in the eight­eenth century and published under the title of Vita dei Medici sodomiti. Grand-Duke Gian Gastone (1671-1737) was a notorious homosexual and he died with­out issue, ending the Medici Une. There is also the semiserious invective, Delia Vita e costumi de' fiorentini, of Francesco Moneti (1635-1712), who accused his fel­low citizens of being too much given to unnatural love. These texts document the persistence of widespread male prostitu­tion and a degree of tolerance for homosex­ual conduct.
In the eighteenth century Ferdinando IE, of the new ruling house of Habsburg-Lorraine, was one of the first European sovereigns to accept the Enlight­enment ideas concerning the crime of sodomy; in 1795 he abolished the death penalty.
In the nineteenth century Florence became part of the grand tour of homosexual travelers from northern Eu­rope, though it was less popular than such cities as Venice, Naples, and Rome. Still by the end of the century a small colony of foreign gay and lesbian residents, mainly English speaking, had formed. The persist­ing tolerance is shown by the indulgence always enjoyed by the noted Florentine versifier Tommaso Sgricci (1786-1836), of whom Byron remarked in 1820: "He is also a celebrated Sodomite, a character by no means so much respected in Italy as it should be; but they laugh instead of burn­ing, and the women talk of it as a pity in a man of talent."
In the twentieth century Florence saw a fervent cultural flowering, to which such homosexuals as the writers Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893-1973), Piero Santi (1912- ), Aldo Palazzeschi (1885-1974), and the painter Ottone Rosai (1893-1957) contributed. The present scene in Florence is characterized by a special concentration of leather locales, which attract homo­sexuals from other northern Italian cities, as well as foreigners.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice, Santa Barbara, CA: Ross-Erickson, 1979; Luigi Greci, "Benvenuto Cellini nei delitti e nei processi fiorentini, ricostruiti attraverso le leggi del tempo," Archiviodi antropologia criminale, 50 (1930), 342-85, 509-42; Michael Rocke, "Sodomites in Fifteenth-Century: The Views of San Bernardino of Siena," Journal of Homosexuality, 16(1988), 7-31.
Giovanni Dall'Orto

Flower Symbolism
In classical antiquity the theme of picking flowers represented enjoyment of life's transient pleasures, which must be gathered before they fade: the came diem motif. For many cultures the budding of plant life in spring represents nature's resplendent, but ever temporary self-re­newal. Ancient pederasts wrote poignantly of the anthos, or "bloom" of the adoles­cent sex object destined to fade all too soon.
The idea that specific flowers have meanings, that there is a "language of flowers," seems to derive from Turkish eighteenth-century practice, when flow­ers served to make up a secret code for love messages in the harem. This concept of the selam, a flower code able to express a range of meanings, spread to western Eu­rope, so that by 1820 Victor Hugo spoke of "doux messages oü l'amour parle avec des fleurs!" In 1884 Kate Greenaway summed up Victorian lore on the subject in her book The Language of Flowers. One dia­lect she did not present was the homosex­ual one, which was then known to a very small group. In 1894Robert Hichens' novel, The Green Carnation, popularized that flower as the distinguishing mark of the aesthete, though the Wilde scandals in the following year led quickly to the abandon­ment of that particular badge. Of course flowers featured prominently in the inte­rior-decoration schemes of the Arts and Crafts Movement and they were central to the fin-de-siecle imagery of the Art Nouveau in design and the minor arts.
The association of pansies with male homosexuals is documented in America as early as 1903. Dressing up in overelegant fashion may be called pansying up, while an effeminate boy may be called pansified. Other flowers that have been associated with male homosexuality are lilies and daffodils (the latter is jocu­lar). The use of violets as a gift in Edouard Bourdet's play The Captive, a major event of the 1926 Broadway season, caused an association of this flower with lesbianism that lasted several decades.
The slang term for the act of sev­eral persons having sexual intercourse with each other simultaneously is a daisy chain. While such a gathering might be hetero­sexual, the usual interpretation is that of a male-homosexual orgy.
The reasons for the floral meta­phor are various. Botanically, flowers have both male and female organs of reproduc­tion. In the early nineteenth century the study of this phenomenon led to the crea­tion of the term bisexuality, though it is doubtful whether this recognition had much direct impact on the popular imagi­nation. Flowers assume complex shapes and colors as a means of passive sexual attraction, since they lure insects who will bear their pollen to their partners. Then too they often have a scent, something to which homosexuals are allegedly addicted.
In Greek mythology the death of heroes could give rise to flowers and other plants. Especially touching is the story of the lovers Calamus and Carpus. When the latterwas accidentally drowned, Calamus, inconsolable in his grief, found solace in being changed to a reed. Then the beauti­ful youth Narcissus, having spumed the love of a nymph, was caused by the god­dess Aphrodite to feel unquenchable love for himself. At length he gained relief by being turned into the flower that still bears his name. As noted, the ancient Greeks described the bloom of a teenaged boy as the anthos, "blossom, flower," a term which captures not only the rosy glow of youthful beauty but its transience.
In our society flowers, because of their delicacy and beauty, are most often given by a man to a women. Flower names, such as Blossom, Camille, Daisy, Lily, and Petunia, are given only to women (though at one time they were assumed by gay men as "camp names"). The adjective florid means ornate and excessive; it can also describe an advanced stage of disease. Finally, flowers can be raised in hothouses to assume striking, even bizarre shapes and colors. They represent the triumph of culture over nature, a principle that also serves to buttress our society's stereotype of the homosexual.
See also Color Symbolism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Philip Knightly, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
Wayne R. Dynes

Folklore, Gay Male
Traditional aspects of culture - learned behavior - that are generally passed on orally or by example instead of through writing are usually classified as folklore. All people, regardless of education and social status, have many types of folklore. Often this is divided into such broad cate­gories as oral tradition, nonverbal commu­nication, and material culture. Each of these concepts can be further broken down into genres - specific types of folklore.
Homosexual men have developed a large number of traditions, including an argot (a form of language used by people who wish not to be understood by outsid­ers), jokes, legends, personal experience narratives, clothing and jewelry used as symbols, and a type of behavior known as "camp."
Language and Humor. The lan­guage used by some homosexual men is quite developed, and it is much more enduring than slang. The words and phrases cover a range of subjects; the largest group is made up of words used to describe vari­ous types of people. For example, queen is a standard term some homosexual men use to refer to themselves and others; it can be used derogatorily or as a term of endearment, a sort of affectionate insult. This term is frequently used in compounds, like "flaming queen"; "flaming" means "carrying on in a blatantly effeminate manner" and is probably derived from "flamboyant." Some gay expressions have entered the general vocabulary, most no­tably "to come out of the closet" and the word gay itself, as referring to sexual orien­tation. Such a colorful language commonly results in puns and other types of word play.
Humor is one of the hallmarks of the folklore of homosexual men. The most familiar genre of humor is the joke. The following riddling question shows how jokes can carry messages: "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? - Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change." The joke is based on the stereotype that homosexual people are mentally ill and in need of professional help, and that psychiatrists can "change" them, making them heterosexual. But the punch line carries the subject further, making the point that homosexual people are in control of their lives, and psychia­trists cannot "change" them. By implying that gays do not want to change, this joke offers a psychological victory over oppres­sion.
Legends and PersonalNarratives. Homosexual men also tell legends - sto­ries that are told as actual events; some­times the tellers believe the stories, and in fact the event described in a legend may have taken place. After countless retellings, however, the legend has been associated with so many people, places, and times that any facts it may contain cannot be verified. Often the story is told as some­thing that happened to a friend of a friend of the teller. A common legend told by homosexual men is the following:
"This really happened to a friend of a friend of mine in Chicago. He went into a tearoom [public rest room] and stuck his dick through the glory hole [a hole cut through the partition between two stalls]. The guy on the other side stuck a hatpin through it so he couldn't get out."
This legend is a cautionary tale, warning against anonymous and semipublic sexual acts. It is ironic that this story reveals a substantial amount of internal­ized homophobia; the theme of punish­ment for homosexual activity is quite clear.
Another type of story people tell is the personal experience narrative. Sto­ries of this sort are not traditional in them­selves, but the narrators have told them so often that they have taken on a traditional structure. The most familiar type of per­sonal experience narrative among homo­sexual men is the coming-out story, in which a man describes revealing his homosexuality to someone (usually friends or family). Most gay men have more than one coming-out story, since one comes out to different people at different times.
Nonverbal Expressiveness. Non­verbal communication involves the use of gestures, clothing, symbols, jewelry, and the like to convey messages about oneself. For example, some homosexual men wear black leather to indicate an interest in sadomasochism; others may wear the same type of outfit to project a macho image. A gay man might wear a necklace with a pendant in the shape of the lower case Greek letter lambda, a symbol of gay lib­eration. Another might wear a badge in the form of an inverted pink triangle as a symbol of the oppression to which homo­sexual men and women are subjected. (During the Holocaust the Nazis forced homosexual prisoners to wear inverted pink triangles. Many thousands of these men, like millions of Jews, ultimately died in the camps.)
Drag and Camp. Two types of gay men's folklore, drag and camp, combine verbal and nonverbal behavior. Drag, or female impersonation, although not prac­ticed by most homosexual men, is widely associated with gays, and drag shows are a common form of entertainment in some gay bars.
Camp is widespread and widely misunderstood. Camp is an attitude, a style of humor, an approach to situations, people, and things. The camp point of view is assertively expressed through exaggera­tion and inversion, stressing form over content, deflating pomposity, mocking pretension, and subverting values. Some­times (but certainly not always) camp behavior is effeminate. Like much gay humor, camp plays with stereotypes, car­rying them to extremes, flouting hetero­sexual values. Camp can be solely playful, but often it is a serious medium, providing a weapon against oppression.
Camp is best understood through examples. In the spring of 1987, someone stomped several goslings to death in an Indianapolis neighborhood that has a large number of resident ducks and geese. Shortly thereafter, someone planted a small cross beside the canal where the goslings had been killed. Reminiscent of the crosses placed at the sites of fatal automobile accidents, the memorial in this case im­plied - contrary to most Christian theolo­gies - that animals have souls and that the deaths of the goslings were the equivalent of human deaths.
Strategic Deployment of Folklore. Homosexual men demonstrate a variety of strategies in their use of folklore. Humor is pervasive. Ambiguity is also common, allowing covert messages to be conveyed through the use of double meanings. If someone receiving a message takes of­fense, the sender can protest innocence by insisting that the receiver misunderstood. Since gay men were brought up in the heterosexual culture, they have a back­ground from which they can draw double meanings.
In the following double entendre, the ambiguity is rather obvious. Feeling his attempt at finding a sexual partner for the evening to be futile, one man said, "Well, I guess I'll go home and do some­thing constructive, like knit." Another man responded, "But you only have one needle." The first replied, "So I'll cro­chet." The exchange was spontaneous and the reactions were quick; nothing was laboriously thought out. The humor goes a bit deeper than it first appears, for it plays upon the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual male: both knitting and cro­cheting are associated with women. A man with only one needle (or penis) cannot engage in a cooperative endeavor like knitting, which requires two needles working together. Thus he must make do with the equipment at hand: having but one needle, he must crochet (masturbate). Since this encounter took place between two men, each of whom knew the other was homosexual, and because it occurred within a gay context, both intended mean­ings were clear to those who heard the exchange. The two men were simply en­gaging in a bit of word play. Had the men continued the conversation along similar lines, the double entendres could have been used to lay the basis for a sexual proposition.
Inversion is a third strategem used by homosexual men. In taking words like faggot that heterosexual people have used as tools of oppression and turning them into statements of pride and defiance, gay men state their refusal to be labeled as sick, immoral, and evil.
Conclusion. The folklore of homosexual men functions in many ways - as a means by which gays can iden­tify and communicate with one another without other people's awareness, as a tool to help create a sense of "group" and be­longing, and as a way of coping with and expressing conflict. Most of all, folklore helps homosexual men gain cultural competence, that is, to function as gay men with other gay men. As long as schools, families, churches, and other institutions fail to fulfill this role, folklore will con­tinue to meet such needs.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Joseph P. Goodwin, More Man than You'll Ever Be: Gay Folklore and Acculturation in Middle America, Bloomington: Indiana Univer­sity Press, 1989; Bryan Keith Knedler, "Performance and Power in the Gay Male Community," master's thesis, Ohio State University, 1983; Venetia Newall, "Folklore and Male Homosexuality," Folklore 97:2 (1986), 123^7; Bruce Rodgers, Gay Talk: A (Sometimes Outrageous) Dictionary of Gay Slang, New York: Paragon Books, 1979.
Joseph P. Goodwin

Folklore, Lesbian
Lesbian folklore is the collection, documentation, and analysis of the tradi­tional cultural products and experiences of lesbians learned through face-to-face interaction and through observation and imitation. The following presentation utilizes examples of contemporary Ameri­can lesbian folklore collected by the au­thor from a cross-section of the Bloomington, Indiana lesbian-feminist community during the first half of 1988. Bloomington, a small Midwestern town and home of Indiana University, is a "gay mecca" be­cause of the large homosexual population.
Bloomington lesbians belong to three lesbian communities: national, re­gional, and local. Within the local lesbian community diverse groups exist such as factory dykes, academic dykes, and bar dykes. It is within these informally struc­tured community networks that the ma­jority of lesbian folklore exists. That folk­lore can be classified into three categories: verbal folklore (oral), customary folklore (verbal and non-verbal), and material folk­lore (artifacts).
VerbalFolklore. One particularly fertile area in this realm is folk speech, including a specialized vocabulary and expressions which are circulated by word of mouth within the folk group. Folk ter­minology utilized by lesbians is vast .Dyke, formerly a derogatory term, is now a re­claimed term of pride. Numerous deriva­tions of dyke exist: "baby dyke," "blazer dyke," "psychodyke" (in therapy), "execudyke" (yuppie), "softballdyke," "back-to-the-land-dyke," and "the dyke of life" (stereotypical lesbian). Formalized phrases also make liberal use of the word dyke: "it was dykes for days" means seeing a lot of dykes, especially in unexpected places such as the grocery store. "Dyke detector" means picking out another lesbian. An­other example is the term "queer," which can be comfortably spoken in a group of lesbians, thus serving as a camaraderie word. The traditional toast "cheers for queers" shows the friendly way queer can be used in an in-group context.
The lesbian lexicon contains a wealth of other folk speech items: initial­ized terms such as "p.i." (politically incor­rect), "d.p." (dyke potential), and "p.h.d." (pretty heavy dyke); expressions to refer to outsiders (heterosexuals) such as "hets" and "breeders"; and word play such as "no homo" (when someone is not home when the phone rings), "forward gaily" (when giving directions), and "straightening up" (the house). One fascinating area of folk speech concerns coding or the way one lesbian communicates information when lesbian identity is concealed. "She goes to my church" (she's a lesbian) is a phrase of black lesbians. Folk speech demarcates the lesbian community's uniqueness and separateness. Use of folk speech helps maintain group solidarity.
Personal experience narratives are a significant part of many lesbians' reper­toire. These stories are about an experi­ence in the narrator's own life that one recounts frequently. Two types of per­sonal experience narratives in the Bloomington lesbian community are "comingt: normal;" lang="EN-US">One particularly fertile area in this realm is folk speech, including a specialized vocabulary and expressions which are circulated by word of mouth within the folk group. Folk ter­minology utilized by lesbians is vast .Dyke, formerly a derogatory term, is now a re­claimed term of pride. Numerous deriva­tions of dyke exist: "baby dyke," "blazer dyke," "psychodyke" (in therapy), "execudyke" (yuppie), "softballdyke," "back-to-the-land-dyke," and "the dyke of life" (stereotypical lesbian). Formalized phrases also make liberal use of the word dyke: "it was dykes for days" means seeing a lot of dykes, especially in unexpected places such as the grocery store. "Dyke detector" means picking out another lesbian. An­other example is the term "queer," which can be comfortably spoken in a group of lesbians, thus serving as a camaraderie word. The traditional toast "cheers for queers" shows the friendly way queer can be used in an in-group context.
The lesbian lexicon contains a wealth of other folk speech items: initial­ized terms such as "p.i." (politically incor­rect), "d.p." (dyke potential), and "p.h.d." (pretty heavy dyke); expressions to refer to outsiders (heterosexuals) such as "hets" and "breeders"; and word play such as "no homo" (when someone is not home when the phone rings), "forward gaily" (when giving directions), and "straightening up" (the house). One fascinating area of folk speech concerns coding or the way one lesbian communicates information when lesbian identity is concealed. "She goes to my church" (she's a lesbian) is a phrase of black lesbians. Folk speech demarcates the lesbian community's uniqueness and separateness. Use of folk speech helps maintain group solidarity.
Personal experience narratives are a significant part of many lesbians' reper­toire. These stories are about an experi­ence in the narrator's own life that one recounts frequently. Two types of per­sonal experience narratives in the Bloomington lesbian community are "coming out" stories and humorous tales of lesbian life. Coming-out stories are the best known of all lesbian narratives and are so firmly ingrained into lesbian culture that a les­bian may request another lesbian to share her coming-out story. Coming-out stories are now available in printed form. Two collections are The Coming Out Stories edited by Julia Stanley and Susan Wolfe and Testimonies: A Collection of Coming Out Stories, edited by Sarah Holmes. Each lesbian's story is unique and chronicles the transitional stage of a lesbian's life when she solidifies her lesbian identity to herself and to others. Since coming-out is a process, many lesbians have several coming-out stories. Telling and retelling one's coming-out story or stories serves to reinforce one's lesbian identity.
Humorous tales of lesbian life are experiences after one has established her identity. Common themes in these hu­morous tales are: visiting parents, espe­cially during holidays; asking another woman for a date; detailing of a situation where the lesbian is for the first time being open with non-lesbians failing to under­stand; situations in the workplace and ironic situations (e.g., a lesbian teacher of sex education meeting a lesbian worker at Planned Parenthood). More often than not the core of these humorous narratives points to the painful aspects of living day-to-day as a lesbian in a homophobic world. Telling these tales provides an avenue for the narrator and her audience to laugh at herself and lesbian life.
Customary Folklore. This area encompasses both verbal and non-verbal traditions. Customary folklore can be found within celebrations and festivals. Within the lesbian community, relationships provide a framework for the creation and perpetuation of celebratory customs. One celebration frequently observed is the anniversary, acknowledging the day a couple made love for the first time; the celebration serves as a marker for the longevity of the relationship. Anniversary celebrations are private, quiet times. Many couples go out to dinner or make a special dinner at home and exchange gifts. When a major relationship landmark has been reached, such as the fifth anniversary, a couple may have a big party.
Joinings or bondings are another relationship celebration with traditional customs which, although not legally rec­ognized, acknowledge the couple's pair­ing. A local park or other natural setting is a frequently chosen site for a bonding. A couple write their own vows and may exchange rings. Following the ceremony food (including vegetarian selections), music (women's), and games (volleyball is a favorite) may complete the celebration. One relatively new addition to the lesbian community's expanding list of celebra­tions is baby showers, as more and more lesbian couples choose to have children. Lesbian-feminist community values are reflected in these folk celebrations and customs.
Festival season (summer) is many a lesbian's favorite time of year. Strength and energy gained during "festi's" helps one get through the rest of the year. In the Midwest, two festivals are frequented: The National Women's Music Festival and the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Festi­vals bring together diverse groups of lesbi­ans as well as a few heterosexual women. When in progress, festivals become tem­poral lesbian communities. Over the years (both mentioned festivals are now in their teens) a variety of customs have devel­oped. It is customary, for example, to make sure that the festivals are accessible to women with disabilities. Sign-language interpreters for women who are deaf or hearing impaired are provided for major concerts and for other activities upon request. At the concerts it is becoming customary for performers to recognize interpreters in a lovingly humorous way, behavior which brings loud applause from the audience. These annual music festi­vals with their attending customs hold special signficance for lesbians as times to escape the daily oppression of a homopho­bic culture and as times to celebrate one's lesbianism communally.
Material Culture. Among the tangible objects of material culture are items of folk costume. In pre-feminist days describing a lesbian folk costume was a relatively simple matter, as several older Bloomington lesbians recalled. Plaid flan­nel shirts or work shirts, bib overalls or jeans, and heavy work boots were standard pieces of apparel. A lesbian might wear a pinky ring (a symbol of one's lesbian iden­tity recognized by other lesbians) and cut her hair short (Ann Bannon's novels about Beebo Brinker and Lee Lynch's novel Swashbuckler are excellent sources for learning about clothing styles in the 1950s and 60s). With the advent of feminism in the 1970s folk costume became more di­versified. Shirts are cotton or other natural fibers commonly worn open at the neck to show off one's woman-identified jewelry (especially at lesbian community events). A more tailored style - not a lot of frills - is appropriate for shirts. T-shirts often display sayings. Lesbian sayings such as "I got this way from kissing girls" may be worn at lesbian events. For everyday wear good "lefty" sayings are usual choices. Most selected color choices are lavender, purple, or bright colors, not pastels. Pants can be jeans, tailored slacks, or baggy pants. Again, natural fibers and no pastel colors are the rule.
Shoes should be flat and comfort­able, made of good quality material, espe­cially leather. Tennis shoes, especially high-tops, are popular style choices. One comic note which points to the prevalence of comfortable shoe use can be gleaned from Robin Williams' movie Good Morn­ing, Vietnam. At one point during one of his A.M. radio broadcasts he says: "We can't even use the word dyke, you can't even say the word lesbian. It's women in comfortable shoes." Much lore surrounds Birkenstocks, including the belief that there is a good chance that a woman who wears Birkenstocks is a lesbian.
Favorite jewelry choices are crys­tals (unpolished) and woman-identified jewelry such as a labrys (double ax) or a double women's symbol. Cowrie shells woven into the hair are favored by many black lesbians. The primary lesbian com­munity value expressed in how and what clothing and adornments are worn is comfort.
Conclusion. There are also other forms of lesbian folklore: legends, jokes, arts, crafts, and the like. Other regions of the United States would provide additions to and variations of the examples given. Imbedded within lesbian books are won­derful samples of lesbian folklore. The grassroots newsletter Lesbian Connection is another rich source of lesbian folklore. On the academic side several ethnogra­phies give descriptions of lesbian commu­nities. Lesbian archives located through­out the United States house primary data collections (letters, diaries, photographs, and the like) which contain f olkloric infor­mation. Lesbians should be encouraged to preserve their heritage by donating docu­ments to archives and by interviewing friends and donating tapes.
Aside from a few papers read at the American Folklore Society's annual meetings in the 1980s, folkloristic analy­sis of lesbian material is non-existent. By not including data about lesbians within folklore scholarship, a heterocentric bias has been allowed to permeate the scholar­ship. When lesbian data are part of folkloric definitions and theories, they will add to a better understanding of America, its folklore, and American lesbian culture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Susan Krieger, The Minor Dance: Identity in a Woman's Community, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983; Denyse Lockard, "The Lesbian Community: An Anthro­pological Approach," loumal of Homosexuality 2:3 (1985), 83-95; Gail Sausser, Lesbian Etiquette, Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1986; Deborah Goleman Wolf, The Lesbian Community, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Ian Laude

Forster, E[dward] M[organ] (1879-1970)
English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Forster's father died less than two years after his birth, and he was raised by a group of female relatives, who were connected with a stern evangeli­cal sect. When he was ten, a great-aunt left him a legacy, which permitted him to obtain a good private education and to attempt a career as a writer. Forster de­tested public school, but found King's College, Cambridge, by contrast almost a paradise. Among students and faculty the atmosphere was strongly homoerotic, and Forster developed an intense Platonic rela­tionship with another undergraduate, H. O. Meredith, whom he later was to depict as "Clive" in Maurice. Forster's sensibil­ity took shape under the guidance of teach­ers of Hellenist bent, especially Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and under the influence of the ethics of personal integrity that stemmed from the philoso­pher G. E. Moore. In 1901 Forster was elected to the elite secret society at Cam­bridge, The Apostles, leading to close ties with such other members as John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey.
Uncertain what course to follow after graduation, he sojourned for a year in Italy with his mother. Not only did he find his vocation as a writer there, but he came to cherish to the end of his life a somewhat idealized concept of Mediterranean toler­ance and "earthiness" in contradistinc­tion to the Protestant uprightness and commercialism of his native England.
Returning to London in 1902 he affirmed his belief in reducing class barriers by teaching a course at the Working Men's College, a part-time commitment he would retain for over twenty years. Four novels followed in quick succession: Where Angels Feared to Tread (1905), The Long­est Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howards End (1910). This bril­liant debut secured him fame and mem­bership in the exclusive Bloomsbury group. Critical of Edwardian pieties, the novels adhere to an individualistic ethics of psy­chic integration and fulfilment through interpersonal relationships. Although in retrospect elements of male-bonding are evident, all these novels deal with heterosexuality.
In July 1914 Forster completed the first draft of a homosexual novel, Mau­rice. Realizing that it was not publishable in the England that had persecuted Oscar Wilde, he shared the manuscript only with a few friends, including D. H. Lawrence, who chose it as the model for his heterosexual Lady Chatterley's Lover. Forster last revised Maurice in 1960, but it was not published until after his death, in 1971. After completing Maurice Forster felt that his novel writing was over, as he had exhausted his insights into heterosex­ual relationships and would not be al­lowed to publish about those that affected him most deeply.
In 1915 he went to Alexandria in Egypt with the Red Cross. There he came to know the great modem Greek poet Constantine Cavaf y, whose work he helped to publicize. He also met a young tram conductor, Mohammed el Adl, with whom he enjoyed his first satisfactory sexual relationship. After Forster returned to England, El Adl died (1922).
Forster's connection with India began earlier, in 1906, when he met a handsome young Indian in England, Syed Ross Masood. Forster then visited the subcontinent in 1912-13 in the company of G. Lowes Dickinson. In 1921-22 he served as private secretary to the Mahara­jah of Dewas State Senior. During this period he gathered the material for his novel, A Passage to India, which on pub­lication in 1924 was acclaimed his master­piece. Offering a sharp critique of British imperialism, the novel nonetheless por­trays human connections as possible even across national and class lines.
Having resettled in England for good, in 1927 he gave the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, which were published as Aspects of the Novel. He became concerned with civil liberties, and in the following year he rallied public opinion to protest the suppression of the lesbian novel of Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness. The most significant per­sonal event of this period was Forster's friendship with the heterosexual police constable, Bob Buckingham, which lasted for the rest of his life.
In 1946, forced to leave his ances­tral home at Abinger, he accepted an offer to become an honorary fellow at King's College Cambridge, where he lived for the rest of his life. After 1924 he wrote no further novels, j ust reviews and essays, but the five that he had published in the first quarter of the century sufficed to secure his reputation as a novelist. As he had feared, however, the posthumous appear­ance of Maurice (1971), even in the liberal climate of the "sexual revolution," caused a furor. Several critics who had formerly admired his work now began to speak of "homosexual bias," and the novel was generally relegated to an inferior place outside the canon of his major works.
These criticisms are unjustified. While Maurice is not flawless, it is cer­tainly as good as his first four novels. Forster's homosexual novel falls into two parts. In the first, the impressionable hero is under the domination of the highminded, but insubstantial Platonism of his Cam­bridge friend, Give; in the second, he comes to find his true destiny with a working-class boy, the gamekeeper at Clive's estate with whom he then elopes "into the green­wood." Although this ending has struck some readers as romantic and unlikely, it is modeled on the successful life of Edward Carpenter, who ran a farm together with his proletarian lover, George Merrill. With minimal changes, the film version released by the Ivory-Merchant-Jhabvala team in 1987 emerged as fully credible.
In his novels Forster was a conservative modernist, with roots in the social comedy of Victorian times, but also showing affinities with the work of his friends D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Although the revelation of Forster's homo­sexuality diminished him in the eyes of some critics, his f amiliarity with the ideas of the early homosexual rights movement was actually a source of strength. He suc­ceeded in translating the insights of Car­penter, John Addington Symonds, and others into universal terms, and for this all his readers should be grateful.
BIBLIOGRAPY. P. N. Furbank, E. M. Förster: A Life, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978; Claude J. Summers, E. M. Forster, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.
Wayne R. Dynes

Foucault, Michel (1926-1984)
French historian and social phi­losopher. After completing his university work, Foucault was active in the French cultural services in a number of European cities. His first major book was Folie et déraison: histoire de la fohe à l'âge clas­sique (Paris, 1964; translated only in an abbreviated version: Madness and Civili-zation, New York, 1967). This monograph shows Foucault's characteristic ability to frame bold historical hypotheses and to give them literary form in gripping set pieces. As the audience for his work grew, however, more conventional historians began to flag gaps between evidence and inference.
Developing his ideas further, Foucault advanced the guiding concept of "archeology," the notion that western civilization had seen a succession of dis­tinct eras, each characterized by its par­ticular "episteme," or style of thinking. He then extended the scope of his investi­gation into clinics and prisons; as "total institutions" these sites display in con­centrated form the strategies of social surveillance and subjugation that regu­lated the whole society. Foucault's work in the 1960s was often viewed as structu­ralist, but he denied this affiliation. Al­though he was out of France at the time, he was deeply marked by the Paris uprising of May 1968, which created a general climate of activism; in Foucault's case this com­mitment found expression in concern for prisoners, mental patients, the Afghan rebels, and human rights generally.
The 1970s saw him increasingly involved with the problem of power, which he perceived as universally diffused though not in very different measures. The mod­em state in particular has learned to har­ness to its purposes such bodies of knowl­edge as medicine and the social sciences, which serve to colonize and subjugate the individual. The individual can confront this phalanx of domination with only a stubborn recalcitrance. At this time the concept of archaeology yielded to the more corrosive and dynamic "genealogy," de­rived from Friedrich Nietzsche, probably the most important influence on Foucault's later thought. His increasing iconoclasm and skepticism led him to deny that his­torical record yields any evidence of a stable human subject, of a human "condi­tion," or of human "nature."
In the mid-70s he turned to the matter of sexuality, issuing a program­matic statement in 1976 {La Volonté de savoir, Paris, 1976; translated as The His­tory of Sexuality, vol. I, New York, 1978). The five volumes that were to succeed this little book, treating the early modem pe­riod and the recent past, never appeared. Yet at the end of his life he surprised the world with two successor volumes with a different subject matter: the management of sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome.
While completing these books he was al­ready gravely ill, a fact that may account for their turgid, sometimes repetitive pres­entation. In June 1984 Michel Foucault died in Paris of complications resulting from AIDS.
In some ways a quintessential Parisian intellectual, Foucault obtained remarkable success also in the English-speaking world. On several occasions he taught at the University of California at Berkeley. Although he was wary of being identified as a homosexual thinker tout court, he made no bones about his orienta­tion, and could sometimes be found in the leather bars south of Market Street in San Francisco.
It is not surprising that scholars of homosexuality should be attracted to Foucault's work, since apart from its (nonexclusive) focus on sexuality it ac­corded with several aspects of the spirit of the times. Discontent with the systems of Marx and Freud and their contentious followers had nonetheless left an appetite for new "megatheories," which the Anglo-Saxon pragmatic tradition was unable to satisfy. Foucault's thought was both ambitious and critical. Moreover, he at­tacked the oppression model, which saw the shaping of sexual minorities as merely a function of negative social pressures, while at the same time he denied that there was such a thing as a transhistorical homosexual, an invariant building block of social typology. In particular Foucault was influential among a group of gay and lesbian historians who rallied to a program called Social Construction. This approach sees human beings and their sexuality as artefacts of the spirit of the age in which they live. Social Construction also detects sharp breaks, "ruptures," from one era to another. This concept of discontinuity was all the more welcome as the ground had been prepared by an influential American philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, whose concept of radical shifts in para­digm had been widely adopted. In vain did Foucault protest toward the end of his life that he was not the philosopher of discon­tinuity; he is now generally taken to be such.
As has been noted, the influence of Foucault has been complex and ramify­ing. Not since Jean-Paul Sartre had France given the world a thinker of such reso­nance. Yet Foucault's work shows a number of key weaknesses. Not gifted with the patience for accumulating detail that since Aristotle has been taken to be a hallmark of the historian's craft, he often spun elaborate theories from scanty em­pirical evidence. He also showed a predi­lection for scatter-gun concepts such as episteme, discourse, difference, and power; in seeking to explain much, these talis­mans make for fuzziness. Foucauldian language has had a seductive appeal for his followers, but repetition dulls the magic and banalization looms. More generally, Foucault found it hard to resist an anar­chistic, "anything goes" vision of histori­cal change, which leaves unanswered the question of why we are embedded in a temporal-cultural process from which it is useless to try to escape. Methodologically, his relativism permits no secure place from which to evaluate conf lictingtruth claims. Despite these criticisms, there can be no doubt of Foucault's personal sincerity, and his generosity toward those who sought to consult him. Refusing to be bound by the somewhat rigid and old-fashioned training he had received in France, he boldly sought to open new vistas of enquiry. The lesson of Foucault then is his quest, rather than the particular points at which he arrived in his relatively short creative life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Michael Clark, Michel Foucault: An Annotated Bibliography, New York: Garland, 1983; J. G. Merquior, Foucault, London: Fontana, 1985.
Wayne R. Dynes

Fourier, Charles (1772-1837)
French Utopian philosopher and sexual radical. Fourier spent much of his life in Lyon, trapped in a business world which he hated with a passion. Disillu­sioned in childhood by the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the people around him, he gradually formulated an elaborate theory of how totally to transform society in a Utopian world of the future known as Harmony, in which mankind would live in large communes called Phalansteries.
Fourier hid his sexual belief s from his contemporaries, and it was more than a century after his death before his main erotic work, Le nouveau monde amouieux, was first published. He was "modern" in many of his sexual attitudes, believing in the overthrow of traditional morality and universal replacement of this morality with a restrained and elegant promiscuity for everyone over the age of sixteen. He did not believe that anyone under sixteen had any sexual feelings, nor did he understand the psychology of sadism, pedophilia, or rape, so that his sexual theories are not entirely suitable for modem experimenta­tion. Moreover, he had a bizarre belief that planets were androgynous beings that could and did copulate. He was attracted heterosexually to lesbians, and although he called pederasty "a depraved taste," he was tolerant of male homosexuals and ephebophiles. He recognized male homo­sexuals and lesbians as biological catego­ries long before Krafft-Ebing created the modern concept of immutable sexual "perversions."
Fourier called for a "sexual mini­mum," the right of everyone to constant sexual gratification by means of teaching young people of both sexes to commit the "saintly" act of sexually sacrificing them­selves to older people, rather like Lars Ullerstam's modern call for providing the poor with free prostitutes at the taxpayers' expense.
Fourier, however, had no sympa­thy for "gutter" sex or for promiscuity in the face of the threat of venereal diseases. He wanted these diseases to be done away with before sexual liberation would be allowed. He wrote some fictional episodes in the vein of William Beckford, one of which describes the seduction of a beauti­ful youth by an older man.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu, trans, and ed., The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
Stephen Wayne Foster

France
In its present basic form ("the hexagon") France emerged from the terri­tory of the early Gauls and Franks during the central Middle Ages (1000-1270). Waves of repression of homosexuality by church and state have never succeeded in uprooting the homophile subculture, sti­fling the writing of erotic literature, or preventing homosexuals from occupying high positions. French politics and litera­ture have exercised an incalculable influ­ence on other countries, from England to Quebec, from Senegal to Vietnam. Whether justified or not, a reputation for libertine hedonism clings to the country, and espe­cially to its capital, Paris - by far the larg­est city of northern Europe from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries (when London surpassed it), making France a barometer of changing sexual mores.
The Middle Ages. Little of the exuberant homosexuality for which the ancient Celts, including the Gauls, were famed in antiquity seems to have survived the Roman occupation, Christian conver­sion, barbarian invasions, and finally the Frankish conquerors' adoption of Catholi­cism with its moral theology that pilloried as the "crime against nature" allnonreproductive forms of sexual expression. The heavy-drinking later Merovingians, descen­dants of the Frankish king Merovech and his grandson Clovis, who conquered all Gaul, were barbarians who indulged their sensual appetites freely. Lack of control allowed considerable sexual license to continue into the more Christianized Carolingian period (late eighth-ninth centuries), and probably to increase during the feudal anarchy that followed the Vi­king invasions of the ninth and tenth, but in the eleventh century the church moved to regulate private conduct according to its own strict canons.
The term sodomía, which appears in the last decades of the twelfth century, covered bestiality, homosexual practices, and "unnatural" heterosexual relations of all kinds. As early as the late eleventh cen­tury theologians associated what came to be called sodomy with heresy and magic. Commentators on the Scriptures grouped around Anselm of Laon, the most influen­tial teacher of his day, linked heresy and sodomy as forms of sacrilege both punish­able by death.
Before 1200 Southern France became a stronghold of heretical sects known as Cathars or Albigensians. Be­cause of their similarity to the Bogomils of Bulgaria they came to be stigmatized as bougres, a term that meant first "heretic" and then "sodomite." Charges of sexual heterodoxy were brought against them by the Catholic authorities, who claimed that unrestrained sexual hedonism was part of their cult. Popes organized the Inquisition against them and invoked the bloody Albigensian Crusade which devastated much of Languedoc, homeland of a sen­sual culture tinged by Moslem influences from the south. The word itself survives to this day as English bugger, which in Great Britain, apart from legal usage, remains a coarse and virtually obscene expression.
Paris, already the center of French academic and political life, had its trouvères who like the troubadours of Languedoc sang of love - and its clandestine homoerotic subculture. About 1230 Jacques de Vitry denounced the students at the Sorbonne for practicing sodomy, and in 1270 the poet Guillot in his Dit des rues de Paris cited the rue Beaubourg as a favorite cruising area for sodomites. Again in the fifteenth century the poet Antonio Beccadelli alluded to the continued homosex­ual practices of the intellectual commu­nity in Paris and the still-obscure jargon poems of François Villon (b. 1431) have also been cited as evidence for that Pari­sian subculture.
Some feudal customaries and municipal ordinances punished sodomy. Politics have occasioned accusations of sodomy in many epochs, none ever more notorious than the trial of the entire order of Knights Templars, who were blamed for the fall to the Moslems of Acre (1291), the last remnant of the crusader state in Pales­tine and Syria. The first charges of sexual heterodoxy against the Templars date from 1304 or 1305 in the Agen region of France. Many witnesses - some of whose testi­mony is suspect because they had been expelled from the order for misconduct or subjected to torture under examination - claimed that the order tolerated as sinless "acts against nature" between members. Philip IV of France pressured Pope Clem­ent V to take action against the Templars, and by October 13, 1307, the arrest of all Templars throughout France was ordered. For the next several years, despite some conflict between secular and ecclesiasti­cal authority, hundreds of episcopal and royal tribunals tallied the wealth of the order, gathered witnesses, heard testimony, and passed judgment. By 1314 the dignitaries of the order were placed in perpetual imprisonment by the church and executed by royal edict. The guilt of the Templars remains moot to this day; while some may have been involved in homosexual liai­sons, the political atmosphere surround­ing the investigation and the later contro­versy made impartial judgment impos­sible.
A persistent fear of sexuality and a pathetic inability to stamp out its pro­scribed manifestations, even with peri­odic burning of offenders at the stake and strict regulations within the cloister, plagued medieval society to the end. However, the medieval state was unable to concert the mass arrests and judicial murders of homosexuals that were to occur in the eighteenth-century Netherlands.
The Renaissance. If the Italy of the quattrocento saw the revival of the culture of classical antiquity - including its open avowal of pederasty - in France homosexuality was long deemed a caprice reserved to the nobility, the intellectual and artistic elite, and the princes of the Church. To be sure, other classes are known to have been involved, but their activity tended to be severely repressed. The no­tion of homosexuality as the aristocratic vice took root and thrived into modern times, though even this privileged minor­ity did not enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution.
At the court both male and fe­male homosexuality could at times flour­ish. The "flying squadron" of Catherine de' Medici was accused of lesbianism by such contemporaries as Brantóme. Henri -'III was celebrated for his mignons, the favorites drawn from the ranks of the petty nobility - handsome, gorgeously attired and adorned adolescents and magnificent swordsmen ready to sacrifice their lives for their sovereign. Although the king had exhibited homosexual tendencies earlier in life, these became more marked after a stay in Venice in 1574. Yet neither he nor the mignons scorned the opposite sex in their pursuit of pleasure, and there is no absolute proof that any of this circle ex­pressed their desires genitally. Yet a whole literature of pamphlets and lampoons by Protestants and by Catholic extremists, both of whom disapproved of the king's moderate policy, was inspired by the life of the court of Henri IJJ until his assassina­tion in 1589.
The intellectual nonconformity of the last centuries of the Old Regime was accompanied, or perhaps motivated, by a sexual nonconformity that found expres­sion in different modes. The amalgam of free thought and sodomy precisely mir­rored the medieval association of heresy and sodomy. The circle of "libertine" poets whose work launched the great tradition of French erotic verse included Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin, who so openly proclaimed his fondness for Greek love that he earned the nickname "the King of Sodom." For centuries his poems could circulate only in manuscript, where many of them still await publication. Saint-Pavin's friend and fellow poet Théophile de Viau was also gay in his life and writ­ings.
Even the entourage of Cardinal Richelieu included the Abbé Boisrobert, patron of the theatre and the arts, and founder of the French Academy, the sum­mit of French intellectual life. His pro­clivities were so well known that he was nicknamed "the mayor of Sodom," while the king who occupied the throne, Louis XIII, was surnamed "the chaste" because of his absolute indifference to the fair sex and to his wife Marie de' Medici.
Under Louis XTV, who himself was strongly averse to homosexuality, the court nevertheless had its little clique of homosexuals led by the king's brother "Monsieur" (Philippe of Orléans), who may have inherited the tendency from their father Louis XHI, if indeed he was their biological father. Despite France's long history of homoeroticism, the king and his associates affected to believe that the prac­tice had been recently introduced from Italy. About 1678 the court homosexuals formed a secret fraternity whose statutes provided for total abstinence from women other than for the purpose of obtaining offspring and whose insignia depicted a man trampling a woman underfoot in the manner of Saint Michael and the devil. In 1681 the young Count de Vermandois, the son of Louis by Louise de La Vallière, applied for admission, but so indiscreetly that the king learned of the order in 1682 and broke it up with great severity. He sent for his prodigal son, had him whipped in his presence, and then exiled him. The other members of the fraternity were in their turn disgraced and driven from the court.
The Enhghtenment. In the eight­eenth century France became the center of the intellectual movement that was to challenge the beliefs of the Old Regime and overthrow it. Critique of the morality and criminal legislation of the past could not fail to include the medieval attitude toward "sodomy." The very word sodo­mite faded from the usual vocabulary to be replaced by pédéraste or infame, the latter being the designation preferred by the police. On the other hand, the Enlightenment philosophes could never break fully with the earlier beliefs, in part because they had no alternative sexual morality, and in part because they were aware of the large number of homosexuals in the church, which they hated as the source of the superstition and intolerance they opposed. In fact, a monastic setting characterizes one of the best erotic novels of the eighteenth century, Gervaise de Latouche's L'Histoiie de Dom Bougre, portier des chartrenx (The History of Dom Bougre, the Porter of the Carthusian Monks; 1742). In his posthumously published novel La zeligieuse, Denis Diderot indicted convents as hothouses of lesbianism.
Despite the link between theo­logical and sexual non-conformity, the Enlightenment thinkers never perceived individuals with homosexual inclinations as their allies. When they wrote on the subject of homosexual activity and the attitude which the state should adopt toward it, it was either in terms of con­demnation as "unnatural," "infamous vice," "turpitude," "filthiness," or else as a peccadillo that had lost the aura of the mephitic and diabolical in which medie­val fantasy had enveloped it. At times they could treat homosexual inclinations as the result of a "bad habit" encouraged by the rigid segregation of the sexes in the educational establishments of the Old Regime, or advocate a more rigorous "police des moeurs" that would maintain the moral purity of the large cities. The practice of keeping a list of known ped­erasts already existed; in Paris in 1725 it had 20,000 names, in 1783 40,000. How­ever, with the Italian Cesare Beccaria the task of reforming the criminal law of the Old Regime began, to be pursued by Voltaire and others who upheld the gen­eral principle that crimes against religion and morality, when they violated the rights of no third parties or the interests of soci­ety but were penalized solely out of super­stition and fanaticism, did not fall within , the purview of civil law, until the French Revolution created a new code of laws in which sodomy had no place.
This innovation, it is true, was effected quietly and almost without at­tracting anyone's attention,- it was an act of omission rather than of commission. But the criminal code enacted by the Constituent Assembly in September -October 1791 for the first time in modern history contained no penalties for homo­sexual activity that did not entail the use of force or the violation of public decency; and incorporated into the Code Napoleon of 1810, it became the model for repeal of the medieval laws throughout the civi­lized world.
During the Revolution an anony­mous pamphlet appeared entitled Les Enfans de Sodome á l'Assemblée Nationale (The Children of Sodom at the Na­tional Assembly), proposing to ameliorate the lot of the homosexuals in the name of the rights of man, and offering a Constitution in seven articles which as­serted that one could be both bougre et citoyen, "bugger and citizen." It contained a list of all the members of the National Assembly who were accused or suspected of belonging to the special interest group to which the title of the pamphlet refers. The Revolution secured the release (though only for a time) of the imprisoned pansexual writer and thinker, the Marquis D. A. F. de Sade, who carried the transgressive strain in the Enlightenment to the ulti­mate limits of the imagination.
From the Restoration to World War 1. While French homosexuals were freed from the legal burdens of outlawry and infamy which had been theirs under the Old Regime, society still forced them to lead a clandestine existence, with cruis­ing areas known only to the initiated, secret gatherings and clubs - in short, they constituted in the nineteenth century a "freemasonry of pleasure" that unobtru­sively pursued its goals but did not as yet claim to be a distinct sub-species of man­kind. While conditions were scarcely ideal, in the absence of a criminal code that made their activities illegal the French homo­sexual subculture felt no need of a move­ment that would assert its rights. France became a haven for Englishmen seeking refuge from the far more intolerant law and public opinion of their own country. Also, Paris was a publishing center where books banned in England could be pub­lished and sold to British and American tourists.
Nineteenth-century France did see significant treatments of the homosex­ual theme in literature, from the porno­graphic novella Gamiani (1833) by Alfred de Musset to the realism of Balzac who included several gay characters in his panorama of the France of the July monar­chy, followed by Paul Verlaine, the lover of Arthur Rimbaud and author of a number of classic poems on homosexual love and Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose 1884 novel A reborns (Against the Grain) depicts the decadent sensuality of the fin-de-siecle. Joséphin Péladan celebrated androgyny in a series of works under the general title La decadence latine. It is to France that modem art and literature owe the whole "decadent" trend that often included a display of overt homosexuality among the more bohemian-inclined sectors of the artistic elite. To the theme of lesbianism Pierre Louys devoted his Chansons de Bilitis (1894), while Paris under the Third Republic became the residence of little coteries of French and foreign intellectu­als, including Oscar Wilde, Natalie Bar­ney, Djuna Barnes, Robert McAlmon, and Gertrude Stein, and patrons of the arts who expressed their homosexuality in lit­erature. This foreign colony was to play a significant role in spreading a more open discussion of the matter to the cultural life of other nations. But a political movement aimed at "emancipation" of the homosex­ual did not develop.
The homosexual emancipation movement that began on the other side of the Rhine, in Germany, after 1864 barely reached France, where after 1871 every­thing German became suspect. In 1909 Jacques d'Adelsward Fersen published a few issues of a journal entitled Akademos in Paris. The erotic literature that flour­ished in France in the early years of the century abounded in lesbian themes, but only rarely treated male homosexuality. Also, the psychiatric study of homosexu­ality that began in the German-speaking countries reached France only in the 1880s, when Julien Chevalier published first a dissertation and then (1893) a book entitled Une maladie de la personnalité (A Dis­ease of the Personality). Several other French psychiatrists wrote on the subject, at times in connection with other sexual "perversions," but two foreigners, Marc-André Raf f alovich, a Polish Jew resident in England, and Arnold Aletrino, a Dutch Jew, were responsible for the most impor­tant writings in French. The pages of the Lyon periodical Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle from the years before the First World War contain numerous contribu­tions on the subject, among them Raffalovich's eyewitness accounts of the trial of Oscar Wilde in London and the Harden-Eulenburg affair in Berlin and Munich.
From the Interwar Period to the Present. Not until after World War I did the public become aware of the extent of homosexuality in French Ufe. The work that "broke the ice," the first part of Marcel Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921), fea­tured the homosexual Baron de Charlus as a member of the French aristocracy in the early years of the Third Republic. Then Andre Gide, by publishing the set of essays entitled Corydon (1924), made homosexu­ality a literary and political question that the salons could no longer ignore. Yet the attempt to create a homosexual journal Inversions in 1924-25 ended when the publisher was prosecuted and convicted. In the literary avant-garde Jean Cocteau devoted Le Livre blanc (1929) to an auto­biographical treatment of homosexuality, albeit anonymously, and contributed po­etry, plays, diaries, and drawings to the subject; beginning with Le Sang d'un poète (1930) he added films to his repertoire. The surrealist movement proved hostile to homosexuality, except for René Crevel, who was openly gay. Interwar Paris saw the number of resident foreigners multi­ply, and a colony of expatriates, exiles and émigrés, escaping the provincialism and Puritanism of normalcy on the other side of the Atlantic established itself. A few minor non-fiction works on homosexual­ity were published, never approaching in volume the material issued in Germany under the Weimar Republic.
The fall of the Third Republic and the imposition of the Vichy regime saw a change in the laws that had scarcely been altered since 1810. A new law of 1942, promulgated by Pétain at the instigation of Admiral Darían, made homosexual acts with an individual under the age of 21 criminal - a parallel to similar legislation elsewhere. On the other hand, in occupied France Roger Peyrefitte completed the writing of Les Amitiés particulières (1943), a classic novel of homosexual at­tachment between two boys at an exclu­sive Catholic boarding school that was later filmed ( 1959). Peyrefitte's friendship - based on their joint quest of teen-aged boys - with the closeted novelist Henry de Montherlant was only revealed after the latter's suicide (1971 ). The postwar period, in which French law retained Pétain's in­novation, did not alter the general atmos­phere, but witnessed significant develop­ments.
Under the editorship of André Baudry, the homosexual monthly Arcadie was for many years after 1954 the most intellectual among the journals that pro­moted the gay cause. In the face of the hostility of the De Gaulle regime the publication stood firm and survived be­yond his fall until the beginning of the 1980s. The novels of Jean Genet, a former professional thief, treated male homosexu­ality with a pornographic frankness and style rich in imagery unparalleled in world literature. Genet enjoyed the patronage of the dominant intellectual of the time, the heterosexual Jean-Paul Sartre, who also wrote about homosexuality in other con­texts. Heartened by his example, other writers in the 1950s and 1960s broached the matter as public hostility diminished.
The sudden efflorescence of the gay movement in the United States after 1969 could not fail to affect France, which had already felt the impact of American popular culture. A whole subculture in­spired by the example of San Francisco and New York sprang up, with bars, baths, political organizations, and a pictorial magazine entitled Gai Pied (first issue: April 1979) that outdid the Los Angeles Advocate in splashing homoerotic sensu­ality across its pages. The arrival in power of a socialist regime at the end of the 1970s spelled the end of many of the barriers which the Gaullist Fifth Republic had erected against the intrusion of such a minority as the homosexual, and soon even a gay radio station, Frequence Gaie (subsequently renamed Future Genera­tion), was broadcasting around the clock. In 1981 the socialist government repealed the discriminatory law that had been enacted by the Vichy regime, and the exis­tence of a homosexual minority was ac­cepted as an unalterable fact by even the conservative parties which regained much of their strength in the mid-1980s, if not by the church. Innovations such as a compu­terized gay bulletin board - the Minitel - reached France, but also the tragic incur­sion of AIDS (in French SIDA), spread in no small part from Haiti and the United States. A flood of new publications ranging from trivial and movement literature to serious investigations of the homosexual aspects of France's own past showed that the Gallic spirit had its own inimitable contribution to the homoerotic culture of the late twen­tieth century. Even the provincial cities began to boast their own organizations; periodicals, and rendezvous for the gay public. All are recorded in the Gai Pied Hebdo Guide, published annually since 1983.
The political battles that had to be waged before courts and legislatures in other countries to gain the minimum of legal toleration were spared the French movement; its principal foe was the unen­lightened public opinion surviving from the recent past, but receding as the subject of homosexuality became an everyday matter in the mass media. So France joined the ranks of those nations with a politi­cally conscious and culturally enterpris­ing gay community.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Gilles Barbedette and Michel Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1961; Jean Cavailhes, et al.. Rapport gai: enquête sur les modes de vie homosexuelles en France, Paris: Persona, 1984; Claude Courouve, Vocabulaire de l'homosexualité masculine, Paris: Payot, 1985; D. A. Coward, "Attitudes toward Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century France," Journal of European Studies, 10 (1980), 231-55; Maurice Lever, Les bûchers de Sodome, Paris: Fayard, 1985.
Warren Johansson and William A. Percy

Frederick II (1197-1250)
Hohenstaufen king of Sicily and Holy Roman emperor (1212-1250). Called Stupor mundi (Wonder of the World) by contemporaries, he was designated the "first modem man" by the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Son of the German Emperor Henry IV and Constance, the Norman heiress of the Kingdom of Sicily, as well as grandson of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, he was bom in the square in a small town in Southern Italy, in full public view so that no one could doubt that his mother, old in the estimation of contemporaries for a first conception, produced him. Orphaned at the age of one and entrusted to the guardianship of Inno­cent III (1198-1216), the most powerful of medieval popes, he actually grew up on the streets of Palermo in Sicily, where he re­ceived a most unorthodox education, learn­ing Arabic and Greek as well as German, French, and Latin in that melting pot of cultures.
When Frederick attained his majority he broke his promises to his now dead guardian by failing to surrender the Sicilian crown, which included all of Southern Italy up to the border of the Papal States, when he received the crowns of Germany (1215) and of the Holy Roman Empire (1220), which included all of North­ern Italy down to the Papal States. Innocent's successors excommunicated him when he also delayed his promised crusade. Frederick was the only leader to crusade while excommunicated, but he recovered Jerusalem, which Saladin had recaptured from the Christians, by negoti­ating with Saladin's sophisticated nephew al-Kamil. When he returned he completed the reorganization of Sicily, making it the first autocratic European monarchy, bas­ing it on Arab, Byzantine, and Norman models and Roman law precedents. He issued at Melfi in 1231 the constitution known as the Liber Augustalis, which remained in effect until 1860. He was then drawn into the disastrous second Lombard war by the papacy that feared renewed imperial domination more than before, now that Frederick's lands surrounded the papal states. The struggle renewed the War of the First Lombard League (1162-1183) that the popes had waged against his grand­father Barbarossa and the earlier war of the Investiture Controversy (1076-1122) that Pope Gregory VQ had launched against another of Frederick's relatives, Emperor Henry IV (1050-1106), who has frequently been considered bisexual.
The Guelph allies of the Papacy captured one of Frederick's sons, Enzio, and held him captive in a cage in Bologna for years, breaking the emperor's heart. Later popes ordered the extermination of "that breed of vipers." Charles of Anjou, brother of St. Louis of France, dutifully beheaded the last of the line, Frederick's grandson Conradin and his noble Austrian companion in the marketplace of Naples in 1268. Here to this date German tourists weep for the fate of these royal youths, who were still adolescents and probably lovers.
Propagandists accused Frederick of keeping a harem and also of homosexual sodomy - both Moslem practices. He sup­posedly blasphemed "Mankind has had three great deceivers: Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed," a legend that underlay the belief in the apocryphal Liber de tribus impostoribus. At his court in Sicily Freder­ick encouraged the beginning of Italian literature in the form of troubadours, poets who copied the Provencal lyrics and in­spired the Tuscans and Dante. He himself composed outstanding love poems as well as what became the standard text on falconry. Many medieval poets were homoerotic and some modem scholars believe that courtly love with its unattain­able ladies spurred homosexual instincts and even acts among knights and squires.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. David Abulafia, Frederick II, a Medieval Emperor, London: Allen Lane, 1988; Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194-1250, London: Constable, 1931.
William A. Percy

Frederick II (the Great) of Prussia (1712-1786)
Prussian general and enlightened ruler of the eighteenth century. The son of the brutal, anti-intellectual, homophobic, and fanatical Friedrich Wilhelm of Prus­sia, Frederick was in his adolescence small and pretty, loved French literature and art, wore French clothes and curled his hair. His relationship with his father was hide­ous; almost every day of his life until he was eighteen Frederick was beaten and verbally abused. At that time he decided to run away from home with his dearest friend, Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte, who was eight years older than Frederick, well-educated, a lover of the arts, and a freethinker. Just what their sexual relationship was remains unknown, as Frederick took care to destroy the evi­dence. The father discovered their plot and had them both arrested; then, overruling the decision of the court-martial that had sentenced Katte to life imprisonment, he ordered him beheaded and forced Freder­ick to watch the execution. At the mo­ment the sword fell on Katte's neck Freder­ick fainted, and after regaining conscious­ness he hallucinated for a day and a half.
Upon ascending to the throne of Prussia in 1740, he immediately displayed the qualities of leadership and military skill that characterized his reign, during which Prussia expanded territorially and gained the basis for its later role as corner­stone of the German empire. Frederick's officials, confidants and friends never doubted that he was homosexually ori­ented. Ecclesiastical Councilor Busching declared that "Frederick forewent a good deal of 'sensual pleasure' because of his aversion to women, but he made amends for it by his intercourse with men, recall­ing from the history of philosophy that Socrates had a great fondness for Alcibiades." Hard put to account for Frederick's unorthodox social life, historians ascribed it to misogyny, but this assumption has no other ground than his separation from his wife and the general absence of women from his court. He did have female friends and correspondents with whom he had an intellectual affinity, but his courtiers in residence were all male, and Prussian society in general had a high degree of sex segregation.
Frederick's separation from his wife is quite understandable. His father had forced him to marry her as a sign of his obedience, to produce an heir to the throne, and possibly to prove his heterosexuality. The bride, Elizabeth Christine of Bruns­wick, had been chosen by the Holy Roman emperor in the hope that she would influ­ence Frederick to follow Austrian policies, but Frederick had no intention of being dominated by a woman. The wife, more­over, was a dull German hausfrau, submis­sive, unsophisticated, and nowhere near as intellectual as he, so that the absence of a sexual interest precluded any human relationship between them. The minute his father died, Frederick separated from his wife but never divorced her, and as compensation he gave her the palace of Schonhausen, apartments in the palace in Berlin and an income suit able for the queen of Prussia.
Frederick's brother Henry of Prus­sia, who was fourteen years younger and also homosexual, but far more open and undisguised in his erotic preferences, chose the officers in his regiment for their hand­someness rather than for their military competence. Frederick did, however, force his younger brother to marry "to save appearances."
There are allusions to homosexu­ality in a mock-epic which Frederick composed in French, Le Palladion, and in a victory poem commemorating the defeat of the French at Rossbach on November 5, 1757. Some of his poetic references to Greek love were negative on the surface, but this may have been mere literary camouflage. The male friends whom he loved deeply nearly all died of disease or in battle and left him lonely in his old age. He carefully kept his male intimates separate from the affairs of state, never allowing them to exert an undesirable influence on his regime. His relationship with the French writer and philosopher Voltaire was fraught with ambivalence - including the homoerotic overtones, and the exas­perated Frenchman went so far as to pub­lish an anonymous book entitled The Prí­vate Life of the King of Prussia which amounted to an exposé of Frederick's homosexuality, yet in the end each ac­knowledged the other's greatness.
Frederick was a crowned homo­sexual who loved other men passionately - and sometimes suffered terribly as a re­sult. He exercised his royal prerogative to pardon those convicted of sodomy, and never let his personal feelings override his duties as a ruler. If his life experiences made him bitter, they never robbed him of the capacity for male love.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Susan W. Henderson, "Frederick the Great of Prussia: A Homophile Perspective," Gai Saber, 1:1 (1977),46-54.
Warren Johansson

Freedom, Sexual
See Liberation, Gay; Sexual Lib­erty and the Law.

Freemasonry
The fraternal order of Free and Accepted Masons is a male secret society having adherents throughout the world. The order is claimed to have arisen from the English and Scottish fraternities of stonemasons and cathedral builders in the late Middle Ages. The formation of a grand lodge in London in 1717 marked the begin­ning of the spread of freemasonry on the continent as far east as Poland and Russia. From its obscure origins freemasonry gradually evolved into a political and benevolent society that vigorously pro­moted the ideology of the Enlightenment, and thus came into sharp and lasting an­tagonism with the defenders of the Old Regime. The slogan "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" immortalized by the French Revolution is said to have begun in the lodges of the Martinist affiliate. The Catho­lic church became and remained an impla­
tern" that like freemasonry exercised an invisible web of influence over the politi­cal life of the country, and in 1953 the national conventions of the Society aban­doned this conspiratorial model for a simpler set of local and regional organiza­tions. In the United States freemasonry has had the quality of a fraternal and be­nevolent society extending into all walks of American life rather than that of a po­litical force engaged in sinister manipula­tions.
In Europe the freemasons have retained some of their former political might. A well-known French freemason, Henri Caillavet, drafted the law eliminat­ing antihomosexual discrimination that was passed in 1981. At the same time the leading French lodge, the Grand Orient de France - despite its defense of other op­pressed groups - remains uneasy about the subject of homosexuality, and gay mem­bers feel obliged to remain in the closet.
Warren Johansson

Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939)
Viennese physician and thinker, the founder of psychoanalysis. Born in Pfibor in Moravia (now Czechoslovakia) of a Jewish family that stemmed from Gal­icia, Freud accompanied his father, a wool merchant, when he moved to Vienna in 1859. The family lived in considerable poverty, relieved only by gifts from the two sons of a previous marriage of his father's who had settled in Manchester and prospered. In school Sigmund was a brilliant student, sitting at the head of his class and mastering the classical and sev­eral modern languages.
Early Career. In 1871 Freud en­tered the University of Vienna as a medi­cal student and passed his qualifying ex­aminations as a physician in 1881. He continued research work for some fifteen months, publishing among other things a paper that entitles him to rank among the discoverers of the neurone theory, a basic cable foe of freemasonry and of liberalism, so that the political history of not a few countries is the chronicle of the struggle between them.
The significance of freemasonry for homosexuality is complex. By actively furthering the downfall of the Old Regime, freemasonry contributed to the massive reform of the penal codes of Europe, in­cluding the abolition of the crime of sod­omy. And the clandestine nature of the freemasonic lodges, with their degrees of initiation, suggested to the participants in the erotic subculture of nineteenth-cen­tury Europe that they belonged to "love's freemasonry" as the unknown author of the Leon to Annabella, attributed to Lord Byron, expressed it. The great French liter­ary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869) later spoke of a "freemasonry of pleasure" whose adepts recognize one another everywhere at a glance. Down to the beginning of the modern homosexual liberation movement, this was probably how most homosexuals defined them­selves - not as members of a psychological or ethnic "minority." Not surprisingly, the conservative and clerical forces in retreat sought to defame the mason ic lodges by claiming that their members were "vile pederasts," so that the issue of homosexu­ality has largely been avoided within masonic circles. A book such as Hans Burner's Die Rolle der Erotik in der männli­chen Gesellschaft (The Role of the Erotic in Male Society; 1917-18), which empha­sized the homoerotic component of male bonding and organization-building, could create only embarrassment in masonic circles, even if the lodges practiced a con­siderable toleration in regard to the sexual Uves of their members.
Harry Hay's original design for the Mattachine Society was modeled in part on the well-established hierarchical orders of freemasonry, as well as on the clandestine, anonymity-protecting struc­ture of the American Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. Such a scheme risked rousing fears of an international "homin­
concept for modern neurology. In 1882, however, his teacher Ernst Brücke advised him to abandon research and to practice medicine; and since Freud wished to marry and start a family, he took this advice. There followed three years as a resident at the Vienna General Hospital, with five months in the psychiatric division. In 1885 the University awarded him a traveling fellowship that enabled him to study in Paris under Jean-Martin Charcot, the famous neurologist who had demonstrated the value of hypnosis; this contact awak­ened Freud's interest in hysteria and psychopathology. In 1886 Freud began his practice as a specialist in nervous diseases, and a few months later, after a long engage­ment, he married Martha Bemays.
The role played by sexuality in Freud's writings has given his own sex life a certain interest for the investigator. The available evidence suggests that Martha Bemays was the only love of his life, that he had no extramarital affairs and no homosexual activity, and that he ceased having sexual relations with his wife at the age of 42, in 1898, on the pretext that he wanted no more children and that contraceptive devices were aesthetically unsatisfactory. Thus he was a preeminently Victorian figure in his private life, even if his theories helped to foster the demand for sexual liberation from the bind of Christian asceticism.
The Emergence of Freud's Dis­tinctive Ideas. In the 1880s most of the patients referred to a specialist in nervous diseases were neurotics with no physical illness of any kind, while the emphasis in psychiatry on hereditary degeneration and on lesions in the central nervous system left the practitioner helpless, fostering an attitude of therapeutic nihilism. The x-ray had not yet been discovered, operations on the brain were exceedingly dangerous and usually ended in the death of the patient, and diagnostic brain imaging techniques lay many decades in the future. Freud exhibited moral courage when he adopted the hypnotic technique in 1887 and a re­version to scientific respectability when he replaced hypnosis with "free associa­tion," advising the patient to utter what­ever came into his head in the hope that such undirected thought would revive the repressed traumatic event that had caused the illness. The underlying theoretical assumption was that neurotic symptoms are physical expressions of repressed emotion that will vanish if the painful experience is recalled and the emotion belatedly expressed. Examples of this were given in the book by Freud and Josef Breuer, Studien über Hysterie (Studies on Hys­teria; 1895), which is usually regarded as the first psychoanalytic work, since it introduced into psychiatry the concepts of trauma, the unconscious, repression, con­version, and abreaction. It should be noted, however, that the concept of the uncon­scious had been for some decades a com­monplace of German romantic literature and philosophy.
Breuer recoiled, however, from certain of the corollaries of the technique, in that patients who benefited from this form of therapy became passionately at­tached to the therapist, and the patho­genic, traumatic experience often seemed to be sexual. Freud was undeterred and went on to formulate the concept of trans­ference to explain the first phenomenon and his theory of infantile sexuality to explain the second. Breuer's withdrawal from the scene left Freud alone, and so psychoanalysis proper was his individual creation, not that of a group of collabora­tors. Also, in the years 1894-1902 Freud was undergoing a period of self-analysis that was in fact a creative mental illness. During this time Freud was obsessed by his own dreams and suffered from feelings of total isolation alleviated only by corre­spondence and occasional meetings with the Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess, in whose eccentric numerological fantasies he was absorbed for years. He only gradu­ally emancipated himself from them.
At the close of this ordeal he emerged with the conviction that he had discovered three great truths: that dreams are the disguised fulfillment of uncon­scious, mainly infantile wishes; that all human beings have an Oedipus complex in which they wish to kill the parent of the same sex and possess the parent of the opposite one; and that children have sex­ual feelings. At the same time Freud felt himself despised, rejected, and misunder­stood. This last attitude became part of a myth which held that Freud was univer­sally ignored and even persecuted by his psychiatric colleagues, although it is true that the lay reception of Freud's work was often far more sympathetic and positive than theirs.
Maturity. Freud's first notable publication concerning bisexuality and homosexuality was the Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) of 1905. During the following decade Freud made other significant observations on sexuality. In 1902 he had founded the Vienna Psycho­analytic Society, to be followed, in 1910, by the International Psychoanalytic Soci­ety. Promoted by an increasing number of disciples, Freud's thought was on the way to becoming institutionalized.
In the 1920s he added two ideas to his original corpus: the tripartition of the human mind into superego, ego, and id; and the concept of the death instinct [thanatos). As the founder of psychoanalysis Freud attracted the rich and famous to his couch in Vienna, while a cancer of the upper jaw induced by cigar smoking under­mined his health. His rise to world renown during this period was clouded by the threat of National Socialism, which fi­nally forced him to leave Austria. Just after the outbreak of the World War II, he died in London on September 23, 1939. At this point the turmoil of world events pre­cluded any full assessment of the value of his work.
After World War II appraisals in the English-speaking world inclined to the laudatory, following paths laid down by the psychoanalytic establishment itself;
Emest Jones' three-volume biography is the best example of this tendency. Those who criticized Freud and his ideas were commonly accused of clinging fearfully to traditional morality and of willful resis­tance to his insights, while the foes of psychoanalysis branded it a mystical and dogmatic belief system that merely per­petuated in a new guise notions inherited from the idealistic thinkers of antiquity. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, more fundamental criticisms were heard, and the psychoanalytic establishment was forced on the defensive, while new thera­peutic techniques took the place of pro­longed and costly analyses with doubtful outcomes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Emest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols., New York: Basic Books, 1953-57; Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976; Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend, New York: Basic Books, 1979.
Warren Johansson

Freudian Concepts
The following discussion reviews a number of Sigmund Freud's published writings on sexuality and homosexuality, in an attempt to isolate elements of endur­ing value within them. Five aspects of Freud's psychoanalytic work are relevant to homosexuality, though by no means have all of them been fully appreciated in the discussion of the legal and social as­pects of the subject. These include: (1) the psychology of sex; (2) the etiology of para­noia; (3) psychoanalytic anthropology; (4) the psychology of religion; and (5) the origins of Judaism and Christianity. In regard to the last two the psychoanalytic profession in the United States has nota­bly shied away from the implications of the founder's ideas, in no small part be­cause of its accommodation to the norms of American culture, including popular Protestant religiosity.
Psychology of Sex. This realm was treated in a classic manner in Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheoríe (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; 1905), in which Freud polemicized against Magnus Hirschf eld's theory of homosexu­ality as constitutionally determined, in­born, and unmodifiable. He pointed out that these characteristics could only be ascribed to exclusive inverts, as he desig­nated them; but to accept such an explantion would be tantamount to renouncing an understanding of homosexual attrac­tion in its totality. He stressed the contin­uum that extends from the exclusive homosexual to the individual who has only fleeting experiences or merely feel­ings in the course of adolescence. In a footnote (conveniently overlooked by many psychoanalysts since then) Freud mentioned that in the understanding of inversion the pathological viewpoints have been replaced (abgelöst) by anthropologi­cal ones, and that this shift was the merit of Iwan Bloch in his Beiträge zur Ätiologie der Psychopathia sexualis (Contributions to the Etiology of Psychopathia sexualis; 1902-03), which laid particular emphasis on homosexuality among the civilized peoples of antiquity.
In this study Freud also recog­nized that deviations of the secondary and tertiary sexual characters in the direction of the norm for the opposite sex are inde­pendent of the homosexual orientation itself. He examined the theories that re­lated homosexuality to a primitive or constitutional bisexuality, and pointed out that the pederast is attracted only to the male youth who has not yet lost his an­drogynous quality, so that it is the blend of masculine and feminine traits in the boy that arouses and attracts the adult male; and the male prostitutes of Freud's time seem to have affected a particularly ef­feminate guise to lure their customers. The disturbance in the orientation of the sexual impulse, he held, must be related to its development. In all the cases that he had analyzed he found that in the early years of their childhood future inverts had an intense but short-lived phase of intense fixation on a woman (usually the mother), which after overcoming, they identify with the woman and take themselves as sexual object. So that with a narcissistic starting point they seek youthful sexual partners resembling themselves, whom they then love as the mother loved them. He also determined that alleged inverts were not indifferent to female stimuli, but trans­ferred their arousal to male objects. This mechanism continues to function through­out their entire lives: their compulsive quest of the male is caused by their restless flight from the female.
Freud later (1915) added to these remarks the assertion that psychoanalysis is decisively opposed to any effort at sepa­rating homosexuals from the rest of man­kind as a special class. If anything, psycho­analytic study has found that all human beings are capable of a homosexual object choice and have in fact made one in the unconscious. Libidinous feelings for per­sons of the same sex play no less a role in normal mental life, and a greater one in the pathological, than do those for the oppo­site sex. Independence of the object choice from the sex of the object, the freedom to pursue male and female objects that is observed in childhood, among primitive peoples, and in early historic times, is the primitive state from which both heterosexuality and homosexuality derive through a process of restriction. Thus Freud adopted the notion of universal primary bisexuality, which had earlier been pro­pounded by Wilhelm Fliess, and made it a cornerstone of his thinking on all aspects of human sexuality.
Not long after the publication of the Drei Abhandlungen, Freud gave an interview to the editor of the Vienna newspaper Die Zeit (who as it chanced lived in the same apartment house at 19 Berggasse, although the two men were not acquainted socially) in connection with the trial of Professor Theodor Beer, ac­cused of homosexual relations with two boys whom he had used as photographic models. In a statement printed in the issue of October 27,1905, he asserted that "like many experts, I uphold the view that the homosexual does not belong before the bar of a court of justice. I am even of the firm conviction that the homosexual cannot be regarded as sick, because the individual of an abnormal sexual orientation is for just that reason far from being sick. Should we not then have to classify many great think­ers and scholars of all ages, whose sound minds it is precisely that we admire, as sick men? Homosexual persons are not sick, butneitherdo they belong before the bar of a court of justice. Here in Austria, and to a greater extent in Germany, a powerful movement is on foot to abrogate the paragraph of the penal code that is directed against those of an abnormal sexual disposition. This movement will gather ever more support until it attains final success." Long ignored by orthodox psychoanalysts (though noted by Hirschfeld's committee and reprinted in several publications), this opinion reflects not just Freud's judgment as the founder of psychoanalysis, but also his political liber­alism as a follower of John Stuart Mill, whose essays he had translated into Ger­man early in his career.
Etiology of Paranoia. In explain­ing the genesis of paranoia, Freud pur­loined from Wilhelm Fliess the notion that it was dependent on repressed homo­sexuality, but only in 1915 did he formu­late this interpretation as a general rule. He believed that the paranoic withdrawal of love from its former object is always accompanied by a regression from previ­ously sublimated homosexuality to nar­cissism, omitting the half-way stage of overt homosexuality. Recent investiga­tions have sought to confirm this insight for paranoia in male subjects only, and in all likelihood it is related not just to the phenomenon of homosexual panic but to the generally higher level of societal anxi­ety and legal intolerance in regard to male as opposed to female homosexuality. This would also explain why lesbianism is invisible to the unconscious: the collec­tive male psyche experiences no threat from female homosexuality.
Psychoanalytic Anthropology. Reading in manuscript the first part of Jung's Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Freud became increasingly unhappy with the latter's tendency to derive conclusions from mythology and comparative religion and transfer them to clinical data, while his own method was to start with his analytic experience and to apply the conclusions to the beliefs and customs of man's early history. The out­come of Freud's explorations in this direc­tion was Totem and Taboo (1913), which despite the break with his Swiss colleague in that year is the most Jungian of all his works.
The first section, on "The Horror of Incest," deals with the extraordinarily ramified precautions primitive tribes take to avoid the remotest possibility of incest, or even a relationship that might distantly resemble it. They are far more sensitive on the matter than civilized peoples, and infringement of the taboo is often pun­ished with instant death. This observation is pertinent to the problem of intergenerational homosexuality, above all to the intense condemnation that Western soci­ety still attaches to pederasty - which ironically enough is the normative type of homosexuality in many other cultures. While Hellenic civilization could distin­guish between father-son and erastes- eromenos relationships, Biblical Judaism could not, and expanded its earlier prohibi­tion of homosexual acts with a father or uncle to a generalized taboo. It is perhaps pertinent that pedophilia (sex with prepu­bertal children), as distinct from pederasty, usually involves members of the same family, not total strangers. Also, extend­ing this mode of thinking, the fascination which some homosexual men have for partners of other races may be owing to the unconscious guilt that still adheres to a sexual relationship with anyone who could be even remotely related to them, which is to say a member of the same ethnic or racial group.
The second section is entitled "Taboo and the Ambivalence of Feelings," whose relevance to homosexuality lies in the survival of the medieval taboo in its most irrational forms down to the last third of the twentieth century. To the believer the taboo has no reason or expla­nation beyond itself. It is autonomous, and the fatal consequences of violating it are equally spontaneous. Its nearest parallel in modern times is the conscience, which Freud defined as that part of oneself which one knows with the most unquestioning certainty. The tabooed person is charged with prodigious powers for good or evil; anyone coming in contact with him, even accidentally, is similarly laden. These notions are relevant for the understanding of the ostracism which Christian society has traditionally inflicted upon individu­als known to have had homosexual expe­rience, and of the belief that the homosex­ual constantly seeks to initiate others into his own practices - for which they then ostensibly experience an irrepressible craving.
The fourth section, the most important of all, was called "The Infantile Return of Totemism." Totems were origi­nally animals from a particular species of which the clan traced its descent, and which the clan members were strictly forbidden to kill. From studying the atti­tude of young children to animals Freud had found that the feared animal was an unconscious symbol of the father who was both loved and hated. Exogamy was noth­ing but a complicated guarantee against the possibility of incest. Totemism and exogamy are hence the two halves of the familiar Oedipus complex, the attraction to the mother and the death wishes against the rival father.
Following a suggestion of Darwin's that early man must have lived in primal hordes consisting of one power­ful male, several females, and their imma­ture offspring, Freud postulated that on the one hand the dominant male would drive away, castrate, or kill his younger challengers, on the other the growing sons would periodically band together to kill, slay, and devour the father. The clan of brothers that would be left would be ambivalent toward the slain father and prone to quarrel among themselves; this situation would lead to remorse and an internalized incest taboo. Freud then ap­pealed to Robertson Smith's writings on sacrifice and sacrificial feasts in which the totem is ceremonially slain and eaten, thus reenacting the original deed. The rite is followed by mourning and then by tri­umphant rejoicing and wild excesses,- the events serve to perpetuate the community and its identity with the ancestor. After thousands of years of religious evolution the totem became a god, and the compli­cated story of the various religions begins. This work of Freud's has been condemned by anthropologists and other specialists, yet it may throw considerable light on aspects of Tudeo-Christian myth and leg­end that cluster around the rivalry of the father and his adolescent son - in which the homosexual aggressor is, ostensibly, seeking to destroy the masculinity of his rival by "using him as a woman."
Psychology of Rehgion. In the tradition of the Enlightenment Freud ap­proached religion from the standpoint of a dogmatic atheism. As early as 1907 he published an essay on "Obsessive Acts and Religious Practices," showing that in both there is a sense of inner compulsion and a more or less vague apprehension of misfor­tune (= punishment) if the ceremonies are omitted. In obsessional neurosis the re­pressed impulses that have to be kept at bay are typically sexual ones; in rehgion they may extend to selfish and aggressive desires as well. Obsessional neurosis is thus a pathological counterpart of reli­gion, while religion may be styled a collec­tive obsessional neurosis.
Twenty years later, in Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion), Freud returned to the problem of religion and its survival, albeit in attenu­ated forms, in modern society. He pursued the line of scientific criticism of religion which concluded that religion is the col­lective neurosis which, like inoculation against disease, saves the individual from his individual neurosis. Then in Das Unbehagenin derKultur (Civilization and Its Discontents; 1929), Freud approached the problem of the conflict between in­stinctual drives and the demands of civili­zation, in particular the restrictions im­posed on sexual life, which exact a heavy toll in the form of widespread neuroses with the suffering and loss of cultural energy which they entail. These writings are pertinent to the conflict experienced by many homosexuals between their reli­gious identity acquired in childhood and the needs of the erotic side of their person­ality which the Judeo- Christian moral code forbids them to satisfy.
The Origins of Judaism and Chris­tianity. The fullest treatment of this sub­ject Freud reserved for his last major work, Dei Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (Moses and Monotheism; 1938). The book has two main themes: a study of the beginnings of Judaism, and secondarily of Christianity, followed by a consideration of the significance of reli­gion in general. From the secondary sources that he had read, Freud surmised that the lawgiver Moses was an Egyptian who had opted for exile after religious counter-revo­lution had undone the reforms of the first monotheist, Akhenaten. His Egyptian reti­nue became the Levites, the elite of the new religious community which received its law code, not from him, but from the Midianite priest of a volcanic diety, Jahweh, at the shrine of Kadesh Barnea. This last site, amusingly enough, presumably took its name from the bevy of male and female cult prostitutes who ministered at its shrine. The Biblical Moses is a fusion of the two historic figures.
Freud also, on the basis of a book published by the German Semiticist Emst Sellin, posited the death of Moses in an uprising caused by his autocratic rule and apodictic pronouncements. The whole notion was based upon a reinterpretation of some passages in the book of Hosea, which because of its early and poetic char­acter, not to speak of the problems of textual transmission, poses enormous difficulties even for the expert.
The last part of the study treats the role of Oedipal rivalry and conflict in the myths and rites of Judaism and Chris­tianity. Judaism is a religion of the father, Christianity a religion of the son, whose death on the cross and the institution of the eucharist are the last stage in the evolution that began with the slaying and eating of the totem animal by the primal horde. However fanciful some of Freud's interpretations may have been, given that he was a layman speculating on secondary sources, in opening the sup­posed Judeo-Christian revelation to the scrutiny of depth psychology, he stood squarely in favor of a critical examination of the myths and the taboos of Judaism and Christianity.
Legacy and Influence. The half-century following Freud's death in exile in London in 1939 saw the controversy over the merits of his theories continue un­abated. The exodus of the German and Austrian psychoanalysts to the English-speaking world greatly enhanced their influence on the culture of the countries in which they settled. At the same time, a body of experience with psychoanalytic practice and a critical literature on Freud's life and work arose that make it possible to evaluate his contribution to the problems posed by homosexuality and the Judeo-Christian attitude toward it.
In retrospect it is clear that Freud's own strictures in regard to homosexuality have been disregarded by the psychoana­lytic profession, particularly in the United States, where many analysts have been almost fanatical in their insistence that "homosexuality is a disease. " The particu­lar emphasis with which Freud contradieted Magnus Hirschfeld's notion that homosexuals were a biological third sex led - together with a tendency (not con­fined to psychoanalysis) to deny the con­stitutional bases of behavior - to the asser­tion that homosexuality was purely the result of "fixation" in an infantile stage of sexual development provoked by the ac­tion or inaction of the parents. The corol­lary was that individuals with varying degrees of homosexuality were forced into prolonged therapeutic sessions, or even subjected to cruel applications of electric shock - invented only in 1938 by Ugo Cerletti - and other measures designed to "cure" them. In the popular mind the belief that homosexuality is somehow a failure of psychological development has its underpinning in the Freudian concepts.
Freud's contribution to the psy­chology of the intolerance of homosexual­ity has, on the contrary, never been fully appreciated and utilized by the psychoana­lytic profession. Yet by freeing the think­ing of the educated classes from the taboos that enveloped sexuality in the Victorian era, Freud strongly promoted the démysti­fication of the whole subject and made possible a gradual onset of rationality in place of the horror, disgust, and condemna­tion that had been the norm until recent times. Although seldom quoted in the continuing legal debate over gay rights, his legacy has quietly worked in favor of tol­eration - as Freud himself would have wished.
On his eightieth birthday Freud was honored with an address composed by Thomas Mann and signed by some two hundred European intellectuals which congratulated "the pioneer of a new and deeper knowledge of man." It went on to say that "even should the future remould and modify one result or another of his researches, never again will the questions be stilled which Sigmund Freud put to mankind; his gains for knowledge cannot be permanently denied or obscured." The weaknesses and shortcomings of Freud's legacy were in no small part failings of the science of his own day. He had to study the final product of conscious and unconscious mental activity; future generations, thanks to new devices for sounding the brain and the central nervous system, will be able to correlate these with the underlying physio­logical processes. Pioneer that he was, he ventured at times into fields that were beyond his own command, but left foot­steps which others, endowed with a surer perspective, would follow into the heart of the matter. To homosexuals he bore no ill-will, to religion he had no commitment, to intolerance of sexual expression he gave no sanction, and by tearing away the cur­tain of irrationality and superstitious fear that had for so long enveloped sexuality in general he set the stage for the forces of reason that must someday overcome the misunderstanding and injustice that homosexuals have endured in Western civilization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Homosexual­ity, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988; Timothy F. Murphy, "Freud Reconsidered: Bisexuality, Homosexual­ity, and Moral Judgement," Journal of Homosexuality, 9:2/3 (1983-S4), 65-77.
Warren Johansson

FRIEDLAENDER, BENEDICT (1866-1908)
German natural scientist, thinker, and leader in the homosexual emancipa­tion movement. In 1903, he cofounded the "Gemeinschaft der Eigenen" ("The Com­munity of the Exceptional," but "eigene" also means "self," "same" [sex], and, in reference to Max Stimer's anarchist phi­losophy, "self-owner"), along with Wilhelm Jansen and Adolf Brand. Although also a member of Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, he did not agree with the Committee's exclu­sive emphasis on explaining homosexuals as a third sex who by their nature were creatures that exhibited the external at­tributes of one gender while possessing the "soul" (character, emotions) of the oppo­site gender. Friedlaender led a move to split the Committee in 1907, but it failed in part due to his death in 1908 and to Hirschfeld's successful outmaneuvering of the "secessionists."
These men desired a renaissance of the male-male bonds which had formed so important a part of culture in ancient Greece. Their ideal would be realized in a homoerotic relationship, usually between an adult man and an adolescent boy. The base, animal desires were reserved strictly for procreative purposes; thus, woman's role in their Utopia was strictly subordi­nated to that of the male. His notion of "physiological friendship" did, however, lead to the assumption that male bonding would find expression in physical acts. To be sure, several of the Community's members, including Friedlaender and Brand, were married. Friedlaender ex­pounded this philosophy at length in his treatise Die Renaissance des Etos Uianios (1904). This work greatly influenced the theories of Hans Blüher as to the cohesive and drivingforces of homosexuality within society (see esp. Blüher's Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft, 1917-19).
The Community's defense of male-male "love" (i.e., friendship) evinced an elitist character which looked long­ingly toward the past. It demonstrated a decidedly hostile attitude toward the modern era with its supposed evils of urbanization, socialism, and women's liberation, all of which made more diffi­cult, if not impossible, the unity of body and soul because they dragged all men down to the basest level.
fames W. Jones

Friendship, Female Romantic
The Renaissance interest in Platonism encouraged a revival of passionate friendships between men, reflected in works such as Montaigne's "On Friend­ship, " Castiglione's The Book of the Court­ier, Timothe Kendall's "To a Frende," William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, and Thomas Lodge's Euphues Shadowe. Liter­ary examples of such relationships between women are less numerous in the Renais­sance, but they may be found in work such as Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, and later, in the seventeenth century, in many of the poems by Katharine Philips. It is in the eighteenth century that such relationships, which came to be called "romantic friend­ships, " became common. Romantic friend­ship between women was socially con­doned, originally because it was not be­lieved to violate the platonist ideal, and later for more complex reasons. But while it is true that love between women was "in style," women's experiences of that love were no less intense or real for their social acceptability.
The Ladies of Llangollen. Such passion in the eighteenth century was not believed seriously to violate any code of behavior, even when it was taken to such extremes that women eloped with each other, as did the Ladies of Llangollen - Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby - in 1778. When Sarah's family discovered that she had run off with a woman instead of a man, they were relieved - her reputation would not suffer any irreparable harm (as it would have had her accomplice been male). Her relative Mrs. Tighe observed, "[Sarah's] conduct, though it has an ap­pearance of imprudence, is I am sure void of serious impropriety. There were no gentlemen concerned, nor does it appear to be anything more than a scheme of Ro­mantic Friendship."
The English, during the second half of the eighteenth century, prized sensibility, faithfulness, and devotion in a woman, but forbade her significant con­tact with the opposite sex before she was betrothed. It was reasoned, apparently, that young women could practice these senti­ments on each other so that when they were ready for marriage they would have perfected themselves in those areas. It is doubtful that women viewed their own romantic friendships in such a way, but - if we can place any credence in eighteenth century English fiction as a true reflection of that society - men did. Because roman­tic friendship between women served men's self-interest in their view> it was permitted and even socially encouraged. The attitude of Charlotte Lennox's hero in Euphemia ( 1790) is typical. MariaHarley's uncle chides her for her great love for Euphemia and her obstinate grief when Euphemia leaves for America, and he points out that her fiance "has reason to be jeal­ous of a friendship that leaves him but second place in [Maria's] affection"; but the fiance responds, "Miss Harley's sensi­bility on this occasion is the foundation of all my hopes. From a heart so capable of a sincere attachment, the man who is so happy as to be her choice may expect all the refinements of a delicate passion, with all the permanence of a generous friend­ship."
Eighteenth-Century Fiction. The novels of the period show how women perceived these relationships and what ideals they envisioned for love between women. Those ideals generally could not be realized in life because most women did not have the wherewithal to be indepen­dent. In fiction, however, romantic friends (having achieved economic security as a part of the plot, which also furnishes them with good reasons for not having a hus­band around) could retire together, away from the corruption of the man-ruled "great world"; they could devote their lives to cultivating themselves and their gardens, and to living generously and productively, too; they could share perfect intimacy in perfect equality. The most complete fic­tional blueprint for conducting a romantic friendship is Sarah Scott's A Description of Millennium Hall ( 1762), a novel which went through four editions by 1778.
Even the mention of such a rela­tionship in the title of a work must have promoted its sales - which would explain why a 1770 novel that uses friendship between women as nothing more than an epistolary device was entitled Female Friendship. Women readers could identify with the female characters' involvement with each other, since most of them had experienced romantic friendship in their youth at least. Mrs. Delany's description of her own first love (in The Autobiogra­phy and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany, ed. Sara L. Woolsey) is typical of what numerous autobiographies, diaries, letters, and novels of the period contained. As a young woman, she formed a passionate attachment to a clergyman's daughter, whom she admired for her "uncommon genius ... intrepid spirit... extraordinary understanding, lively imagination, and humane disposition." They shared "secret talk" and "whispers" together,- they wrote to one another every day, and met in the fields between their fathers' houses at every opportunity. "We thought that day tedi­ous," Mrs. Delany wrote years later, "that we did not meet, and had many stolen interviews." Typical of many youthful romantic friendships, it did not last long (at the age of 17, Mrs. Delany was given in marriage to an old man), but it provided fuel for the imagination which idealized the possibilities of what such a relation­ship might be like without the impinge­ment of cold marital reality. Because of such girlhood intimacies (which were of­ten cut off in an untimely manner), most women would have understood when those attachments were compared with hetero­sexual love by the female characters in eighteenth-century novels, and were con­sidered, as Lucy says in William Hayley's The Young Widow, "infinitely more valu­able." They would have had their own frame of reference when in those novels, women adopted the David and Jonathan story for themselves and swore that they felt for each other (again as Lucy says) "a love passing the Love of Men," or pro­claimed as does Anne Hughes, the author of Henry and Isabella (1788), that such friendships are "more sweet, interesting, and to complete all, lasting, than any other which we can ever hope to possess; and were a just account of anxiety and satisfac­tion to be made out, would, it is possible, in the eye of rational estimation, far ex­ceed the so-much boasted pleasure of love."
American Aspects. By the mid-eighteenth century, romantic friendship was a recognized institution in America, too. In the eyes of an observer such as Moreau de St. Mery, who had just recently left Revolutionary France for America and must have been familiar with the accusa­tions of lesbianism lodged against Marie Antoinette, the women of her court, and most of the French actresses of the day, women's effusive display of affection for each other seemed sexual. Saint Mery, who recorded his observations of his 1793-1798 journey, was shocked by the "unlimited liberty" which American young ladies seemed to enjoy, and by their ostensible lack of passion toward men. The combination of their independence, heterosexual passionlessness, andintimacy with each other could have meant only one thing to a Frenchman in the 1790s: that "they are not at all strangers to being willing to seek unnatural pleasures with persons of their own sex." It is as doubtful that great masses of middle- and upper-class young ladies gave themselves up to homosexuality as it is that they gave them­selves up to heterosexual intercourse be­fore marriage. But the fiction of the period corroborates that St. Mery saw American women behaving openly as though they were in love with each other. Charles Brockden Brown's Ormand, for example, suggests that American romantic friends were very much like their English counter­parts.
The female Island. So many of these fictional works were written by women, and they provide a picture of female intimacy very different from the usual depictions by men. The extreme masculine view, which is epitomized in Casanova's Memoirs, reduced female love to the genital, and as such it could be called "trifling." But love between women, at least as it was lived in women's fantasies, was far more consuming than the likes of Casanova could believe.
Women dreamed not of erotic escapades but of a blissful life together. In such a life a woman would have choices; she would be in command of her own destiny; she would be an adult relating to another adult in a way that a heterosexual relationship with a virtual stranger (often an old or at least a much older man), arranged by a parent for consideration totally divorced from affection, would not allow her to be. Samuel Richardson per­mitted Miss Howe to express the yearn­ings of many a frustrated romantic friend when she remarked to Clarissa, "How charmingly might you and I live together and despise them all."
Throughout much of the nine­teenth century, women moved still far­ther from men as both continued to de­velop their own even more distinct sets of values. Men tried to claim exclusively for themselves the capacity of action and thought, and relegated women to the realm of sensibility alone. Women made the best of it: they internalized the only values they were permitted to have, and they developed what has been called the Cult of True Womanhood. The spiritual life, moral purity, and sentiment grew in importance. But with whom could they share these values?
Female Bonding Strengthens. In America and England during the second half of the nineteenth century, as more women began to claim more of the world, the reasons for bonding together against men who wished to deny them a broader sphere became greater. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has amply demonstrated that deeply felt friendships between women were casually accepted in American soci­ety, primarily because women saw them­selves, and were seen as, kindred spirits who inhabited a world of interests and sensibilities alien to men. During the sec­ond half of the nineteenth century, when women slowly began to enter the world that men had built, their ties to each other became even more important. Particularly when they engaged in reform and better­ment work, they were confirmed in their belief that women were spiritually supe­rior to men, their moral perceptions were more highly developed, and their sensi­bilities were more refined. Thus if they needed emotional understanding and sup­port, they turned to other women. New England reform movements often were fueled by the sisterhood or kindred spirits who were righting a world men had wronged. In nineteenth-century America close bonds between women were essen­tial both as an outlet for the individual female's sensibilities and as a crucial prop for women's work toward social and per­sonal betterment in man's sullied and insensitive world.
What was the nature of these same-sex bonds? Margaret Fuller, an early feminist, saw same-sex love as far superior to heterosexuality. She wrote in her jour­nal in the 1840s, "It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man." Such love, she says, is regu­lated by the same law that governs love between the sexes, "only it is purely intel­lectual and spiritual, unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts, undisturbed by any need of consulting temporal inter­ests."
William Alger in The Friendships of Women (1868) cites one historical ex­ample after another of love between women. Typically the women wrote each other, "I feel so deeply the happiness of being loved by you, that you can never cease to love me," "I need to know allyour thoughts, to follow all your motions, and can find no other occupation so sweet and so dear," "My heart is so full of you, that, since we parted I have though of nothing but writing to you," "I see in your soul as if it were my own."
The Twentieth Century. In 1908 it was still possible for an American children's magazine to carry a story in which a teenage girl writes a love poem in honor of her female schoolmate, declar­ing:
My love has a forehead broad and fair,
And the breeze-blown curls of her chestnut hair
Fall over it softly, the gold and the red
A shining aureole round her head. Her clear eyes gleam with an amber light
For sunbeams dance in them swift and bright
And over those eyes so golden brown,
Long, shadowy lashes droop gently down...
Oh, pale with envy the rose doth grow
That my lady lifts to her cheeks' warm glow!...
But for joy its blushes would come again
If my lady to kiss the rose should deign.
If the above poem had been writ­ten by one female character to another in magazine fiction after 1920, the poetess of the story would no doubt have been rushed off to a psychoanalyst to undergo treat­ment of her mental malady, or she would have ended her fictional existence broken in half by a tree, justly punished by nature (with a little help from a right-thinking heterosexual) for her transgression, as in D. H. Lawrence's The Fox. Much more likely, such a poem would not have been written by a fictional female to another after the first two decades of the twentieth century, because the explicit discussion of same-sex love in most popular American magazines by that time was considered taboo. In the early twentieth century, however, popular stories in magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Harpers often treated the subject totally without self-consciousness or awareness that such re­lationships were "unhealthy" or "im­moral," even for several years after French novelists and German sexologists started writing voluminously about lesbianism and were published in America.
America may have been slower than Europe to be impressed by the taboos against same-sex love for several reasons: (1) Without a predominant Catholic men­tality the country was less fascinated with "sin" and therefore less obsessed with the potential of sex between women; (2) by virtue of distance, America was not so influenced by the German medical estab­lishment as other countries were, such as France and Italy and, to a lesser extent, England; (3) there was not so much clear hostility, or rather there was more am­bivalence to, women's freedom in a land which in principle was dedicated to toler­ance of individual freedom. Therefore, romantic friendship was possible in Amer­ica well into the second decade of the twentieth century, and, for those women who were born and raised Victorians and remained impervious to the new attitudes, even beyond it.
However, that view did not con­tinue for long in this century. A 1973 experiment conducted by two Palo Alto, California, high school girls for a family-life course illustrates the point. For three weeks the girls behaved on campus as all romantic friends did in the previous cen­tury: they held hands often on campus walks, they sat with their arms around each other, and they exchanged kisses on the cheek when classes ended. They did not intend to give the impression that their feelings were sexual. They touched each other only as close, affectionate friends would. But despite their intentions, their peers interpreted their relationship as les­bian and ostracized them. Interestingly, the boys limited their hostility to calling them names. The girls, who perhaps felt more anxiety and guilt about what such behavior reflected on their own impulses, threatened to beat them up.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. William Rounsevelle Alger, The Friendships of Women, Boston: Roberts Bros., 1868; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, New York: William Morrow, 1981; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nine­teenth Century America," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1:1 (Autumn 1975), 1-29.
Lilhan Faderman

Friendship, Male
Friendship has been a basic theme in Western civilization, one which has interacted with other social and intellec­tual currents. As the definition of homo­sexuality has changed over time, so has the way of conceiving its relationship with friendship.
Themes of the Classic Texts. When the Greeks first learned to write they wrote about friendship. For more than two millennia the discussion they began continued with undiminished enthusiasm, across Imperial Rome, the Christian Middle Ages and the philosophers, poets, and dramatists of the Renaissance.
The essential texts on which this discussion depends are very few. One is Cicero's essay De Amicitia. The second is Aristotle's discussion of friendship in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics and Book VII of the Eudemian Eth­ics. The third is Plato's Symposium, both in his own version and in the influential commentary written by Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century. These three texts dominated the discussion of friendship until well into the seventeenth century and one finds them woven together time and again with the supple ease of ideas which have long been companions.
One might well wonder why. For all that they appear together so frequently, these are very diverse texts. Cicero's essay breathes the clear air of humanism. For him, friendship is personal and its basis is virtue. It is thus a harmony between two people in everything, multiplying joys and dividing griefs. Such a friendship necessar­ily requires an equality and if it is lacking it must, Cicero tells us, be made. For Plato friendship is rather part of the philosopher's quest: a link between the world of the senses in which we live and the eternal world. In Ficino's commentary, however, there is a subtle shift from the philosopher to the lover of God. The sparks of God's glory scattered throughout the world, if the haunted lover but knew it, are what attract him in the beauty of his beloved and the love they inspire are what binds the universe together in all its myriad forms. But something which is the very knot of the universe is as likely to bind the high and the low as much as it does men of equal degree, if all these are but the shadow of the bond that binds in one the Creator and His creation. Somewhere along the way, equality has been forgotten.
But friendship is disinterested, both Ficino and Cicero agree on that: it is content to be its own reward. It is here, though, that we hear the questioning voice of Aristotle. Such friendship, he tells us, is of course the best, but it is not the most common. Why do most men love one another, he asks? They do so, he tells us, because of their usefulness to each other.
These writers had by no means the same ideas about friendship, and the lack of embarrassment with which they were later combined needs some explana­tion. It is odd to see the humanism of Cicero intertwined with the religious rapture of Ficino; but we do, frequently. It is also odd to find a critical comment reminiscent of Aristotle within a text which otherwise draws on either of these two; but the assiduous researcher will also find that. This ease in combining the uncombinable tells us something we ought perhaps in any case to have guessed for ourselves. It is that when medieval or Renaissance writers wrote of friendship, they were not writing of something they had discovered in the pages of Cicero or Plato. It was something that already ex­isted in their society, and what they were doing was presenting it in its very best clothes.
Subsequent Reflections. In the more mundane documents of their time - in the writings of a medieval chronicler or the letters of a man of affairs - there is a tacit but salutary commentary on such material. There one will frequently find "friend" or "friendship," but the kind of relationship characterized by these words is altogether more practical. It is quite likely to be the relationship a patron had with his client or a lord with his tenants: the relationship, to put it at its broadest and most characteristic, between those men who possessed power and those with whom they were willing to share it.
"Friendship" in this sense casts a revealing light on the more literary de­scriptions of friendship. Typical of many is John Lyly's (ca. 1554-1606) description of Euphues' friendship with his friend Philautus, written in the England of Elizabeth I:
But after many embracings and protestations one to another they walked to dinner, where they wanted neither meat, neither music, neither any other pastime; and having banqueted, to digest their sweet confections they danced all that afternoon. They used not only one board but one bed, one book (if so be it they thought not one too many). Their friendship augmented every day, insomuch that the one could not refrain the company of the other one minute. All things went in common between them, which all men accounted commendable.
The description is engagingly ideal and it was meant to be, but the idealization does not He in its details; all had their ready parallels in the England in which John Lyly was writing. Similar protestations of affection could be found in the correspondence of the hardworking secretaries of the Earl of Essex or Lord Burghley. Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), the hopeful poet of The Shepheardes Calen­der, also looked forward, as many of his contemporaries did, to the kisses and embraces of other men that would mark his success. And as Euphues slept with Philautus, so Archbishop Laud dreamt of sharing his bed, in the eyes of all the court, with the great Duke of Buckingham: in a society where most people slept with someone else in conditions which lacked privacy, with whom a powerful man shared his bed was a public fact and a meaningful one. The idealization lies rather in what John Lyly misses out: that material inter­est between men of which such signs were the public symbols, and the stream of coin, of New Year's gifts and ready credit that these marks of influence could produce from those who sought to make use of them.
It is such things that were apt to find themselves dressed in elegant gar­ments drawn from Cicero's De Amicitia or Ficino's commentary, without, it has to be said, a very close reading of either; and one will very probably find that the imme­diate source is not these writings but one of those numerous treatises of love which were as common in the sixteenth century as popular Freudianism is today.
Between such friendship and homosexuality there appears at first sight a towering divide. Elsewhere John Lyly speaks of homosexuality with the same terms of fear and loathing Elizabethan writers usually used when mentioning "unnatural vice,-" and to some extent there had always been anxiety about it. How could the masculinity of a youth be pre­served in a homosexual relationship with an older man? That was the kernel of the problem for the Greeks. For the Romans it was the perennial anxiety that a free citi­zen might take a passive role in a sexual relationship with a slave. Homosexuality in itself was not the problem for either: it was in the forms that homosexuality might take that the difficulty lay.
Distinctions. In the late Middle Ages the absolute abhorrence of homo­sexuality took full shape, and it was a fear the Renaissance inherited in full measure. It was characteristically among the fears and anxieties of the thirteenth century that the fearful link was first made be­tween the sodomite and the heretic and, by a transition natural to a society where state and church lay so close together, between these figures and the traitor; the polemics of the Reformation only sharp­ened that deadly association. Now more than ever the distinction between friend­ship and homosexuality had to be securely defined.
It was not, though, an easy dis­tinction to make. A description like that of John Lyly makes that very clear. Each involved an emotional bond, each required a physical intimacy and the signs of the one were dangerously close to the signs of the other. Yet the distinction was all the more important and no light matter in a society where "friendship" in the forms of its daily use played the role it did.
In time the problem would lessen, and it is not one that the modern world has inherited. With the coming of the eight­eenth century, friendship was well on the way to becoming a more individual and personal relationship. Homosexuality, too, was putting on a different mask, for it was from about this point that the sodomite began to be conceived as part of a minority of human beings for whom homosexual desire alone was a possibility. The change has meant that the tension between friend­ship and homosexuality which was alive for so long is apt now to elude one.
But if it does, one will have diffi­culty in fully understanding the history of either homosexuality or friendship before the eighteenth century, for it is here that one inevitably finds the larger world of relations between men in which homo­sexuality found expression; and time and again in the courts of medieval and Renais­sance Europe the accusations of sodomy occur in social relations which at other times a contemporary might have called "friendship."
But there is another reason also why the historian needs to be alive to this tension. Is one so sure that on occasion some did not indeed call the one the other? The two also lay at the boundaries of each other's meaning and to see that is also to ask inexorably a more critical question about who it was that had the power to define that the one was the one and the other was the other. Here is an illustra­tion: In 1368 a boy called Antonio appears among the court records of Renaissance Venice in a trial for sodomy along with a man called Benedicto, who was teaching him to be a herald. During the proceed­ings, the judges turned to the boy and asked him what he made of this crime. It was, the boy replied, "friendship" because Benedicto was "teaching him like a mas­ter." His judges had not asked their ques­tion out of curiosity. They had elicited his answer all the more effectively to replace it with their own. They had decided that their account should prevail, not his. But why, one is forced still to ask, should the modem investigator?
Homosexuality and friendship: they may well appear at first as two dis­crete histories, one of society and the other of sexuality. But if one tries to follow their subterranean currents in the Europe of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, one will end by finding oneself drawn into writing about something larger. One will find oneself writing about power and the power not only of judges but of words.
Alan Bray and Michel Rey
Post-Renaissance Developments. Since the Renaissance the relationship between friendship and homosexuality has seen a contrast between those who sought to define friendship in a manner that would exclude the homoerotic element, and those who preferred, often for covert reasons, to make friendship encompass the phenome­non of homosexuality and serve as a code name for it. Did homosociality, a major aspect of modern social relations, include or exclude homoerotic feelings and rela­tions? The distinction between friendship and love that denied the erotic component of the former and legitimized eroticism solely between men and women redrew the boundary between them in a manner which the defenders of homosexuality tended not to contest directly, but rather to modify by placing their own markers.
Marriage itself was redefined, with implicit consequences for friendship. A society that had observed the tradition of arranged marriages between unequal partners was confronted with a need for change. Under the influence of the middle-class ideology of the eighteenth century, society now accepted the principle of a marriage founded upon the affinity of equals, upon love rather than family inter­est. In this sense husband and wife could now be friends, and friendship was no longer invested with an exclusively homo-social character. The decisive shift in this direction occurred in England, where the Industrial Revolution and the ideology of classical liberalism went hand in hand.
In Germany political and social relations were more backward, and the period between 1750 and 1850 is often called the "century of friendship" because friendship was held in such high esteem as a bond of intimate feeling in circles where conversely, the intimacy and self-revela­tion of friendship were opposed to the mask that one had to wear in order to play one's role in society. That this notion corresponded to the antithesis between the homosexual's true self and the socially prescribed mask of obligatory heterosexuality subtly reinforced the fusion of friend­ship with homoeroticism. This type of friendship was grounded in a bond be­tween kindred spirits, but also was an expression of social virtue that promoted the general well-being. However, because true friendship excluded the erotic, it could not exist between men and women, in whose lives it would be only the ante­chamber leading to a sexual relationship. Friendship with its higher and nobler ends could thus be seen as superior to the emotionally stormy and unpredictable relationship between a man and a woman. So Romanticism revived the classical model of friendship for which Hellenic antecedents could always be held up as an ideal by such homosexual admirers of antiquity as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a thinker who in Goethe's words "felt himself born for a friendship of this kind" and "became conscious of his true self only under this form of friendship."
Ambiguities of the Modem Situ­ation. The ambivalence which the Chris­tian attitude toward male homoeroticism introduced into the equation always made for mixed feelings on the subject. (As late as the 1930s German legal authors seeking to justify the Nazi laws against homosexu­ality claimed that their purpose was to keep relations between men - but not women - free of the sexual element.)
It was in this context that the first psychiatric writers on homosexuality for­mulated their definitions, taking as their point of departure the notion that in "normal" subjects sexual contact with members of the same sex caused aversion and disgust, while in pathological subjects it was a source of pleasure. Friendship was healthy because it remained asexual, homosexuality was diseased because it did not. This view was clearly not acceptable to defenders of homophile affection. Their rejoinder took either the form of (1) treating homosexuality as "Freundschaftseros," or (2) of openly asserting the homoerotic element in male bonding and its institu­tional expression. The first course was followed by Elisär von Kupffer in his anthology Lieblingsminne und Freundes­hebe in der Weltliteratur (1900), which inspired Edward Carpenter's Ioläus: An Anthology of Friendship (1902) - two col­lections of texts in which the homosexual content was scarcely veiled. The second, more insightful claim was put forth by Hans Blüher, first in Die Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches Phänomen (The German Boy Scout Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon; 1912) and then in Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Kultur (The Role of the Erotic in Male Culture; 1917-19). In these works Blüher revived the Platonic opposition between the eros pandemos, the lower form of erotic attrac­tion that united man and woman and served as the basis of the family, and the eros uranios, the higher form that underlay male bonding and was the psychological underpinning of the state.
Controversial as this idea had to be, it has been revived in recent times by such authors as Lionel Tiger, who have analyzed at length male bonding and the advantage it gives the male sex in political and economic competition, as well as in shaping the ethos of teamwork which, even in an individualistic society, is neces­sary for the effective functioning of organi­zations. Viewed in this perspective, the inability of women either to internalize this ethos or to participate in male bond­ing with its ever-present, but highly sub­dued eroticism handicaps them in two crucial respects.
At the same time, sociologists such as Georg Simmel denied that the old forms of friendship were appropriate to modern society. In particular, the tradi­tion of pairs of warriors fighting and dying together on the battlefield had been re­placed by an ethos of the group, the mili­tary unit. It was this feeling that lingered after World War I, with its experience of comradeship in the trenches, and carried over into the paramilitary groups that fought in the streets of German cities under the Weimar Republic. But the old ambiva­lence remained, again finding oblique expression on both sides of the fence divid­ing homosexual from heterosexual. While Ernst Röhm could boast, late in 1933, that the homoerotic component in the SA and SS had given the Nazis the crucial edge in their struggle against the Weimar system, homophobic writers could call for the suppression of all forms of overt male homosexuality and the enactment of even more punitive laws - which were in fact adopted in 1935.
Contemporary America. The lingering distinction between friendship and love based upon the absence or pres­ence of the overt erotic component also affects relations between homosexual men and heterosexual women. Certain women feel more comfortable in their dealings with gay men, just because they know that they do not have to be constantly on guard against sexual aggression, but can have close relationships, both social and profes­sional, that attain high levels of creativity and imagination. Particularly in profes­sions where homosexuality is no handi­cap, there can be friendships between gay men and women who take no offense at the male's lack of physical desire for them.
The use of "friend" or "friend­ship" as a euphemism for the homosexual partner (lover) and the liaison itself per­sists. Recently the compilers of newspaper obituary columns have taken to describ­ing the lifelong companion of a deceased homosexual as his "friend," in contexts where a heterosexual would be survived by the spouse and children. And the author of a bibliography of Freundschaftseros published in West Germany in 1964 stoutly upheld not only the distinction between classical pederasty and modem homosexu­ality, but also the existence of a form of male bonding from which the erotic ele­ment is absent.
Conclusion. The overlap since time immemorial between friendship and eroticism persists in the ongoing debate over the place of homosexual feeling and homosexual activity in modern society. The advent of the gay rights movement has helped some individuals become more accepting of the erotic nature of their at­tachments to friends of the same sex - though some others have become more self-conscious and defensive. The lines of demarcation are being continually renego­tiated as part of the revolution in moral values that has undermined many of the old norms without as yet formulating new ones. It will be the task of the future to resolve the antagonism rooted in the en­counter of classical and Judeo-Christian attitudes toward homoeroticism/homosociality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Janet L. Barkas, Friendship: A Selected, Annotated Bibliography, New York: Garland, 1985; John W. Malone, Straight Women/Gay Men: A Special Relationship, New York: Dial Press, 1980; Stuart Miller, Men and Friendship, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980; Ernst Günther Welter, Bibliogra­phie Freundschaftseros einschliesslich Homoerotik, Homosexualität und die verwandte und vergleichende Gebiete, Frankfurt am Main: Dipa Verlag, 1964.
Warren Johansson

Fruit
In general English usage, this noun designates the edible reproductive body of a seed plant, particularly one having a sweet pulp. In North American slang, especially in the second and third quarter of the twentieth century, it has been a disparaging epithet for a male homosex­ual - sometimes used in the vocative: "Hey, fruit!"
Unlikely as it may seem, the term belongs to that significant class of words in which a pejorative appellation at one time given to women shifted to male homosexuals (compare gay and faggot). The explanation of this transfer is as fol­lows. At the end of the nineteenth cen­tury, fruit meant an easy mark, a naive person susceptible to influence, reflecting the notion that in nature fruits are "easy pickings. " From this sense it came to mean "a girl or woman easy to oblige." The transfer and specialization to gay men was probably assisted by the stereotypes that homosexuals are soft and use scent. In the 1940s, the heterosexual counterpart was the more specific "tomato," an available woman.
In England the expression "old fruit" is a mild term of affection (compare "old bean"). The word may also be aclipped form of "fruitcake" - from "nutty as a fruitcake."
The disparaging use of the term in reference to male homosexuals is now less common, and a Los Angeles gay radio program is called (with a quaint air) "Fruit Punch."
Wholly unrelated is the "Sodom apple," a name given to a mythical fruit that is fair to the eye but, once touched, turns to ashes - hence recalling the confla­gration of Sodom in Genesis 19. The trans­formation could be glossed metaphorically as the outcome of vain or illicit conduct. "Through life we chase, with fond pur­suit,/ What mocks our hope like Sodom's fruit" (J. Bancks, Young's Last Day, 1736).
See also Flower Symbolism.
Wayne R. Dynes

Fuller, Henry Blake (1857-1929)
American novelist. Scion of an eminent Chicago family, he gradually slid into genteel poverty and literary obscurity after enjoying early wealth and critical esteem. He used to be remembered as the author of novels which attacked the cor­rupt plutocrats of Chicago, and it is only in the last few years that attention has been turned to his literary treatment of homo­sexuality, in which he was a pioneer.
Little is known about his private life. His journals from his teenage days make it clear that he was in love with some dormitory roommates at Allison Classical Academy (1873-74). At the age of 19 he wrote an imaginary personal advertisement in which he says, "I would pass by twenty beautiful women to look upon a handsome man."
The years pass without further evidence until, at the age of 34, Fuller admits to being in love with a 15-year-old boy whose initials are "C.N.," and who had blue eyes and strawberry-blonde hair. Five years later, Fuller wrote and managed to publish a very short play, At Saint Judas's, about a homosexual who com­mits suicide at the wedding of his former lover. This was strong stuff for the period, but today this poorly-written play would be laughed at for its melodramatic absurdi­ties. Nevertheless, it deserves credit as the first American play to deal explicitly with homosexuality.
Fuller did not return to this theme until 1919, when he published at his own expense Bertram Cope's Year, a novel about a homosexual love affair between Bertram Cope and Arthur Lemoyne, which ends with Cope turning heterosexual. Critics agree that Fuller lost his nerve while writ­ing this novel and spoiled it by having his hero end up as a conformist. Four years later, the elderly Fuller began an affair with a college student named William Shepherd, with whom he went to Europe. A few years later, Fuller died after Carl Van Vechten had made an attempt to revive interest in his writings. Mention should also be made of the letters that Fuller received in 1897 and 1898 from a homo­sexual Canadian named Harold Curtis, which reveal the homosexual subculture of Toronto. Fuller saved these letters for future historians.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Kenneth Scambray, A Varied Harvest, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987.
Stephen Wayne Foster

Functioning
Down to the 1950s, psychiatric and psychological opinion held that homo­sexual behavior in an adult was sympto­matic of severe emotional disorder. A detached evaluation of the homosexual personality was rendered even more diffi­cult by the anger, revulsion, and distaste with which many clinicians reacted. The central difficulty, however, stemmed from the fact that for decades the clinical pic­ture of homosexuality had been formed by the observation of subjects found in con­sulting offices, mental hospitals, or pris­ons. These groups did not constitute a valid sample of the homosexual popula­tion as a whole.
The Hooker Study. In the mid-1950s, recognizing this bias, Evelyn Hooker of the University of California at Los Angeles set out to investigate the adjust­ment of the overt homosexual. She judged it important to obtain a sample that did not derive from skewed sources. Thus there was a chance of finding individuals with an average psychological adjustment. She also believed it important to obtain a comparable control group of heterosexu­als that would not only provide a standard of comparison but also assist the clinician in suspending theoretical preconceptions. Securing both was a difficult undertaking, but in the end she procured two samples of thirty individuals each who were paired for age, education, and intelligence quo­tient. No assumptions were made about the random selection of either group. The materials used for the comparative study of personality structure and adjustment of these two groups of men consisted of a battery of projective techniques, attitude scales and intensive life history inter­views - the standard paraphernalia of the American depth psychologist of the 1950s. Experts in the assessment of personality structure were called in to evaluate the 60 sets of records. The judges knew that some of the subjects were homosexual and some heterosexual, but did not know which; their task was merely to tell as much as the data revealed about the personality struc­ture and adjustment of each subject.
The finding of the study - epoch-making for its time - was that there were no significant differences between the number of homosexuals having a rating of average or better for each judge; two-thirds of each group of subjects received an ad­justment rating of average or better. In 42 out of the 60 cases the judges agreed ex­actly or differed by only one step. The judges themselves commented that the records which they thought to be homo­sexual were unlike the ones familiar to them from clinical experience. Hooker concluded that healthy skepticism was justified in regard to many of the so-called homosexual-content signs on the Ror­schach test. Moreover, no single pattern of homosexual adjustment emerged; the rich­ness and variety of ways in which homo­sexuals adjust could not be reduced to a formula. Some homosexuals proved to be quite ordinary individuals, indistinguish­able except in their sexual orientation and behavior from other ordinary individuals who were heterosexual. Some were even quite superior individuals, not only devoid of pathology, but capable of functioning at a superior level.
Hooker concluded that (1) homo­sexuality as a clinical entity did not exist, that its forms were as varied as those of heterosexuality, (2) homosexuality may be a deviation in sexual orientation that is within the normal psychological range, and (3) the role of particular forms of sex­ual desire and expression in personality structure and development might be less important than hitherto assumed. Even if homosexuality represents a form of mal­adjustment to a society that condemns it, this fact does not imply that the homosex­ual subject is severely maladjusted in other areas of his behavior.
Freedman and Others. This study was replicated in 1967 by Mark Freedman with lesbian subjects in a doctoral disser­tation in clinical psychology at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He even found that the lesbians functioned better than the control group of heterosex­ual women; they scored higher on auton­omy, spontaneity, orientation toward the present (as opposed to being obsessed with the past or anticipating the future), and sensitivity to their own needs and feelings. An earlier study using Raymond B. Cattell's 16 Personality Factor test showed the les­bian subjects as independent, resilient, self-sufficient, and "bohemian," while a third investigator, again using a control group, found the lesbians scoring higher on both goal-direction and self-acceptance.
Freedman made the further point that homosexuals and lesbians, marginal­ized as they are by conventional society,
do not reject all its standards and mores, but choose among them and so develop new, stable patterns of behavior. The consciousness of alienation can lead to a creative adaptation within a hostile envi­ronment, even if not to it. At the same time sexual roles may be more egalitarian and sexuality more expressive than in contemporary heterosexual milieux. There is more freedom to experiment in both couple and group sexual activity. Even the need to hide one's true sexual identity may render the homosexual subject quite so­phisticated about the persona of others - the tension between role-playing and covert identity. The range of self-disclosure can also be controlled, and in a friendly setting the homosexual can be more truthful and candid than his heterosexual counterpart. Others pragmatically hide their sexual orientation, adapting as best they can to the social dangers of life as a homosexual, while benefiting from the survival skills that they have internalized.
More recent studies done in a number of countries have confirmed the aforementioned findings. Not only are homosexuals no less psychologically ad­justed than heterosexuals, the homosex­ual identity may be positively correlated with (1) psychological adjustment and (2) support of "significant others." It cannot be judged a psychopathological phenome­non, and such differences as can be demon­strated to exist are those directly related to the sexual orientation itself. The differ­ences in mental functioning for which evidence has been found - higher verbal ability in females, higher mathematical and scientific ability in males - are not disabilities, but correlate with a different locus on the androgyny scale. They corre­spond to the evolutionary continuum between the sexes that Magnus Hirschf eld stressed in his magisterial work on grades of intersexuality, not adichotomy divinely ordained for all time.
Anticipations. This recent work on the psychological functioning of the homosexual was anticipated by what had been learned at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenti­eth. The first homosexual subjects exam­ined by psychiatrists were seen in the setting of the mental hospital or the prison; usually they were severely disturbed and individuals in conflict with society and with themselves. But when sympathetic psychiatrists were enabled to make con­tact with homosexuals in everyday life, in their homes and places of work, under conditions that favored a relaxed confi­dentiality, they reversed their earlier judg­ment. At a meeting of the Berlin Psychiat­ric Society on June 8,1891, the discussion following a paper concluded that homo­sexuality in and of itself is no mental illness for the following reasons:
(1) there is no clouding of conscious­ness or disturbance of the rational mind;
(2) there is no irresistible impulse;
(3) the subject has no delusion as to the character of his own sexual organs or those of the partner;
(4) the subject is aware that his sexual orientation differs from that of the majority of the population.
Papers written later in the dec­ade, when such writers as Moll, Chevalier, and Raf f alovich had published their mono­graphs on the subject, argued that an indi­vidual who successfully deceives his sur­roundings as to his true sexual orientation and activity quite as well as does the undercover agent in a hostile milieu can­not be judged mentally ill or lacking in responsibility. The homosexual subject is as responsible, legally and morally, for his sexual conduct as is the heterosexual one. The condemnation of homosexual behav­ior on religious grounds does not alter the personality functioning of the homosex­ual in any objective manner. Whether the sexual activity of the population should be exclusively with members of the opposite sex is an issue of sexual politics that falls outside the empirical question of whether or not the homosexual functions efficiently and purposefully in his milieu and in the face of the obstacles that an intolerant society poses to his quest for sexual grati­fication.
Conclusion. Beginning with the pioneer study by Evelyn Hooker, modern investigators have overturned the assump­tion that homosexuals are less able to cope with their life tasks than are heterosexu­als, or that homosexuality is in and of itself a pathological entity. The research of the future should address the question of the manner of their adjustment and the sub­tleties of the interaction between society and the homosexual as a paradigm of sur­vival in a hostile environment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Mark Freedman, Homosexuality and Psychological Functioning, Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole,
1971; Sue K. Hammersmith and Martin S. Weinberg, "Homosexual Identity: Commitment, Adjustment, and Significant Others," Sociometiy, 36 (1973), 56-79; Evelyn Hooker, "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual," Journal of Projective Techniques, 21 (1957), 18-31;Paul Kronthal, Discussion of Lewin, "Ueber perverse und conträre Sexual-Empfindungen. [Forenischer Fall]/ Neuro­logisches Centralblatt, 10 (1981), 378-79; Martin Willmott and Harry Brierley, "Cognitive Characteristics and Homosexuality," Archives of Sexual Behavior, 13 (1984), 311-19.
Warren Johansson

Fundamentalism
See Protestantism.