N


Nameless Sin (or Crime)
The designation of homosexual­ity as "the nameless sin" derived from the belief that it was unfit even to be men­tioned in Christian society. In 1769, for example, the influential English jurist Sir William Blackstone described the "crime against nature" as "a subject the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature. It will be more eligible to imitate in this respect the delicacy of our English law, which treats it in its very indict­ments, as a crime not fit to be named, peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum." Blackstone alludes not to the statute of 1533 [see Sixteenth-Cen­tury Legislation), but probably to a single celebrated case, the arraignment of Lord Castlehaven in 1631, where the indict­ment speaks (in Latin) of "that detestable and abominable sin . . . 'buggery' [in Eng­lish in the text] not to be named among Christians." (Similar language occurs in a text of Sir Edward Coke, published in 1644.)
Comparable expressions enjoyed the favor of canonists and authors of con­fessionals on the European continent; in 1700, for example, Ludovico Sinistrari d'Ameno records the terms peccatum m utum ("silent sin"), vitium nefandum ("unspeakable vice"), and vitium innommobile ("unnamcable vice"), all designat­ing the crime against nature or sodomy. A century before, the Andean historian of Peru, Garcilaso de la Vega, claimed that sodomy was so hated by the Incas and their people that the very name was odious to them and they never uttered it; while the Incas were apparently hostile to male homosexuality, Garcilaso's claim that they refused to name it is probably a projection of Christian attitudes. Significantly, Gar­cilaso also mentions a city that, like Sodom, was destroyed by fire for its addiction to homosexuality. In late antiquity, through a false etymology based upon the Greek form of the place name, Sodom was inter­preted as meaning pecus tacens, "silent herd," a gloss that may have influenced the later formula peccatum mutum. Wil­liam of Auvergne (ca. 1180-1249) said that it was the "unmentionable vice," noting Gregory the Great's claim that the air itself was corrupted by its mention.
Thus it was against an extensive and varied background of usage that Oscar Wilde was to seek to turn the tables in his eloquent plea during his 1895 trial for the "love that dare not speak its name," taking up a phrase from the poem "Two Loves" by Lord Alfred Douglas (1894). As used by Douglas, the phrase applied allegorically to a pitiful uninvited companion to the true Love, and is called "Shame" by the latter; the poem itself gives little clue as to the nature of this bogus Love. In Wilde's statement under cross-examination, how­ever, the phrase was transformed into "a great affection of an elder for a younger Man. It is intellectual... when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him." In subsequent usage, the phrase became synonymous with homoeroticism in general.
In the New Testament Paul re­marked mysteriously "For it is a shame even to speak of the things that they do in secret." (Ephesians 5:12). Although this passage has been taken to refer to homo­sexuality, there is no conclusive evidence to pinpoint the sin (or sins) in question. Nonetheless, the words show that the notion of a transgression too horrible to be named directly was familiar to the early Christians. The Book of Wisdom (14:17) had spoken of "worshipping of idols not to be named." Latin pagan usage supplies infandus, "unspeakable, abominable" and nefandus, "impious, heinous," both some­times used of sexual conduct (cf. the later vitium nefandum-, in some Spanish texts sodomites are curtly termed nefandarios). Primitive societies, of course, observe taboos on certain words either because the objects they designate are too dangerous or too numinously sacred to be mentioned outright. In early Christian thought, Dionysius the Areopagite (ca. 500) evolved his "negative (or apophatic) theology," which held that God's attributes are too incomprehensible to limited human rea­son even to be mentioned. Thus by a curi­ous irony, the Christian Trinity and the sodomites are linked in their ineffability/ unspeakability.
In ordinary parlance today, this taboo on naming homosexuality some­times takes the form of deleting any spe­cific word for it, e.g., "Is he. . . ?" "Is she that way?" or "Could he be one?" (often accompanied by a raising of the eyebrows or the simulation of a limp wrist). One can find numerous instances of it in twenti­eth-century fiction, film, and lyrics, where oblique references are left as clues but the clear words are missing. With the wide­spread publicity accompanying the gay liberation movement in the 1970s, how­ever, the taboo seems to have been finally vanquished, its obituary phrased in the apocryphal enhancement: "The love that dared not speak its name... now scarcely ever shuts up."
Wayne R. Dynes

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
General and Emperor of France. Homosexuality was ascribed to Napoleon by such writers as Sir Richard Burton and Auguste Cabanes, and more recently, though no more convincingly, by Major General Frank M. Richardson in Mars without Venus (Edinburgh, 1981). In par­ticular the Emperor was accused of an erotic liaison with General Duroc, the Grand Marshal of his palace. Duroc, born in 1772, became the adjutant of General Bonaparte in 1796 and was one of his close collaborators until fatally wounded by a grenade splinter at the battle of Wurtzen in 1813. During the height of Napoleon's power Duroc had been the one who at­tended to all his personal needs, both in France and on his travels, and the one who was privy to all the Emperor's love affairs. The death of such a faithful attendant naturally grieved Napoleon enormously, but there are no grounds for seeing their relationship as a homosexual one. Also, Napoleon never lacked women to gratify his sexual needs and desires, and all the evidence points to the heterosexual char­acter of his passions. The only well-at­tested trait that would have given rise to the allegation of homosexuality is a some­what feminine body build that became more pronounced as the Emperor grew older.
However, the personal attitude of Napoleon toward homosexuality needs to be mentioned, as it contrasts markedly with the homophobia of his contemporar­ies in England, where a virtual paranoia prevailed into the second decade of the nineteenth century. Napoleon selected the homosexual Cambacérés as his Arch-Chancellor, and because of his legal tal­ents entrusted him with the redaction of the Code Napoleon (1810) - not a new document, but a collection of 28 separate codes that embodied all the legal reforms enacted since 1789, including the quiet disappearance of the provisions against sodomy that had been part of the penal law everywhere in Europe under the Old Re­gime. Hence Napoleon allowed to stand the decision of the Constituent Assembly in 1791 to omit sodomy from the list of sexual offenses - following the line of thought of Enlightenment criticism of the criminal legislation and practice of previous centuries. The prestige which Napo­leon imparted to the new code by placing his name and seal on it was responsible for its widespread adoption, not only by the Catholic nations of Europe but by nearly the whole of Latin America as well. In this area of the law the First Empire completed and consolidated the work of the French Revolution, while in England the law re­form of 1828 under Robert Peel not only left the law against buggery on the books but actually made it more punitive by narrowing the evidence required for con­viction. So while there was no more psy­chological understanding of homosexual­ity in nineteenth-century France than in the eighteenth, the legal oppression of the homosexual as a capital offender whose crime was scarcely less heinous than murder ended forever, and the homophile movement in France was spared the need to fight decade-long battles for the irreduc­ible minimum of toleration. The reign of Napoleon I is thus a landmark in the emancipation of the homosexual from medieval intolerance and outlawry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Numa Praetorius, "Homosexualität und Napoleon I," Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, 8 (1921),95-105.
Warren Johansson

Narcissus
Greek mythological figure. A beautiful youth, he rejected the advances of the nymph Echo and was punished by Aphrodite with boundless self-love. One day, while drinking at a spring, he was smitten with his own image. With the object of his love unreachable, he fell more and more into lassitude and despair until he was changed into the flower that bears his name. His fate recalls that of other Greek youths who were changed into plants, such as Calamus and Ampelos, the companion of Dionysus.
His fame was revived in the Re­naissance when Narcissus was often shown in paintings, where the depiction of the image seen in reflection offers a pretext for bravura effects of illusionism. Havelock Ellis cited the name in his discussion of self-contemplation as a psychodynamic fixation in 1898, and the term Narzissismus was coined in German by Paul Nácke in his book Die sexuellen Perversitaten of the following year. The term was picked up by Freud in 1910. In his view it applied to homosexuals, "who take themselves as a sexual object; they begin with narcissism and seek out young men who resemble them whom they can love as their mother loved them." In the following year, in his discussion of the Schreber case, Freud suggested that narcissism was a stage in human psychic development: "the subject begins by taking himself, his own body as love object." In his revised perspective it was the original universal condition, out of which object love later developed, with­out necessarily effacing the narcissism altogether. Inevitably psychoanalysts linked narcissism to homosexual behavior and masturbation as immature forms of gratification. Later Jacques Lacan was to make the "mirror stage" a cornerstone of his own creative reinterpretation of Freud's thought.
In popular-culture criticism of the 1970s narcissism became an epithet that served to excoriate the self-absorption of the "me generation." Such journalistic usages illustrate the trickle-down of psy­choanalysis into the general culture. In this polemical sense it is just a high-sound­ing term for selfishness.
Wayne R. Dynes

Nationalism
Born of the French Revolution, mass nationalism spread across Europe during the nineteenth century, and, in reaction to colonialism, beginning with Japan in 1867, to the rest of the world. It triumphed after World War II even in areas in Africa that had never been distinct or unified before they became colonies a century earlier.
The link between nationalism and sexuality is subtle but real. On the one hand, nationalist movements have tended to foster male bonding that is homosocial. On the other, they have favored inherently heterosexist pronatalist policies in the belief that population is power. One should be careful to avoid a simplistic equation to the effect that nationalism corresponds flatly to right-wing ideology and this in turn to antihomosexuality. There have been many nationalists whose emphasis on male bonding has carried them on to sympathy, at some level, with homosexu­ality itself.
Forerunners. Modem nationalism profoundly differs from the aristocratic and haut-bourgeois nationalism, related to dynastic loyalty, that began in the late Middle Ages with Henry V of England and Joan of Arc, leaders in the Hundred Years War, and with Jan Hus' revolt that stirred Czechs against Germans as well as against popes. Lutheranism kindled nationalist pride among Germans. Like his Hussite inspirers, Luther, and soon Calvin too, whose followers used the vernacular, appealed to the bourgeoisie as well as to princes and nobles, criticizing the moral laxity of Catholics, of the penitentials, and of the canon law. Although at first univer­salis! like Catholicism, Protestantism reinforced nationalism throughout Teutonic lands by translating the Bible into the vernaculars and thus helping to standardize languages and literatures. All these earlier forms of nationalism, even those formed or reinforced by Catholic reaction in lands such as France, Poland, and Ireland, were tempered by aristocratic reservations and regional variations.
Mass Nationalism. Not until the French Revolution swept away royalty and nobility and attacked the altar did the bourgeoisie triumph. Like Italian, Flem­ish, and Dutch burghers of earlier centu­ries, their French counterparts felt them­selves to be more industrious, moral, and deserving than the decadent, spendthrift aristocracy and superstitious, indolent clergy. Revolutionary lawmakers in 1791 and Napoleon's code of 1810, which was adopted in Holland, Belgium, Germany (except for Prussia and Austria), Italy, and Spain, decriminalized sodomy between consenting adults in private along with other survivals of medieval superstition and fanaticism.
After the Restoration in 1815 homosexuality, though not recriminalized in France and certain German states, suf­fered greater disapproval as it was associ­ated with Spain, Naples, and the papal states. Homosexuals were ostracized after the model of triumphant England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, none of which de­criminalized the offense before the twen­tieth century. In fact the repressive Eng­lish sentenced sodomites more than ever before to prison, the pillory, and even hanging during the Napoleonic Wars and afterwards, in part to display their moral superiority over the French. In the post-Napoleonic reaction romantic outcasts like Lord Byron and Count Platen suffered, while Catholic and Protestant moralists, not to mention Orthodox in less advanced lands, joined and encouraged the petty bourgeoisie in condemning sexual free­dom. To unify their people, nationalists suppressed dissidents. After the suppres­sion of the revolutions of 1848, when many nationalists became anti-liberal, homo­sexuals and Jews were increasingly sus­pect and persecuted by an enlarged and strengthened bureaucracy and police, even in those countries where the Code Na­poleon had emancipated them.
The Age of Imperialism. Prussia's annexation of western areas of Germany in 1866 and the formation of the German Empire in 1871 brought about the imposi­tion of Prussian laws against male homo­sexuality (lesbianism was not criminal­ized) in the Rhineland, Bavaria, and Al­sace-Lorraine, and inspired the homosex­ual emancipation movement pioneered by K. H. Ulrichs. Repressive measures in England after the adoption of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, with the Labouchere amendment, in 1885, as well as police raids and other harassment in France par­alleled by growing anti-Semitism, led to the trials of Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 and of Oscar Wilde in 1895. In Imperial Ger­many, the Harden-Eulenburg affair (1907-09) resulted from the jingoist editor Maximilian Harden's discovery that the First Secretary of the French Legation in Berlin, Raymond Lecomte, had infiltrated the circle of homosexuals around Wilhelm II and was using the confidential informa­tion that he collected there to France's advantage, as Andrew Dickson White, founding President of Cornell University, had done for his country in 1898, when as Ambassador to Berlin he skillfully kept Germany neutral during the Spanish-American war. Homosexuals have often been outstanding spies and intelligence officers, as were in the present century W. Somerset Maugham, Alfred Redi, and Anthony Blunt. {See also Espionage.)
Disregarding official promulga­tions, a number of imperialist nationalists and missionaries deviated from sexual norms. Marshal Ly autey (1854-1934), who conquered Morocco for France, reputedly said that he could not work with men with whom he had not previously had sex. The British hero General Charles George "Chinese" Gordon, who perished at Khar­toum in 1885, was homosexual. Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), creator of an eco­nomic empire in southern Africa, had his closest emotional relationships with hand­some young men. The British government, which circulated his homosexual diaries, caught and executed the Irish nationalist Roger Casement in 1916. Most famous of all, T. E. Lawrence inspired the Arabs with whom he rode and to whom he made love to revolt in the desert against the Turks and promised their sheiks kingdoms after the fall of the Ottomans. These men shared a predilection for male companionship under challenging conditions and an intui­tion that in what Alfred Sauvy later named the Third World they could pursue their interests away from direct surveillance by the moral guardians of their home coun­tries.
In Europe the iconography of extreme nationalism, which often featured muscular men in heroic poses derived from the classic art of Greece, promoted eroticization of the male body. In the 1930s such German artists as Fidus (Hugo Hoppener] and Arno Breker manipulated the over­tones of this macho (but ambivalent) imagery - with full official approval. Also, especially in Teutonic nations the cult of fitness produced the boy scouts and the Wandervogel movement, both nationalis­tic, the latter often practicing nudity. The Olympic games, revived in 1896, empha­sized nationalistic competition. The sta­dium Mussolini prepared for their celebra­tion in Venice in 1940 was adorned with muscular male nudes so beloved by fas­cists.
World Wars and Totalitarianism. The repression of homosexuality under Hitler and Stalin went hand in hand with nationalism and anti-Semitism, both con­spicuous among Nazis from their very outset, and reviving - the latter covertly but also effectively - in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s onward and especially duringthe "Great Patriotic War" (1941-45). Also, both dictators, like the fascist Mus­solini, favored pronatalist policies subsi­dizing and honoring mothers of large families without regard for their genetic quality; they wanted not intellectuals but cannon fodder for the wars they were plan­ning. By nature as well as by definition totalitarian governments demand more conformity and enforce greater repression than any other type.
Social Democracy at first resisted bourgeois nationalism but, caught up in the enthusiasm for the war of 1914 - 18, it was (unlike anarchism) not immune to homophobia and other petty bourgeois sexual prejudices.
It is difficult to apportion the blame for anti-Semitism and homophobia between Christianity and nationalism. The teachings of the medieval church in regard to Jews as deicides, not repudiated until the Second Vatican Council in 1963, and to sodomites as guilty of a mortal sin that might provoke the wrath of God against the whole society that tolerates it, still influenced many in the first half of the twentieth century. Extreme nationalist definitions of "racial identity" that la­beled the Jew as a foreign body which had to be removed from the political and eco­nomic life of the country, undoubtedly fed the irrational hatreds that culminated in the Holocaust and other persecutions of the 1930s and 1940s, while the ideas that homosexuals undermined the country by failing to reproduce and even betraying the nation because they were degenerates and targets of blackmail are still voiced by many homophobes. Many Communists and Third World nationalists, especially in Africa, even today claim that homo­sexuality is a foreign import or a bourgeois vice.
Right-Wing Nationalism in the Democracies. In the early 1950s, United States Senator Joseph McCarthy directed his smears not only at Communists and fellow travelers but also at "sex perverts in government." The conviction that homo­sexuals were security risks led to a wave of dismissals from government service in the United States and to pressure on America's allies to undertake similar purges in their own ranks. In England, a number of spies who had been involved in homosexual activity as undergraduates at Cambridge and Oxford were exposed as Soviet agents.
Even today the British and Ameri­can right combines nationalistic appeals with homophobic prejudice to win the electorate over to policies that are against its own economic interests. The campaign of Margaret Thatcher against the "looney left," which had openly sympathized with the cause of gay liberation, and Ronald Reagan's pro-family and traditional mo­rality patriotism, supported by television evangelists and moralizing Catholics, both gained resounding victories at the polls in the 1980s. In 1988 Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican, denounced the other major American party, the Democratic, as the "party of the homosexuals."
The left has not dealt effectively with the irrational forces in the mass psyche the right is uncannily adroit at sensing and exploiting. National Social­ism in Germany, like fascism elsewhere, made no secret of the value that it attached to the irrational in all its forms as con­trasted with the "sterile intellectualism" of the liberals and the left, and especially of Social Democracy. Conservative and cleri­cal parties unfailingly stress the virtues of morality, the family, religion, and all the other institutions that are symbolically opposed to the "uninhibited, immoral" gay lifestyle. With the coming of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, many became appre­hensive that homophobia might be des­tined to play much the same role in the political maneuvering of the right as did anti-Semitism between 1880 and 1945. Because conservatives of all sorts still re­ject and condemn homosexuality, they can unite around this issue, even where economic and other factors would keep them apart. If anti-Semitism is no longer respectable because of the mass murder to which it led, homophobia has kept the blessing of f undamentalist and most main­stream churches - a formidable right-wing bloc. Whether from Christian backgrounds or not, many Third World nationalists, of democratic as well as of authoritarian bent, the late Ayatollah Khomeini being the most notorious, have imported Western homophobia.
Homosexual "Nationalism." Scholars of nationalism have pointed out that many modern nations have come into being as "imagined communities," where charismatic leaders have arisen with a vision of drawing divided human groups together, endowing them with national symbols, promoting a common (sometimes ersatz) language, and then demanding independence - as occurred in eastern Europe in the early decades of the present century (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugo­slavia) and more recently in the Third World (Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria). Inspired by such examples, some gay liberation leaders have suggested that homosexuals may be undergoing such a process of crys­tallization into a new nationality. Yet the mere mention of such a project shows how chimerical it is. Homosexuals do not pos­sess a territory of their own on which to erect a state; were they to seek to create such a haven, as in the abortive Alpine County project in California in the 1970s, it would immediately become a target for homophobes of all stripes. Moreover, the vast majority of homosexuals, as patriotic citizens of their own countries, have no wish to transfer their political loyalties. Spread thinly across the territory of the democracies, they have difficulty electing an avowed gay representative to a state legislature, Elaine Noble in Massachusetts being the first of a handful of exceptions, or to a city council except in a few districts where they form a significant plurality. Still, the quicksilver appeal of the political fantasies of gay nationalism attests the continuing refulgence of the nationalist model.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectabil­ity and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, New York: Howard Fertig, 1985.
William A. Percy

Native Americans
See Indians, North American.

Nature and the Unnatural
As Raymond Williams has ob­served in Keywords (New York, 1976), the term "nature" is one of the most complex in the language; it is also one of the most dangerous. An adequate study of the prob­lem must also focus on the emotionally charged antonym: the "unnatural," which needs to be distinguished from the super­natural and the praetematural, from sec­ond (and for the Greeks, third, fourth, and fifth) nature, and from the peculiarly Thomistic concept of the "connatural" (which, as the personal and habitual, stands in a kind of intermediate zone between the natural and the unnatural).
Historical Semantics of the Con­cept. The ancient Greek word for nature, physis, was unique to that language and to Hellenic thought; no equivalent can be found in the Semitic and Oriental lan­guages, or in other intellectual traditions. The term physis derives from a verb mean­ing "to grow," and hence retains strong connotations of organic completeness and development toward a goal. The primary notion of physis is a magical, autonomous life force manifesting itself not only in the creation and preservation of the universe, but even in the properties and character traits of species and individuals. Thus in medical usage it even leads into the sphere of the pharmacopoeia and of constitutional biology.
Its use among the Greeks can be further understood in the light of three contrasting pairs of terms: physis/nomos (law or custom); physis/techne (art); kata physin/para physin (against nature). The last of these antinomies, which is of par­ticular significance for our enquiry, re­ceived a decisively influential formula­tion from the aged Plato (ca. 427-347 b.c.) in his Laws. In this book the philosopher condemns same-sex relations because, unlike those in which animals naturally engage, they cannot lead to procreation. In the so-called intertestamental period this Hellenic idea found its way into the Testa­ments of the Twelve Patriarchs and into the apologetic writings of Philo Judaeus, who equated the Mosaic Law with the "law of nature," and thence into the New Testament with the fateful formulation of Romans 1:26-27, which speaks of chang­ing "the natural use to that which is un­natural." This language - which in the Pauline text cited sets the stage for a con­demnation of male homosexuality - made its way into other contexts, including that of jurisprudence.
The path for this development was smoothed by the earlier Roman accep­tance of the concept of "natural law," defined by Cicero as "right reason in agree­ment with nature." Cicero ascribed this law to God, hence giving legal standing to Biblical injunctions in the eyes of Chris­tian interpreters, and went on to insist that "it is a sin to try to alter this law. "On the other hand, the Christians tended to overlook Cicero's statement that in prac­tice God is also the enforcing judge of natural law; that role they took on them­selves. The twelfth-century groundswell of interpretation of Roman law and canon law had a major emphasis on natural law perspectives, both classical and Christian. Natural law underpinned arguments justi­fying antihomosexual legislation through­out the Middle Ages and into early modern times, when its legacy passed from church to secular penology, retaining much of its influence. This secularization notwith­standing, natural-law arguments play a major role today in the continuing Roman Catholic condemnation of homosexual behavior.
It is curious that the notion of "crime against nature," so familiar to us from the penal codes of the American states, did not figure in Henry VIIJ's Eng­lish statute of 1533 or its successors. Sir Edward Coke, however, did affirm it in his seventeenth-century Institutes and Re­ports, whence it became part of the not-fully-investigated Anglo-American legal tradition down to the present time.
In medieval Europe the semantically iridescent concept of natura was perpetuated and even given some new twists and images by moralists (Peter Damian), literary figures (Bernard Silvestre, Alan of Lille, and Jean de Meun), and phi­losophers (Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aqui­nas). Later French usage coined the adjective antiphysique (taken into English in the rare "antiphysical") for unnatural sexual behavior.
Eighteenth-century aesthetics saw a broad shift from a view of nature as rule obeying and rule enforcing to one in which the awesome complexity and sov­ereign fecundity of nature was empha­sized - the source of the admiration which naturalists of today profess for the un­spoiled wilderness, untrodden by man and unaltered by human hands. This shift is part of the change from neo-Classicism to Romanticism. By providing a more flex­ible definition of nature the new approach gave it new life as a normative (though more diffuse) principle.
The contemporary scene offers a curious paradox in that conservative think­ers continue to denounce homosexuality as "unnatural" (Ezra Pound), while some homophile apologists have revived the ancient Hippocratic definition to claim that homosexuality is inborn and thus "natural" (K. H. Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld). For its part, the countercul­ture has glorified natural foods and the environmental protection of nature (which are in themselves valuable) without ad­dressing the contradiction that the sexual freedom and tolerance that it cherishes have been historically denounced as "unnatural."
Inadequacy of the Traditional Ar­guments. The arguments thus far discussed may be briefly refuted as follows. If nature is truly all-embracing, it is impossible to depart from it. Only things that do not exist at all, such as centaurs and phlogis­ton, would be unnatural. In this perspec­tive, the supposed criterion of naturalness provides no means for separating existing acts that are judged licit from those re­garded as illicit; some yardstick other than "naturalness" - since all acts possess that attribute - must be supplied. If, however, one chooses the other path, regarding some things within the world as natural and others not, the dichotomy becomes cul­ture-bound and subjective. Thus clothing, cosmetics, and airplanes have been some­times stigmatized as unnatural. Perhaps they are. But then it is hard to see how, say, life-saving heart surgery can be regarded as anything other than an unnatural inter­vention in otherwise inevitable processes. How many proponents of "naturalness" would be willing to revert to a Stone Age economy and Stone Age medicine? In short, opponents of "unnatural" sex need to demonstrate that they have at their dis­posal a comprehensive and even-handed theory of the natural and its opposite. What usually happens in practice is that some other assumption, or assumptions, are imported to provide a basis of decision. Thus the natural-unnatural contrast be­comes essentially a rhetorical device to provide a pseudo-confirmation of moral presuppositions reached on quite other grounds.
Another critique is that the im­age of Natura is a survival of the mother goddess figures of pagan antiquity, in which God is the male principle of creation and "Nature" the female counterpart. Discard­ing such relics of polytheism, modern scientific thought does not concern itself with the supposed "purposes" or "aims" of nature, and in general rejects teleological concepts as empirically undemonstrable. The standard claim is that nature has intended sexuality solely for the pur­pose of procreation and that any sexual pleasure obtained from non-procreative activity is therefore "unnatural" and wrongful. To this assertion it can be re­joined that only a tiny fraction of all human sexual activity has reproductive conse­quences, and that to restrict it to such a narrow goal would doom most of the population to virtually lifelong absti­nence - though the ascetic ideal would regard such a state of affairs as a desirable end.
From a scientific perspective, the debate over the "naturalness" of homo­sexuality has been joined by the eminent sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey who, hold­ing that norms of naturalness are in the last analysis historically contingent and arbitrary, concluded that anything sexual which can be done is natural. The older arguments deployed by theologians and moralists were, in his view, accompanied by a considerable charge of emotionality. "This has been effected, in part, by synonymizing the terms clean, natural, nor­mal, moral, and right, and the terms un­clean, unnatural, abnormal, immoral, and wrong."
Anthropologists have reported homosexuality in many tribal societies (presumed "close to nature"); a wide range of ethologists have described homosexual­ity among other species (presumed more "natural"); and theorists in sociobiology have sought to provide an evolutionary rationale for human homosexuality. Per­haps as a reflection of these efforts as well as of other scientific embarrassments involving earlier cultural assumptions about "naturalness," it is no longer scien­tifically respectable to maintain the argu­ment against homosexuality as "unnatu­ral." This development has not yet had a major impact on Judeo-Christian homophobes or popular demagogic rhetoric, nor on public opinion among the less edu­cated, but over time it can be expected to undermine the credibility of the position that "homosexuality is unnatural."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. A. P. d'Entreves, Natural Law, London: Longmans, 1951; Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., "Concepts of Normality and Abnormality in Sexual Behavior," in P. H. Hoch and J. Zubin, eds., Psychological Development in Health and Disease, New York: Grune and Stratton, 1949, pp. 11-32; Donald Levy, "Perversion and the Unnatural as Moral Categories," Ethics, 90 (1980), 191-202; C S. Lewis, Studies in Words, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, pp. 24-74; Arthur O. Lovejoy, " 'Nature' as Aesthetic Norm," Essays in the History of Ideas, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948, pp. 69-77; Cl6ment Rosset, L'Anti-nature, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973.
Wayne R. Dynes

Navy
See Seafaring.

Nazism
The ideology and practice of National Socialism, which under the lead­ership of Adolf Hitler ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, united several virulent strands of hostility to homosexuality. Inheriting the repressive attitudes of the nineteenth-century sexual purity move­ments, Nazi ideologues reacted also to the licence they perceived as eroding the so­cial fabric of Germany under the Weimar Republic (1918-33). Popular sentiment among the Nazis favored a strong polariza­tion of male and female roles, which the perception of homosexuals as "the third sex" contradicted. Equating population growth with power, the Nazis also pur­sued a vigorous pronatalist policy. Their attitude toward male homosexual behav­ior, regarded as a threat to the survival of the German people, was unequivocably negative. Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi leader most concerned with the question, advocated drowning homosexuals in bogs as a return to the tribal custom of the ancient Germans recorded by Tacitus.
It is a historical paradox that the presence of a few known homosexuals in the ranks of the early Nazi Party, notably Ernst Rohm, the head of the paramilitary Brownshirts (SA), gave unscrupulous op­ponents and propagandists of the left the leverage required for the superficial plau­sibility of their myth of the "fascist perver­sion" - a supposed affinity between sexual deviation and Nazism. In fact, Rohm and his associates were liquidated on Hitler's orders in the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934.
The jurists of the Third Reich reinforced the existing antihomosexual clause of the Reich Penal Code by adding a new section (175a), but at the same time inserted an article in the Code of Criminal Procedure (154b) that allowed the public prosecutor to take no action in a case in which the offender had been the object of blackmail - thus acknowledging the va­lidity of Magnus Hirschfeld's claim that the existing law encouraged the extortion of homosexuals. The prohibition was not extended to lesbians, so that female homo­sexuality remained legal.
When detected, male homosexu­als were arrested and consigned to the concentration camps, where they were placed in the lowest category of prisoners. In the camps homosexual inmates were required to wear the pink triangle as an identifying mark; subsequently, this emblem was adopted as a positive symbol by the gay liberation movements of the 1970s. Estimates of the number of pink triangle men killed vary from 10,000 to 250,000; probably the true number will never be known. Sadly, homosexual vic­tims of the Nazis were the only such group denied monetary compensation from the West German government after World War 13 because of their continuing illegal status. Even today commemorations of the Holo­caust often fail to mention them. A bizarre footnote is the appearance of two tiny groups of "gay Nazis" in California in the mid 1970s; this episode is a reflection, probably of ephemeral significance, of the lingering myth of the "fascist perversion."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Heinz Heger, The Men with the Pink Triangle, London: Gay Men's Press, 1980; Manfred Herzer, "Nazis, Psychiatrists, and Gays," Cabirion, 12 (1985), 1-5; Rüdiger Lautmann, "The Pink Triangle," Journal of Homosexuahty, 6(1980-81), 141-60; Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, New York: Holt, 1986.
Wayne R. Dynes

Neoplatonism
A revival and recasting of Platonism - mingling with it Pythagorean, Aristotelean, Stoic, and mystic ideas - Neoplatonism supplanted Stoicism as the dominant philosophy of the classical world from the mid-third century to the closing of the pagan schools at Athens and else­where by Justinian in 529. Philosophers from Antiochus (d. ca. 68 b.c.) to Plotinus (205-269/70), who opposed all sex, includ­ing homosexuality of every type, evolved this new synthesis. In Rome when he was forty, Plotinus founded a circle of leading politicians and scholars, including his most important disciple, Porphyry (232/3-ca. 305), who arranged for the publication of Plotinus' Enneads almost on the eve of the official recognition of Christianity in 313. In the fourth century, from its chief cen­ters in Syria and then Pergamon, its star proponent being Iamblichus, Neoplatonism became the creed of the pagan antago­nists of Christianity, which had been made the state religion by Theodosius ca. 390.
Neoplatonism even influenced Christianity through St. Gregory of Nyssa and other theologians of the Byzantine Empire, and through St. Augustine. Neo­platonism survived at Athens and Alexan­dria into the sixth century. It appeared in the writings of the pseudo-Areopagite (about 500) and John Scotus Eriugena in the ninth century, as well as in the work of the middle Byzantine polymath Michael Psellus. One of the principal features of Neoplatonism was its spectrum of grada­tions between "the One" and "matter': the world-mind, the world-soul, and nature - each stage being characterized by dimin­ishing unity. Mystical as well as rational, Neoplatonism encouraged Christian be­lief in intermediate powers such as angels and demons. One of Porphyry's works in five books, Against the Christians, of which fragments survive, though the source was condemned to the flames by the Chris­tians in 448, used historical criticism to prove the lateness of composition of the Book of Daniel, as elsewhere he proved the "Book of Zoroaster" a forgery. His work on logic became the standard Byzantine text and his critique of Homer a philological landmark.
Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine philosopher and humanist who was also homophile, was the chief exponent of Renaissance Neoplatonism. Ex­posed to Greek thought by the arrival in Italy of learned Byzantines fleeing Con­stantinople after its fall to the Turks in 1453, the young Ficino discovered Plato and his later followers, learning Greek in order to study the original texts. (Plato had been known in medieval Europe only through often faulty Latin versions, some of them secondary translations from the Arabic.) An eclectic, Ficino sought to rec­oncile Platonism and Neoplatonism with Christianity, using another body of Greek texts, the Hermetic Corpus compiled in late antiquity.
Of special significance 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 repackaged in countless trea­tises on love, becoming the prototype of a new concept of "courtly love" that was very different from the medieval variety. Ficino advocated a profound but highly spiritual love between two men, ideally united by their common quest for knowl­edge. This love is caused, following Plato's conception, by the vision of beauty con­veyed by the soul of the other individual - a beauty that reflects the celestial perfec­tion of God. Through the physical beauty of a young man - women were in Ficino's view unsuitable as catalysts of this sub­limity - the conscience of the enlightened man ascends to the Beauty which is the archetypal Idea (in Plato's sense) on which the beauty that he responds to depends - to God himself. With Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici's patronage, he founded - in imitation of Plato's Academy in Athens - the Platonic Academy in Florence, which was to be a major center of Italian Renais­sance thought.
In the course of the sixteenth century those who followed Ficino be­came increasingly uncomfortable with the homoerotic aspects of his philosophy of : love. Deploying an intellectual sleight of hand, they heterosexualized the ideal - so that today "Platonic love" usually means the love of man and woman that includes no physical expression.
William A. Percy

Nero (37-68)
Roman emperor. Exiled as a re­sult of the disfavor of the Emperor Caligula, the boy Nero and his ambitious mother Agrippina were rehabilitated and allowed to return to Rome after the emperor's death in 41. Several years later Agrippina married the emperor Claudius and, on his demise in 54, was able to secure the throne for her son. Guided by the philosopher Seneca, the empire then entered an auspi­cious period of sound government. Grow­ing bored of the tedium of rule, however, Nero became addicted to luxury and to his artistic pursuits - he imagined himself a distinguished poet and performer. He constructed for himself a great palace known as the Domus Transitoria. This proved insufficient, and Nero apparently ordered a large part of Rome set on fire in 64, to serve as a site for the construction of his Golden House. As foreign relations became more difficult, his connections with the Senate soured, and the plots against him required increasingly repres­sive measures. A revolt by the army and Senate caused him to commit suicide, uttering the words, "What an artist is perishing in me." His death ended the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
Nero's appetite for luxury and self-indulgence emerged in his sexual es­capades. After enjoying sexual relations with his mother (or so Suetonius claims] he grew tired of her when she disapproved of his liaisons with the freedwoman Acte and the glamorous sophisticate Sabina Poppaea. He then devised a special collaps­ing boat on which he sent her with great ceremony for a short cruise. But Agrippina escaped and swam to shore, where she was dispatched. Nero had a youth, Sporus, whom he castrated and treated as his wife. Sporus was escorted through the streets, receiving the homage due an empress.
Reversing roles, Nero made his husky freedman Doryphorus marry him (though dispensing with the castration).
Nero's many misdeeds have earned him an infamy outstanding even for the profligate age in which he lived. Recent historians, however, have sought to redress the balance. His early years were marked by a serious effort at governmental reform. Unlike his cruelty, his sexual ir­regularities no longer seem monstrous. And Nero presided over what has been called the Roman architectural revolution, the beginning of the great phase that made the empire's accomplishments in this field unsurpassed. The image perpetuated by Henryk Sienkiewicz' novel Quo Vadis (1896) and by Hollywood films is not confirmed by sober historical analysis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. K. R. Bradley, Suetonius' Life of Nero: An Historical Commentary, Brussels: Latomus, 1978; Miriam Tamara Griffin, Nero, the End of a Dynasty, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984; Villy Sarenson, Seneca, the Humanist at the Court of Nero, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Warren Johansson

Netherlands, the (Holland)
A European kingdom of fifteen million Dutch-speaking inhabitants, the Netherlands has in recent times acquired a reputation as the most tolerant country in the industrialized Western world on the subject of homosexuality.
History. The (northern) Nether­lands emerged as a national entity (the Republic of the United Provinces) during the Eighty Years War (1568-1648), a revolt against the Spanish Habsburg empire, which separated them from the southern Netherlands (Belgium). A great commer­cial and maritime power, until 1795 they were a loose federation of seven virtually independent provinces. The House of Orange, by no means a monarchy, held only limited rights. Until 1748 the princes of Orange, the so-called stadtholders (vice­roys), held no hereditary office but each time had to be appointed by each of the provinces separately.
A process of unification of the seven provinces started in 1795 when, after a decade of democratic uprisings, a French invasion put an end to the old system and turned the United Provinces into the Batavian Republic. In 1806 Napo­leon made the Republic one of his satellite kingdoms with his brother Louis Napo­leon as its monarch. After an annexation by France in 1810, the end of the Napole­onic era in 1813 saw the restoration of the House of Orange, now turned into a mon­archy, and a short-lived (1815-1830) reuni­fication with the southern provinces.
During the nineteenth century the Netherlands gradually changed into a parliamentary democracy with universal suffrage (including women) finally estab­lished in 1917. From an almost absolute monarchy in the early nineteenth century, the House of Orange changed into a consti­tutional monarchy. From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards the country grew from an agricultural into a modem industrialized nation. It remained neutral in World War I, but was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1940 and occupied until the end of World War II in 1945.
Legislation. Lack of centraliza­tion and the indistinctness of "the crime" make it hard to obtain a general view of legislation concerning same-sex behavior in the period prior to the unification of the nation and the law. In the absence of a central legislature each of the provinces (or parts of them) was responsible for its own legislation. Only some of them had articles of law against sodomy or unnatu­ral acts, hi the absence of - or next to - such explicit articles, Roman and Mosaic law, legal comments, and tradition could be applied. All of them provided capital punishment for sodomy. The Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (1532)of theHabsburg emperor Charles V, to a certain extent authoritative in the Netherlands, provided that bestiality and sodomy should be punished by burning at the stake (article 16). Legal texts or comments in many cases included under a single heading such different things as masturbation, rape, bestiality, parricide, arson, as well as sex­ual acts with Jews or Saracens. Where the articles were explicit, they usually referred to sexual acts with animals, between men or between women, and to non-procreative, "unnatural," sexual acts involving members of both sexes.
Soldiers and sailors were subject to martial and admiralty law respectively. The 1590 Articul-Brief, meant for the military forces, threatened those who had committed sodomitical acts, whatever these were considered to be, with the death penalty, as did admiralty law at least from the early eighteenth century onwards.
It was not until 1730 that a wave of persecutions of sodomites swept through the country and prosecutions indeed had already started, where the province of Holland (because of the diversity of puni­tive measures) felt the need for anti-sod­omy legislation. On July 21,1730, an edict was issued which stipulated that those who had committed sodomy should be executed publicly, leaving the method of execution to the discretion of the judges. A week before, on July 14,1730, the province of Groningen granted anonymity to whom­ever denounced anyone suspected of the crimen nefandum. (Since only two men were executed in the city of Groningen in that year, the announcement can hardly be considered to have been successful.) In 1764 a slightly modified version of the edict of 1730 was issued inHolland, where­upon Amsterdam especially was hit by a new wave of persecutions.
In 1777 A. Perrenot, legal adviser to Stadtholder William V, published anony­mously the treatise Bedenkingen overhet straffen van zeekere schande lijke misdaad (Thoughts About the Punishment of a Certain Shameful Crime). In this he pleaded for the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy in the enlightened tradition of Beccaria and Voltaire. Sodomy, though a sin, in his opinion could not be considered a crime. Far from being a Bentham, he still wanted sodomites guilty of seduction to be imprisoned. Perrenot's treatise was soon followed by another anonymous pamphlet, Naderebedenkingen over het straff en van zeekere schandelyke misdaad (Further Thoughts About the Punishment of a Certain Shameful Crime), whose author argued sodomy to be a crime because it weakened male power and thus the power of the state. For practical reasons he argued against the death penalty: if sodomites were imprisoned and occasionally shown to the public in shameful clothes, em­ployed in cleaning toilets and doing other filthy jobs, it would inspire more horror of the crime to the public than the short­lived impression of a public execution.
In 1798 separation of church and state was declared. It inspired a member of the Amsterdam Court, J. Gales, to publish a treatise in which he rejected the possibil­ity that this separation automatically meant the abolition of the 1730/1764 edicts. Indeed, no such abolition followed.
Between 1795 and 1809 a new national criminal code was drafted, com­ing into force in the latter year. It threat­ened those who were guilty of unnatural acts with man or beast with a long term of imprisonment and banishment from the kingdom, and maintained the death pen­alty for those guilty of seducing others. The new criminal code had little or no effect since a necessary restructuring of the legal system still had to be prepared. Besides, with the annexation of the Neth­erlands by France in 1810 and the intro­duction of the French penal code in 1811, the 1809 code became redundant. The French code, which contained no article against sodomy, was left in force until 1866 despite new drafts of a Dutch crimi­nal code that still provided penal sanctions against same-sex behavior.
The criminal code of 1886, be­cause of liberal dominance in parliament, did not provide a penalty for same sex behavior, but set the age of consent for all sexual behavior at fourteen. Yet all through the nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries local legislation against public indecency and sexual acts in public made it possible to prosecute those who had given public offense.
It was only in 1911, when Chris­tian influences permeated Dutch politics, that a new Morals Statute included a dis­criminatory provision: Article 248bis added to the Criminal Code set the age of consent for same-sex behavior at 21, fixing that for heterosexual behavior at 16, and providing an imprisonment for offenders. This pro­vision was abolished in 1971 after the so-called Speyer Report had ascertained that no youth became a homosexual because of early homosexual experience.
With the exception of the period of Nazi occupation of the Netherlands (1940-45), no law prohibiting homosexu­ality as such was ever reintroduced. Regu­lation 81 of the German occupiers pro­vided for punishment of all same-sex behavior with imprisonment. This regula­tion, like other exactments of the occupa­tion, was abolished immediately after the Liberation.
Prosecutions. Until the eight­eenth century prosecutions because of same-sex behavior in the Netherlands were a rare phenomenon. Some verdicts are known from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century courts in Utrecht. In the same period some cases with political overtones are known to have been tried in The Ha­gue, one of them involvingthe president of the States of Holland. Most cases prior to the eighteenth century deal either with men who had sexual relations with chil­dren or with misuse of marriage, for in­stance women dressed as men who "mar­ried" other women. Until 1795 all cases in which women were involved dealt with cross-dressing.
Best known are the prosecutions of 1730. The discovery of a nationwide network of sodomites caused an avalanche of verdicts. Courts all over the country dealt with some 300 people, about half of them by default. Seventy death penalties were carried out. The most notorious were the 1731 prosecutions led by the country squire Rudolph de Mepsche in the Groningen provincial counties. On September 24, 1731, 22 men and boys from Faan and other nearby villages were put to death after dubiously obtained confessions. Several others were kept in prison without a verdict until 1747. The case caused wide disbelief and political upheaval. De Mepsche was accused of an attempt to get rid of political opponents.
Less known is the fact that in Rotterdam as early as 1702 two men were put to death and in 1717 a small local network was discovered which led to the banishment of several people. Equally less known are waves of prosecutions later in the eighteenth century. Such waves oc­curred in 1764-65 in Amsterdam and in 1776 in the province of Holland, in both cases following the discovery of networks of sodomites. Especially between 1795 and 1798 prosecutions in Amsterdam reached a new peak in a number of isolated trials (without the death penalty), which for the first time involved women, who without any reference to cross-dressing were ac­cused of sexual acts with one another. Prosecutions stopped in 1811 with the introduction of the French penal code. Altogether throughout the eighteenth century some 600 people were prosecuted because of same-sex behavior.
In the eighteenth century capital punishment was only applied when anal intercourse with an ejaculation in the body of a partner was considered proven by a confession and eyewitness accounts or confessions of accomplices. Other genital acts, or the absence of either a confession or some other part of the necessary evi­dence in charges of anal intercourse, re­sulted in long-term solitary confinement.
To obtain a confession the courts had torture (shin screws or whipping) at their disposal, though this was subject to rules. It could only be applied in cases that might result in a death penalty (anal inter­course) when eyewitness accounts or confessions of accomplices were available. Moreover, bailiffs had to ask their court's permission to submit a suspect to torture. A confession obtained under torture had to be repeated "free from pain and restraint."
Until 1795 in sodomy cases the rules for torture were observed even more than usual, with the exception of the trials in the village of Faan in the province of Groningen, where suspects seem to have been beaten up regularly and at least one man died as a result of torture. Judicial torture was abolished in 1798.
Before the eighteenth century, death penalties for sodomy were usually carried out by burning at the stake. In the eighteenth century garroting, the usual punishment for women guilty of a capital crime, was mostly applied to sodomites as well. In this period no sodomite was burned alive. The last death penalty for sodomy in the Netherlands was carried out in Schiedam in 1803. Prosecutions in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century, though no doubt the severest in the early modern period in Europe, were never sys­tematic, but the result of accidental dis­coveries.
During the nineteenth century same-sex behavior was liable to prosecu­tion only in case of public indecency, sexual acts in public places, which could be punished by imprisonment or sometimes led to confinement in a lunatic asylum. In the second half of this century such prose­cutions increased tenfold as a result of improvements in policing, the introduc­tion of rules concerning the use of public lavatories, and changes in the design of the latter which made activities in the lavato­ries visible from the outside.
The history of Article 248bis is one of a trail of blackmail, ruined reputa­tions, and derailed careers. The number of trials under this article gradually grew from about fifty per year before the war to several hundred per year in the first decade after the war. In 1936 the case of General Treasurer Ries became notorious. He was accused by a minor, fired from his office, and abandoned by the government, even though the accusations against him were withdrawn. Equally notorious was a series of 1939 prosecutions in the Dutch East Indies [Indonesia), which were covered by Dutch newspapers in a sensational manner.
Contrary to popular belief, prose­cution of homosexuals by the Nazis dur­ing the Occupation was rare. Only a small number of trials in regard to Regulation 81 are known to have happened, usually re­sulting in a few months of imprisonment. The number of trials under Article 248bis decreased compared with the number of such trials before the war. Homosexual behavior was left to the Dutch police, who were no more repressive than before the war. Though a couple of raids on pubs where homosexuals gathered did occur, historians so far have failed to uncover any case in which a homosexual was sent to a concentration camp, just for being a homosexual. Which does not mean to say that no Dutch homosexual was sent to a concentration camp, but that such a per­son was there either for being Jewish, as a member of the Resistance, or for political reasons.
Social Organization. The earliest references to a sodomite subculture have been traced to the last quarter of the seven­teenth century. Public buildings like the City Hall in Amsterdam, a park in The Hague, and public lavatories in different cities were widely used by sodomites as meetingplaces from the last decades of the seventeenth century onwards.
It was especially through the trials of 1730 and those in later years that the extent of the subculture came to the atten­tion of the authorities [and modem histo­rians). To a large extent sodomite contacts were organized through a network in which men of all classes and ranging in age from 20 to 60 participated. Most of the partici­pants (or at least those that are known because they were prosecuted) occupied professions that easily could bring them in touch with numerous other people: they were merchants, shopkeepers, peddlers, footmen. Many were married. The women involved in persecutions in the 1790s did not form a network or a subculture and were of a poorer, sometimes prostitution, background. Only some of them were married.
Brothels and pubs existed in The Hague, Utrecht, Amsterdam, and Leiden. Special go-betweens provided footmen for gentlemen. Public buildings like the Amsterdam City Hall, the Bourse in Amsterdam, churches, theatres, as well as numerous lavatories which sometimes were specially nicknamed, city walls, specific streets, the underbrush in and outside city walls: all were known to sodo­mites as places where they either could have sex or find a casual partner.
At some of these places they used special codes to make contact with one another, like tapping with one hand on the back of the other, or putting the hands on the hips and hitting with the elbow against that of somebody who did the same thing.
In some places rituals existed, e.g., a group of sodomites in Haarlem used to elect one of them when they met under a tree and gave him the first choice of a partner. Though drag was not as popular among sodomites in the Netherlands as in England, some were described by accom­plices or witnesses as effeminate.
The eighteenth-century subcul­ture was essentially a street culture and by its very nature an urban one. Sodomite contacts in rural areas seem to have had an even more casual and much less organized character. In the village of Faan, men and boys more or less accidentally engaged in games which included sexual acts, with­out being aware that these acts were con­sidered criminal and sinful.
The nineteenth century showed a gradual growth of this street culture and it has survived well into the second half of the twentieth century. The number of pubs and brothels showed an equal growth, while at the same time coteries of male as well as female friends, usually of higher class, either with or without a sexual purpose, came into existence. During World War II, "tearoom trade" prospered as never be­fore, mostly owing to the blackout. Even some pubs kept their largely homosexual clientele during the war. Though still existing, the street culture now seems to be giving way to a large commercial sub­culture, and also to more intimate forms of homosexuality.
A lesbian subculture has been much slower in coming into existence and today is much smaller than its male counterpart, though it provides not only pubs but also archives, bookshops, and health organizations.
Organizations. The first homo­sexual movement in the Netherlands was founded in 1911 as the Dutch branch of Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humani­tarian Committee (Nederlandsch Wetenschappelijk Humanitair Komitee - NWHK) by the nobleman and jurist Jacob Schorer in response to the introduction of article 248bis. He intended to fight this law and to give support to homosexuals whenever and wherever they got into trouble.
The NWHK published yearbooks and brochures, which were sent to stu­dents, politicians, medical doctors, and key figures in society. Schorer collected a huge library of publications on homosexu­ality, which was seized by the Nazis in the early days of the Occupation. Not a genu­ine movement per se, the NWHK was what it said it was, a committee, mostly personified by Schorer himself, financially dependent on the gifts of homosexuals who wanted to support it. Throughout its existence the NWHK met with fierce opposition from Protestant and Catholic groups. It came to an end in 1940 when Schorer wisely destroyed his membership records at the outbreak of war with Ger­many.
The editors of the newly founded homosexual magazine Levensrecht (Right to Live) also destroyed their records in May 1940, as well as the recently-printed fourth issue of their magazine. In 1946, after World War II had ended, the editors decided to revive Levensrecht. The au­thorities were obliged to give them a per­mit since, having ended the publication in 1940, the editors had obviously not col­laborated with the Germans. Like the editors of the Swiss magazine DerKreis/Le Cercle, which the Dutch editors took as their model, they started to organize spe­cial evenings in Amsterdam and other places with lectures and cultural events for a homosexual audience. Shortly there­after, they founded the Shakespeare Club, forerunner of the COC.
Neither the publication of Levensrecht nor the existence of the Shakespeare Club was welcomed by the Dutch authorities, who sought reasons to prohibit both. Through the careful policy of one of its founders, Niek Engelschman, who managed to keep on speaking terms with the vice squad of the police, and through tough negotiations, such a prohi­bition was prevented. The police, how­ever, made Engelschman stop publication of Levensrecht before a legal prohibition was issued. Yet shortly afterwards, the board of the Shakespeare Club decided to start a new magazine, Vriendschap (Friend­ship), which was left undisturbed by the authorities. (In 1986, at the COC's fortieth anniversary, Engelschman was awarded a royal decoration by the Dutch govern­ment for his role as one of the founding fathers of the organization and for his activities in later years.)
In 1948 the Shakespeare Club changed its name to COC (Cultuur en Ontspannings Centrum, "Center for Cul­ture and Recreation"). Unlike its prede­cessor, the NWHK, the COC wanted to organize homosexuals and offer them the opportunity to meet and relax in "decent" surroundings. Its principal goal was to strengthen the self-consciousness of homosexuals by acquainting them with the "great" cultural, literary, and political homosexuals of past and present and with scientific research on homosexuality. Like the NWHK, the COC in its external policy focused on key figures in society.
Social changes, including more openness about (homo)sexuality, caused the COC in 1964 to change its rather introverted policy into a more extroverted one, reflected by its new "open" name, Nederlandse Vereniging van Homofielen COC (Dutch Organization of Homophiles COC). With a new journal Dialoog it liter­ally hoped to enter into a dialogue with society.
Hardly aware of things happening elsewhere in the world and without any knowledge of the Stonewall Rebellion, at the end of the sixties the Dutch homosex­ual movement went through a series of changes that were not unlike those in America. Vietnam, radical student pro­tests, sexual revolution, the feminist movement and, not least, radical gay groups affected the COC and turned it into a more radical movement that increasingly fo­cused on society. Homosexuality was no longer considered to be the problem of homosexuals but society's problem. Once again these changes forced the COC to change its name: from 1971 onwards it called itself Nederlandse Vereniging tot Integratie van Homoseksualiteit COC (Dutch Society for the Integration of Homosexuality COC). In 1973, having been refused in 1963 and 1968, it was granted legal status.
From the very beginning women had been involved with the COC, though only as a small minority. Since the second half of the seventies, when the COC started to provide special facilities for women, this minority has been growing. Yet numerous lesbians prefer women-centered organizations and meeting places.
Perceptions. Until the persecu­tions of 1730, neither secular nor ecclesi­astical authorities in the Netherlands paid much attention to sodomy. It was consid­ered a crime and a sin that eventually would be punished. But until 1730, the church councils in their constant diatribes against "crying sins" (card-playing, swear­ing, whoring, etc.) never mentioned sod­omy. Secular authorities seemed to con­sider sodomy as an incidental crime or, as Michel Foucault claimed, as a temporary aberration from the norm. All this changed in 1730. In several books published by ministers after the persecutions had al­ready started, they presented interpreta­tions of the Biblical chapters on Sodom and Gomorrah that provided an etiology of same sex behavior on both a collective and an individual level. At a collective level such behavior was mostly seen as the re­sult of an abundance of food and the ab­sence of enemies of the state. At an indi­vidual level such abundance made people yield to the successive stages of the "crying sins" which in the end would make the individual vulnerable to seduction into same sex behavior by an individual who had reached that (new) nadir of sinfulness already. This was supposed to have hap­pened on a large scale in 1712-1713 during the negotiations in Utrecht to end the War of the Spanish Succession, when numer­ous Catholic diplomats visited the city.
Once an individual had been lured into such a behavior he would cling to these practices and seduce others. Indeed, in 1730, faced with men who had not committed their sins just accidentally but deliberately and in an organized manner, these were the questions and sometimes unprovoked answers to and from suspects on trial: how long had they persisted in their behavior and who had been their seducers? From an accidental sin, sodomy became a permanent state of sinfulness. Same-sex behavior was understood in a religious manner and the secular and ec­clesiastical authorities, the general public, and the men involved in the trials referred to acts "for which cities had been de­stroyed."
So far as the existence of a vague sodomite identity is reflected in such state­ments, this may have derived from the subculture and been acknowledged by the trials. Women seem not to have had such an identity.
As elsewhere in Europe, the Neth­erlands in the nineteenth century gradu­ally put more emphasis on the prevention than on the punishment of same-sex be­havior; this brought the discussion of such behavior into the sphere of medicine. Same-sex behavior became pivotal in the discus­sion, mostly conducted within the medi­cal profession, of cellular imprisonment, the spread of venereal diseases, and prosti­tution. Yet no original contributions in the process of the medicalization of homo­sexuality were published in the Nether­lands in this period. The writings of K. H. Ulrichs and other authors on the Third Sex in the second half of the nineteenth cen­tury became known there among physi­cians and those directly involved. Terms like "Urning" replaced "sodomite" and in 1892 for the first time the word "homo­sexuality" was used in the Netherlands, conveying the biological or medical mean­ings attached to same sex acts.
It was two members of the medi­cal profession, Arnold Aletrino (also a lit­erary author) and Lucien von Römer, who, as forerunners of the NWHK, were the first to defend "Urning rights," though the former wanted them to abstain from sex­ual acts, thus separating desire and behav­ior. Both of them believed that "uranism" originated in biological deviations, though Aletrino preferred to compare it to vari­ations in plant life rather than see it as a perversion or sickness. Both of them pub­lished on the subject, not seldom putting their reputations at risk.
The extensive Dutch press cover­age of the Oscar Wilde trial in England and later scandals in Europe provided further opportunity for homosexuals to identify with the accused. The Radclyffe Hall case and her Well of Loneliness (1928) provided such an opportunity for women.
The NWHK mostly followed Hirschfeld in his "intermediate type" theory, although Schorer was not espe­cially interested in any theory about homosexuality. On the eve of World War II, such biological theories were firmly established among homosexuals. This is best reflected in the book De Homosexueelen, which the lawyer Benno Stokvis published in 1939. In a series of short autobiographies men and women claimed to have felt that they were different from an early age onwards. Most of the men considered themselves effeminate and in their relationships they thought of them­selves in husband/wife roles, each com­plementing the other.
In the early years after the war, the COC continued to think of homosexu­ality in biological terms. It tried to pay attention to new theories as well, includ­ing obscure eugenic ones. Gradually such thinking gave way to a psychological (Freudian) concept. In the late sixties any concept that included an etiology became suspect and was made a taboo, though the existence of homosexuals and lesbians as a separate category still goes largely un­questioned.
Conclusion. As far as homosexu­ality is concerned today's Netherlands enjoys a reputation as one of the most tolerant countries in the world. The popu­larity of the Amsterdam "scene" with its more than 50 bars, representing many different lifestyles, rivals that of much larger cities. The Dutch government offi­cially carries out a gay and lesbian emanci­pation policy and so do many municipali­ties, one of the cabinet ministers being responsible for coordinating such policy. In Amsterdam, the first official gay and lesbian monument (widely mistaken as a tribute to homosexual victims of Nazi persecutions) has been built with govern­ment support. At an institutional level - government, parliament, press - there seems to exist a taboo on anti-homosexu­ality, to which even fundamentalists have at least to pay lip service. Yet attempts in the 1980s to introduce anti-discrimina­tion legislation concerning same-sex be­havior have been frustrated by fundamen­talist and Christian Democratic opposi­tion and seem to have entered a deadlock. As neither Christian Democrats, Liberals, nor Socialists have a majority in parlia­ment, no party is able to enforce its views. Christian Democrats, though in agreement with such legislation, want exceptions to be made for schools and other institutions of a Christian character, exceptions which are unacceptable to the other parties. Equally frustrated have been attempts to lower the age of consent to twelve or to grant gay couples the right to adopt chil­dren.
Long considered to be the only representative of homosexuals and lesbi­ans in the Netherlands, the COC nowa­days is no longer the only gay and lesbian organization. Homosexuals and lesbians have organized in gay and lesbian caucuses in professional groups such as in health care, teachers' and civil servants' unions, in the police forces and the army, in reli­gious groups, groups of elderly people and youths. Special groups or organizations havebeen set up for gay and lesbian (mental) health especially in regard to AIDS, and against anti-gay and -lesbian violence. At three universities (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Nijmegen) it is possible to take courses in gay and lesbian studies or research. Dutch universities organized two of the world's major gay and lesbian academic events: the "Among Men/Among Women Confer­ence" in 1983 (University of Amsterdam) and the "Homosexuality, Which Homo­sexuality? Conference" in 1987 (Free University, Amsterdam).
In the eighties the Netherlands entered the AIDS era. This crisis seemed to reenforce the taboo on anti-homosexual expression, as a result of a widely-pro­claimed compassion toward AIDS victims. In AIDS prevention, the gay and lesbian movement has become a negotiating part­ner of the government, carrying out a pol­icy of restraint.
Despite all this progress, anti-gay violence seemed to increase; the Nether­lands joined other countries in their hys­teria about child abuse and incest, creating an exceedingly dangerous atmosphere for pedophiles and homosexuals alike. More­over, question marks should be put beside some of the government's efforts to sup­port gay and lesbian emancipation, since they are also used to control homosexual­ity in a heterosexual manner. Despite these shortcomings, the Netherlands continues to point the way to true homosexual emancipation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Gert Hekma, Homoseksualiteit, een medische reputatie, Amsterdam: Sua, 1987; Pieter Koenders, Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland, Amsterdam: Sua, 1984; Theo van der Meer, De Wesentlijke sonde van sodomie en andeie vuyligheeden, Amsterdam: Tabula, 1984; A. X. van Naerssen, ed., Interdisciplinary Research on Homosexuality in the Netherlands, New York: Haworth Press, 1987; Rob Tielman, Homoseksualiteit in Nederland, Meppel: Boom, 1982.
Theo van der Meer

New Orleans
This major port (population ca. 600,000) at the mouth of the Mississippi River was founded in 1718 as capital of the French colony of Louisiana. Sold to the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisi­ana Purchase, New Orleans has longranked as a major gay center and mecca for homo­sexuals from all over the American South.
Two main factors fostered the early development of New Orleans' excep­tionally large gay community and con­tinue to shape that community's unusual contours: the city's cosmopolitan charac­ter and its French heritage. To the diverse, largely male, French, Spanish, German, Indian, and African populations (including Jean Lafitte's pirates) assembled during the port's colonial decades, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries added successive, and still largely male, waves of Americans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Filipinos, Latin Americans, still more French, and most recently a number of Vietnamese. And from its French colonial period, New Orleans also inherited a high degree of racial, ethnic, and social tolera­tion; a certain almost feminine gentilesse; a sure urbanity; and a distinctive public culture that still sets it apart from other American cities.
The Nineteenth Century. In the nineteenth century the lower strata of New Orleans' day-to-day illicit sex world cen­tered, as in many other ports, on the water­front, as well as in the grog shops and upstairs rooms of the French Quarter's Gallatin Street that ran along the wharves behind the French Market. The waterfront bars catered, from the beginning, to an unusually high number of Greek seafarers brought to the port by the Mediterranean trade patterns inherited from the city's French and brief Spanish (1763-1800) pe­riod. Such Greek bars even today remain heavily mixed, straight and gay.
A cut above the nightly grime of Gallatin Street, a number of public dance halls, called "ballrooms," catered to a sexually, racially, and socially mixed as­sortment of masked revellers. Each winter season these masked balls also became centers of the city's most famous, and traditionally its most sex-oriented, public festival, Mardi Gras.
The top stratum of nineteenth-century New Orleans gay society, while it might periodically drag through Gallatin Street and the ballrooms, more often fre­quented cafes, theatres, and restaurants. Unlike the rest of the United States, where bars, theatres, and restaurants remained largely rough male preserves, New Or­leans, from the beginning, afforded respect­able women the pleasure of attending. Consequently these institutions took on, in New Orleans, a gentle character, in the French mode, combining restaurant, bar, and coffee house, often along with music, into a neighborhood cafe. Moreover, New Orleans perpetuated the close connection the French had long made between food and sex. From their inception in the 1830s and '40s, great restaurants always had a series of private dining rooms upstairs, each equipped not only with the usual dining furniture but, de rigueur, also with an ample and armless couch. The intime dinner and the dejeuner galant became, and remain today, fixtures of New Orleans social-sexual life for the affluent of all orientations.
At the same time, the institution of placage (the keeping, by many white men, of free women of color as mistresses) found a parallel, albeit small by compari­son, in some white men's keeping of free black youths as lovers. The latter practice continued after the abolition of slavery, more often than not with a black lover disguised as a manservant in a bachelor white man's house.
From the Turn of the Century to World War II. At the opening of the twen­tieth century, Gallatin Street died as a waterfront, crowded out by an expansion of the French Market's food stalls. New Orleans' new "monkey wrench corner," as sailors traditionally called the center of any port's tenderloin district, became lower Canal Street and the first blocks of Deca­tur, Chartres, Exchange Alley, and Royal streets, which run from Canal into the French Quarter. On these seedy blocks seamen's bars, pool rooms, penny arcades, and cheap hotels proliferated, and hustlers and prostitutes abounded, even as they do today.
Prohibition had little effect on heavy-drinking New Orleanians. Cafés kept their liquor under the bar instead of on top of it., and served it in coffee cups instead of glasses. Otherwise the city's social-sex life continued virtually as be­fore. In addition to the national trends of the 1920s, the major changes the Prohibi­tion decade saw were: (1) a largely homo­sexual nightspot, mixed male and female, operated as a sort of gay speakeasy in an apartment of the Lower Pontalba building, facing Jackson Square; (2) the fad of private "ether parties" involving that substance along with marijuana and cocaine; and (3) the rise of literary and theatrical circles that had heavy homosexual components.
Theatre devotees gathered at a small res­taurant in the Upper Pontalba building that continued into the 1960s as Dottie Reiger's Alpine Cafe. The chief literary circle formed around Lyle Saxon and his black lover, whom Saxon fictionalized in his last work, The Friends of foe Gilmore. Victor's Cafe, situated at the Chartres/ Toulouse comer which had earlier been the site of the House of the Rising Sun (the city's most famous prostitution parlor, which gained international reknown when an old blues song about it became a world­wide hit after being recorded in 1964 by Eric Burdon and the Animals), became the literary circle's watering place.
With the end of Prohibition in 1933, bar-restaurants immediately blos­somed in New Orleans. The heavily mixed (gay and straight) James' Beer Parlor on Royal Street at Toulouse became such a favorite with gay men and women that its comer remained the chief gathering place for gay people to watch nighttime Mardi Gras parades until these processions ceased entering the Quarter in 1972. A number of other bars also developed sizable gay components in the 1930s, most notably Mom's Society Page on Exchange Alley, Pat O'Brien's on St. Peter Street, and the Old Absinthe House on Bourbon Street.
The nineteenth-century masked ball tradition continued in the decayed form of shows featuring transvestite fe­male impersonators, especially in black bars, of which the Dew Drop Inn off Lou­isiana Avenue uptown and the Caledonia Inn on St. Philip Street just outside the Quarter were the most celebrated. Both drew considerable white patronage, straight as well as gay. And by the late thirties, drag shows at the Wonder Bar and the My-Oh-My Club on the Lake Charles marina had become two of the city's most frequented tourist attractions. In the long view, the era's most important contribu­tion, the architectural restoration of the French Quarter and its official recognition as an historic district, was spearheaded, and has since been maintained, largely by the city's gay community.
During World War H, gay activi­ties increased in New Orleans as in other American cities. The pool halls, poker rooms, and bookie joints that lined lower Canal Street functioned as easy pick-up spots, and any number of small hotels in the vicinity, such as the Teche, by then decayed from their former elegance, served as convenient trick parlors. Jackson Square in the middle of the Quarter, a jungle of overgrown vines, trees and shrubs at the time, became an all-night cruising ground, and the public men's room across the street in the French Market achieved national notoriety as "the blue grotto." The leader of one of the thirties' most famous all-girl orchestras opened Dixie's Bar of Music on St. Charles Avenue, a straight bar but favored by female and male gays as well. Exchange Alley added Wanda's Seven Seas and Mack's Oyster Bar to its collection of hustler dives.
The postwar forties saw the open­ing of the Starlet Lounge at Chartres and St. Philip streets and of Tony Bacino's on Toulouse near Bourbon; both remained infamous for a decade. In the front room of Bacino's a bartender called the "White Roach" and black pianist and singer Ginny and Gracie entertained a mixture of tour­ists and locals under the eye of black door­man "Tune," while in the slave-quarter bar to the rear, across the patio which connected via typical narrow passageways to neighboring bars, an outrageous French-speaking Cajun drag queen called "Candy Lee" regaled a largely gay crowd with coarse humor. And a few blocks away on the corner of Bourbon and St. Philip, the Cafe Jean Lafitte opened in an old blacksmith shop to become one of the most elegant gay bars in the country, though it contin­ued, as did all New Orleans bars of the period, to have many straight patrons as well.
The Postwar Period. When au­thorities closed the poker halls and bookie joints of lower Canal Street in the 1950s, their back-room sexual activities moved into several old cinema theatres, by then reduced to showing bawdy films: the Avenue Theater on St. Charles, the Globe, the Tudor, and the Center on Canal, and the Gaiety in the Quarter. At the same time, Exchange Alley's House of the Fenc­ing Masters, a rough bar commonly called Ivan's after its owner, inherited some of the spillover. Air travel in the fifties also greatly increased the city's daily number of tourists and the annual Mardis Gras crowds. Dixie moved her bar into the Quarter, at Bourbon and St. Peter, and it, along with the Cafe Lafitte in Exile, which moved from the blacksmith shop to the corner of Bourbon and Dumaine, became the twin hubs of gay life, with exclusively gay patronage. New black bars such as the Golden Feather on St. Bernard Avenue and the Dream Castle on Frenchmen Street also sprang up. At the same time the Missisippi Gulf Coast, the city's nearby beach resort, developed gay bars such as the Cafe Ko-Ko and Charley's Hideaway, but they remained, like the black bars in New Orleans, a straight-gay mix.
The increased crowds of the 1950s not only forced a certain anonymity upon individuals, but also caused bars to dis­pense first with food service and later with live entertainment, both long their hall­marks. These changes had two profound effects on the city's gay life. Without food and entertainment to bind them together, male and female homosexuals began to drift apart, and a few lesbian bars opened, the earliest ones on the Tchoupitoulas Street waterfront uptown, well outside the Quarter. Sheer numbers also produced the phenomenon of bar sex. The 1957 Mardi Gras crowds in Dixie's developed small groping circles that suddenly be­came daisy-chains, the idea of which, despite Dixie's and other bar owners' ef­forts to stop it, rapidly spread. Before 1960 such "public" sex was a commonplace in New Orleans gay bars, precursors by over a decade of the orgy rooms that became a national fad in the 1970s.
The baby-boom generation reached its twenties in the late sixties and seventies and their presence multiplied the number of gay bars and baths in New Orleans, as elsewhere. Establishments followed the sixties' bifurcated sense of style: urbane elegance on the one hand and hippy hedonism on the other. But in New Orleans the two mixed more than else­where, for the Counterculture's emphasis on freedom of choice and street life found easy accommodation in New Orleans' traditionally tolerant attitude and festival culture.
Dancing, for example, which had never before been part of the New Orleans gay bar scene, became common, if only briefly, for dancing was traditionally so much a part of the city's daily life that gay natives saw no advantage to having it in their ever more crowded bars.
The unusual mix of the 1960s produced one particularly notable bar, Las Casa de los Marineros at the corner of Decatur and Toulouse. Beginning in the fifties as a Latin American seaman's bar, it nightly assembled in the sixties an ex­traordinary collection of artists, intellec­tuals, street people, gays, workers, college students, and young society couples, to become a remarkable microcosm.
The 1970s saw another enormous jump in the number of gay bars and the New Orleans version of coming out of the closet. By 1980 the city had nearly thirty gay bars, almost all within the one square mile constituting the Quarter, an average of a bar every third block. Even the Grey­hound Bus station sported a gay bar, black and wild. And the local bars reflected something of the segmentation of the gay community that was occurring nation­ally, but with a difference. The specializa­tion that characterized bars in other American cities during that decade re­mained in New Orleans a cosmetic differ­ence. Leather bars, for example, never became exclusively, much less rigidly, leather. Most gay men, from all social strata, now went periodically to all bars. Hence, below surface differences, the bars of the seventies actually were more alike than they had ever been before. That fact represented the major change the decade brought, a loss of focus for the gay commu­nity. When Dixie's closed and Lafittes in Exile installed disco music, there ceased to be centers of the city's gay life; it lost its stratification to become diffuse and disor­ganized.
By contrast the gay pride move­ment in New Orleans proved notably ef­fective, especially its political arm. In 1977 the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club grew out of a somewhat older gay literary salon called the Gertrude Stein Society and began political lobbying. In 1982 the GSDC gave way to NORCO, the New Orleans Re­gional Chapter of the Louisiana Gay Po­litical Action Committee. NORCO has succeeded in electing a number of city council members and state legislators sympathetic to gay rights and in influenc­ing gay rights ordinances and legislation.
Other aspects of the gay pride movement, for reasons directly traceable to the city's general lifestyle and its public culture, had both somewhat less as well as considerably more success than their founders hoped. Impact, the gay newspa­per established in 1977, has, save for the brief period it was edited by Jon Newlin, never made a dent on the city's largely non-reading public. A new publication aimed at gay Christians is called The Sec­ond Stone. But gay parades and public drag contests, designed to pique, instead de­lighted the local population who simply coopted them and turned them into new civic festivals. "Southern Decadence," for example, a drag parade originated in 1974 as a protest march, is today the center event of the N w Orleans Labor Day cele­bration.
The main effects of the AIDS epidemic of the eighties on the New Or­leans scene have been the diminution of drugs and the associated lifestyle, the dis­appearance of most public and bar sex, and the closing of most, but not all, bath­houses. There has been no official suppres­sion, and gay life continued quite public, especially in the Quarter. Young people were markedly few on the public gay scene, and bars became more social and more entertainment-centered than at any time since the 1950s. Live music and even food again made their appearance in gay bars, whose patrons reflected the highest fe­male-male ratio seen in over thirty years.
Lucy /. Fail

New Testament
Consisting of twenty-seven short writings, the New Testament forms the second part of the Christian Bible. The first part of the Christian Bible, the He­brew Bible or Old Testament, is consid­ered authoritative by Jews, but the New Testament is not. Apart from this, the New Testament does have some value as a source book for the history of both the synagogue and the church, although a great part of it is of dubious merit as historical source material because it amounts to a series of testimonials of faith.
The Gospels. The four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with which the New Testament begins, are not biographies of Jesus but statements of belief. Mark, the earliest, was written as homiletic material to the new church in Rome, Matthew as a tract to convert Jews, Luke as a tract to convert Greeks, and John as a pseudo-gnostic treatise to win the pagans of the Orient, positing Jesus as the True Light of the world. Though the his­torical school would assign these gospels to the reigns of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, all four may have been com­posed as late as the time of Hadrian ¡117-138), as they begin to be mentioned and quoted only in the third quarter of the second century, and are recognized by all Christendom only in the last quarter. To take any one of them as an accurate life of Jesus is to misunderstand them from the outset, though some of the information about Jesus may be accurate. He is de­picted as an itinerant preacher, faith healer, and miracle worker who wandered through Judea, Galilee, Syria, and Trans-Jordan in the reign of Tiberius, when the prefect of the province of Judea was Pontius Pilate. He was accompanied by a small group of devoted followers of diverse social back­grounds, some with extensive property, others marginal types in the eyes of Phari­saic Jewry, the inner circle of his disciples being entirely male, but with some de­voted women in their entourage.
The four gospels record Jesus as making no statement that focused explic­itly on homosexual behavior or rendered a judgment in favor of either the Jewish or the Hellenic attitude toward it. The omis­sion of this narrow area of sexual morality in no way means that he had no moral judgment on such matters. His statements on adultery and divorce (Matthew 5:27-32) and on that which "defileth the man: . .. adulteries, fornications... lasciviousness" (Mark 7:20-23) imply no weakening or abrogation of the code of sexual mora) ity recognized by both Palestinian and Helle­nistic Jewry, but instead a higher standard of morality that goes far beyond the con­ventional Judaic one; it is not just overt acts, but even thoughts and intentions that are condemned and banished from consciousness. Even if one takes the Ser­mon on the Mount to be a new ethical standard meant only for the elite of the proto-Christian community in contrast with the ritual and ceremonial observances minutely prescribed by the Old Testa­ment for the priests and Levites - the elite of the old covenant - it still urges a broad­ening rather than a narrowing of the sexual taboos in the Holiness Code of Leviticus. The word racha in Matthew 5:22 may be a vulgar loanword (from Hebrew rakh) in Hellenistic Greek signifying the passive-effeminate homosexual whom both Jew and Gentile held in contempt; the mean­ing of the passage would then be that not simply physical aggression and violence, but even verbal insults directed at the masculinity of the addressee are forbidden by the higher morality of the new faith.
Other Aspects. The Christian tradition as we now have it, however, must have been purged by James the pious brother of Jesus, who took charge of the infant church soon after Jesus' death and held onto it until he himself was executed (ca. 44). He would hardly have let anything salacious about the relationships of the earliest apostles survive. The same is true of Paul of Tarsus, a Jew who came upon the Christian scene about six or seven years after the death of Jesus and reshaped the new sect largely accordingto his own think­ing, in the process writing about two-fifths of what later became the canonical New Testament. Letters attributed to him number thirteen, although several of these (I-II Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, and Ephesians), should be called pseudo-Pauline, for to attribute them entirely or at all to him raises numerous critical objec­tions that are not easily answered by the traditional arguments.
There are explicit references to the morality of homosexual acts in Ro­mans 1:26-27,1 Corinthians 6:9-10, and I Timothy 1:9-10. The first is often mistak­enly understood as the sole reference to lesbianism in the Bible, but is in fact a reinterpretation of the sin of the "daugh­ters of men" who had intercourse with the "sons of God" (= fallen angels) in Genesis 6:1-2,4, echoed in Testament of Naphtali 3:5, an intertestamental writing. The opening statement that "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven" (Romans 1:18) shows that the whole passage is a com­mentary on the Deluge and the destruc­tion of Sodom, in both of which Paul sees retribution for violations of the natural order. There is no reference in the passage to the sexual behavior of Paul's Roman contemporaries, though implicitly the conduct of the gentile world is excoriated as transgressing the Judaic norms.
The passage in I Corinthians 6:9-10 is modeled on the Decalogue: those who violate its precepts will find them­selves excluded from the Kingdom of God. The words malakoi, "effeminate," and arsenokoitai, "abusers of themselves with mankind," signify the passive and active partners in male homosexual relations respectively, rephrasing the explicit con­demnation of both in Leviticus 20:13, which Philo Judaeus and Flavius Josephus alike show to have been universally up­held in the Judaism of the first century. The reference in Timothy parallels the one in Corinthians, with the same catalogue of evil-doers who are deserving of ostracism and punishment. For fundamentalists the sanctions expressed in these passages are absolute and beyond question, while the liberal Christian would seek to "reinter­pret the Bible in the light of contemporary knowledge," and the gay Christian advo­cate must use every exegetical strategem at his disposal to excise the offending texts from the canon of authority.
Apart from this standard group of three passages, the references to "dogs" in Paul and in Revelations 21:8 and 22:15 are probably not allusions to the kelebh, the Canaanite and Phoenician hierodule who prostituted himself in honor of Astarte. The story of the Centurion's servant in Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10 may suggest a pederastic relationship, since the servant "who was dear [entimos] unto him" may have been both orderly and bed part­ner. But the emotional or physical over­tones of the tale are less important than Jesus' remark that "I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel," which fore­shadows the conversion of the Roman Empire alongside the rejection of the new faith by Jewry. The "beloved disciple" in the Gospel of John alone is sometimes, usually not in a pious vein, asserted to have been a youth for whom Jesus' love was tantamount to a Greek pederastic attachment of the mentor to his protege.
An eighteenth-century manu­script recently discovered and published by Morton Smith includes a passage that refers to the "young man having a linen cloth cast about his naked body," amplify­ing Mark 14:51-52, with the innuendo that Jesus had an homoerotic relationship with this otherwise mysterious disciple as well.
So the New Testament references to homosexuality fully echo the Judaic origins of primitive Christianity, even if the customs of the Hellenic world occa­sionally emerge from the backdrop of the narrative. These passages indicate that the primitive Church implicitly ratified Lev­iticus 18 and made its strictures part of its own constitution (Acts 15:20, 29). In due time the sexual morality of Hellenistic Judaism, interpreted in a rigoristic and even ascetic manner, became normative for Christian civilization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Tom Horner, Homo­sexuality and the fudeo-Chzistian Tradition: An Annotated Bibhography, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981; idem, Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times, Philadel­phia: Westminster, 1978; Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexual­ity: Contextual Background for Contem­porary Debate, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983; Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.
Tom Horner and Ward Houser

New York City
Settled by the Dutch in 1624 and acquired by the English in 1667, the New York colony (unlike most other American colonies) lacked the character of a reli­gious haven; its emphasis was overtly commercial from the start. After Ameri­can independence (1783), the city became the major port of entry for millions of immigrants, chiefly European, some of each ethnic group staying behind to establish the city's cosmopolitan society. Given this demography, it would be expected that its gay subculture would be largely European in type, as it was - though with significant modifications for local conditions. In modern times, New York and San Fran­cisco vied for leadership of the American gay subculture.
Colonial Times. Dutch Roman law punished sodomy with death, and cases are recorded from 1646, 1658, and 1660. After the English conquest a new capital statute was enacted in 1665, but it seems rarely to have been enforced. Lord Edward Cornbury, governor of New York and New Jersey in 1702-08, had a penchant for women's clothing, but appears to have been entirely heterosexual.
The Nineteenth Century. The newly independent American states were spared the recrudescence of antisodomy bigotry that disfigured Britain during the Napoleonic wars, and for the first seven decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's homosexuals seem to have been largely left alone. There were two competing and somewhat ineffectual po­lice forces, which were not proactive, which is to say they undertook no entrapment, raids, or other activity to bring sodomites to justice, unless the matter was brought to their attention in an unavoidable way. Thus in 1846 a man was prosecuted for making lewd advances to a police officer. As we know from Horatio Alger's novels, the streets were full of footloose teenage boys, a constant temptation for some. Churches, which were generally kept open and relatively dark, seem to have been a regular place of assignation. Walt Whitman's laconic diary entries give evi­dence of one man's pursuit of ephebic sex objects.
After the Civil War this easy-going atmosphere changed. The social purity and censorship movements put pressure on public authorities to "clean up" America's cities. The importation of re­cent European ideas about "inverts" and "degenerates" increased the glare of pub­licity, provoking the indignation of the respectable. At the same time, New York City developed a vibrant bohemian and entertainment subculture. As a result of vice investigations of the 1890s, we know of such establishments as the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, Manilla Hall, Paresis Hall, The Palm, the Black Rabbit, Little Bucks, and the Artistic Club. Some of these places were essentially male brothels, while others offered drinks and entertainment. In the Bowery and lower Broadway areas, the streets were cruised by aggressive male hustlers, identifiable by their painted faces and red ties.
The Twentieth Century. The first two decades of the twentieth century were the original heyday of Greenwich Village as a cultural center and also as a place of some toleration for lesbians and gay men. Others preferred to visit the nightspots in Harlem, which was also the scene of a major black intellectual movement with several significant gay and bisexual par­ticipants: the Harlem Renaissance. Among the notables who enlivened New York during these years were Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, Hart Crane, Marsden Hartley, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. At this time the modem gay bar and bathhouse began to take shape. For the bars, however, Pro­hibition (1919-1933) meant devastation, though some gay bars continued as speak­easies. An unintended consequence of the legal change was to make gay and straight bars more similar, since both were now invested with the same atmosphere of clandestinity. Until the rise of the Ameri­can gay liberation movement, the gay bar represented the premier institution - vir­tually the only institution - for male homosexuals. In the late 1930s, however, a kind of satellite appeared in the summer resorts on Fire Island, notably the all-gay village of Cherry Grove.
As the country veered away from Prohibition attitudes in the 1930s, bars became legal but subject to supervision, in New York by the State Liquor Authority. This agency could revoke the licence of any tavern for permitting "degenerate disorderly conduct," and campaigns of particular virulence were waged in 1939 and in the early 1960s, in order to sanitize the city for the two world's fairs. With a sword of Damocles hanging over them, so to speak, bar owners themselves tried to keep "obvious" types and behavior at a minimum. Dancing and kissing, though they sometimes occurred, were particu­larly liable to bring down the wrath of the public guardians. In addition, many bars were owned or partially controlled by organized crime, while payoffs to the po­lice were de rigueur. This tyrannical situ­ation in the bars was finally ended by the New York Mattachine Society and the election of John Lindsay as Mayor in 1965.
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s an average of at least a thousand men were arrested annually on solicita­tion charges, which were usually occa­sioned by police entrapment. Public dis­like and fear of homosexuals continued to be fanned by campaigns in the tabloid press; the first major series occurred in 1892, and such yellow journalism was often repeated on the eve of municipal elections.
The Gay Movement and New Visibility. After World War II New York was the scene of a proto-gay rights organi­zation, the Veterans Benevolent Associa­tion [chartered in 1948). But the real gay movement came to New York from Cali­fornia in the form of the Mattachine Soci­ety (1955). Other groups followed, includ­ing a chapter of ONE, the West Side Dis­cussion Group, a chapter of Daughters of Bilitis, and the Student Homophile League, which established chapters at Columbia (1966) and New York (1967) universities. These groups began meeting together in 1964, sponsoring demonstrations and conferences, and eventually coalescing into the East Coast Homophile Organiza­tions (ECHO). In the 1960s the increasing efforts by Mayor Robert Wagner, Jr., and others to repress homosexuals and homo­sexual behavior collided with a mood of intransigence and rebellion heightened by outrage against the Vietnam War. The result was the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, in which a huge crowd of angry gay people imprisoned the police for a time in a bar in Greenwich Village. This landmark event, commemorated each year in marches or parades on the last Sunday in June in New York City and throughout the world, led to a heady but turbulent period. A New Left organization, the Gay Liberation Front, elbowed the Mattachine Society out of the limelight, only to be itself replaced by the single-issue Gay Activists Alliance, which promoted the lambda symbol. Disputes among gay leaders and entrenched opposi­tion by old-line politicians were to delay the passage of a gay rights bill in the city council until 1986. In 1973 the Gay Aca­demic Union was founded, holding a series of annual conferences that promoted a comprehensive sense of gay studies. Con­tributions from the many homosexual and lesbian artists resident in New York led to its flourishing as a gay cultural center, notable for a strong presence in theatre, film, popular music, visual arts, and litera­ture. In different ways Frank O'Hara and Andy Warhol had influential roles in po­etry and painting, while gay novelists banded together to form the Violet Quill Club.
As a result of gay political activ­ity and legal pressure, an atmosphere of unprecedented openness, almost a con­tinuous carnival, developed in the 1970s. Bathhouses, backroom bars, clubs such as the Mine Shaft, and even open- air places of sexual encounter attracted a national and international clientele of tourists seeking a gay Mecca - a title that New York dis­puted with San Francisco.
In the 1980s, however, increasing awareness of the city's many social prob­lems, together with the AIDS crisis, dimmed this festive atmosphere, and New York's gay and lesbian leaders settled into the slower and more arduous task of community building. A persistent prob­lem is that because of the high degree of stratification and social distance which the gay community shares with the larger New York City society, no organization bringing together the leadership of all the diverse groups has been able to survive.
New York City as Pioneer. Sig­nificant firsts in gay history that New York claims are the publication of Donald Webster Cory's The Homosexual in Amer­ica (New York: Greenberg, 1951); the beginning of the homophile phase of the man-boy love movement in the United States with the publication of J. Z. Eglinton's Greek Love (New York: Oliver Layton Press, 1964); the founding of the Student Homophile League at Columbia University by Stephen Donaldson (1966); the openingin November 1967of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first to be devoted solely to gay/lesbian books, by Craig Rodwell, who had earlier organized a gay youth group; the Stonewall Rebel­lion (June 1969); the founding of the Gay Liberation Front (July 1969); the founding of Gay Activists Alliance (December 1969); the first Gay Pride March [simultaneously with Los Angeles] (June 1970); the launch­ing of the Gay Academic Union at John Jay College (1973); the founding of the Na­tional Gay Task Force (1974); the estab­lishment of Gay Men's Health Crisis (1981); the founding of Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (1985); the founding of ACT UP [AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power] (1987); the Stonewall commemo­rative postal cancellation initiated by Warren Johansson (1989).
Wayne R. Dynes

Nicolson, Harold (1886-1968)
British diplomat, gardener, pub-lisher, and prolific writer of biographies, diaries, and letters. Born into the British diplomatic service (in Teheran, where he would later serve), Nicolson helped write the Balfour Declaration during World War I, and was a junior adviser (along with John Maynard Keynes) at the Paris Peace Con­ference which launched the League of Nations. In his spare time Nicolson wrote popular biographies of Byron, Swinburne, and Verlaine. In 1929 he retired to write for the Evening Standard, published by Lord Beaverbrook, and to create formal gardens.
Nicolson met Vita Sackville-West in 1910,and marriedherin 1913. Both had a series of homosexual affairs with persons of their own station, in marked contrast with the British upper-class pattern of seeking proletarian homosexual partners. Nicolson's liaisons with younger aristo­crats were emotionally cooler than his wife's passions for Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis. He was quite devoted to her, while she was less promiscuous than he and more devoted to the women she loved than to her husband. Their third-born son published Vita's account of their open marriage and her unhappy affair with Violet Trefusis in 1973.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, London: Weidenfeld &. Nicolson, 1973.
Stephen O. Murray

North Africa
See Africa, North.

Novels and Short Fiction
Fiction in the form of novels and short stories ranks as a particularly charac­teristic feature of modern imaginative life, continuing to flourish even in an era dominated by electronic entertainment. Gay and lesbian characters and situations sometimes appear in mainstream novels whose major context is heterosexual. Less well known to the general public is the "gay novel," a modest though surprisingly hardy variant. Few works of this type have garnered acclaim as masterworks, and gay/ lesbian novels are perhaps best regarded as forming a genre, such as mystery or sci­ence-fiction.
Classical Antiquity. As a literary category the novel was a late-comer in ancient Greece, becoming popular only in the second century b.c. Achilles Tatius' romance The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon mingles heterosexual and homosexual episodes with nonchalant impartiality, though Longus' Daphnis and Chloe is less favorable to male same-sex love. A proto-science-fiction story, the True History of Lucian of Samosata, tells of a man who voyaged to the moon, where he found an all-male society in which off­spring emerged from plants. Finding favor with the king, the hero was invited to marry his son.
A major landmark is the Latin Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (first cen­tury of our era), which recounts the pica­resque adventures of Encolpius (the narra­tor) and his boyfriend Giton in southern Italy. The present fragments, running to some 160 pages in modem editions, are believed to amount to only a tenth of the original, which would have been a work of almost Proustian scope.
From the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. The medieval legend otAmis andAmile is a tale of intense male bonding of two devoted friends, the David and Jonathan of their age. To save his friend from leprosy, the other agreed to slay his own two children. However, after he made the sacrifice they were miracu­lously restored to life.
The Renaissance revival of an­cient models paved the way for the bawdy novel of early modern times, diffused by the printing press, though often clandes­tinely. With its great pioneering figure of Aretino at the head, Venice early took the lead. Here the homosexual classic is the mid-seventeenth-century L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola (Alcibiades the School­boy), attributed to Antonio Rocco. This little book is a plea for pederasty that takes the form of a conversation between the young Alcibiades and his lustful teacher. A work that belongs in a class of its own is La Cazzaria of the Sienese Antonio Vignali (" Arsicciolntronato," 1501-59), which presents a series of playful fantasias on a variety of sexual subjects. In France Nico­las Chorier took the lead in his De arcanis amoris et Veneris (ca. 1658), which, though primarily heterosexual, has both lesbian and male homosexual passages. In order to avoid repercussions, Chorier disguised his book as the product of a Spanish woman author as adapted by a Dutch Latinist. A disapproving, voyeuristic homosexual episode appears in John Cleland's Mem­oirs of a Woman o/Pieasuré("FannyHill," 1748^9), and in Roderick Random (1748) Tobias Smollett includes two unmistaka­bly homosexual characters, Lord Strutwell and Captain Whiffle, both presented negatively.
The French eighteenth century, combining the Enlightenment with liber­tine trends, saw a plentiful production of erotic literature, most of it heterosexual. Only irt the last decade of the century were the pansexual works of the Marquis de Sade published, as well as Denis Diderot's La Rehgieuse, which concerns lesbianism inside a convent.
The Nineteenth Century. Through the nineteenth century a copious flow of clandestine erotic novels appeared for the well-heeled purchaser. Near the century's beginning is a lurid novel Gamiani ¡1833), attributed to Alfred de Musset, that features lesbianism. At its end is the still mysterious English Teleny (1893), about a gay Hungarian pianist. A main­stream author, Honoré de Balzac, left an example of a noteworthy homosexual character, Vautrin, embedded in his vast tapestry, La Comedie humaine. The se­cret of the character is that he does not love women, but his homosexuality is woven skillfully into the fabric of the narrative, as Balzac had mastered the tech­nique of suggesting in an unobtrusive manner the erotic motives and actions of the subject. Balzac was also aware of the political dimension of homosexuality, of the "freemasonry of love" that it repre­sented.
The end of the century saw a greater flow of relevant works, though the authors still had to tread a careful path to avoid prosecution for pornography. Catulle Mendés' Mephistophéla offers a broad panorama of lesbian life, though inscribed in a judgmental framework. The mystic Toséphin Pela dan, leader of the Rose+Croix group, gave novelistic form to his obses­sion with androgyny in L'androgyne and La gynandie (both 1891). From a literary point of view, probably the finest work of the decade is Escale-Vigor (1899) by the Belgian writer Georges Eekhoud, which concerns the love of a Flemish nobleman for a middle-class youth.
The Modern French Achieve­ment. In the early years of the twentieth century Marcel Proust took up the chal­lenge of the great French novelists of the past: his vast A la recherche du temps perdu includes extensive male homosex­ual and lesbian materials refracted in a special concept of love. For his younger contemporary, Andre Gide, the pivotal novel is Tie Counterfeiters (1926), though his autobiographical works surpass his fiction in frankness. Although she wrote also about heterosexuality, the lesbian counterpart to these giants is Colette, who drew upon her experiences at school and on the Parisian stage. Her friend Jean Cocteau Was multitalented, but could not concentrate his gifts in a single master-work. Marcel Jouhandeau and Julien Green (the latter a gallicized American) have been much preoccupied with religion and homosexuality. A place apart belongs to the searing novels of Jean Genet, which reflect his experiences among the under­class - on the road and in prison. Marguerite Yourcenar, who spent many years in the United States, has preferred male-homosexual themes to lesbian ones.
After a hiatus in the wake of World War II, a new crop of French writers has confronted gay themes. By all odds the leader is Michel Toumier, the author of intricately wrought philosophical fables. Other significant French gay novelists of the late twentieth century are Renaud Camus, Tony Duvert, Dominique Fernan­dez, and Yves Navarre. Among lesbian novelists Monique Wittig stands out for her formal innovations reflecting French and American feminism.
Germany and Austria. The dis­tinguished Austrian writer Robert Musil produced a novel based on his military school experiences, Young Törless (1906), that shows the exploitation of a vulner­able, effeminate boy by two bullies. Using the pseudonym of Sagitta, the German anarchist theorist John Henry Mackay wrote what was probably the first com­pletely sympathetic novel of boy-love, Fenny Skalier (1913). In 1926 "Sagitta" published Der Puppen junge (The Hustler) which details the milieu of boy prostitutes in Berlin in the 1920s.
Thomas Mann, a Nobel prize winner, was much troubled by his homo­sexual side, to which he succeeded in giv­ing powerful artistic form in his novella Death in Venice (1912), which depicts the downfall of an aging writer who falls in love with a beautiful Polish boy. His son Klaus Mann was entirely homosexual, and all his novels deal with the matter either directly or indirectly. Like the Manns, Hans Siemsen found it necessary to emi­grate because of his anti-Nazi opinions. The journals Der Eigene and Der Kreis offered opportunities for lesser German-speaking gay writers to publish short fic­tion. Not well known outside of Germany, Bruno Vogel combined explicit, positive homosexuality with socialist-anarchist politics as seen in his antiwar novel Alf (1929). The lesbian novelist Anna Elisabet Weihrauch produced a panorama of Ger­man lesbian life in her Skorpion (1919-21). Christa Winslow's The Child Manuela (1931) has been repeatedly filmed as Mädchen in Uniform. Hermann Broch, considered by some as one of Europe's great modern novelists, completed his The Death of Vergil (1946) while in exile in America.
Bridging the war years was the pacifist Hans Henny Jahnn, who was based in Hamburg. Now recognized as a major figure is another Hamburg writer, Hubert Fichte, who explored themes relating to the counterculture and the Third World. Alexander Ziegler's message novel of gay emancipation, Die Konsequenz (19751 was made into a film. Other contemporary German writers of note include Guido Bachmann, Friedrich Kröhnke, and Mar­tin Sperr.
Britain. As Henry Spencer Ashbee has remarked about erotic literature, "The English nation possesses an ultra-squeamishness and hyper-prudery peculiar to it­self, sufficient alone to deter any author of position and talent from taking in hand so tabooed a subject." In the wake of the Oscar Wilde trials this caveat applied par­ticularly to homosexual literature. E. M. Forster wrote his homosexual novel Mau­rice in 1913, but showed it only to a few friends; the book was not published until 1971. In 1928 Radclyffe Hall, an estab­lished writer since before World War I, created an enormous furor with her les­bian novel The Well of Loneliness. Al­though Virginia Woolf's novel of androgyny Orlando (also 1928) was about her lover Vita Sackville-West, the tale was so fan­tastic that no one seemed to mind. Simi­larly, Ronald Firbank's Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) was done in such a coy and gossamer style of high camp that it could hardly give offense. Compton Mackenzie's Vestal Fire (1927) paints a delightful picture, based in part on the doings of Count Adelswärd Fersen, of the international set on the island of Capri. In the 1930s Christopher Isherwood included homosexual motifs in his Berlin stories, but carefully "balanced" with heterosexual material.
Only after World War II did this situation begin to change - though censor­ship kept out many foreign writings on homosexuality even into the 1980s. Mary Renault, who specialized in writing about male homosexual experience, began her career with a wartime novel, The Chari­oteer, in 1953; she soon switched to his­torical novels about ancient Greece which enjoyed a popular following among gay readers throughout the English-speaking world. Perhaps the best-known of these are The Last of the Wine (1956), set in the Athens of the Peloponnesian War, and the second of her books on Alexander the Great, The Persian Boy (1972).
Leading British middle-brow au­thors, such as Angus Wilson [Hemlock and After, 1952) and Iris Murdoch [The Bell, 1958; and A Fairly Honourable De­feat, 1970), presented sympathetic homo­sexual characters in a context of social comedy. The coming of gay liberation created a larger market, but the new gay writers were characteristically tradition­alist: among the best are David Galloway, Adam Mars-Jones, David Rees, and David Watmough. Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library (1988) earned widespread admiration for its poignant contrast between the sexual-revolution era and pre-1969 oppression.
Other Countries. The fall of Mussolini opened Italian literature to for­eign influences, especially American ones. The realistic novelists Alberto Moravia andhis wife ElsaMorantehaveboth treated homosexuality, though it is not their main theme. A small masterpiece is Giorgio Bassani's The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (1958), which shows the dovetailing of homophobia and anti-Semitism at the end of the 1930s. The homosexual Pier Paolo Pasolini, later better known as a filmmaker, wrote frank treatments of Roman prole­tarian life, as well as pederastic sketches, which were published only after his death. The reception of French influences led to a new experimentalism in the Italian gay novel, as seen in the work of Mario Appignano, Francesco Merlini, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, and Dario Trento. Aldo Busi, author of The Standard Life of a Tempo­rary Pantyhose Salesman (1985), ranks as a writer of European stature.
In the Russia of the Silver Age Mikhail Kuzmin produced Wings (1906), a delicately etched portrait of a young man's gradual self-understanding. The great Dutch novelist Louis-Couperus, wrote two relevant historical novels, De Berg van Licht (1905), on the Emperor Heliogabalus, and De komedianten (1917). His contem­porary Jacob Israel de Haan wrote the realistic Pijpelijntjes (1904), commenting on the homosexual scene of the day. After World War n, Gerard Reve repeatedly scandalized theDutch public with his frank novels, featuring sardonic wit and a mix­ture of gay liberation and Catholicism. The Dane Herman Bang's Mikael [ 1904) is a sensitive portrait of artistic circles that a decade later was made into the first gay film. Pre-Meiji Japan had an extensive tradition of gay samurai stories, as exem­plified by the prolific Saikaku Ihara. After World War II, the spectacular Mishima Yukio produced two sardonic portraits of Japanese gay Ufe: Confessions of a Mask and Forbidden Colors.
An early standard bearer in Latin America was Brazilian Adolfo Caminha's Bom Crioulo (1895), concerning the tragic love of a black sailor for a white cabin boy. Since World War II the emergence of a vibrant gay scene in Brazil has nourished a number of fiction writers, including Gasparino Damata, Caio Fernando Abreu, Aguinaldo Silva, Edilberto Coutinho, and Darcy Penteado. Several little known Spanish-speaking writers treated same-sex themes, including Enrique Gómez-Carrilio and Rafael Arévalo Martínez (both Guate­mala), Augusto D'Halmar (Chile), and Porfirio Barba-Jacob (Colombia). Since its publication in Havana in 1966, José Lezama Lima's Paradiso has been recognized as a Proustian masterpiece and translated into many languages. The Argentinian Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, about two men in a jail cell, has been turned into a notable film. In Spain the openly gay Juan Goytisolo has established himself as a major writer.
French-speaking Canada has pro­duced a number of distinguished gay and lesbian writers {see Quebec). In 1986 Scott Symons, bom in Toronto, published Hel­met of Flesh, offering a vision of culture shock in Morocco that mingles reality and fantasy. Australia's Patrick White, author of The Twybum Affair {1980), received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1973.
Wayne R. Dynes
The Gay American Novel. Homo­sexuality as an explicit subject appears relatively late in American fiction, though much has been made of homoerotic themes which critics have found in works by Herman Melville (Billy Budd and Moby-Dick), James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), and Henry James. Not until the 1899 publication of Alfred J. Cohen's A Marriage Below Zero was explicit homosexuality the central theme of an American novel. Cohen, concerned that a lack of information about homosexuality was leading young women into marriages with homosexuals, also established the tradition of ending the major homosexual character's life with suicide.
In 1908 Edward I. Prime-Steven­son ("Xavier Mayne") published the first positive picture of homosexuality, Imre: a Memorandum. Also a distinguished scholar of the field, Prime-Stevenson be-lieved homosexuality congenital but found justification in achievements by many homosexuals in history. After much hid­ing and self-doubt, his lovers find true and lasting bliss, but probably only a few people read this privately printed book. Before 1920, Henry Blake Fuller's Bertram Cope's Year (published in 1919) is the only other example of an American novel with ex­plicit homosexuality as a theme.
The 1920s showed little further development, but in 1931 Blair Niles wrote Strange Brother, attempting to be compre­hensive and sympathetic, she achieved a result that is mainly of use in understand­ing contemporary ideas and for a glimpse of the homosexual subculture in New York. Two other novels of the thirties, Butterfly Man and TwiHght Men, offer a less clinical picture of gay Ufestyles, but in both sui­cide is still the fate of the protagonists. The anonymous "underground" novel Scazlet Pansy satirized many of the prevalent negative views of homosexuality, but also ends with the death of the hero.
Two exceptions to the generally bleak picture of homosexuality in this decade are the sentimental Better Angel by "Richard Meeker" (Forman Brown) and the campy bohemian novel The Young and Evil by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. While around a dozen novels treated homosexuality as a major theme between the wars, none of them was written by a major novelist.
In the years immediately follow­ing World War n (1946-50), the dam of silence was clearly collapsing, with nu­merous works, some by renowned writers, making an impact on the American mar­ket. First-hand information about the sexual habits of males in an all-male envi­ronment seems to have influenced many of the authors, and about half the novels deal with war or military experiences. James Jones, often acclaimed as the lead­ing American war novelist, described homosexuality in the peacetime army in From Here to Eternity (1951); eleven years later Jones gave a sympathetic account of "situational homosexuality" in the com­bat zone in The Thin Red Line.
The most famous novel of this period (and probably the first novel with homosexuality as a major theme to reach general circulation) was Gore Vidal's 1948 The City and the Pillar. The author's later outspoken positive ideas on homosexual­ity are barely visible in this early work; none of the gay characters is able to find lasting love or emotional fulfillment, but at least suicide is avoided. Other major writers employing homosexual characters or themes include Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, John Horn Burns, and Vance Bourjailly. The first novels to discuss homosexual problems as a result of intol­erance appear at this time and include Richard Brooks' The Brick Foxhole and Ward Thomas' remarkable Stranger in the Land (1949), in which homophobia is com­pared to racism and anti-Semitism. Pseudo-Freudian views can be seen in Isabel Bolton's The Christmas Tree and Michael DeForrest's The Gay Year. James Barr's 1950 Quatrefoil has remained popular in the gay subculture as an idealized picture of a gay relationship, though its depiction of homosexuality is less positive than appears at first glance. None of these works seems very enlightened by the standards of two or three decades later, but they repre­sented a great advance in tolerance at the time.
In the fifties, with its political conservatism (Senator Joseph McCarthy was Unking homosexuality with Commu­nism) and high regard for Freudian con­cepts, fiction about homosexuality is less salient and less positive. The subject is exploited as titiliation in Meyer Levin's Compulsion and AllenDrury's Advise and Consent. Only James Baldwin in Giovanni's Room and Christopher Isherwood (a British expatriate) made homo­sexuality a main theme.
The dominant psychiatric view of homosexuality as an iliness led to a prevalence of novels ending in suicide or death such as Fritz Peter's Finistère, Oakley Hall's The Corpus of Joe Bailey, and the Baldwin work. The best example of this tendency can be found in Jean Evans' Three Men, which was used in psychology classes in some universities. So dominant were these views that only Isherwood, Vidal, and counterculture writers such as Paul Goodman and William Burroughs were able to avoid them. Burroughs, a member of the beat writers group, wrote a series of phantasmagoric novels which included nearly pornographic descriptions of male homosexuality. His best-known work, Naked Lunch (1959), was the subject of obscenity trials in the early 1960s.
The social changes which swept through the American landscape in the sixties brought about a major Liberalization and extension of treatments of homo­sexuality in fiction. Early in the decade, Isherwood wrote Down There on a Visit and A Single Man, both treating homo­sexuality as an ordinary alternative life­style. Baldwin's Another Country (1962) was more positive than his work from the fifties. John Rechy's City of Night (1963) carried much of the old negative baggage, but it presented an honest and insightful look into the seamier side of gay life, with its theme of male prostitution. By 1968, Vidal's Myra Breckinridge showed a radi­cal view of acceptance, while many minor novels served to convey the varied sociol­ogy of gay life.
When the fiction of the seventies caught up with the gay liberation move­ment, major works for a general reading public such as Patricia Nell Warren's 1974 book, The Front Runner, and Laura Z. Hobson's Consenting Adult began to re­flect a view that equated homosexual with heterosexual behavior and depicted prob­lems as owing to social intolerance. By the end of the decade, homosexual themes appeared in such genres as mystery, hu­mor, and science fiction, while styles var­ied from the elegant symbolism of Edmund White to explicit realism and literary quality ranged from the highly literate to gross pornography. By 1978, two novels which expressed negative views, Larry Kramer's Faggots and Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance, were coming under fire from many gay leaders for ideological deficiencies.
With the 1980s, bookstores cater­ing to a gay market proliferated and with them novels with major homosexual themes. Following the lead of Joseph Hansen with his David Brandsetter mys­tery series, several authors began series of novels with gay detectives. Felice Picaño, Paul Monette and others produced novels set in the gay community or with major gay characters. Charles Nelson made homosexuality a major theme in his Viet­nam novel The Boy Who Picked the Bul­lets Up. Christopher Bram, Robert Ferro, and David Leavitt were among the authors who attracted attention for the Uterary quality of their work.
Most of the newer authors depict a homosexual orientation as unproblematic in itself. In general, however, the "gay" fiction of the eighties has become as di­verse as the subculture and behavior it describes, making it impossible to gener­alize in the manner in which works of earlier decades were treated. In many ways it is melting into the general body of American fiction.
James B. Levin
The American Lesbian Novel. In the first few decades of the twentieth century the archetypal figure was the expatriate Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris with her lover Alice B. Toklas. Stein's prose was too experimental and formalistic for most to make out much lesbian content, but she remained a formidable symbolic figure. Her contemporary Pari­sian-by-adoption, Natalie Barney, wrote in French. More directly related to the "lost generation" was Djuna Barnes who, however, returned to live in New York City; her major works were Ladies'Alma­nac (1928) and the darkly claustrophobic Nightwood (1936). The latter work knits together the story of five troubled charac­ters, told from the perspective of a transvestite doctor.
The Great Depression caused a reaction against twenties preocupations, which were seen as frivolous and deca­dent. Nonetheless, Gale Wilhelm pub-lished two novels in this period that ad­dress the dilemma of lesbian women: Torchhght to Valhalla (1935) and We Too Are Drifting (1938). In the first the heroine resigns herself to separation from her be­loved, but in the second two women are united - an unusual ending for a novel of the period.
After World War II the spread of mass-market paperbacks led to a consider­able production of lesbian pulps - some of them "lesbian trash," that is potboilers aimed at the prurient interests of straight male readers. This period nonetheless saw the start of the building of a lesbian audi­ence which sought out the somewhat melodramatic novels of Ann Bannon and Paula Christian. A little later new stan­dards of quality were set by May Sarton (Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Sing­ing, 1965; A Reckoning, 1978) and Jane Rule \Desert of the Heart, 1964; Contract with the World, 1980). Sarton linked lesbi­anism with creativity and artistic inspira­tion, though her Mrs. Stevens seems to have found more fulfillment with men. With rare veracity, Rule's work portrays lesbian and gay male characters interact­ing with heterosexual friends. A widely read historical novel, set in early nine­teenth-century America, is Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah (1972; originally pub­lished in 1969 as A Place for Us).
Resolute lesbian feminism made a splash in Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973). This book's preachy ear­nestness is relieved by its occasional humor, tenderness, and heartfelt anger, and it has rightly become a landmark in the field. Brown subsequently became a "cross-over" writer, gaining mainstream attention and commissions for Hollywood film scripts, but at the cost of some loss of verve. Ann Shockley pioneered in writing about the black lesbian experience, and others wrote from chicana, American Indian, and Asian points of view. Alice Walker's mainstream The Color Purple (1982) contrasts love between two poor southern black women with the brutality of relations with men, while Maureen Brady's less well known Folly of the same year deals with both black and white working-class women in a Carolina mill town. In several fast-paced novels that break new ground, Sarah Schulman has explored aspects of violence and emotion in lesbian life in the inner city.
Evelyn Gettone
The Gay/Lesbian Novel as His­tory. Attempts to trace out a history of homosexual behavior are seriously handi­capped both by a lack of empirically valid research from earlier periods and by the taboos on the subject which have led to enormous gaps in documentation. Given such uneven, often threadbare materials to work with, historians can only rejoice in the glimpses which fiction gives us of the texture and ideational context of homosexuality in days long gone by. The efforts of novelists have bequeathed us pictures of homosexualities which no amount of culling of archival records, law cases, and polemical works can equal. They open a window to local variations and to the various mores of homosexuality in such diverse and otherwise undocumented worlds as ancient Rome and medieval Ja­pan, Renaissance Venice and Fascist Italy, 1930s Berlin and turn-of-the-century Amsterdam. They portray the homosexu­ality of soldiers and junkies, street hus­tlers and pederasts, black women and prisoners, wooden-ship sailors and mili­tary-academy schoolboys. They shed light on the subjective as well as objective reali­ties faced by homosexuals of many times and cultures in ways that no social scien­tist can hope to match.
Conclusion. The great variety of novels and short fiction that treat male homosexuality and lesbianism gives the impression of almost limitless horizons. Yet reflection suggests that the achieve­ment of this body of work depends upon a complex network of publishers, editors, critics, and bookstores. In the past this network often operated to shift narratives into a negative key as authors scrambled to "play the game" by satisfying the chang­ing demands of the gatekeepers of the book world. Today such publishers as Alyson, Gay Sunshine Press, and Naiad Press in the United States, Gay Men's Press (GMP) in England, Persona in France, and Rosa Winkel Verlagin Germany assure an alter­native to mainstream publishing houses. The many gay and lesbian periodicals providereviews, and specialized bookstores make the fiction available. Although such specialization has often been decried, this infrastructure assures that gay and lesbian creativity will not be constricted by hos­tile or indifferent outsiders.
Stephen Donaldson
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Roger Austen, Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977; Jeannette H. Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature, 3d ed., Tallahas­see: Naiad Press, 1985; Francesco Gnerre, L'eroe negato, Milan: Gammalibri, 1981; Barbara Grier, The Lesbian in Literature, Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1981; James Levin, The Gay Novel, New York: Irvington Press, 1983; Jane Rule, Lesbian Images, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975; Ian Young, The Male Homosexual in Literature, 2nd éd., Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1982.

Nude in Art, The
As an art form the monumental nude was perfected by the Greeks in the fifth century b.c. It was, and remains, one of the major vehicles for the realization of the concept of beauty in art. Commonly the nude is automatically equated with the female nude, despite the relatively recent origin of this predominance.
Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The beginning of the sixth century b.c. saw the realization of the Dorian concept of the nude youth in the kouros type. Only later, toward the middle of the century, did the female counterpart, the kore, appear. Developing in the Ionic sphere, the kore is finer, lighter, and - clothed. The male statues, conveniently termed Apollos, are the primordial expres­sion of the young male body, forming an essential component of the art of ancient Greece from the Archaic period until the end. Stemming from a society in which young men regularly exercised naked, in the gymnasium and at athletic competi­tions, they incarnate the most cherished ideals of the Greeks. The flowering of the male nude in Greek art (sixth-fifth century b.c.) was situated during the period in which the pédérastie institution was at its height. Moreover, the depiction of homo­sexual relations in Greek vases occurred mainly between 570 and 470 b.c., consti­tuting, together with statuary, the fullest repertoire of nudes surviving from classi­cal antiquity.
A radical break took place in the Hellenistic period, in which large monar­chies replaced the earlier city-states. Formed in association with the city-state tradition of citizen participation, the clas­sic ethos of earlier times became increas­ingly less satisfying and less relevant for the average Greek. Women demanded more personal freedom, while at the same time seeking to bind men to their family duties. New phenomena, including the growing Stoic flight from the world, a contrasting Epicurean quest for creature comforts, sophisticated cosmopolitanism, and the rising mystery cults, made their appear­ance. In this atmosphere, it is not surpris­ing that pederasty lost its sociocultural centrality, becoming more and more a matter of personal preference. In the fourth century b.c. themes of female beauty and heterosexual love made their way into poetry. The appearance and increasing popularity of the nude Aphrodite symbol­ized the considerable social and psycho­logical changes. Sculptors sought to en­dow their figures with human passions: joy, sorrow, anger, despair. The develop­ment of the male nude shows a tendency to polarization, so that the figures are either too virile or too effeminate.
In the Middle Ages the male nude underwent a kind of etherealization. The Crucified Christ is a symbol of suffering, passion, abnegation, and death. The con­trast with classical antiquity could scarcely be greater.
The Renaissance Tradition. The Renaissance rediscovery of the ideas and values of antiquity created an inexhaust­ible source for artistic creation. The male nude body claimed a central place and, especially in fifteenth-century Florence, reclaimed its status as an aesthetic object; in this climate outstanding figures were created, studied, and judged. Several fac­tors contributed to this development. First is the relation between the male body and architecture, which goes back to the Greeks. They were the first to develop post-and-lintel architecture based on the archetype of the male body. The vision of the male body as an architectural form depended on a system of proportion. The male body, with its clear relationships among the various component parts, can itself be viewed as a kind of post-and-lintel architecture. The nude David, as seen in works by Donatello and Michelangelo, was popular for another reason. Thanks in large measure to the advocacy of Ficino, ideas of Platonic love came to be cherished in Florentine artistic and intellectual circles during the late fifteenth century. Even Greek love enjoyed a certain popular­ity among the elite. The mitigation of legal prosecutions for sodomy was for a time an enabling factor.
During the following century the female nude gradually came to predomi­nate. The first artists to give the female nude pride of place in their work were the early sixteenth-century Venetian paint­ers. These artists preferred a recumbent Venus - simultaneously vulnerable and inaccessible - to a standing David. The nude female body was easily assimilated to the soft contours and valleys of a ver­dant landscape, where each part readily flows into another. At this same time, Venice pioneered in launching the tradi­tion of the independent landscape, one that is not simply a foil for the figures. Moreover, courtesans, who were impor­tant in the social and economic life of the Adriatic city, probably played an ancillary role: theVenusesmayberegarded as ideal­ized versions of them. Three underlying factors contributed to the success of the female nude in Venetian painting. First, nudes symbolized the city's independence from the church. In comparison with neigh­boring lands, the Venetian republic was openly refractory with regard to the power of the church. Significantly, this type of erotic painting flourished also in conjunc­tion with a similar spirit of independence of kings and princes with regard to the church. North Of the Alps, Lucas Cranach in Germany and the School of Fontaine­bleau in France depicted female nudes in this political context. Secondly, for the elite these female nudes symbolized privi­leges not shared with the common people. Finally, the female nude was popular be­cause their male counterparts had come to be regarded as suspect. The artistic presen­tation of suspect sexual preferences was something that even the most powerful rulers could not countenance, certainly not after the onset of the rigorism of the Reformation and Counterref ormation. For reasons of state Venice had its own intol­erance of deviant sexuality; the earliest mass campaign against sodomy is docu­mented in the archives of the Adriatic city. These factors help to explain an epochal development: the identification of the female nude with the erotic itself. This predominance even allowed occasional presentation of scenes of female-female eroticism, as in the scenes of Diana at the bath - but only at the behest of male pa­trons.
Baioque, Rococo, and Neo-Classicism.lxi seventeenth-century art the male nude retained a major role in the form of models for the training of artists in the academies. Male models were more read­ily obtainable than female ones. In compo­sitions intended for sale, however, the female nude gradually became universal as a symbol of freedom and pleasure (eroti­cism and sensuality). The art market, which had attained maturity in this pe­riod, seized every opportunity to promote genres: still life, landscape, portraiture, the nude. In this context the female nude became ever more common throughout western Europe.
The rococo was a style that was particularly susceptible to erotic fascina­tion with the female body. The very crea­tion of the rococo has been hailed as a female achievement: women painted, purchased, and collected more than ever before, as earlier in the Hellenistic period women had gained more importance in society. Toward the end of the eighteenth century there occurred a break in costume history, which J. C. Flügel characterized as the "Great Masculine Renunciation"; this change entailed a drastic reduction of decorative exuberance in male attire. The male abandoned all claims to beauty in exchange for a clothing code of "sobriety." The wish to be seen was transformed into a wish to see. Exhibitionism became a female privilege.
Nonetheless, there were some attempts to rehabilitate the male nude. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the homo­sexual archeologist who was also an influ­ential herald of Neo-classicism, cultivated his personal preference for the male body, making it the hallmark of a whole artistic movement - though the male nude had lost its earlier symbolic value. An effort was made to give it a new significance, resulting in nude statues of such figures as Voltaire and Napoleon, but with little success. After 1800 the nude portrait statue became an academic cliché. Nineteenth-century artists drew the male nude during their studies, but mostly chose the female nude as the major subject of their mature work. Painters such as Hans von Marees who emphasized the male nude were ex­ceptional.
Toward the Present. In the twen­tieth century both the rise of abstract art and of photography tended to discourage a revival of the male nude. Through their tacit voyeurism, photographic nudes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries usurped the erotic function that had previ­ously been reserved to the fine arts. One exception was the erotic work of the American painter Charles Demuth, which included all-male nude bathhouse and beach scenes.
Outside the realm of art, other trends, such as dress reform, nudist colo­nies, body building, and sun bathing, con­tributed to a renewed appreciation of the beauty of the human body. The Nazi ideal­ization of beautiful, healthy, and "pure" bodies fit with the claim that classic Greek beauty reached its full perfection in the Nordic race. Earlier, some of the first pho­tographs of the male nude, such as those of Wilhelm von Gloeden, had appeared in the budding homosexual press of Germany. A highly ambiguous relationship existed between the Nazi male ideal and homo­sexuality.
Pop art of the 1950s and the counterculture of the sixties renewed in­terest in the nude male body. But the male body returned as a focus of artistic interest only in the 1970s, stimulated in part by the international homosexual movement. Also, feminism and the ever more numer­ous women artists became a major factor. Especially in photography the male nude served as a fount of inspiration. Yet even in the twentieth century the male nude caused uneasiness. The guardians of pub­lic morality regard the penis, however artfully it is presented, as more threaten­ing than the vagina. And frontal male nudes are less acceptable than female ones.
The interest of lesbian artists in the female body is as yet insufficiently demonstrated. If they wish to give expres­sion to their own sexuality, lesbians must first secure the necessary financial and social means. After the end of World War II women became somewhat more com­fortable with investigating their own sexu­ality and giving it artistic value. Leonor Fini's surrealism underlines the way fe­male desire tends not to be as passionate and outspoken as male lust. Lesbian art­ists who do not simply use their sexual nature as a source of inspiration, but employ it as a central focus of their work, remained the exception in the early eight­ies. Images of nude women could be inter­preted by men - and by feminists as well - as soft-core pornography specially produced to give pleasure to the consumers.
In general the domination of the female nude began in the sixteenth cen­tury as part of a "sexualization" of the nude as an object of enjoyment. The fe­male nude in the art of the last four centu­ries was viable precisely because it was an icon of male desire. With male nudes the matter is different: those that are erotic (though not openly so) seem to have flour­ished in periods that may be regarded as homosocial - classical Greece, early Ren­aissance Florence - or under the umbrella of trends that had a definite homoerotic aspect - Winckelmann's circle, early twen­tieth-century homosexual emancipation, and elements of the German right that overlapped with National Socialism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, New York: Pantheon, 1956, Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuahty and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986; Edward Lucie-Smith, The Male Nude: A Modern View, Oxford: Phaidon, 1985; David Martocci, The Male Nude, Williamstown, MA: McClelland, 1980; Margaret Walters, The Nude Male: A New Perspective, London: Penguin, 1978.
Daniel Christiaens