T
Tacitus (born ca. a.d. 55-56)
Roman historian and
ethnographer. Tacitus had a public career which ended in service as proconsul
in Asia circa 112-113, but even earlier he had begun to compose the works on
which his later fame rests.
The Geimania was published in all likelihood in 98, but contains
material from sources of earlier decades; it is the most extensive source that
has survived from classical antiquity on the customs and beliefs of the Germanic
barbarians who lived east of the Roman province of Gaul. The text that is most
often quoted as evidence for the attitude of the pagan Germanic tribes toward
homosexuality is in the twelfth chapter: "Penalties are proportional to
the gravity of the offense,-traitors and deserters they hang on a tree, the
slothful and cowardly and sexually infamous [ignavos
et imbelles et coipoie infames) they drown in mud and swamps with a wicker basket placed over their
heads." This passage has been interpreted as expressing an intolerance of
homosexual behavior that preceded any contact with the Christianity of the
Mediterranean world, but in fact the three Latin words express a single
Germanic one, corresponding to Old Norse argr,
which is a designation for
the male who is in general passive, cowardly, and effeminate; the penalty
named is for cowardice and lack of manliness on the battlefield, not for sexual
activity per se. However, right-wing circles in twentieth-century Germany
conceived on the basis of this text the notion that their pagan ancestors punished
homosexuals by drowning them.
The Histories and the Annals are Tacitus' great contribution to Roman history. Composed
in an exceedingly refined and concise style, they are informed by the ideology
of the Senatorial aristocracy and its resentment of the power of the imperial
regime that had supplanted the Roman republic. These works include occasional
references to homosexual matters, such as that under Tiberius men were
forbidden to wear thin silk clothing of the sort in which handsome slave boys
were appareled {Annals, 2:33). He mentions that Nero had sexual connections with
his stepbrother Britannicus - whom he poisoned shortly after coming to power - [Annals,
13:17), with the actor
Paris, and with boys of free birth, thus using freemen for his own gratification
as if they were slaves. Tacitus also describes Nero's "marriage" with
a male favorite whose name is given as Pythagoras or Sporus, and says that he
went in disguise to participate in lewd revels in the city of Rome, accompanied
by other men who robbed and assaulted those who crossed their path (Annals,
13:25). Another story [Annals, 14:42) tells how Pedanius Secundus, the prefect of Rome,
was murdered by one of his slaves, either because he had been refused the
liberty that he had purchased or because he was in love with a youth and could
not bear to be supplanted by his master. When all the slaves living under the
same roof were to be executed as retribution, a mass meeting called to protest
this excessive penalty turned into a riot. This incident, like others, shows
that homosexual attachments in no way diminished the esteem which even a slave
could enjoy in antiquity. Tacitus also recounts [Annals,
16:18) the life and death
of Nero's favorite Petronius, the probable author of the Satyricon
which, even preserved as
it is in a fragmentary form, still affords a panorama of the sexual life of
first-century Rome. Thus while Tacitus does not describe the homosexuality of
that period in as much detail as do Suetonius and Martial, his work is a
valuable supplement to other contemporary portrayals of Roman eroticism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Otto Kiefer,
Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934; Ronald H. Martin,
Tacitus, London: Batsford, 1981.
Warren Johansson
Talmud
A collection of 67
treatises, the Talmud interprets and elaborates the commandments of the Torah
and the narratives of the Old Testament; the legal portion is known ashalakhah,
the folklore is called agadah.
There are two redactions
of the Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud. Both have as
their core the Mishnah, the decisions of the sages of the preceding three
centuries that was edited, by Rabbi Judah the Prince in 193. Written in late Hebrew,
it served as the basis for subsequent teaching and interpretation that lasted
from the first half of the third century to the year 499. These secondary
deliberations, not in the Mishnah and assembled in the Gemara, were mainly
conducted in Aramaic, the spoken language of the Jews of Palestine and
Babylonia (each with its own dialect). The final process of redaction probably
began before the end of the fifth century and lasted into the seventh. The editio
princeps of
the Babylonian Talmud is that of Venice: Daniel Bömberg, 1520-23, the numbering
of whose folios is the basis for later citation; the standard modem edition is
that of Vilnius: Romm, 1922, with the classic commentary in Rabbinic Hebrew of
Solomon benlsaac of Troy es (1040-1105) and numerous minor glosses.
The largest part of the material relative to homosexuality in the Talmud is in
the treatise Sanhedrin, which deals with the capital crimes adjudicated by the
Beth Din, the high court of the Jewish religious community. In Sanhedrin 53a it
is stated that death by stoning is the penalty for two groups of offenses, the
first of which constitute violations of the patria
potestas -
the authority of the head of the patriachal extended family - the second the
propagation or practice of idolatry or magic:
incest with mother |
blasphemy |
father's sexual |
idolatry |
intercourse with |
|
daughter in law |
|
intercourse with |
giving one's |
another male or |
seed to |
with a beast |
Molech |
cursing one's father |
necromancy or |
or mother |
divination |
adultery with a |
incitement to |
betrothed maiden |
idolatry |
a wayward and |
sorcery |
rebellious son |
|
In Sanhedrin
54a-55a the Gemara elaborates this prescription as follows: In Leviticus 20:13
"if a man also he with mankind" means "a man" not a minor,
"mankind" both adult and minor; "their blood shall be upon
them" is by analogy with Leviticus 20:27 (the penalty for one who
"hath a familar spirit" or "is a wizard" is interpreted to
ordain death by stoning). Leviticus 18:22 is taken to apply to the active
partner, Deuteronomy 23:18 to the passive, proving that the kadesh mentioned
in the latter verse was the sacred prostitute who served the male worshipper
in the Ishtar-Tammuz cult; but Rabbi Akiba derived both prohibitions from the
former by reading the consonantal text as both tishkabh,
"thou shalt lie"
and tishshakebh, "thou shalt be lain with." Legal responsibility
commenced at the age of nine years and a day, which was also the lower limit for
the emancipation of the child from the patria
potestas in
sexual matters in later Islamic law.
In Niddah 13b, the tractate that deals with
menstrual impurity in women, there is the curious statement that "those
who play with children delay the coming of the Messiah." While the
assertion is not interpreted solely to refer to pederasty, the underlying
notion is that the Messiah will not come until all the unborn souls contained
in Guph (literally "body") have been disposed of. This is the
probable source of the thirteenth-century Christian accretion to the account
of the Nativity which maintained that because of the "crime against
nature" the Son of Man repeatedly postponed his incarnation, and even
thought of abandoning the project altogether.
Sanhedrin 70a interprets the passage in Genesis 9:22 "And Ham... saw the
nakedness of his father" as meaning that Ham sodomized Noah, while the
alternative explanation is that he castrated him. The allusion is to the legal
language of Leviticus 18:7 "The nakedness of thy father . . . thou shalt
not uncover," which prohibited homosexual incest with the male parent, an
indirect proof that the generalized taboo of Leviticus 18:22 is a later
insertion into the Holiness Code.
On the subject of Sodom, Sanhedrin 109a-b relates that the "men of Sodom
were wicked and sinners" [Genesis 13:23), "wicked" meaning
"with their bodies" and "sinners" with their money, hence
both depraved and uncharitable. In their prosperity the Sodomites resolved to
abrogate the laws which protected the stranger and the traveler, and further inverted
the principles of justice so that if someone wounded his neighbor he was
ordered to pay the fee for bleeding; if someone crossed the river by ferry he
had to pay four zuzim,
if on foot he had to pay eight. A particular
tale of their inhospitality concerned a maiden who gave a poor man some bread
hidden in a pitcher. When the Sodomites discovered this, they smeared her body
with honey and exposed her on the city wall so that the bees would come and
devour her.
The decisions and pronouncements of the sages were later codified, first by
Musa ibn Maimun (Maimonides) in the thirteenth century in the Mishneh Torah, then
by Joseph Karo in the sixteenth in the ShuLhan Arukh. The
latter remains the fundamental code of morality and religious observance for
the Orthodox Jew to the present day, and authorizes the fierce opposition of
some Orthodox groups in large American cities to the enactment of gay rights
legislation. On this issue they can form alliances with conservative Catholics
and fundamentalist Protestants, even though they refuse, unlike the
Conservative and Reform wings of Judaism, to join the contemporary ecumenical
dialogue on public policy and social justice with the Christian denominations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Immanuel
Jacobovits, "Homosexuality," Encyclopedia fudaica, 8 (1971), 961-62; Barry Dov Schwartz, The Jewish Tradition and Homosexuality, New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1979 (unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation).
Warren
Johansson
Taste
Traditionally one of the five senses, taste
is used in an extended sense to denote critical judgment, discernment, or
appreciation. In this broader sense it has played a major role in the history
of aesthetics. In addition, sociologists hold that taste preferences
characterize specific social groups or classes.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a reign of "good taste."
While most agreed that this taste was formed through experience and cultivation,
it proved difficult to determine what its actual defining characteristics were.
For some, good taste was unitary and identifiable with classic norms,
including such qualities as balance, restraint, and ideal beauty; for others,
there were several tastes, each valid in its own sphere. In the latter
approach, one might acquire a taste for the sublime, the romantic, or the Gothic, as distinct from the
classic. During the later decades of the eighteenth century, the concept of
taste meshed with the novel idea of sensibility,
viewed as a matter of
subtle intuition, of attunement to a kind of unheard melody, rather than a
simple assimilation of rules. The notion that tastes are personal and variable
is sometimes summed up in the Latin proverb De
gustibus non disputandum est, "There is no arguing about tastes." If, in principle, a
plurality of tastes is generally recognized today, it is still possible to
speak of, say, a bawdy joke as being "in poor taste."
The idea that sexual interests are appetites probably lies at the root of the
concept of homosexuality as itself a taste, though the expression has also had
its appeal as a euphemism. In a passage in The
Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), Tobias Smollett spoke of Petronius'
(homosexual) "taste
in love." The notion is probably more common in French, where older
writers spoke of sodomy as le gout
contie nature, "the
unnatural taste." In his great novel A
la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust rang many changes on the word gout
with relation to
homosexuality. French also records an expression goiir florentin,
"Florentine
taste," for horn osexuality; technically, this is an ethnophaulism,
an ascription of a
disprized behavior to a foreign group.
A different topic is that of homosexuals as tastemakers. As far as can be
determined, this role emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The presiding genius of this period was the archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann
(1717-1768), whose
interpretations of Greek art (which was filtered through his homoerotic
appreciation of male beauty) had a formative influence on the course of
neo-Classicism in the visual arts throughout Europe. His efforts were reinforced
by a noble gadfly, Count Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764), a close friend of Frederick
the Great of
Prussia. It is a curious fact that the rise of the opposing current of
romanticism was also promoted by homosexuals, especially the poet Thomas Gray
(1716-1771), whose 1751 ElegyWritten
in a Country Churchyard is a major harbinger of the new sensibility, and Horace Walpole
(1717-1797), whose villa at Strawberry Hill near London counts as one of the
first monuments of the Gothic revival.
The bisexual poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), had an incalculable
influence over romanticism throughout Europe. None of the romantic critics,
with the possible exception of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), seem to
have been homosexual. In a lesser realm, Edward Lear (1812-1888), with his
limericks and other nonsense writings, helped to define the characteristically
English genre of humor. On the continent French artists and writers, such as Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), took an
interest in Islam, its art and culture, noting that sexual norms in Arab
countries [moeurs árabes,
moeurs levantines) differed from those of the Christian Occident.
Through his Russian
Ballet, Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) not only changed attitudes about dance
but, through his patronage, was able to promote avant-garde music and painting
as well. Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946), a friend of Picasso and Matisse, played
a major role in the introduction of modern art into the United States. The New
York poet Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) was one of the chief advocates and definers
of Abstract Expressionist painting. On a less exalted level of cultural
achievement many modern couturiers, whose sensibilities determine the changing
tides of women's fashions, are homosexual. The prominence of gay people in the
fashion industry has led hostile observers (such as the late Edmund Bergler, a
Freudian psychoanalyst) to denounce their influence as perverse and
conspiratorial.
In conclusion it is perhaps appropriate to advance some speculative suggestions
as to why homosexuals, in some periods at least, have felt a special calling as
tastemakers. Participation in a different (but justifiable) mode of sexuality
may sensitize one to different (also justifiable) artistic modes. Then the well
known affinity of homosexuals for travel, and for partners of other races,
allows them to immerse themselves in the aesthetic theory and practice of
"exotic" peoples, and then to return with these discoveries to their
own lands. Finally, the stereotypical ascription of aesthetic sensitivity to
male homosexuals may operate - as stereotypes generally do - to lure some
members of the affected group into the general field. From the host society
they have absorbed the idea that they must be "sensitive," and some
are impelled to achieve this quality.
Wayne R. Dynes
Tchaikovsky, Peter Il'yich (1840-1893)
The greatest Russian
composer of the nineteenth century. Imbued with Western techniques and
attitudes at the conservatory, his artistic personality remained profoundly
Russian both in his use of folksong and in his absorption in Russian ways of
life and thought. His genius for what he called "the lyrical idea,"
the beautiful, self-contained melody, gives his music permanent appeal, a
hard-won but secure and professional technique and his ability to use it for
emotional expression enabled him to realize his potential more fully than did
any of his Russian contemporaries.
The son of a mining engineer, he began taking piano lessons at the age of five
and quickly evinced a striking talent. In 1840 he was enrolled at the School of
Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, where the homosexual practices common in the
institution may have served to bring out or to confirm his own tendencies.
After several years as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice, he resigned in 1863
to become a full-time student at the Conservatory and thereafter devoted
himself to a musical career. He had a brief attachment to a woman named Desirée Artot, but their wish to marry was opposed by family and friends, and
Tchaikovsky had no further direct emotional involvement with any woman until,
in 1877, he received a written declaration of love from Antonina Miliukova,
whom he married on July 18. Inspired by self-loathing and a desperate effort to
escape from his homosexuality, the marriage was - in the euphemistic language
of the Victorian era - a complete failure. The composer fled his bride and even
attempted suicide, after which he suffered a complete nervous collapse. A
medical specialist advised him never to see his wife again. On the other hand,
he maintained a correspondence over some 14 years with the wealthy widow
Nadezhda von Meek, never meeting her in person so that each for the other could
remain a figure of fantasy.
His work has no specifically homosexual themes, the love affairs in his
compositions are all heterosexual, as befitted works intended for performance
in the Russia of the nineteenth century, especially the repressive regime of
Alexander HI under which the last years of his life were played out. His Sixth
Symphony, the Symphonie Pathétique,
written in 1893, was
dedicated to Bob Davydov, and was the expression of his love, the fullest
outpouring of the emotions he had felt during a lifetime. In the Soviet Union,
where the composer's musical achievement is deeply revered as a national heritage,
a complete veil has been drawn across his homosexuality in historical,
critical, and cinematic accounts. In the West, however, his orientation is
generally acknowledged. Thus the German homosexual writer Klaus Mann devoted
to Tchaikovsky a novel that treats the erotic side of his character, Symphonie
Pathétique (1935).
The circumstances of his death have been disputed. In 1978 a Soviet scholar,
Aleksandra Orlova, revealed a narrative dictated to her in 1966 by the school
of Aristotle (the Lyceum) or philosophical sects based on his teaching, each
object had an end or purpose at which naturally it should aim. Nature designed
the sexual organs, they maintained, for procreation upon which the future of
the race depended. To direct the penis to other orifices than the human vagina,
its predestined container, was to act against nature.
Another strand derives from Plato. Although Aristotle recognized that some
individuals were homosexual "by nature," that is congenitally, while
others acquired that sexual orientation through experience and practice, on the
whole his numerous and often contradictory writings argued that homosexuality
was something to be explained, and therefore not clearly a part of the given,
of the world of nature in the ordinary sense. In the work of Plato, however,
the concept of nature was more clearly evaluative. In the Laws,
his last dialogue, the old
Plato - whose earlier dialogues had praised pederasty as inciting love of truth
and beauty - condemned homosexual acts as against nature.
While a minority of Greeks observed homosexual behavior among animals, those
who denied it there argued that its absence was proof that such conduct was at
best artificial, rather than natural. Although some argued that what made man
superior to animals was exactly his improvement over nature, the majority of
later Greek thinkers felt that it was best to act in accord with nature. This
doctrine typified the Stoics, who dominated ancient philosophy during the late
Republic and the first two centuries of the Roman Empire. Most but not all
teachers of the "Second Stoa," centered in Rome and catering to old
Roman disapproval of pederasty as a Greek import, decried homosexuality as
against nature: Seneca, Musonius Rufus, and Epictetus.
Judeo-Christian Attitudes. Philo Judaeus of Alexandria combined the Greek doctrine
that homosexuality was unnatural with the peremptory injunction pre
aged Aleksandr Voitov of the Russian Museum in Leningrad. According to this
source, a member of the Russian aristocracy had written a letter accusing
Tchaikovsky of a homosexual liaison with his nephew, entrusting it to Nikolai
Jakobi, a high-ranking civil servant, for transmission to the Tsar. Jakobi,
also a former pupil of the School of Jurisprudence, feared the disgrace which
the scandal would bring on the institution and hastily summoned a court of
honor that included six of Tchaikovsky's contemporaries from the school. On
October 31, 1893, after more than five hours of deliberation, the court
supposedly resolved that the composer should kill himself. The arguments
against this story are considerable. Homosexuality was too extensively
tolerated among the upper classes in Russia at that period for the matter to
have had such serious import. Moreover, the intervals of freedom from censorship
that followed the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 gave sufficient opportunity for
the publication of the facts, had the tale been true. It is more likely that
Tchaikovsky died of cholera after accidentally drinking a glass of contaminated
water.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Nina
Berberova, Tchaikovski:
biogiaphie, Paris:
Editions Actes Sud, 1987.
Warren Johansson
Tearooms
See Toilets.
Teleology
Teleology (from Greek, telos
"end") is the
character attributed to nature or natural processes of being directed toward an
end or shaped by a purpose. As such, the concept has been deployed as a
criterion of the morality of sexual acts.
ClassicalThought. Teleology was a favorite concern of the Greeks. The pivotal
discussion is Aristotle's treatment of final cause, "that for the sake of
which a thing exists" {Degenerationeanimahum).
According to those
belonging to the served in Leviticus that Judaism had taken from
Zoroastrianism, the Persian state religion. St. Paul merely echoed this ban in
the first chapter of Romans, citing the Flood and the destruction of Sodom as
proof of divine disapproval of unnatural sexual conduct. William Benjamin Smith
(1850-1934) speculated that this Pauline passage, which makes no mention of
Christ or Christianity, is a self-contained essay on the revelation of God's
wrath taken from an anonymous Jewish source. St. Clement of Alexandria, an
assiduous student of Greek philosophy, held that "one must follow nature
herself when she forbade [pederastic] excesses through the disposition she gave
the organs, having given virility to man not to receive seed but to eject
it" [Paedagogus, X, 87, 3).
Constantius and Constans, the sons of the first Christian Roman emperor,
Constantine the Great, inscribed the condemnation in Roman law. In a tortuously
worded edict of 342, they first decreed death for homosexual offenses and
forbade sexual relations between man and wife in any fashion that did not involve
penetration of the vagina by the penis. Theodosius the Great resumed this
tradition, followed most horribly by Justinian, who proclaimed that sodomites
if unpunished brought famines, earthquakes, and pestilences on society.
Medieval and Modern Times. Medieval theologians continued and developed this
Patristic approach, which the Scholastics Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas
greatly strengthened in accord with the new reverence for Aristotle's
teleological system. Aquinas claimed that even rape was preferable to sodomy,
because it was, after all, a penis-to-vagina act. The revival of Roman law, as
interpreted by Christian jurisconsults in the twelfth century, stressed the
idea of nature. Curiously, it was the early Middle Ages, and not classical
antiquity, that elevated Nature to the status of a goddess, and her supposed
decrees were adduced in the condemnations of homosexuality of Alan of Lille and
Jean de Meun.
Even apart from the peremptory condemnation in the Mosaic law and the legend of
the destruction of Sodom deriving from Genesis 19, the ascetic motif in
Christian morality, which sets Christianity apart from the other Abrahamic
religions - Judaism and Islam - that have no such ideal of an asexual
humanity, would alone have sufficed to render all non-reproductive sexual
activity immoral. Dualistic and gnostic thought imbued Pauline Christianity with
an intense pathological rejection of the body and its erotic functions,
conditioned by the proximity of the sexual and the excretory organs that made
disgust an inescapable component of the Christian attitude toward sexuality and
especially toward homosexual activity. The fantasies of Scholastic writers in
Latin Christendom bear witness to this irrational hatred of homoerotic feeling
and behavior. A legal author of the fourteenth century, Luca da Penne (ca. 1320-ca. 1390), went so far as to call the sodomite worse than a
murderer, because he aimed at destroying not just a single human being but the
entire human race, and declared that if such a culprit had been executed and
could be brought back to life several times, each time he should be punished more
severely than the preceding one. Paradoxically enough, such views were
maintained alongside the glorification of virginity, which if it became
universal would effect the end of the human race just as surely as any form of
non-procreative sexuality. Other legal writers held that God could wreak
vengeance on an entire community for the crime of a single individual, so
branding the sodomite as an enemy of society to be blamed for every manner of
collective misfortune.
Modem Critiques of Teleology. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the
popularity of the "argument from design" as a proof of the existence
of God. Even deists like Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), himself possibly
homophile, argued that the perfect mechanism of the universe required a clockmaker
- a "prime mover" as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had supposed. The
things of the world manifest such order, so it was claimed, that they could
only have reached their present state through the purposeful guidance of a
creator who endowed each thing with its own specific character, which man
should not seek to alter. Hence the penis is suited only for placement in a
vagina, not in an anus or mouth. The argument oddly neglects the point that the
penis has a dual function: it serves to urinate (presumably not in the vagina)
as well as emit semen. If it can have two distinct types of emissions, why must
it have only one proper vessel? Conversely, if Cod had been opposed to putting
the penis in the mouth or anus, could he not have shaped these latter organs in
such a way as to make penetration difficult? Voltaire ridiculed the argument
from design because by it one could demonstrate that God had foreseen ships,
since he provided harbors for them, and eyeglasses, since he gave noses a
bridge.
Of course modern biologists recognize purpose in the world, in the limited
sense that birds build nests in which to hatch and raise their young and
spiders weave webs to trap insects. What they generally do not hold, however,
is that some cosmic mind has predetermined the purposes of all living things.
Even today, however, Aristotle's discarded model of a grand teleology ruling
nature inspires Roman Catholic and much other Christian doctrine. In spite of
all subsequent criticism and the repudiation by the physical and biological
sciences of the concept of "Nature" as a personified feminine
principle whose intentions are somehow frustrated by non-procreative sexual
activity, these religious thinkers persist in their antiquated views. Though
scarcely metaphysicians and unwilling to discuss how many angels could dance on
the head of a pin, Hitler and Stalin were as convinced as any Roman pope or
Southern Baptist that homosexuality is unnatural. The most recent
pronouncements of the Roman Catholic church still teach that homosexual acts
are "intrinsically disordered because they lack finality," which is
to say that they are immoral because they cannot lead to procreation - as if
any good would result if every sexual act did have procreative consequences.
The prospects for world population densities would be horrifying. In the
twentieth century the increasing longevity of the population and the need to
maintain the proper equilibrium with available resources has forced heterosexuals
to adopt birth control techniques ranging from periods of abstinence and the
use of the condom to abortion to keep the pro-creative consequences of their
own sexual activity within bounds. Yet even most of those branches of
Protestantism which do not completely reject birth control and other forms of
non-procreative sex (as the Catholics and Orthodox do), still tend to condemn
homosexuality as against the law of God and nature. It is incumbent on
thinkers not beholden to a revealed religion to expose such positions as
inconsistent, and above all to affirm that they embody no inherent logic
sufficient to compel a secular, pluralistic society to adopt them.
William A. Percy
Telephone
See Phone and Computer Sex.
Television
Although the technology on
which it is based came into existence as early as 1923, it was only in the early 1950s that television became
a fixture of American domestic life, gradually elbowing the Hollywood film out
of its primacy in the entertainment field. Establishing itself in Europe at the
same time, television eventually spread throughout the globe, even to the
poorest Third World countries. While in America most television stations are
commercially owned, in many countries the medium (like radio) is a government
monopoly. It is uncertain, however, whether the exigencies of censorship in
state systems are more restrictive than the "tyranny of the ratings"
in the United States. The spread of cable TV and increased use of satellite
transmissions in the 1970s reduced the stranglehold of the major networks. In a
few cities gay people were even able to secure their own programs, thanks to
public access legislation. In the 1980s the widespread use of VCRs [recording
equipment operating through television sets) further promoted diversity, and
users could, if they wished, rent a wide variety of porno films to be shown
through their home sets. The new field of video emerged as a means for minority
artists to create individualized works which could be shown on television
screens.
Gay Men and Lesbians in Television. From the beginning children formed a large portion of the
TV audience. Commercial advertisers were sensitive to campaigns by pressure
groups. These factors excluded sex of any kind from the small screen, and
reduced controversy to a minimum. Only in the news services, which were to some
extent insulated from the rest of programming, was some discussion of issues
possible. In the view of many, the early decades of television justified the
claim of Federal Communications Commission commissioner Newton Minnow that
television was a "vast wasteland."
The fledgling industry inherited many practices and trends from Hollywood -
among them self-censorship. However, Hollywood had created a genre of
"sissy" character, a figure with veiled gay traits. This type
occasionally appeared, in even more disguised form, in such early situation
comedy series as "Mr. Peepers," with Wally Cox. When motion pictures
that contained references to homosexuality were shown, even on late-night
television, the offending sections were ruthlessly edited out, a practice
that continues to this day. For this reason many now prefer to buy or rent
uncensored versions to play on home VCR equipment.
In the 1960s the civil rights movement, and increasingly the women's movement,
were big news. This opened the way for some rare excursions into the realm of
homosexuality. Mike Wallace's CBS Report, "The Homosexuals," aired
nationwide on March 7, 1967, was something of a landmark, but it had been preceded
in England by BBC-TV's "One in Twenty" (1966), based on more thorough
research by Brian McGee. Occasional discussions on local stations were
generally dominated by the judgmental views of psychiatrists.
After the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 coverage increased somewhat, and gay
activists appeared on "The Dick Cavett Show," "Jack Paar
Tonight," and "The David Susskind Show." In 1972 ABC's
"Movie of the Week" aired a sensitive portrayal of a gay-male couple
in the San Francisco Bay Area, "That Certain Summer," featuring Hal
Holbrook and Martin Sheen. Situation comedy series produced by Norman Lear
("All in the Family" and "Maude") occasionally showed
nonstereotypical homosexuals. In the 1980s, prime-time series such as
"Cagney & Lacey," "Designing Women," and "LA.
Law" treated the subject. Such popular series as "Brothers" (a
cable series), "Dynasty" (with its "sensitive son," Steven
Carrington), "Hooperman," "Love, Sidney," and
"Soap" have included gay and lesbian characters. A few long and
lavish British series based on literary classics have provided portraits of
gay people in the round (e.g., "Brideshead Revisited," 1980;
"The Jewel in the Crown," 1984), but these have reached only elite
audiences. When all is said and done, however, after forty years of the
hegemony of network television, gay people have had good reason to feel that
they are woefully underrepresented.
Gay Influence over Television. It was to be expected that from the first, television,
recruiting much of its talent from Hollywood and Broadway, had many gay and
lesbian participants, especially in such behind-the-scenes work as makeup and
costuming. Yet an unwritten law (itself inherited from Hollywood) held that the
actors who appeared on the screen must be heavily closeted. The revelation of
Rock Hudson's homosexuality, after he had appeared in several television
dramas, sent shock waves through the industry. Symptomatic of the prejudice
that exists is the fact that open membership organizations to defend the rights
of gay people in television have never really gotten off the ground, and
homosexuals have had to rely on informal groups of friends. Fear of loss of
work - even blacklisting - continues to be a powerful deterrent to speaking
out.
Following the pattern of Jewish and black organizations fighting stereotyping
in the media, gay "pressure groups" have had some success in reducing
blatant expressions of prejudice on television screens. A 1974 episode of
"Police Woman" called "Flowers of Evil," about three
lesbians who murder patients in an old-age home, provoked justified outrage.
Soon afterward, the National Gay Task Force induced the Television Review Board
of the National Association of Broadcasters to issue a directive stating that
the Television Code's injunction that "material with sexual connotations
shall not be treated exploitatively or irresponsibly" applied to
homosexuals. In Los Angeles Newton Deiter, a gay psychologist and activist,
successfully ran the Gay Media Task Force (GMTF). He and his associates were
able to monitor scripts for the networks, and to obtain frank meetings with
producers. GMTF was particularly alert for lisping, limp-wristed mannerisms for
gay men and truck-driver characterizations of lesbians. Such offensive words
as faggot and queer were taken out.
In the 1980s these lobbying efforts seemed to falter. However, gay newspapers
publicized writing campaigns against offensive programs, and new civil rights
groups, such as New York's Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)
organized their own efforts.
AIDS and Television. When the AIDS crisis appeared in 1981 mainstream newspapers
were the main vehicle of information for the general public. Eventually,
through news programs and specials, television made a contribution, though its
insensivity sometimes fueled a climate of panic that could have been avoided or
at least reduced. In 1983 the hospital series "St. Elsewhere"
introduced an AIDS story line, while the made-for-TV film "An Early
Frost," about the effect of knowledge of the disease on a middle-class
homosexual's family, garnered an Emmy (American television's highest award)
in 1985.
Although Hollywood stars lent their support to campaigns to raise money in the
fight against AIDS, many felt that a silent backlash was taking place. In the
late 1970s several major performers seemed on the verge of "coming
out," but the atmosphere shifted radically. Even heterosexual actors who
had portrayed gays found that it was hard to get work. If kissing scenes were
involved, actresses demanded to be able to veto leading men who were gay. Those
in the industry who did contract the disease felt the need to conceal it in
order to retain benefits, and to avoid "incriminating" friends.
All in all, the AIDS crisis revealed the inadequacy of television's feeble efforts
to mend its ways. Much work remains to be done by activists, but even so it is
unlikely that mass-market television will ever be a true friend of gay men and
lesbians. Rather, hope lies in the spread of new technologies which will cut
the commercial networks down to size by making communications accessible to a
full range of viewpoints, not just those that a few opportunistic and amoral TV
executives judge appropriate.
See also Communications.
Ward Houser
Templars
Founded in 1119 to protect
pilgrims who flocked to the Holy Land after the First Crusade of 1095, the
Knights Templars (or Poor Knights of Christ) of the Temple of Solomon were,
with the Hospitalers and Teutonic Knights, one of the three great military
orders of medieval Christianity. Vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience, as
well as to the Benedictine rule for monasticism, the Knights were "to
fight with a pious mind for the supreme and true King." They gained immunity
from excommunication by bishops and parish priests. Backed by the anti-Jewish
fanatic Bernard of Clairvaux, the most influential clergyman in
mid-twelfth-century Europe, they adopted a Rule, copies of which exist, giving
vast powers to the Grand Master, who did on occasion have to consult the
Chapters. No copy has ever been found of their alleged "Secret Rule."
Special chaplains under the Grand Master served the order, which married men
could enter if they bequeathed it half their property. Through bequests and
profits from interest charged on loans and from letters of credit for pilgrims,
the Templars became the richest of the orders.
The Templars in the Levant. Rashness on the part of Templars helped provoke defeats,
and also led to the recapture of Jerusalem in 1187 by Saladin, who ordered the
execution of all Templars and Hospitalers he had captured. The Templars
expended much of their blood and treasure in an attempt to hold a few fortresses
against the Saracen onslaught. During the Third Crusade in 1190, they tended to
side with the sodomitical Richard the Lionhearted against his rival Philip
Augustus of France. "First to attack and last to retreat," the
Templars heroically saved the Fifth Crusade (1228-1229) from annihilation in
Egypt. They did not cooperate with Frederick II of Hohenstaufen during the
Sixth Crusade (1227-1230), and except in the most dire crises, regularly
opposed their rivals the Hospitalers, helping to fragment further the feudal
Kingdom of Jerusalem, already rent by factions and quarrels among Italian
merchants from rival cities. In the disaster of 1244 at Gaza only 18 of the 300
Templars and 16 of the 200 Hospitalers, and neither Grand Master, survived the
slaughter by the Saracens. The Seventh Crusade led by Louis IX was captured in
Egypt in 1250. After his ransom the King went on to the Holy Land but his best
efforts failed to restore the situation. The few Templars from Palestine who
survived the fall in 1291 of the last Christian outpost there, Acre, during the
siege of which the Grand Master was slain, sailed for their new headquarters on
Cyprus.
The Dissolution of the Order. The order of the Templars, of whom there were about 4,000
in Europe, half of these in France, did not long survive the loss of the Holy
Land. They had become the greatest international bankers in Europe. The Paris
Temple became the principal money market where popes and kings deposited their
funds, which the Templars loaned out at interest, rivaling the Lombard bankers
and circumventing canon law prohibitions against usury. Philip IV the Fair
(Philippe Le Bel) went deeply into debt to the Templars, who sided with him in
his quarrel with Pope Boniface Vm (r.
1290-1303), whom the king had arrested at Anagni in 1302. Having taxed the
clergy, robbed and expelled Jews and Lombards, and debased the coinage, Philip began
to plot the despoiling of the Templars as early as 1305. Having obtained the
election of his French puppet Clement V as pope, he struck through venal informers
who denounced the Templars for heresy, blasphemy, and sodomy.
Popular suspicion had for half a century attributed strange events to the
Templars' secret midnight meetings. In spite of papal procrastination and
professions of disbelief in the charges, Philip had the Grand Inquisitor of
France proceed. In August 1307 Philip had the suspected Templars arrested,
including Jacques de Molay, then Grand Master, who had come from Cyprus to
consult about a crusade. Tortured first by royal officials, then if need arose
by the papal inquisition, 36 Templars died under torment in Paris alone. Of the
138 examined in Paris, 123 confessed to spitting on or at the cross at the
rites when they joined the order. The Grand Master confessed to spitting on the
crucifix and denying Christ. When papal opposition collapsed, Templars were arrested
in England, Aragon, Castile, and Sicily, but the Pope assumed control and
summoned a general council to decide the case. When the public trial began in
1310, many Templars withdrew their confessions, trusting in the pope - in
vain. As relapsed heretics 67 were consigned to the flames. In all about 120
died in Paris.
In 1312 Clement abolished the order, transferring its property to the
Hospitalers. At last Jacques de Molay revived his courage and repudiated his
confession, whereupon he was burnt along with the Preceptor of the order in
Normandy, in front of Notre Dame de Paris. This horrible trial confirmed the
precedent for burning heretics, blasphemers, and sodomites - something the
scholastic philosophers had been preaching for a century - and sealed it with
the approval of the mightiest authorities. It was the forerunner of the
witchcraft trials with their atrocious cruelty and rivaled that of Joan of Arc
as the most dramatic trial in medieval France.
Among the chief accusations leveled at the Templars by Philip IV in 1307 when
he issued the order to arrest them was that initiates to the Order kissed its
receptors on the buttocks, stomach, navel, spine, and mouth and were enjoined
to commit sodomy. In spite of the most exquisite tortures, which included roasting
the feet until the bones fell from their sockets, only two or three of the
accused Templars confessed to committing sodomy, which they either regarded as
more heinous than blasphemy and heresy or believed themselves innocent of
committing, though many more confessed to the other two offenses. Some seventy
said that they had been ordered to commit sodomy but denied having done so.
Scholarly opinion is about equally divided as to whether recruits had to
perform the osculum infante (infamous kiss), i.e., rimming the arsehole of their
superiors at the secret midnight initiation rituals. No one can deny that in
the minds of these tortured heroes, sodomy was a worse sin to confess than
heresy and blasphemy, a view cultivated by the scholastic philosophers
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas during the thirteenth century. Franciscans
and Dominicans, enemies of the order and leaders of the Inquisition, helped in
the prosecution and propaganda. More than ever since the fall of the Roman
Empire, a Catholic secular power, the Capetian monarchy, already inured by its
bloodthirsty campaigns against the Albigensians, was exploiting the supposed
ties between demonic powers and heretics, blasphemers, and sodomites - against
whom the Christian clergy had for so long warned. This was a momentous
precedent for Hitler in the twentieth century, but a more immediate one for the
torture and murder of Philip's son-in-law Edward II of England in 1327,
engineered by Philip's daughter Isabella.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Malcolm
Barber, The
Trial of the Templars, New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1978,- Alain Demurger, Vie et mart de l'ordre da
Temple, 1118-1314, Paris: Seuil, 1985; Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth, London: Oxford University Press, 1982.
William A. Percy
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-1892)
English poet laureate. The
son of a country rector, Tennyson began writing poetry at the age of eight. In
1830 he published his first significant book, Poems
Chiefly Lyrical. Three
years later occurred what was probably the most important event of his life:
the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam in Vienna. They had met at Trinity
College, Cambridge in 1828, and had taken two continental trips together,
which had deeply impressed the poet. Tennyson's continual and intense brooding
over the loss yielded many manuscript drafts, which he finally combined in his
major poetic sequence, In Memoriam, published anonymously in 1850. Later he gained fame for a
number of individual shorter poems, as well as for the Arthurian cycle, The
Idyls of the King (1859).
Profiting from the innovations of the romantic poets, Tennyson enjoyed a superb
ear, and was able to combine color and richness of imagery with ethical statement.
By no means the apologist for Victorian beliefs that he is sometimes taken to
be, Tennyson found the way to capture some of the chief moral dilemmas of his
age in verse of matchless eloquence.
From the first, In Memoriam puzzled and disconcerted many of Tennyson's admirers. It is
difficult to avoid the challenge of a prolonged expostulation to a dead friend
that speaks of "A spectral doubt which makes me cold,/ that I shall be thy
mate no more." For Tennyson, Hallam had once been "the centre of a
world's desire," its "central warmth diffusing bliss." The
years had only brought more depth of feeling: "My love involves the love
before;/ my love is vaster passion now;/ tho' mixed with God and Nature thou,/1
seem to love thee more and more."
In a contemporary review of In
Memoriam, Charles
Kingsley found the poetic sequence a descendant of "the old tales of David
and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his
nameless friend, of 'love passing the love of woman.'" Benjamin Jowett,
wondering whether it was manly or natural to linger in such a mood, excused the
poems by speaking vaguely of their "Hellenism." For a century and a
quarter after the publication critics twisted and turned to avoid directly
addressing the disturbing implications of this pivotal work. To be sure, Tennyson
complicated matters by conflating the love of his dead comrade with the love of
Christ. Probably in his own mind the poet laureate was never sure what the
meaning of the whole searing experience was. It is significant that he was able
to marry his cousin Emily Sellwood, as he had long planned, only after the
final publication of In Memoriam.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Christopher
Craft,'"Descend and Touch and Enter': Tennyson's Strange Manner of
Address," Cendets, 1 (1988), 83-101; Alan Sinfield, Alfred
Tennyson, Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Wayne R. Dynes
Tesla, Nikola (1856-1943)
Serbian-American scientist
and inventor. Born the son of an Orthodox priest in the village of Smiljan in
the province of Lik, he received his higher education at the Technische Hochschule
in Graz and at the Charles University in Prague. In 1882 he worked for the telephone
company in Budapest and invented the amplifier, and in February of that year
discovered the phenomenon of the reverse magnetic pole. Between 1882 and 1884
he worked in Paris and Strasbourg, rebuilding the Edison dynamos. Then he came
to America and worked with Edison himself for a time. In 1886 he invented the
arc lamp for lighting city streets, and in April 1887 he founded the Tesla
Electric Company. He also built the first high-efficiency multiphasic current
machines and motors. In November and December 1887 he applied for patents for
the Tesla induction coil and other inventions. In 1888-89 he worked for
Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, applied for a patent for the transmission of
alternating current, and built the first high-frequency generators, and in 1890
he discovered high-frequency currents. In 1892 he patented a transformer to
increase oscillating currents to high potentials, and began his work on
wireless telegraphy.
Between then and 1899 he pioneered in the development of radio communication
and in the transmission of electricity without wires, which he realized at a
distance of more than 1000 kilometers. This marked the end of his creative
period, though he continued to be an active inventor for more than twenty
years afterward. He became an American citizen and lived in New York until his
death in 1943.
Tesla never married; no woman, with the exception of his mother and his
sisters, ever shared the smallest fraction of his life. He believed that he had
inherited his abilities as an inventor from his mother. As a young man he was
not unattractive, though too tall and slender to be an ideal masculine type;
he was handsome of face and wore clothes well. He idealized women, yet planned
his own life in a coldly objective manner that excluded women entirely. Only
the highest type of woman could win his friendship,- the remainder of the sex
had no attraction for him whatever. In 1924 he gave an interview published in Collier's
magazine in which he
asserted: "The struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end
up in a new sex order, with th females superior. . . . The female mind has
demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of
men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman
will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated. . . .
Women will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress."
Tesla tried to convince the world that he had succeeded in eliminating love and
romance from his life, but he merely drew a veil over the secret chapter of his
life which an intolerant world had no right to know. The mystery of his
devotion to science is one of those episodes in the annals of invention and
discovery that are illuminated by insight into the androgynous character of
genius.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Margaret
Cheney, Tesla:
Man Out of Time, New
York: Laurel, 1983; John J. O'Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla, New York: Ives Washburn, 1944.
Warren Johansson
Thailand
Previously known as Siam,
in 1939 the country was officially renamed Prathet Thai, or Thailand -
literally, "the land of the free." The change of name closely
followed a change in the country's form of government, from the previous
absolute monarchy to the modem constitutional monarchy with a representative
legislature. With some fifty-two million citizens, Thailand occupies a key
position in the rapidly developing Asian economic sphere, and aspires to join
Taiwan and Korea as a world-wide economic force.
An ethnically and linguistically diverse nation, Thailand began to assume its
present shape only within the last thousand years, and many key elements of
Thai culture reached their present form in the relatively recent past. The
formation of the nation began with the arrival in Thailand of members of a
linguistic and cultural group designated by the term "Tai." (Some
important members of this group are the Siamese, the Lao, and the Shans of
northeastern Burma; altogether the "Tai" comprise about 70 million
persons in southeast Asia.) The modern Thai may be a descendant of the
incoming Tai, but he may also come from the indigenous Mon and Khmer groups
whom the Tai joined, or from much later Chinese and Indian immigrants to
Thailand. The modem Thai is not so much a member of a race as a person claiming
fealty to the state of Thailand; secondarily, a Thai is identified by his
language ("a speaker of Thai").
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Thailand managed to avoid
colonization by any European power: the primary foreign influence was British,
and later influence came from the United States, but the Thai always retained
their independence. King Rama VI (reigned 1910-25), a poet and translator of Shakespeare, was reputed
to be homosexual. During the 1930s the Thai government hired the libertarian
French sexologist Rene Guyon as an advisor, and he may have had a hand in the
Thai retention of their sexual freedom.
Thailand remains well over ninety percent Buddhist. Thai Buddha figures are
frequently effeminate, especially the so-called "Walking Buddha."
Thai insistence on personal freedom carries with it a logically necessary
corollary: a strong tolerance of eccentricities in other people. One result is
that Thailand is one of the few countries on earth where homosexuality is not
condemned or treated in any special way. During the 1970s, for example, the Minister
of Defense won the national Thai contest for best female dresser. The
combination was not perceived as dreadful, but as sanuk,
a key Thai concept which
roughly translates as "fun" or "pleasure." The toleration
of homosexuality is not a modern development. Somerset Maugham remarked long
ago that "the Siamese were the only people on earth with an intelligent
attitude about such matters." Two recent Thai prime ministers have been
reported to be gay.
One result of viewing sexual pleasure as a domain with little moral content is
that prostitution is not a highly stigmatized activity. In fact, Bangkok is renowned
for its thriving "sex industry," which horrifies many Westerners (who
are, of course, simultaneously tempted by all the perceived depravity).
The male prostitute is not highly stigmatized; it is perfectly possible to make
a transition from a year as a Buddhist monk to a year of working as an
"off-boy" in Bangkok, without abandoning any of the religion one has
absorbed and without losing self-esteem. (The "off-boy" is a young
man employed at a gay bar who may be taken home by clients; the term is
British.) The suburbs of Bangkok also have "off-boy" establishments
which cater almost entirely to Thai customers, and which are more polite as a
result. The misbehavior of foreign tourists has caused some of these Thai
institutions to bar foreigners, beginning in 1988. Thai culture is inherently
nonconfrontational, and the Thai would never think of trying to correct a
foreigner's rude, loud, or stingy behavior. The only way out is a generic ban
on the offending parties. As one owner explained: "The foreigners were
scaring the boys." Bangkok also has discos, saunas, and clubs where gay
men can meet on a noncommercial or freelance basis.
While Thai society is generally lacking in homophobia, and also has little
antipathy to age-graded relationships, an age of consent for males was first
established (with little publicity) in 1987, at 15.
Thai society lacks Western concepts of homosexuality as a distinct identity,
though this situation may be changing. Traditionally, the Thai conceptualization
of male homosexuality is similar to the Mediterranean model: the penetrator is
considered a "complete male," and any normal male may find himself in
this role; his opposite is the "katoey," a term which embraces
transvestism, transsexuality, hermaphroditism, and effeminacy. The katoey is
expected to remain sexually passive and submissive, and to have no interest in
women. While not discriminated against as homosexuals, the katoey suffer from
the limited position of women in the male-dominated Thai culture. Not all males
who take passive roles are katoey, however, and reciprocity in sex is not
unknown.
To these traditional concepts is now being added a more flexible concept,
imported from the West, of a "gay" (the term itself is borrowed into
the Thai language, which has no counterpart).
Thai homosexuality is seldom discussed in public, although changes in this area
are noticeable in the emergence of five homoerotic or bisexual publications, led by Mithuna
(bi), Mithuna, fr.
(gay), and Neon
(gay), a regular radio program
broadcast from Bangkok, and the beginnings of gay literary output in the form
of novels and short stories.
Attitudes on homosexuality show marked differences by class, relating to power positions. While there appears to be no
"queerbashing" violence directed
against homosexuality, there seems to be a considerable amount of coercion,
abuse of authority positions, and rape of
males. Peter Jackson comments that "the lessened resistance to having sex
with a man means that male rape or sexual attacks on men appear to be
significantly more common than in the West." As in other cultures,
however, rape of males is a taboo subject and is not reported to authorities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Eric Allyn
and John P. Collins, The
Men of Thailand, San
Francisco and Bangkok: Bua Luang, 1987; Peter A. Jackson, Male Homosexuality in Thailand, New York: Global Academic Publishers, 1989.
Geoff Puterbaugh
Theatre and Drama
As public performance,
accessible to a wide range of spectators, the theatre has been more subject to
the constraints of censorship
than any other long-established
art. It is expected to confirm and endorse standard social values and to present
the heterodox or the taboo in a manner which will incite either derision or
revulsion. Consequently, homosexual sentiments, behavior and concerns have,
until recently, rarely appeared on stage; when they have, their presentation
has often been skewed to the expectations and sensibilities of
convention-bound playgoers.
At the same time, the practicing theatre, in its gregariousness, its opportunities
for artistic creativity, and its relative tolerance, has been, at least from
the sixteenth century, both in Western and Eastern cultures, an arena where
talented homosexuals have flourished. From the ancient Romans until very
recently, performers were distrusted as outcasts, misfits in the scheme of
things: the outlaw actor and the sexual heretic were often the same individual
(and some psychiatrists are fond of equating the actor's egoist exhibitionism
with an alleged homosexual love of display).
As homosexuality has become more conspicuous in everyday life, the stage,
traditionally regarded as the mirror of life, has portrayed it more openly,
both as a subject worthy of dramatic treatment and as an attitude that informs
the production.
Ancient Greek Theatre. Greek classical theatre developed in a culture saturated with homoerotic
attitudes and behaviors, but owing, perhaps, to deliberate excision by
Byzantine and monastic librarians, there is little surviving evidence of these
aspects in drama. Lost tragedies include Aeschylus' Laius
(467 b.c.),
about the man thought by
the Greeks to have invented pederasty; Niobe, which displayed the love-life of Niobe's sons; and Myrmidons,
concerning Achilles' grief
at the death of his lover Patroclus. This last was a favorite of Aristophanes,
who quoted it frequently. Other lost plays on the Myrmidon theme were written
by Philemon (436/5-379 b.c.) and Strattis [409-375 b.c.).
Sophocles, too, wrote Lovers
of Achilles, whose
surviving fragment describes the intricate workings of passion. The
oft-dramatised tragedy of the house of Labdacus was, in the earlier myths,
triggered by Laius' lust-motivated abduction of the son of his host during his
foreign exile. Sophocles eschewed this episode, but it was the subject of
Euripides' lost Chrysippus (ca. 409 b.c.), apparently created as a vehicle for his own male favorite
Agathon (447-400/399 b.c.j, who was noted for his "aesthetic" way of life.
(Another lost Chrysippus was composed by Strattis.) Euripides' masterpiece The
Bacchae (405
b.c.] depicts the androgynous god Dionysus unsexing and demeriting his antagonist and kinsman Pentheus, before he
sends him to his doom.
But whereas the love and lust of man for man was considered worthy of tragic
treatment, effeminate manners were the stuff of comedy: Gnesippus was ridiculed
for inappropriately using a tragic chorus of effeminates. The successful comic
poet Eupolis |445-ca. 415 b.c.) was attracted to this theme; his Those
Who Dye Their Hair [Baptai, 416/15 b.c.) satirized members of the circle of Alcibiades, who was
rumored to have had him drowned for it. Surviving fragments suggest that they
were ritual transvestites who spoke an obscene lingo of their own in ceremonies
worshipping the goddess Cotytto. Eupolis' The Flatterers
[Kolakes] (431
b.c.), a satire on parasitism with sidelights on compliant sexuality, won
first prize over Aristophanes' Peace.
The comedies of
Aristophanes teem with references to pederasty and cross-dressing. Although his
earthy heroes have no hesitation in declaring what fun it is to watch naked
boys at the gymnasium and to fondle their scrotums, the effeminate [euryproktos
or "broad-ass")
is mercilessly mocked. In The Clouds
(423 b.c.),
for instance, Right Reason
rhapsodizes on the "moisture and down" that bloom on a youth's
genitals "as on quinces" and wins his argument. Yet Cleisthenes is
regularly made a laughingstock for his lady-like carrying-on, and the central
device of the Women's Festival
[Thesmophoriazousai] (411
b.c.) is to have the protagonist disguise himself as a woman, under
Cleisthenes' instruction, thus running the danger of being buggered when
captured and bound.
Roman Theatre. Buggery on compulsion remained a standard comic topos
in the Mediterranean
basin. In Roman comedy, Plautus' characters mistake one another for eunuchs and
effeminates; his Casina (ca. 190-180 b.c.), in particular, is packed with jokes, puns and equivocations
on the theme. Sodomy frequently crops up in the farcical fabula
togata, especially
those of Lucius Afranius (fl. later second century of our era), credited to
have introduced homosexuality into the genre. Among the later Greeks, actors
were respected as artists (Mary Renault's novel The
Mask of Apollo offers
a persuasive recreation); but in Rome, they were legally classified as
"infamous," even if popularly regarded as desirable sexual catches.
The Emperors Caligula, Nero, and Trajan often took their male bedmates from the
ranks of actors, dancers, and mimes; the last became notorious for the
indecency of their performances. To increase the eroticism of their shows, the
mimes introduced women on stage in what had hitherto been an exclusively male
preserve.
The Orient. In the Oriental theatre, women were frequently banned from
the stage, either for religious or moralistic reasons; the resultant
professional female impersonator, the tan of China's Peking Opera, introduced in the reign of Ch'ien
Lung (1735-1796), and the onnagata of Japan's Kabuki theatre, replacing boy players after
1652, exercised a pseudo-female allure. In China actors, no matter what they
played, were frequently prostitutes, sought after by statesmen and scholars:
among the most famous of these actor-favorites were Chin Feng (fl. 1590), Wei
Ch'angsheng (fl. 1780), and Ch'en Yinkuan (fl. 1790). The boy acting-troupes of
nineteenth-century China were often equated with male brothels, and certainly
the boys' looks were regarded as more important than their talent. But these
pedophilic passions were never reflected in the Chinese dramatic repertory. On
the Kabuki stage, on the other hand, a bisexual love affair is the pivot of Tsuwamono
Tongen Sogo (1697),
and a homosexual one comprises a subplot in Asakusa
Reigenki.
The most popular Korean
entertainment form before 1920 was the Namsadang, a traveling troupe of
variety performers; a homosexual commune of 40 to 50 males, it has been
described as the "voice of the common people" [Young Ja Kim). The
company was divided into sutdongmo
("butch") and yodongmo
("queen")
members, the novices serving the elders and playing the female roles. Despite
Confucian disapproval of pederasty, the troupe's sexual identity did not put
off village audiences, probably because its status as an outcast group made
conventional standards irrelevant to it. The institutionalized homosexuality of
the Namsadang raises questions about similar itinerant companies in ancient and
medieval Europe, and has an analogue in the enforced male bonding of acrobat
troupes. Late nineteenth-century commentators on the circus noted that homosexual
relationships were common among gymnasts and aerialists, a combination of
physical contact and the need for trust. Bands of mummers and mountebanks may
have shared such an ethos.
The Middle Ages and Beginnings of the Modern
Theatre in Europe. Christianity
was antagonistic to the theatre, partly on grounds of immorality; Clement of
Alexandria specifically rebuked the obscenity of mimes who brought cinaedia
or male prostitution on
stage. When the theatre in Europe was reborn from the Church, the religious
teleology of the drama precluded treatment of illicit love, except in imitation
of the classics. Nor was the burning of Sodom ever treated by the mystery
plays, although Jesuit school-drama in the Baroque age would dramatize it with
accompanying fireworks, as in Cornelius a Marca's Bustum
Sodomae (Ghent,
1615). The Renaissance revived the comic treatment of homosexuality, first in
ribald farces by Bolognese students, mocking burghers and clergy: one of these
is Ugolino Pisani's Philogenia (after 1435), wherein the boy hustler Epifebo deploys his
charms to snare the venal priest Prodigio.
Sexual ambiguity is the basis of "gender-confusion" comedy in which a
male or female character disguises him/ herself as the opposite sex and
attracts the amorous attentions of the "wrong" sex. The archetype is
Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena's (1470-1520) bawdy La
Calandria (1513),
but it was a common device in commedia
dell'arte as
well as in comme-dia erudita. Involuntary buggery remained a basic joke: in Niccoló Machiavelli's (1469-1527]La Clizia (1525), oldNicomaco is sodomized in his sleep by his
servant Siro. Pietro Aretino's UMarescalco
(1526/ 7) features a
pederastic hero, a chief groom of the stables who is obliged by his master to
marry a woman only to find to his great relief that the bride is a boy (this
served as a source of Ben Jonson's Epicoene, 1609).
Although Spanish Golden Age drama dropped the homosexual references when it
adapted Italian comedy, it often featured the mujer
varonil, a
woman in men's clothes who takes on the aggressive role in the love-chase;
farcical transvestism was not uncommon, as in Lope de Vega's (1562-1635) El
mesón de la corte (The
Inn of the Court, 1583?) and Monroy y Suva's El caballerodama (The Lady Cavalier), in which two men in drag are tricked
into bed together. Intense Platonic relationships between single-sex couples
are often depicted, as in the anonymous El crotalón
(ca. 1553), but in a
society where sodomites were burned at the stake during the Inquisition,
orthodox sexuality always prevailed by the play's ending.
The Elizabethan Stage. The Elizabethan gender-confusion drama was complicated by
the fact that women were played by boy actors, a development from school drama.
Thus, in William Shakespeare's As You
Like It (1599/1600),
there is the intricate enigma of a boy actor playing a girl disguising herself
as a youth who acts as a woman to aid his/her wooer. The practice also required
adjustments in performance convention: nowhere in Antony
and Cleopatra (1607)
do the passionate lovers kiss. This aspect of the stage fueled condemnation by
Puritans and reformers, who damned it as a hotbed of sodomy,-there is scant
hard evidence of homosexual activity among players and playwrights, but the
imputation is not without foundation. Clear cases can be made for Nicholas
Udall (1505-1556), headmaster of Eton and author of Ralph
Roister Doister (between
1534 and 1541), who admitted to "buggery" with one of his students;
and for Christopher Marlowe, whose own predilections found their way into his
work: the grand amour of the king and his favorite Piers Gaveston in Edward
II (1593), the court
of Henri in in The Massacre at Paris
(1593), and the scene
between Ganymede and Jupiter in Dido Queen
of Carthage (1594).
Whatever the homosexual component of his sonnets, Shakespeare only occasionally
portrayed the love of one man for another in his dramatic works: when he did it
was as a consuming, unspoken passion that expressed itself in deeds: Antonio's
sacrifice for Bassanio in The
Merchant of Venice (1594
or 1596); the sea-captain Antonio's protection of Sebastian in Twelfth
Night (1600); and
Achilles' avenging of Patroclus in Tioilus
and Cressida (1602/3).
Further Developments in England. Tudor Morality plays packed with Protestant propaganda had
displayed allegorical characters named Sodomy to stand for corrupt, courtly,
and Catholic manners (as in John Bale's Three
Laws, 1538). Throughout
the Jacobean and Caroline periods, pederasty continued to be associated on
stage with (usually Italian) luxury and high life, a character called Sodome
appearing in Cosmo Manuche's The Loyal
Lovers as
late as 1652. John Marston's The Turk (1610) contains an outspoken scene between the erotic
tourist Bordello and his page Pantofle. In William Davenant's Albovine
(1629), the Lombard hero
has a minion, and in his The Cruel
Brother (1630),
the Duke of Siena cherishes a favorite who "in his love .../ He holdeth thus in his Armes, in
fearfull care/ Not to bruse you with his deere embracements."
After the Restoration of the Stuarts and the introduction of actresses on the
English stage, the heterosexual ingredient became more realistic in comedy,
more idealistic in tragedy, though without entirely ousting the competition.
Montague Summers typically overstates the case when he refers to "the
prevalence of uranianism in the theatre" of the time; it must be noted
that fops, although mocked for such Frenchified behavior as the exchange of
kisses in George Etherege's The Man of
Mode (1676), long to bed
down women exclusively. (Despite their names, for instance, Sir Gaylove and Sir
Butterfly in NewburghHamilton's The
Doating Lovers [1715]
are both inveterate womanizers.) Pederasty is associated not with effeminates,
but with decadent foreign courts or decayed rakes who need a new stimulus: in
Edward Howard's The Usurper (1664), the comments of Damocles and Hugo de Petra
concerning a page are openly pedophilic, and in Aphra Behn's The
Amorous Prince (1671),
Lorenzo tries to seduce the boy Philibert who, however, turns out to be a girl
in disguise. In Thomas Otway's The
Souldier's Fortune (1681),
an elderly fool is delighted to discover - or so he thinks - that a girl he is
tumbling is a boy. The rhymed extravaganza Sodom,
or The Quintessence of Debauchery (1684?), attributed to the Earl of Rochester, which partly hymns the
superiority of buggery to "normal" practices, was never performed.
The matchmaker Coupler is the only blatant "queen" in Restoration
drama; in John Vanbrugh's The
Relapse ¡1696)
"old Sodom" as he is known requests the hero's sexual favors as a
reward for his complicity. He represents a new trend, for in the eighteenth
century the flamboyant fop character, like the audience itself, underwent a
process of embourgeoisement. The fop was shown as an overreaching member of the middle
class, usually a simpering "molly," more distinctly a denizen of a
subculture than his predecessors. The molly's first stage appearance may be
the "nice fellow" Maiden "who values himself upon his
Effeminacies," in Thomas Baker's comedy Tunbridge-Walks;
or, The Yeoman of Kent (1703),
believed by his contemporaries to be a portrait of the author's former
behavior. Other examples are Varnish and Bardach in Kensington
Gardens (1720)
by the actor John Leigh; the much-imitated Fribble in David Garrick's A
Miss in Her Teens (1747);
"The Daffodils" in Garrick's The
Male-Coquette (1757);
and Jessamy in Isaac Bickerstaffe's Lionel and
Clarissa (1768).
A spate of pamphlets and articles about similar "soft gentlemen"
suggest that these types did not exaggerate real life models by much. Within
the theatrical community, a number of homosexual figures were conspicuous,
among them Leigh (1689-1726) himself. Of the boy-actors who continued to play
women into the Restoration period, Edward Kynaston (1643-1712) was accused by
Dryden of being the Duke of Buckingham's catamite; and James Nokes (d. 1696),
who played the title role in The Maid
of the Mill (1660)
and later kept a toyshop, was castigated in the Satyr
on the Players as
"This Bhigger] Nokes, whose unwieldy T[arse]/ Weeps to be buryed in his
Foreman's A[rse]." Later, the popular comedian Samuel Foote (1720-1777),
who often played old women, was tried and acquitted for sodomy with his man-servant.
In the Regency period, a post-mortem revealed the actress and prostitute Eliza
Edwards (1814-1833) to have been a male transvestite.
French Theatre. When Mme. de Maintenon, the morganatic wife of Louis XIV, requested the archbishop of Paris to follow the example of Cromwell's parliament
and order the closing of the French theatres, he resisted by pointing out that
the stage, with its heterosexual concerns, prevented the spread of
"unnatural vice." Under the French Regency (1715-23), a number of
private pornographic theatres were maintained by the noblesse,
but homosexual activities
were rarely shown; an exception was the private theatre of the Duchesse de
Villeroi, where lesbian comedies performed by Opera dancers ended in orgies.
One of the erotic authors, Charles Colle (1709-1783), planned a vaudeville
based on " those
gentlemen, "but gave it up allegedly because he could find no rhyme for bougre.
In La
Comtesse d'Olonne,
attributed to Bussy-Rabutin, Le Comte de Guice,
described as a
"gentilhomme de la manchette" is finally converted to heterosexuality; similarly, in Les
Plaisirs du cloître, sapphic
flagellation gives
way to ordinary love-making. A later parody of these works, Les
Esprits des moeurs au XVIII* siècle, attributed to Charles
de Nerciat, presents
a graphie scene of lesbian lovemaking. The
French acting profession harbored many deviants: the great tragedienne Françoise Raucourt presided over a lesbian secret society, the Anandrynes; the
harlequin Carlo Bertinazzi (1713-1783), admired by Garrick for his eloquent back,
had a liaison with the married actor Favart. The handsome young actor Fleury
(Abraham-Joseph Benard, 1750-1822), was said to be kept by the Venetian
ambassador at an annual pension of eight thousand pounds; he had a declared
admirer in Prince Henry of Prussia, Frederick the Great's homosexual brother.
Europe from the End of the Old Regime to
World War I. From
its inception, the most prominent figures in the German theatre were unabashed
pederasts, starting with the classical actors August Wilhelm Iffland
(1759-1814) and Wilhelm Kunst (Kunze, 1799-1859), both much valued by Goethe.
Some of the greatest German dramatists are believed to have had similar
propensities which nourished their works: Friedrich von Schiller ( 1759-1805) left behind an unfinished play, Die
Malteser (The
Knights of Malta, 1794-1803), whose Crequi and St. Priest exhibit homophilic
feelings; August von Kotzebue's (1761-1819) tendency to lachrymose
sentimentality rather than sensuality in his portrayal of love may be attributed
to his nature. The tastes of Heinrich von Kleist and the Austrian Franz
Grillparzer (1791-1872), on the other hand, are not demonstrated in their
dramatic works. In Vogtland, a workers' neighborhood in northern Berlin, the
Nationaltheater was known before it burned in 1883 as the playhouse of
homosexuals, who included its manager, the "last romantic" star
Hermann Hendrichs (1809-1871), the tragediennes Clara Ziegler (1844-1909) and
Felicita Vestvali (Anne Marie Stegemann, 1829-1880), both of whom played Romeo,
and, among the patrons, Prince Georg of Prussia and J. B. Schweitzer, president
of the All-German Workers' Union. Later, the Viktoriatheater rightfully
inherited its reputation. Josef Kains (1858-1910), the great leading man of
Wilhelmine classical theatre, was, at the age of 27, the final favorite of
Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Simon Karlinsky has argued convincingly for the homosexuality of Russian
playwrights Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol (1809-1852), whose fear of women perspires
through his comedies, and Vladislav Aleksandrovich Ozerov (1770-1816), whose
verse tragedy Dmitrij Donskoj (Dmitry of the Don) (1807) has as a subplot the fervent
devotion of a page for his knight. Homophilic sentiment also motivates Balzac's
melodrama Vautrin (1840), banned not for its content but for the political
satire in its costuming.
Homosexuality, as it came to be defined and recognized in the nineteenth
century, was not unveiled on stage until the fin-de-siecle
cult of decadence made it
modish. A leading star of the Parisian theatre of that period was the
flamboyant Romanian Edouard de Max (1869-1925) who, according to Gide, nursed a
lifelong desire to play Nero, Henri III, and Heliogabalus; a play about him was
written by Andre Boussac de Saint-Marc: Sardanapale
(1926).
Oscar Wilde's aphoristic comedies can be seen as manifestations of a camp
sensibility, and some critics have speculated that the Bunburying of the heroes
of The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) stands for sub rosa excursions into the gay demi-monde. Lytton Strachey
interpreted the main character of A Woman of
No Importance (1893)
as "a wicked Lord, staying in a country house, who has made up his mind to
bugger one of the other guests - a handsome young man of twenty." Wilde's Salome
(1893, prod. 1896) had an
influence on the usually reticent Andre Gide; Saul
(1903, prod. 1922), set in
the Biblical time of David and Jonathan, was his only theatrical paean to an
older man's passion for a younger.
Scandinavia's most illustrious homosexual author, the Danish novelist Herman
Bang (1857-1912), though deeply involved in the theatre, was not an outstanding
dramatist. He founded the first Norwegian artistic cabaret (in Christiania, now
Oslo, 1892), worked in Paris at the experimental Theatre de l'Oeuvre in 1894 as
"scenic instructor," and was director at theFolketheater, Copenhagen,
1898-1901. Despite his insignificance as a playwright, his intimacy with drama
deeply influenced the prose style of his outsider novels. The Swede August
Strindberg (1849-1912) at the outset of his illustrious career was led by his
complex misogyny to introduce evil lesbians as psychic vampire figures into
his writings. In Comrades (1888), a mannish female artist seduces the hero's wife
into a bohemian career; the heroine olMissJuhe
(1889) is doomed because
her mother raised her as a boy and thus undermined her feminine intuition for
survival; and the two-woman one-act The
Stronger (1889)
reflected the author's own insecurities about his wife's women-friends.
Strindberg's later historical dramas about Queen Christina (1901) and Gustav HI (1902) touch glancingly on their
protagonists' sexual nature, the Queen shown to be repelled by the idea of marriage
(a common enough distaste in Strindberg). The modern Swedish play Night
of the Tribades (1975)
by Per Olof Enquist (b. 1934) caused a sensation by exploring Strindberg's
tortured awareness that his first wife was having an affair with another woman.
A lyrical treatment of the male eros was proffered by the Russian poet Mikhail
Afanasievich Kuzmin; several of his plays, including A Dangerous
Precaution (1907)
and The Venetian Madcaps (1912), vaunt the love of two men over that of a man and a
woman. The first professed contemporary gay protagonist in drama is the title
character of Armory-Dauriac's comedy Le Monsieur
aux chrysanthèmes (1908;
the title parodies La Dame aux cameliias),
which satirized the
popularity of elegant homosexuals in society. Deviant characters crop up occasionally
in modernist Italian and Spanish drama - Lorenzaccio in Sem Benelli's La
Maschera di Bruto (The
Mask of Brutus, 1908) and the King in Antonio Buero-Vallejo's Isabela,
reina de corazones
(Isabel, Queen of
Hearts). Sholom Asch's Yiddish melodrama Gott
fun Nekom a
(God of Vengeance, prod. 1907), with its saving love between a lesbian
prostitute and a brothel-keeper's innocent daughter, created no great frisson
when produced in Europe,
but raised a howl of execration in New York in 1922.
Germany was perhaps the first European nation to treat homosexuality frankly,
though as a psychic catastrophe, on the modern stage. Usually historic subject
matter justified its introduction, in plays about Hadrian (Frederiksen, Paul
Heyse), Saul (Wolfskehl), and Frederick the Great (Burchard), or else the play
was based on ancient myth (Elisàr
von Kupffer's Narkissos)
or on stage convention
(Karl von Levetzow's pantomime Die beiden
Pierrots [The
Two Pierrots]). As a "problem" of modern society, homosexuality
appears disguised as the decadent clown Edi in Hermann Bahr's Die Mutter
(The Mother, 1891) and
undisguised as the tormented youth Rudolf in Ludwig Dilsner's fasminblûthen
(Jasmine Blossoms, 1899),
who is one of the first of many to find his way out of the dilemma by shooting
himself. As early as 1902, the critic Hanns Fuchs was complaining that the
denouements of such plays depended too much on the state of the laws: "the
ideal homosexual drama, depicting the conflicts in an individual soul and their
influence on its action and conception of life of homosexuals, is still to be
written." He suggested a dreamer like Grillparzer or a strong-man like
Michelangelo as models.
Fuchs' wish went unanswered. Herbert Hirschberg's Fehler
(Faults, 1906) also
belonged to the school of problem drama. In his "tragedy of sex" Frühlingserwachen
(Spring's Awakening, 1891,
prod. 1906), Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) included a vignette of teenage
homoeroticism amid his spectrum of pubescent anxieties, but again the play's
catastrophe was the result of social attitudes. He came closer to offering an
inner conflict with the Countess Geschwitz, a full-length portrait of an
obsessed tribade in Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1898, prod. 1902) and Die
Büchse der Pandoras (Pandora's
Box, 1904, prod. 1906).
After World War I. The liberation from Victorian values felt after World War I
was reflected in the theatre as well. Expressionist drama often used
adolescent homosexuality as a metaphor for youthful rebellion, morbidity, and
confusion, as in Arnolt Bronnen's Vatermord (Parricide, 1922), Klaus Mann's Anja
und Esther (1925),
and Ferdinand Bruckner's Krankheit
der fugend (The
Disease of Youth, 1926). Bruckner's Die
Verbrecher (Criminals,
1928) included an attack on the infamous Paragraph 175 of the penal code.
Bertolt Brecht's early plays, Baal (1922), Im
Dickicht der Städte (In
the Jungle of Cities, 1924), Edward II (1924), and even Die
Dreigroschen Oper (The
Threepenny Opera, 1928), are filled with erotic male-bonding, partly derived
from Rimbaud. An amateur group, the Theater des Eros, existed between 1921 and
1924 to perform outspoken homosexual liberation dramas in private homes.
Christa Winsloe's Gestern und Heute (Mädchen in Uniform, 1930), filmed and widely revived
outside Germany, presented a girls'-school crush in a tragic light, but put the
blame squarely on old-fashioned values. Throughout the 1920s, in fact, tragedy
was the standard dramatic mode for lesbianism. In France, Edouard Bourdet
(1887-1945) treated upper-class gay males comically in La
Fleur de pois (The
Upper Crust, 1932), but imbued lesbian attraction with dire consequences in La
Prisonnière (The
Captive, 1926). (Its plot had a foreruner in Catulle Mendès' Protectrices,
a pale epigone in Roger
Martin du Gard's Taciturne, 1931, and a German counterpart in Hermann Sudermann's Die
Freundin, 1913/14.)
Federico Garcia Lorca may
have channeled his own predilections into the repressed sexuality of his major
tragedies, for he puts his praise of masculine beauty in the mouths of his
trammelled heroines. More explicit are his early poetic drama Diâlogo
del Amargo (The Bitter One's Dialogue), in which a young man with a
death wish is seduced by the horseman Muerte who offers him his highly
symbolic knives; and the suppressed surrealistic play El
publico (The
Audience, 1930; not published until 1976).
This convention that passion was tragic, but behavioral characteristics comic,
was maintained in the United States. The very first American drama of
homophilic despair, Henry Blake Fuller's "closet" (in both senses)
one-act At Saint fudas's ( 1896), ends with the suicide of the best man reviled by
the beloved (straight) bridegroom. Mae West's The Drag
(1927), which devoted a
whole act to a transvestite ball, and Pleasure
Man (1928), which
filled the stage with hilarious dishing queens, both had tragic endings tacked
on. These plays were prosecuted and banned, whereas Lillian Hellman's
ambivalent melodrama of calumny and suppressed desire, The
Children's Hour (1934),
won critical acclaim. The leading dramatic actresses of the New York stage, Eva
Le Gallienne (b. 1889), Katharine Cornell (1893-1974), and
Lynn Fontanne (1887-1983), were known privately for the intimacy of their
female friendships; the last two married gay men, Guthrie McClintic (1893-1961)
and Alfred Lunt (1893-1977), respectively.
Broadway was somewhat hamstrung by police censorship, which was less
consistent in its bans than was the Lord Chamberlain's Office in London; still,
British drama managed to sneak in the occasional reference. Precious chamber
plays like Ronald Firbank's The
Princess Zoubaroff (1920)
circulated only among the cognoscenti; but in 1925, Arnold Bennett could find
the opening scene of Frederick Lonsdale's Spring
Cleaning, a
gathering of homosexuals at a cocktail party, the only genuine thing in the
play. That same year, a sentimental attachment formed in a prison-camp was made
central to J. R. Ackerley's The
Prisoners of War, and
token homosexuals also made an appearance in Ronald Mackenzie's Musical
Chairs (1931).
The Green Bay Tree (1933) by Mordaunt Shairp (1887-1939), a melodrama about
an epicene older man's hold on a languid youth, made a success, repeated, with
some changes, on Broadway. Schoolboy crushes, familiar to much of the audience,
surfaced in The Hidden Years (1948) by Travers Otway and Quaint
Honour (1949)
by Roger Gellert in more or less covert form. It is typical that England's two
favorite authors of comedies and musicals, Noel Coward (1899-1973) and
IvorNovello (Daniel Davies, 1893-1951), whose sexual orientation was common
knowledge in theatrical circles, remained closeted to the general public; the
campiness of their works was put down to "sophistication." The same
held true for such important playwrights and actors as Somerset Maugham,
Terence Rattigan (1911-1977), Michael Redgrave (1908-1985), Charles Laughton
(1899-1962), Emlyn Williams (1905-1987), Esme Percy (1887-1957), Ernest Milton
(1890-1974), GwenFfrangcon-Davies (b. 1896), and John Gielgud (b. 1904) (even
after Gielgud had been arrested for public indecency), as well as for the
powerful producer Hugh "Binkie" Beaumont (1908-1973) and the
influential critic James Agate (1877-1942). At the end of his career, Coward,
who had put a chorus of "pretty boys, witty boys" wearing green
carnations into Bitter Sweet (1929) and hinted at a bisexual triangle in Design
for Living (
1933), ventured abit more frankness in A Song at Twilight (1966), ostensibly based on Maugham and Max Beerbohm;
Rattigan also made the exploitation of a pederast central to his late play Man
and Boy (1963).
William Douglas Home (b. 1912) is a mainstream playwright who has been willing
to deal with the taboo subject throughout his career, from his prison play Now
Barrabbas (1947),
to his comedy about a transsexual, Aunt Edwina (1960), to his drama David
and fonathan (1984).
When the Nazis came to power in Germany, the leading man Adolf Wohlbruck
(1900-1966) had to flee to England, where he became known as Anton Walbrook; so
did Conrad Veidt, who eventually wound up in Hollywood. Less lucky colleagues
perished in the camps. The immensely popular Gustav Grûndgens (1899-1963) was forced to marry and suppress his propensities to retain
the favor of his masters; after the war, he persisted as the leading director
and classical actor in West Germany, but his survival tactics were attacked by
his former friend Klaus Mann in the novel Mephisto.
After World War II. During
the post-war period, the French theatre was dominated by Jean Cocteau's circle,
including the stage designer Christian Bérard (1902-1949)
and the actor Jean Marais
(b. 1913); the bisexual Gérard Philipe (1922-1959) was everyone's favorite leading man. The foremost
members of the Comédie
Française, such
as Jean Weber and Jacques Charon (1920-1975), were familiar faces at gay
salons. Julien Green's monumental Sud (South, 1953) clothed his doomed love story in Civil War
garb and veiled suggestion; the agony of unrequited affection went even deeper
in Henry de Montherlant's La Ville dont
le Prince est un
Enfant (The City Whose Prince Is a Child, 1951 ), set in a
Catholic school where an obsessive priest roots out the special friendships of
the students. Typically, the secretive and suicidal Montherlant considered it unsuitable for public performance by boys.
New Openness in the Sixties. The drag-ball scene in John Osborne's play about the
Austrian spy Alfred Redi, A
Patriot for Me (1965),
proved one of the nails in the coffin of official British censorship, whose
demands for cuts showed up its absurdity. Joe Orton
was another strain for it,
for, like Wilde, his sense of paradox and sly verbal innuendo informed all his
work, making it not so easy to cut offending passages: Entertaining
Mr. Sloane (1964),
with its bisexual protagonist, the amoral male couple in Loot
(1966), and the polymorphous
perversity of the entire cast of What the
Butler Saw (1969)
could not be neutralized by excision. His camp sensibility led him to include
arcane references within standard farce set-ups, couched in impeccably elegant
utterance; and his successes emboldened him, in rewriting his radio play The Ruffian
on the Stair for
the stage in 1967, to strengthen the sexual bond between the two male
characters.
Three plays of the 1966/67 season continued the tradition of homosexual as
lonely outsider: Frank Marcus' (b. 1928) cruel lesbian comedy The
Killing of Sister George, Charles Dyer's (b. 1928) bleak duet Staircase,
and Christopher Hampton's
[b. 1946) examination of adolescent alienation, When
Did You Last See My Mother! Hampton's next play, Total
Echpse (1968),
was a skillful exploration of the Rimbaud/Verlaine
relationship. At least one
homosexual was to be found as local color in performances by Joan Littlewood's
group [A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney and The Hostage
by Brendan Behan, both
1958). The plays of Peter Shaffer (b. 1926), beginning with Five
Finger Exercise (1958),
generally concern the uneasy relationship between an older man and a younger;
and Simon Gray (b. 1936) played with pathetic same-sex desires in Wise
Child (1967) and Spoiled
(1968) before presenting
a witty bisexual protagonist (but one who is abandoned at the end) in Butley
(1971). Alan Bennett's (b.
1934) plays have been both more open and more fun.
In the United States, Tea and Sympathy (1953) by Robert Anderson (b. 1917) encapsulates a
prevalent American attitude: the sensitive hero could be cured of his
reputation as a sissy by the love of a good woman. The stage image of the
homosexual as outrageous fairy or doomed psychotic was challenged by Ruth and
Augustus Goetz' adaptation of Gide's The
Immorahst (1954);
imperfect in its reasoning, it nevertheless presented a man with homophilic
tendencies as intelligent and sympathetic. It was, however, less significant
than the prominence of Tennessee Williams in the American theatre. In Williams'
early drama, explicit homosexuality remained marginal; the flashback into
Blanche's marriage in Streetcar Named
Desire (1947),
the Baron de Charlus episode in Camino
Real (1953), and the lesbian
undercurrent in Something Unspoken (1958). It became more crucial as the hidden motivation in Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof[ 1955)
and the central secret in Suddenly
Last Summer (1958),
but in a standard mode: the protagonists are both victims, of desires suppressed
and expressed, respectively. In later plays like Small
Craft Warnings (1972)
with its transvestite husband, and Vieux
Carre (1977), the types
are grotesque but the motives are somewhat less disguised.
Such themes remained covert in William Inge [The
Boy in the Basement, 1962,
Natural Affection, 1963) and Edward Albee (although The
Zoo Story, 1959,
is cryptic only to those who cannot spot one of its two characters). This did
not stop hostile critics from declaring that Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolfl (1962) was really about two gay male couples. Albee's savage hostility
to the nuclear family struck them as symptomatic of a perverted imagination;
they were outraged by the musky and enigmatic eroticism of Tiny
Alice (which one claimed
was gay slang for the rectum). Albee's choice of fiction to dramatize - Carson
McCullers'
Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963) and James Purdy's Malcolm
(1966) - also seemed
intent on glorifying the freakish outsider. As homosexual characters
proliferated on the Broadway stage, this critical hostility grew until, in the
mid- and late 1960s, such widely read pundits as Stanley Kauf f mann, Walter
Kerr, and Robert Brustein were positing a homosexual conspiracy in the American
theatre, which "often poisons what you see and hear." They argued
that homosexual playwrights camouflaged their concerns in the guise of
heterosexual relationships; also implicit was the fear that show business was
in the hands of perverts, from costumers and choreographers to producers. A
decade later this paranoia was echoed in Canada, where the actor John Colicos
complained "the faggots have taken over."
Canada was the breeding-ground for John Herbert's (b. 1926) harsh play of
prison life, Fortune and Men's
Eyes (1967), which
pivots on the sexual politics of the cell-block; and the Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay (b. 1942), with his drag-queen soap operas La
duchesse de Langeais [ 1969)
and Hosanna (1973). Tremblay, a master of local patois, was also
influenced by the French thief-turned-prose-stylist Jean Genet, whose dramas,
although they explore the mysteries of personality, are less explicitly
homoerotic than his novels. His first play, Les
Bonnes (The
Maids, 1947), did not get the all-male cast Genet desired in its premiere
production, but since then the two sister-maids and their mistress have
frequently been played by men. Similarly, Herbert's play may owe something to
Genet's Haute Surveillance (Death Watch, 1949), a more oblique and lyrical treatment
of sexual subservience in confinement.
The American critics' demand for homosexual honesty in packaging was answered
by Mart Crowley's (b. 1935) The Boys
in the Band (1968);
drenched in self-pity, predictable in its stereotypes, carrying on the
tradition of the deviant as victim of his own deviance, it nevertheless
presented a half-world independent of heterosexual concerns. Its commercial
success, which opened the flood-gates to similar confessional dramas, was due
in part to its confirming the general public in the view that such a life was
emotionally barren. Although Boys in
the Band did
include a campy sissy in its roster, at least it eschewed the drag queen who
remained a constant in drama of this period (Lanford Wilson's Madness
of Lady Bright, 1964;
Frederick Combs' The Children's Mass, 1973). A rash of commercial farces erupted, using the
homosexual as a trendy type in the hackneyed comic situations; in the West End,
Spitting Image (1966) by Colin Spencer (b. 1933) presented a gay couple
about to have a baby; in New York, Norman, Is
That You! (1972)
by Ron Clark (b. 1933) and Sam Bobrick (b. 1932) and Steambath
(1971) by Bruce Jay
Friedman (b. 1930) exploited coming-out and cruising areas for their crude
cartoons. (The British critic Kenneth Tynan noted that Broadway humor derived
exclusively from Jews and homosexuals.)
The "Liberated" Seventies. In Paris, the phenomenally successful La
Cage aux Folles (Cage
of Queens, 1972) by Jean Poirier ran for four years, its popularity also due to
its reinforcing misconceptions with broad caricatures of glamor drag queens,
ghettoized in a showbiz setting. (When the actor Michel Serrault was asked how
he dared go on in net stockings and ostrichboa at his age, he explained that he
put a spot of red on his nose, and so was not playing a homosexual but a clown
in drag.)
Gay dramatists attempted to infuse the boulevard farce with insider knowledge,
as in A. J. Kronengold's Tub Strip (1973), James Kirkwood's (1930-1989) P.S.
Your Cat Is Dead (1975),
and Terrence McNally's (b. 1939) The Ritz (1975). But the drag queen remained the favored protagonist,
cropping up again in Torch Song Trilogy (1983), three plays by Harvey Fierstein which were evolved
in a gay theatre and then transferred successfully to Broadway to win a Tony
Award. Significantly,
Fierstein's only popular success since was his libretto for Jerry Herman's (b.
1933) musical comedy version of La Cage
aux Folies (1983),
which coarsened an already simplistic sitcom to suit the tired businessman.
Heterosexual playwrights like David Rabe and David Mamet seemed unable to get
beyond the notion that same-sex affection spelled doom, a collapse of
personality. Meanwhile, homosexual dramatists were moving beyond such clichés. It is noteworthy that Robert Patrick and Lanford Wilson (both b. 1937)
first gained recognition on the New York stage in 1964 with oppressed
characters: the obsessed older man in Patrick's The
Haunted Host and
the suicidal drag queen in Wilson's The
Madness of Lady Bright. After treating other themes for more than a decade, they then took a
less hysterical approach to the subject: Patrick in Kennedy's
Children (197'3)
offered a homosexual as a type of his times, and by 1983 was writing
specifically for gay audiences in such plays as Blue
Is for Boys. Wilson
matured to present homosexual relationships and characters as natural features
of the American landscape in The Fifth
of fuly (1978)
and Burn This (1987). Similarly, Albert Innaurato (b. 1948) could
balance his obese and pathetic freak in The
Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie (1977) with a humorous, boy-next-door seduction in Gemini (1977).
It was the "worthiness" and remoteness of the subject and the familiarity
of its treatment which dictated how the general public would react to plays
about gay life. Bent(1978) by Martin Sherman, an overwrought picture of
persecution in Nazi Germany, couched in the prose of Masterpiece Theatre, was
acclaimed; Forty-Deuce (1981) by Alan Bowne, a much more authentic and original
piece of work concerning the teenaged hustlers and their Johns who hang out
around Times Square, was reviled. Black American playwrights tended to define
homosexuality as a decadent white threat to their virility. The work of Imamu
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones, b. 1934) grew more homophobic as his political radicalism
increased: The Toilet (1964), a self-styled "play about love," seems to
sanction the embrace of the white "queer" and the black youth, yet
Baraka's public statements have attacked homosexuals violently. James Baldwin
(1924-1987), excoriated by the radical black community for
"collaboration," never ventured on a theatrical equivalent of Giovanni's
Room. Ed Bullins (b.
1935), who portrayed a stereotypical "bull dyke" in Clara's
Ole Man (1965),
boasted that his directors were not "twisted and trying to find the latest
fad that the faggots are trying to make a new Hair
out of."
The reference was to the "hippie" musical Hair
(1967), which, with the
pseudo-sophisticated revue Oh!
Calcutta! (1969),
presented unorthodox sexual practices as natural variants; but the notion of
homosexual as villain persisted even in a counter-culture phenomenon like the
rock musical Jesus Christ
Superstar (by
Andrew Lloyd Webber, 1971): the disciple who loves Christ most ardently turned
out to be Judas, and Herod is played as a sequined screamer. Exclusively gay
musicals could not redress the balance: Al Carmines' (b. 1936) The
Faggot (1973),
meant as a populist and ecumenical plea for love, was scorned by activists for
stereotyping, and the novelties Boy Meets
Boy (by Bill Solly and
Donald Ward, 1975) and Lovers (1975) enjoyed no particular shelf-life. However, The
Rocky Horror Show (1973)
by Richard O'Brien, especially in its cult film avatar, revealed how familiar psychopathia
sexualis had
become to a youthful mass public.
More vital was the explosion of "low camp" transvestitic theatre that
emerged from New York's underground, in tandem with Andy Warhol's Factory.
Characteristically, the earliest of these playwrights were Warhol hangers-on:
the transvestite actor Jackie Curtis (b. 1947) with Glamour,
Glory and Gold: The Life ofNola Noonan, Goddess and Star (1967), and the scenarist Ronald Tavel (b. 1941) with the
jungle extravaganza Gorilla Queen (1966). An important hothouse was John Vaccaro's Theater of
the Ridiculous, which forged one major talent in the person of Charles Ludlam
(1940-1987). The basic technique of the Ridiculous style was pastiche, trashing
Western civilization by mingling high culture and popular totems, and lacing
it all with genital humor and gender switches. Ludlam's plays, beginning with When
Queens Collide (1967),
and culminating in his own Ridiculous Theatrical Company [Bluebeard,
1970; The
Grand Tarot, 1971;
Camille, 1973; Stage
Blood, 1974,
etc.) were virtual palimpsests, shrewdly inlaying classical allusions and
quotations into pop art. A consummate comedian, best known for his portrayals
of Marguerite Gautier and Galas (a monster diva based on Callas), Ludlam was
surrounded by lesser talents whose ineptitude made its own comment on the aspirations
of the professional theatre. His influence is strong on such an epigone as
Charles Busch (b. 1955), whose Vampire
Lesbians of Sodom (1985)
and Psycho Beach Party (1987) are less cultured, less threatening, and therefore
more accessible than Ludlam's work.
In the wake of the political events of 1968, feminist and gay liberation politics
gave rise to a number of agitprop groups, and by the mid-1970s, theatre
collectives and "coming-out" plays burgeoned. In London, Gay
Sweatshop, organized by Ed Berman in 1975, staged luncht ime bills of short
plays dealing with identity, censorship, and relationships; the actors were
professionals, many of whom, such as Simon Callow and Anthony Sher (both b.
1949), were to become highly articulate luminaries of the establishment stage.
In 1977, the Sweatshop divided into men's and women's groups, the latter
tending to revue-like formats. In Holland, the Rooie Flikkers (or The Softies)
became prominent.
New York counterparts likes TOSOS (The Other
Side of the Stage, New York, 1972-77] and the Stonewall Theater were both more
polemical and less professional in their achievements; they developed their
own playwrights, such as Doric Wilson (b. 1939], William M. Hoffman (b. 1939),
Philip Blackwell and Arch Brown, who preached to the converted, but provided a
sense of cultural solidarity. Jonathan Katz' docudrama Coming
Out! (1975) supplied a useful history
lesson for the newly aware. The Glines Theater (founded 1976) nurtured talents
likeFierstein, whose early work, such asFlatbush
Tosca (1975), made comment through reductive
comedy; and the gifted Jane Chambers (1937-1983), whose Last
Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980) has
become a staple in lesbian theatre. The proliferation of similar groups in other
cities led to the creation of a Gay Theater Alliance in 1978 to provide a
network. Gender-fuck troupes like The Cockettes and the Angels of Light in San
Francisco and Centola and the Hot Peaches, another Warhol-sponsored enterprise,
in New York, combined shock tactics, high camp, glitter rock, and reverse
glamor to achieve their effects. They have been succeeded by less strident,
more recondite performance artists like Tim Miller and Holly Hughes.
Lesbian Troupes. A
score of lesbian ensembles quickly sprang up in the wake of feminist theatre
groups, among them the Lavender Cellar in Minneapolis (founded 1973), the Red
Dyke Theater in Atlanta (founded 1974), and the Lesbian-Feminist Theater
Collective of Pittsburgh (founded 1977). Although they produced plays by
Chambers, Pat Surcicle [Prisons, 1973),
and the poetic imagist Joan Schenkar, their repertories, as in England,
emphasized satiric revue. This was especially the case at the WOW Cafe in New
York's East Village, founded by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw in 1982; Alice
Forrester's subversive parody Heart of
the Scorpion and Holly Hughes'
self-regarding satire The Well of Horniness
(both 1985) were typical offerings.
Developments in World Theatre. Australia,
perhaps because of its willfully macho image, tended to dramatize homosexual
life in transvestite terms, equating the gay male with the drag queen. The
best-known examples are Peter Kenna's (b. 1930) Mates
(1975), whose catalytic character is yet
another depressed and depressive nightclub performer; and Steve J. Spears' (b.
1951) The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (1976),
a one-character tragi-comedy of a middle-aged cross-dresser who gets too close
to a student and ends up all but lobotomized. A Gay Theater Company was formed
in Sydney in 1979 to present a more balanced picture of the varieties of
homosexual experience.
Outside the English-speaking world, homosexuality has not played a pre-eminent
part in mainstream drama. Even Mishima (1925-1970) did not choose to treat it,
although his own sado-masochistic penchants surface in his Kabuki play The
Drawn-Bow Moon (1969), in which a
naked samurai is tortured on stage. In Germany, Martin Sperr's (b. 1941) fagdszenen
aus Niederbayem (Hunting Scenes from
Lower Bavaria, 1966), showing a young mechanic destroyed by his narrow-minded
provincial community, created a stir and was filmed. The German-language
theatre, on the whole, seemed to equate homosexuality with violence. The
Austrian dramatist Wolfgang Bauer (b. 1941) in Magic
Afternoon (1968) had two
layabouts indulge in kissing to torment a young woman, and in Change
(1969) a gay art-dealer has his face shoved
in broken glass. In Bodo Strauss' Der Park (The
Park, 1985), Cyprian, the type of the creative artist, is brutally murdered by
the black park-attendant he fancies. Rainer Fassbinder used his films more than
his plays to express his concepts of social and interpersonal exploitation.
Although Parisian audiences flocked to a boulevard farce like La
Cage aux Folles, a more select public
has appreciated the absurdist plays of Argentinian-born Copi: he has played in
his own works,
such as Lehomosexuel
ou La difficulté de s'exprímez (The Homosexual or The Difficulty of Self-Expression, 19 71) and Le Trigo (The Fridge, 1983). The Soviet theatre, reflecting its society, has
diligently avoided the subject; productions of Williams' Stieetcai and Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, lor instance, cut all allusions to homosexuality. In Italy, on the other hand,
the fashionable theatre and opera have been dominated by elegant
director-designers like Luchino Visconti and his disciple Franco Zeffirelli (b.
1923). They were responsible for introducing Williams and Albee to Italy, but
theiccusations leveled at the Templars by Philip IV in 1307 when
he issued the order to arrest them was that initiates to the Order kissed its
receptors on the buttocks, stomach, navel, spine, and mouth and were enjoined
to commit sodomy. In spite of the most exquisite tortures, which included roasting
the feet until the bones fell from their sockets, only two or three of the
accused Templars confessed to committing sodomy, which they either regarded as
more heinous than blasphemy and heresy or believed themselves innocent of
committing, though many more confessed to the other two offenses. Some seventy
said that they had been ordered to commit sodomy but denied having done so.
Scholarly opinion is about equally divided as to whether recruits had to
perform the osculum infante (infamous kiss), i.e., rimming the arsehole of their
superiors at the secret midnight initiation rituals. No one can deny that in
the minds of these tortured heroes, sodomy was a worse sin to confess than
heresy and blasphemy, a view cultivated by the scholastic philosophers
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas during the thirteenth century. Franciscans
and Dominicans, enemies of the order and leaders of the Inquisition, helped in
the prosecution and propaganda. More than ever since the fall of the Roman
Empire, a Catholic secular power, the Capetian monarchy, already inured by its
bloodthirsty campaigns against the Albigensians, was exploiting the supposed
ties between demonic powers and heretics, blasphemers, and sodomites - against
whom the Christian clergy had for so long warned. This was a momentous
precedent for Hitler in the twentieth century, but a more immediate one for the
torture and murder of Philip's son-in-law Edward II of England in 1327,
engineered by Philip's daughter Isabella.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Malcolm
Barber, The
Trial of the Templars, New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1978,- Alain Demurger, Vie et mart de l'ordre da
Temple, 1118-1314, Paris: Seuil, 1985; Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth, London: Oxford University Press, 1982.
William A. Percy
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-1892)
English poet laureate. The
son of a country rector, Tennyson began writing poetry at the age of eight. In
1830 he published his first significant book, Poems
Chiefly Lyrical. Three
years later occurred what was probably the most important event of his life:
the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam in Vienna. They had met at Trinity
College, Cambridge in 1828, and had taken two continental trips together,
which had deeply impressed the poet. Tennyson's continual and intense brooding
over the loss yielded many manuscript drafts, which he finally combined in his
major poetic sequence, In Memoriam, published anonymously in 1850. Later he gained fame for a
number of individual shorter poems, as well as for the Arthurian cycle, The
Idyls of the King (1859).
Profiting from the innovations of the romantic poets, Tennyson enjoyed a superb
ear, and was able to combine color and richness of imagery with ethical statement.
By no means the apologist for Victorian beliefs that he is sometimes taken to
be, Tennyson found the way to capture some of the chief moral dilemmas of his
age in verse of matchless eloquence.
From the first, In Memoriam puzzled and disconcerted many of Tennyson's admirers. It is
difficult to avoid the challenge of a prolonged expostulation to a dead friend
that speaks of "A spectral doubt which makes me cold,/ that I shall be thy
mate no more." For Tennyson, Hallam had once been "the centre of a
world's desire," its "central warmth diffusing bliss." The
years had only brought more depth of feeling: "My love involves the love
before;/ my love is vaster passion now;/ tho' mixed with God and Nature thou,/1
seem to love thee more and more."
In a contemporary review of In
Memoriam, Charles
Kingsley found the poetic sequence a descendant of "the old tales of David
and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, Socrates and Alcibiades, Shakespeare and his
nameless friend, of 'love passing the love of woman.'" Benjamin Jowett,
wondering whether it was manly or natural to linger in such a mood, excused the
poems by speaking vaguely of their "Hellenism." For a century and a
quarter after the publication critics twisted and turned to avoid directly
addressing the disturbing implications of this pivotal work. To be sure, Tennyson
complicated matters by conflating the love of his dead comrade with the love of
Christ. Probably in his own mind the poet laureate was never sure what the
meaning of the whole searing experience was. It is significant that he was able
to marry his cousin Emily Sellwood, as he had long planned, only after the
final publication of In Memoriam.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Christopher
Craft,'"Descend and Touch and Enter': Tennyson's Strange Manner of
Address," Cendets, 1 (1988), 83-101; Alan Sinfield, Alfred
Tennyson, Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Wayne R. Dynes
Tesla, Nikola (1856-1943)
Serbian-American scientist
and inventor. Born the son of an Orthodox priest in the village of Smiljan in
the province of Lik, he received his higher education at the Technische Hochschule
in Graz and at the Charles University in Prague. In 1882 he worked for the telephone
company in Budapest and invented the amplifier, and in February of that year
discovered the phenomenon of the reverse magnetic pole. Between 1882 and 1884
he worked in Paris and Strasbourg, rebuilding the Edison dynamos. Then he came
to America and worked with Edison himself for a time. In 1886 he invented the
arc lamp for lighting city streets, and in April 1887 he founded the Tesla
Electric Company. He also built the first high-efficiency multiphasic current
machines and motors. In November and December 1887 he applied for patents for
the Tesla induction coil and other inventions. In 1888-89 he worked for
Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, applied for a patent for the transmission of
alternating current, and built the first high-frequency generators, and in 1890
he discovered high-frequency currents. In 1892 he patented a transformer to
increase oscillating currents to high potentials, and began his work on
wireless telegraphy.
Between then and 1899 he pioneered in the development of radio communication
and in the transmission of electricity without wires, which he realized at a
distance of more than 1000 kilometers. This marked the end of his creative
period, though he continued to be an active inventor for more than twenty
years afterward. He became an American citizen and lived in New York until his
death in 1943.
Tesla never married; no woman, with the exception of his mother and his
sisters, ever shared the smallest fraction of his life. He believed that he had
inherited his abilities as an inventor from his mother. As a young man he was
not unattractive, though too tall and slender to be an ideal masculine type;
he was handsome of face and wore clothes well. He idealized women, yet planned
his own life in a coldly objective manner that excluded women entirely. Only
the highest type of woman could win his friendship,- the remainder of the sex
had no attraction for him whatever. In 1924 he gave an interview published in Collier's
magazine in which he
asserted: "The struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end
up in a new sex order, with th females superior. . . . The female mind has
demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of
men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman
will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated. . . .
Women will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress."
Tesla tried to convince the world that he had succeeded in eliminating love and
romance from his life, but he merely drew a veil over the secret chapter of his
life which an intolerant world had no right to know. The mystery of his
devotion to science is one of those episodes in the annals of invention and
discovery that are illuminated by insight into the androgynous character of
genius.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Margaret
Cheney, Tesla:
Man Out of Time, New
York: Laurel, 1983; John J. O'Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla, New York: Ives Washburn, 1944.
Warren Johansson
Thailand
Previously known as Siam,
in 1939 the country was officially renamed Prathet Thai, or Thailand -
literally, "the land of the free." The change of name closely
followed a change in the country's form of government, from the previous
absolute monarchy to the modem constitutional monarchy with a representative
legislature. With some fifty-two million citizens, Thailand occupies a key
position in the rapidly developing Asian economic sphere, and aspires to join
Taiwan and Korea as a world-wide economic force.
An ethnically and linguistically diverse nation, Thailand began to assume its
present shape only within the last thousand years, and many key elements of
Thai culture reached their present form in the relatively recent past. The
formation of the nation began with the arrival in Thailand of members of a
linguistic and cultural group designated by the term "Tai." (Some
important members of this group are the Siamese, the Lao, and the Shans of
northeastern Burma; altogether the "Tai" comprise about 70 million
persons in southeast Asia.) The modern Thai may be a descendant of the
incoming Tai, but he may also come from the indigenous Mon and Khmer groups
whom the Tai joined, or from much later Chinese and Indian immigrants to
Thailand. The modem Thai is not so much a member of a race as a person claiming
fealty to the state of Thailand; secondarily, a Thai is identified by his
language ("a speaker of Thai").
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Thailand managed to avoid
colonization by any European power: the primary foreign influence was British,
and later influence came from the United States, but the Thai always retained
their independence. King Rama VI (reigned 1910-25), a poet and translator of Shakespeare, was reputed
to be homosexual. During the 1930s the Thai government hired the libertarian
French sexologist Rene Guyon as an advisor, and he may have had a hand in the
Thai retention of their sexual freedom.
Thailand remains well over ninety percent Buddhist. Thai Buddha figures are
frequently effeminate, especially the so-called "Walking Buddha."
Thai insistence on personal freedom carries with it a logically necessary
corollary: a strong tolerance of eccentricities in other people. One result is
that Thailand is one of the few countries on earth where homosexuality is not
condemned or treated in any special way. During the 1970s, for example, the Minister
of Defense won the national Thai contest for best female dresser. The
combination was not perceived as dreadful, but as sanuk,
a key Thai concept which
roughly translates as "fun" or "pleasure." The toleration
of homosexuality is not a modern development. Somerset Maugham remarked long
ago that "the Siamese were the only people on earth with an intelligent
attitude about such matters." Two recent Thai prime ministers have been
reported to be gay.
One result of viewing sexual pleasure as a domain with little moral content is
that prostitution is not a highly stigmatized activity. In fact, Bangkok is renowned
for its thriving "sex industry," which horrifies many Westerners (who
are, of course, simultaneously tempted by all the perceived depravity).
The male prostitute is not highly stigmatized; it is perfectly possible to make
a transition from a year as a Buddhist monk to a year of working as an
"off-boy" in Bangkok, without abandoning any of the religion one has
absorbed and without losing self-esteem. (The "off-boy" is a young
man employed at a gay bar who may be taken home by clients; the term is
British.) The suburbs of Bangkok also have "off-boy" establishments
which cater almost entirely to Thai customers, and which are more polite as a
result. The misbehavior of foreign tourists has caused some of these Thai
institutions to bar foreigners, beginning in 1988. Thai culture is inherently
nonconfrontational, and the Thai would never think of trying to correct a
foreigner's rude, loud, or stingy behavior. The only way out is a generic ban
on the offending parties. As one owner explained: "The foreigners were
scaring the boys." Bangkok also has discos, saunas, and clubs where gay
men can meet on a noncommercial or freelance basis.
While Thai society is generally lacking in homophobia, and also has little
antipathy to age-graded relationships, an age of consent for males was first
established (with little publicity) in 1987, at 15.
Thai society lacks Western concepts of homosexuality as a distinct identity,
though this situation may be changing. Traditionally, the Thai conceptualization
of male homosexuality is similar to the Mediterranean model: the penetrator is
considered a "complete male," and any normal male may find himself in
this role; his opposite is the "katoey," a term which embraces
transvestism, transsexuality, hermaphroditism, and effeminacy. The katoey is
expected to remain sexually passive and submissive, and to have no interest in
women. While not discriminated against as homosexuals, the katoey suffer from
the limited position of women in the male-dominated Thai culture. Not all males
who take passive roles are katoey, however, and reciprocity in sex is not
unknown.
To these traditional concepts is now being added a more flexible concept,
imported from the West, of a "gay" (the term itself is borrowed into
the Thai language, which has no counterpart).
Thai homosexuality is seldom discussed in public, although changes in this area
are noticeable in the emergence of five homoerotic or bisexual publications, led by Mithuna
(bi), Mithuna, fr.
(gay), and Neon
(gay), a regular radio program
broadcast from Bangkok, and the beginnings of gay literary output in the form
of novels and short stories.
Attitudes on homosexuality show marked differences by class, relating to power positions. While there appears to be no
"queerbashing" violence directed
against homosexuality, there seems to be a considerable amount of coercion,
abuse of authority positions, and rape of
males. Peter Jackson comments that "the lessened resistance to having sex
with a man means that male rape or sexual attacks on men appear to be
significantly more common than in the West." As in other cultures,
however, rape of males is a taboo subject and is not reported to authorities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Eric Allyn
and John P. Collins, The
Men of Thailand, San
Francisco and Bangkok: Bua Luang, 1987; Peter A. Jackson, Male Homosexuality in Thailand, New York: Global Academic Publishers, 1989.
Geoff Puterbaugh
Theatre and Drama
As public performance,
accessible to a wide range of spectators, the theatre has been more subject to
the constraints of censorship
than any other long-established
art. It is expected to confirm and endorse standard social values and to present
the heterodox or the taboo in a manner which will incite either derision or
revulsion. Consequently, homosexual sentiments, behavior and concerns have,
until recently, rarely appeared on stage; when they have, their presentation
has often been skewed to the expectations and sensibilities of
convention-bound playgoers.
At the same time, the practicing theatre, in its gregariousness, its opportunities
for artistic creativity, and its relative tolerance, has been, at least from
the sixteenth century, both in Western and Eastern cultures, an arena where
talented homosexuals have flourished. From the ancient Romans until very
recently, performers were distrusted as outcasts, misfits in the scheme of
things: the outlaw actor and the sexual heretic were often the same individual
(and some psychiatrists are fond of equating the actor's egoist exhibitionism
with an alleged homosexual love of display).
As homosexuality has become more conspicuous in everyday life, the stage,
traditionally regarded as the mirror of life, has portrayed it more openly,
both as a subject worthy of dramatic treatment and as an attitude that informs
the production.
Ancient Greek Theatre. Greek classical theatre developed in a culture saturated with homoerotic
attitudes and behaviors, but owing, perhaps, to deliberate excision by
Byzantine and monastic librarians, there is little surviving evidence of these
aspects in drama. Lost tragedies include Aeschylus' Laius
(467 b.c.),
about the man thought by
the Greeks to have invented pederasty; Niobe, which displayed the love-life of Niobe's sons; and Myrmidons,
concerning Achilles' grief
at the death of his lover Patroclus. This last was a favorite of Aristophanes,
who quoted it frequently. Other lost plays on the Myrmidon theme were written
by Philemon (436/5-379 b.c.) and Strattis [409-375 b.c.).
Sophocles, too, wrote Lovers
of Achilles, whose
surviving fragment describes the intricate workings of passion. The
oft-dramatised tragedy of the house of Labdacus was, in the earlier myths,
triggered by Laius' lust-motivated abduction of the son of his host during his
foreign exile. Sophocles eschewed this episode, but it was the subject of
Euripides' lost Chrysippus (ca. 409 b.c.), apparently created as a vehicle for his own male favorite
Agathon (447-400/399 b.c.j, who was noted for his "aesthetic" way of life.
(Another lost Chrysippus was composed by Strattis.) Euripides' masterpiece The
Bacchae (405
b.c.] depicts the androgynous god Dionysus unsexing and demeriting his antagonist and kinsman Pentheus, before he
sends him to his doom.
But whereas the love and lust of man for man was considered worthy of tragic
treatment, effeminate manners were the stuff of comedy: Gnesippus was ridiculed
for inappropriately using a tragic chorus of effeminates. The successful comic
poet Eupolis |445-ca. 415 b.c.) was attracted to this theme; his Those
Who Dye Their Hair [Baptai, 416/15 b.c.) satirized members of the circle of Alcibiades, who was
rumored to have had him drowned for it. Surviving fragments suggest that they
were ritual transvestites who spoke an obscene lingo of their own in ceremonies
worshipping the goddess Cotytto. Eupolis' The Flatterers
[Kolakes] (431
b.c.), a satire on parasitism with sidelights on compliant sexuality, won
first prize over Aristophanes' Peace.
The comedies of
Aristophanes teem with references to pederasty and cross-dressing. Although his
earthy heroes have no hesitation in declaring what fun it is to watch naked
boys at the gymnasium and to fondle their scrotums, the effeminate [euryproktos
or "broad-ass")
is mercilessly mocked. In The Clouds
(423 b.c.),
for instance, Right Reason
rhapsodizes on the "moisture and down" that bloom on a youth's
genitals "as on quinces" and wins his argument. Yet Cleisthenes is
regularly made a laughingstock for his lady-like carrying-on, and the central
device of the Women's Festival
[Thesmophoriazousai] (411
b.c.) is to have the protagonist disguise himself as a woman, under
Cleisthenes' instruction, thus running the danger of being buggered when
captured and bound.
Roman Theatre. Buggery on compulsion remained a standard comic topos
in the Mediterranean
basin. In Roman comedy, Plautus' characters mistake one another for eunuchs and
effeminates; his Casina (ca. 190-180 b.c.), in particular, is packed with jokes, puns and equivocations
on the theme. Sodomy frequently crops up in the farcical fabula
togata, especially
those of Lucius Afranius (fl. later second century of our era), credited to
have introduced homosexuality into the genre. Among the later Greeks, actors
were respected as artists (Mary Renault's novel The
Mask of Apollo offers
a persuasive recreation); but in Rome, they were legally classified as
"infamous," even if popularly regarded as desirable sexual catches.
The Emperors Caligula, Nero, and Trajan often took their male bedmates from the
ranks of actors, dancers, and mimes; the last became notorious for the
indecency of their performances. To increase the eroticism of their shows, the
mimes introduced women on stage in what had hitherto been an exclusively male
preserve.
The Orient. In the Oriental theatre, women were frequently banned from
the stage, either for religious or moralistic reasons; the resultant
professional female impersonator, the tan of China's Peking Opera, introduced in the reign of Ch'ien
Lung (1735-1796), and the onnagata of Japan's Kabuki theatre, replacing boy players after
1652, exercised a pseudo-female allure. In China actors, no matter what they
played, were frequently prostitutes, sought after by statesmen and scholars:
among the most famous of these actor-favorites were Chin Feng (fl. 1590), Wei
Ch'angsheng (fl. 1780), and Ch'en Yinkuan (fl. 1790). The boy acting-troupes of
nineteenth-century China were often equated with male brothels, and certainly
the boys' looks were regarded as more important than their talent. But these
pedophilic passions were never reflected in the Chinese dramatic repertory. On
the Kabuki stage, on the other hand, a bisexual love affair is the pivot of Tsuwamono
Tongen Sogo (1697),
and a homosexual one comprises a subplot in Asakusa
Reigenki.
The most popular Korean
entertainment form before 1920 was the Namsadang, a traveling troupe of
variety performers; a homosexual commune of 40 to 50 males, it has been
described as the "voice of the common people" [Young Ja Kim). The
company was divided into sutdongmo
("butch") and yodongmo
("queen")
members, the novices serving the elders and playing the female roles. Despite
Confucian disapproval of pederasty, the troupe's sexual identity did not put
off village audiences, probably because its status as an outcast group made
conventional standards irrelevant to it. The institutionalized homosexuality of
the Namsadang raises questions about similar itinerant companies in ancient and
medieval Europe, and has an analogue in the enforced male bonding of acrobat
troupes. Late nineteenth-century commentators on the circus noted that homosexual
relationships were common among gymnasts and aerialists, a combination of
physical contact and the need for trust. Bands of mummers and mountebanks may
have shared such an ethos.
The Middle Ages and Beginnings of the Modern
Theatre in Europe. Christianity
was antagonistic to the theatre, partly on grounds of immorality; Clement of
Alexandria specifically rebuked the obscenity of mimes who brought cinaedia
or male prostitution on
stage. When the theatre in Europe was reborn from the Church, the religious
teleology of the drama precluded treatment of illicit love, except in imitation
of the classics. Nor was the burning of Sodom ever treated by the mystery
plays, although Jesuit school-drama in the Baroque age would dramatize it with
accompanying fireworks, as in Cornelius a Marca's Bustum
Sodomae (Ghent,
1615). The Renaissance revived the comic treatment of homosexuality, first in
ribald farces by Bolognese students, mocking burghers and clergy: one of these
is Ugolino Pisani's Philogenia (after 1435), wherein the boy hustler Epifebo deploys his
charms to snare the venal priest Prodigio.
Sexual ambiguity is the basis of "gender-confusion" comedy in which a
male or female character disguises him/ herself as the opposite sex and
attracts the amorous attentions of the "wrong" sex. The archetype is
Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena's (1470-1520) bawdy La
Calandria (1513),
but it was a common device in commedia
dell'arte as
well as in comme-dia erudita. Involuntary buggery remained a basic joke: in Niccoló Machiavelli's (1469-1527]La Clizia (1525), oldNicomaco is sodomized in his sleep by his
servant Siro. Pietro Aretino's UMarescalco
(1526/ 7) features a
pederastic hero, a chief groom of the stables who is obliged by his master to
marry a woman only to find to his great relief that the bride is a boy (this
served as a source of Ben Jonson's Epicoene, 1609).
Although Spanish Golden Age drama dropped the homosexual references when it
adapted Italian comedy, it often featured the mujer
varonil, a
woman in men's clothes who takes on the aggressive role in the love-chase;
farcical transvestism was not uncommon, as in Lope de Vega's (1562-1635) El
mesón de la corte (The
Inn of the Court, 1583?) and Monroy y Suva's El caballerodama (The Lady Cavalier), in which two men in drag are tricked
into bed together. Intense Platonic relationships between single-sex couples
are often depicted, as in the anonymous El crotalón
(ca. 1553), but in a
society where sodomites were burned at the stake during the Inquisition,
orthodox sexuality always prevailed by the play's ending.
The Elizabethan Stage. The Elizabethan gender-confusion drama was complicated by
the fact that women were played by boy actors, a development from school drama.
Thus, in William Shakespeare's As You
Like It (1599/1600),
there is the intricate enigma of a boy actor playing a girl disguising herself
as a youth who acts as a woman to aid his/her wooer. The practice also required
adjustments in performance convention: nowhere in Antony
and Cleopatra (1607)
do the passionate lovers kiss. This aspect of the stage fueled condemnation by
Puritans and reformers, who damned it as a hotbed of sodomy,-there is scant
hard evidence of homosexual activity among players and playwrights, but the
imputation is not without foundation. Clear cases can be made for Nicholas
Udall (1505-1556), headmaster of Eton and author of Ralph
Roister Doister (between
1534 and 1541), who admitted to "buggery" with one of his students;
and for Christopher Marlowe, whose own predilections found their way into his
work: the grand amour of the king and his favorite Piers Gaveston in Edward
II (1593), the court
of Henri in in The Massacre at Paris
(1593), and the scene
between Ganymede and Jupiter in Dido Queen
of Carthage (1594).
Whatever the homosexual component of his sonnets, Shakespeare only occasionally
portrayed the love of one man for another in his dramatic works: when he did it
was as a consuming, unspoken passion that expressed itself in deeds: Antonio's
sacrifice for Bassanio in The
Merchant of Venice (1594
or 1596); the sea-captain Antonio's protection of Sebastian in Twelfth
Night (1600); and
Achilles' avenging of Patroclus in Tioilus
and Cressida (1602/3).
Further Developments in England. Tudor Morality plays packed with Protestant propaganda had
displayed allegorical characters named Sodomy to stand for corrupt, courtly,
and Catholic manners (as in John Bale's Three
Laws, 1538). Throughout
the Jacobean and Caroline periods, pederasty continued to be associated on
stage with (usually Italian) luxury and high life, a character called Sodome
appearing in Cosmo Manuche's The Loyal
Lovers as
late as 1652. John Marston's The Turk (1610) contains an outspoken scene between the erotic
tourist Bordello and his page Pantofle. In William Davenant's Albovine
(1629), the Lombard hero
has a minion, and in his The Cruel
Brother (1630),
the Duke of Siena cherishes a favorite who "in his love .../ He holdeth thus in his Armes, in
fearfull care/ Not to bruse you with his deere embracements."
After the Restoration of the Stuarts and the introduction of actresses on the
English stage, the heterosexual ingredient became more realistic in comedy,
more idealistic in tragedy, though without entirely ousting the competition.
Montague Summers typically overstates the case when he refers to "the
prevalence of uranianism in the theatre" of the time; it must be noted
that fops, although mocked for such Frenchified behavior as the exchange of
kisses in George Etherege's The Man of
Mode (1676), long to bed
down women exclusively. (Despite their names, for instance, Sir Gaylove and Sir
Butterfly in NewburghHamilton's The
Doating Lovers [1715]
are both inveterate womanizers.) Pederasty is associated not with effeminates,
but with decadent foreign courts or decayed rakes who need a new stimulus: in
Edward Howard's The Usurper (1664), the comments of Damocles and Hugo de Petra
concerning a page are openly pedophilic, and in Aphra Behn's The
Amorous Prince (1671),
Lorenzo tries to seduce the boy Philibert who, however, turns out to be a girl
in disguise. In Thomas Otway's The
Souldier's Fortune (1681),
an elderly fool is delighted to discover - or so he thinks - that a girl he is
tumbling is a boy. The rhymed extravaganza Sodom,
or The Quintessence of Debauchery (1684?), attributed to the Earl of Rochester, which partly hymns the
superiority of buggery to "normal" practices, was never performed.
The matchmaker Coupler is the only blatant "queen" in Restoration
drama; in John Vanbrugh's The
Relapse ¡1696)
"old Sodom" as he is known requests the hero's sexual favors as a
reward for his complicity. He represents a new trend, for in the eighteenth
century the flamboyant fop character, like the audience itself, underwent a
process of embourgeoisement. The fop was shown as an overreaching member of the middle
class, usually a simpering "molly," more distinctly a denizen of a
subculture than his predecessors. The molly's first stage appearance may be
the "nice fellow" Maiden "who values himself upon his
Effeminacies," in Thomas Baker's comedy Tunbridge-Walks;
or, The Yeoman of Kent (1703),
believed by his contemporaries to be a portrait of the author's former
behavior. Other examples are Varnish and Bardach in Kensington
Gardens (1720)
by the actor John Leigh; the much-imitated Fribble in David Garrick's A
Miss in Her Teens (1747);
"The Daffodils" in Garrick's The
Male-Coquette (1757);
and Jessamy in Isaac Bickerstaffe's Lionel and
Clarissa (1768).
A spate of pamphlets and articles about similar "soft gentlemen"
suggest that these types did not exaggerate real life models by much. Within
the theatrical community, a number of homosexual figures were conspicuous,
among them Leigh (1689-1726) himself. Of the boy-actors who continued to play
women into the Restoration period, Edward Kynaston (1643-1712) was accused by
Dryden of being the Duke of Buckingham's catamite; and James Nokes (d. 1696),
who played the title role in The Maid
of the Mill (1660)
and later kept a toyshop, was castigated in the Satyr
on the Players as
"This Bhigger] Nokes, whose unwieldy T[arse]/ Weeps to be buryed in his
Foreman's A[rse]." Later, the popular comedian Samuel Foote (1720-1777),
who often played old women, was tried and acquitted for sodomy with his man-servant.
In the Regency period, a post-mortem revealed the actress and prostitute Eliza
Edwards (1814-1833) to have been a male transvestite.
French Theatre. When Mme. de Maintenon, the morganatic wife of Louis XIV, requested the archbishop of Paris to follow the example of Cromwell's parliament
and order the closing of the French theatres, he resisted by pointing out that
the stage, with its heterosexual concerns, prevented the spread of
"unnatural vice." Under the French Regency (1715-23), a number of
private pornographic theatres were maintained by the noblesse,
but homosexual activities
were rarely shown; an exception was the private theatre of the Duchesse de
Villeroi, where lesbian comedies performed by Opera dancers ended in orgies.
One of the erotic authors, Charles Colle (1709-1783), planned a vaudeville
based on " those
gentlemen, "but gave it up allegedly because he could find no rhyme for bougre.
In La
Comtesse d'Olonne,
attributed to Bussy-Rabutin, Le Comte de Guice,
described as a
"gentilhomme de la manchette" is finally converted to heterosexuality; similarly, in Les
Plaisirs du cloître, sapphic
flagellation gives
way to ordinary love-making. A later parody of these works, Les
Esprits des moeurs au XVIII* siècle, attributed to Charles
de Nerciat, presents
a graphie scene of lesbian lovemaking. The
French acting profession harbored many deviants: the great tragedienne Françoise Raucourt presided over a lesbian secret society, the Anandrynes; the
harlequin Carlo Bertinazzi (1713-1783), admired by Garrick for his eloquent back,
had a liaison with the married actor Favart. The handsome young actor Fleury
(Abraham-Joseph Benard, 1750-1822), was said to be kept by the Venetian
ambassador at an annual pension of eight thousand pounds; he had a declared
admirer in Prince Henry of Prussia, Frederick the Great's homosexual brother.
Europe from the End of the Old Regime to
World War I. From
its inception, the most prominent figures in the German theatre were unabashed
pederasts, starting with the classical actors August Wilhelm Iffland
(1759-1814) and Wilhelm Kunst (Kunze, 1799-1859), both much valued by Goethe.
Some of the greatest German dramatists are believed to have had similar
propensities which nourished their works: Friedrich von Schiller ( 1759-1805) left behind an unfinished play, Die
Malteser (The
Knights of Malta, 1794-1803), whose Crequi and St. Priest exhibit homophilic
feelings; August von Kotzebue's (1761-1819) tendency to lachrymose
sentimentality rather than sensuality in his portrayal of love may be attributed
to his nature. The tastes of Heinrich von Kleist and the Austrian Franz
Grillparzer (1791-1872), on the other hand, are not demonstrated in their
dramatic works. In Vogtland, a workers' neighborhood in northern Berlin, the
Nationaltheater was known before it burned in 1883 as the playhouse of
homosexuals, who included its manager, the "last romantic" star
Hermann Hendrichs (1809-1871), the tragediennes Clara Ziegler (1844-1909) and
Felicita Vestvali (Anne Marie Stegemann, 1829-1880), both of whom played Romeo,
and, among the patrons, Prince Georg of Prussia and J. B. Schweitzer, president
of the All-German Workers' Union. Later, the Viktoriatheater rightfully
inherited its reputation. Josef Kains (1858-1910), the great leading man of
Wilhelmine classical theatre, was, at the age of 27, the final favorite of
Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Simon Karlinsky has argued convincingly for the homosexuality of Russian
playwrights Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol (1809-1852), whose fear of women perspires
through his comedies, and Vladislav Aleksandrovich Ozerov (1770-1816), whose
verse tragedy Dmitrij Donskoj (Dmitry of the Don) (1807) has as a subplot the fervent
devotion of a page for his knight. Homophilic sentiment also motivates Balzac's
melodrama Vautrin (1840), banned not for its content but for the political
satire in its costuming.
Homosexuality, as it came to be defined and recognized in the nineteenth
century, was not unveiled on stage until the fin-de-siecle
cult of decadence made it
modish. A leading star of the Parisian theatre of that period was the
flamboyant Romanian Edouard de Max (1869-1925) who, according to Gide, nursed a
lifelong desire to play Nero, Henri III, and Heliogabalus; a play about him was
written by Andre Boussac de Saint-Marc: Sardanapale
(1926).
Oscar Wilde's aphoristic comedies can be seen as manifestations of a camp
sensibility, and some critics have speculated that the Bunburying of the heroes
of The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) stands for sub rosa excursions into the gay demi-monde. Lytton Strachey
interpreted the main character of A Woman of
No Importance (1893)
as "a wicked Lord, staying in a country house, who has made up his mind to
bugger one of the other guests - a handsome young man of twenty." Wilde's Salome
(1893, prod. 1896) had an
influence on the usually reticent Andre Gide; Saul
(1903, prod. 1922), set in
the Biblical time of David and Jonathan, was his only theatrical paean to an
older man's passion for a younger.
Scandinavia's most illustrious homosexual author, the Danish novelist Herman
Bang (1857-1912), though deeply involved in the theatre, was not an outstanding
dramatist. He founded the first Norwegian artistic cabaret (in Christiania, now
Oslo, 1892), worked in Paris at the experimental Theatre de l'Oeuvre in 1894 as
"scenic instructor," and was director at theFolketheater, Copenhagen,
1898-1901. Despite his insignificance as a playwright, his intimacy with drama
deeply influenced the prose style of his outsider novels. The Swede August
Strindberg (1849-1912) at the outset of his illustrious career was led by his
complex misogyny to introduce evil lesbians as psychic vampire figures into
his writings. In Comrades (1888), a mannish female artist seduces the hero's wife
into a bohemian career; the heroine olMissJuhe
(1889) is doomed because
her mother raised her as a boy and thus undermined her feminine intuition for
survival; and the two-woman one-act The
Stronger (1889)
reflected the author's own insecurities about his wife's women-friends.
Strindberg's later historical dramas about Queen Christina (1901) and Gustav HI (1902) touch glancingly on their
protagonists' sexual nature, the Queen shown to be repelled by the idea of marriage
(a common enough distaste in Strindberg). The modern Swedish play Night
of the Tribades (1975)
by Per Olof Enquist (b. 1934) caused a sensation by exploring Strindberg's
tortured awareness that his first wife was having an affair with another woman.
A lyrical treatment of the male eros was proffered by the Russian poet Mikhail
Afanasievich Kuzmin; several of his plays, including A Dangerous
Precaution (1907)
and The Venetian Madcaps (1912), vaunt the love of two men over that of a man and a
woman. The first professed contemporary gay protagonist in drama is the title
character of Armory-Dauriac's comedy Le Monsieur
aux chrysanthèmes (1908;
the title parodies La Dame aux cameliias),
which satirized the
popularity of elegant homosexuals in society. Deviant characters crop up occasionally
in modernist Italian and Spanish drama - Lorenzaccio in Sem Benelli's La
Maschera di Bruto (The
Mask of Brutus, 1908) and the King in Antonio Buero-Vallejo's Isabela,
reina de corazones
(Isabel, Queen of
Hearts). Sholom Asch's Yiddish melodrama Gott
fun Nekom a
(God of Vengeance, prod. 1907), with its saving love between a lesbian
prostitute and a brothel-keeper's innocent daughter, created no great frisson
when produced in Europe,
but raised a howl of execration in New York in 1922.
Germany was perhaps the first European nation to treat homosexuality frankly,
though as a psychic catastrophe, on the modern stage. Usually historic subject
matter justified its introduction, in plays about Hadrian (Frederiksen, Paul
Heyse), Saul (Wolfskehl), and Frederick the Great (Burchard), or else the play
was based on ancient myth (Elisàr
von Kupffer's Narkissos)
or on stage convention
(Karl von Levetzow's pantomime Die beiden
Pierrots [The
Two Pierrots]). As a "problem" of modern society, homosexuality
appears disguised as the decadent clown Edi in Hermann Bahr's Die Mutter
(The Mother, 1891) and
undisguised as the tormented youth Rudolf in Ludwig Dilsner's fasminblûthen
(Jasmine Blossoms, 1899),
who is one of the first of many to find his way out of the dilemma by shooting
himself. As early as 1902, the critic Hanns Fuchs was complaining that the
denouements of such plays depended too much on the state of the laws: "the
ideal homosexual drama, depicting the conflicts in an individual soul and their
influence on its action and conception of life of homosexuals, is still to be
written." He suggested a dreamer like Grillparzer or a strong-man like
Michelangelo as models.
Fuchs' wish went unanswered. Herbert Hirschberg's Fehler
(Faults, 1906) also
belonged to the school of problem drama. In his "tragedy of sex" Frühlingserwachen
(Spring's Awakening, 1891,
prod. 1906), Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) included a vignette of teenage
homoeroticism amid his spectrum of pubescent anxieties, but again the play's
catastrophe was the result of social attitudes. He came closer to offering an
inner conflict with the Countess Geschwitz, a full-length portrait of an
obsessed tribade in Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1898, prod. 1902) and Die
Büchse der Pandoras (Pandora's
Box, 1904, prod. 1906).
After World War I. The liberation from Victorian values felt after World War I
was reflected in the theatre as well. Expressionist drama often used
adolescent homosexuality as a metaphor for youthful rebellion, morbidity, and
confusion, as in Arnolt Bronnen's Vatermord (Parricide, 1922), Klaus Mann's Anja
und Esther (1925),
and Ferdinand Bruckner's Krankheit
der fugend (The
Disease of Youth, 1926). Bruckner's Die
Verbrecher (Criminals,
1928) included an attack on the infamous Paragraph 175 of the penal code.
Bertolt Brecht's early plays, Baal (1922), Im
Dickicht der Städte (In
the Jungle of Cities, 1924), Edward II (1924), and even Die
Dreigroschen Oper (The
Threepenny Opera, 1928), are filled with erotic male-bonding, partly derived
from Rimbaud. An amateur group, the Theater des Eros, existed between 1921 and
1924 to perform outspoken homosexual liberation dramas in private homes.
Christa Winsloe's Gestern und Heute (Mädchen in Uniform, 1930), filmed and widely revived
outside Germany, presented a girls'-school crush in a tragic light, but put the
blame squarely on old-fashioned values. Throughout the 1920s, in fact, tragedy
was the standard dramatic mode for lesbianism. In France, Edouard Bourdet
(1887-1945) treated upper-class gay males comically in La
Fleur de pois (The
Upper Crust, 1932), but imbued lesbian attraction with dire consequences in La
Prisonnière (The
Captive, 1926). (Its plot had a foreruner in Catulle Mendès' Protectrices,
a pale epigone in Roger
Martin du Gard's Taciturne, 1931, and a German counterpart in Hermann Sudermann's Die
Freundin, 1913/14.)
Federico Garcia Lorca may
have channeled his own predilections into the repressed sexuality of his major
tragedies, for he puts his praise of masculine beauty in the mouths of his
trammelled heroines. More explicit are his early poetic drama Diâlogo
del Amargo (The Bitter One's Dialogue), in which a young man with a
death wish is seduced by the horseman Muerte who offers him his highly
symbolic knives; and the suppressed surrealistic play El
publico (The
Audience, 1930; not published until 1976).
This convention that passion was tragic, but behavioral characteristics comic,
was maintained in the United States. The very first American drama of
homophilic despair, Henry Blake Fuller's "closet" (in both senses)
one-act At Saint fudas's ( 1896), ends with the suicide of the best man reviled by
the beloved (straight) bridegroom. Mae West's The Drag
(1927), which devoted a
whole act to a transvestite ball, and Pleasure
Man (1928), which
filled the stage with hilarious dishing queens, both had tragic endings tacked
on. These plays were prosecuted and banned, whereas Lillian Hellman's
ambivalent melodrama of calumny and suppressed desire, The
Children's Hour (1934),
won critical acclaim. The leading dramatic actresses of the New York stage, Eva
Le Gallienne (b. 1889), Katharine Cornell (1893-1974), and
Lynn Fontanne (1887-1983), were known privately for the intimacy of their
female friendships; the last two married gay men, Guthrie McClintic (1893-1961)
and Alfred Lunt (1893-1977), respectively.
Broadway was somewhat hamstrung by police censorship, which was less
consistent in its bans than was the Lord Chamberlain's Office in London; still,
British drama managed to sneak in the occasional reference. Precious chamber
plays like Ronald Firbank's The
Princess Zoubaroff (1920)
circulated only among the cognoscenti; but in 1925, Arnold Bennett could find
the opening scene of Frederick Lonsdale's Spring
Cleaning, a
gathering of homosexuals at a cocktail party, the only genuine thing in the
play. That same year, a sentimental attachment formed in a prison-camp was made
central to J. R. Ackerley's The
Prisoners of War, and
token homosexuals also made an appearance in Ronald Mackenzie's Musical
Chairs (1931).
The Green Bay Tree (1933) by Mordaunt Shairp (1887-1939), a melodrama about
an epicene older man's hold on a languid youth, made a success, repeated, with
some changes, on Broadway. Schoolboy crushes, familiar to much of the audience,
surfaced in The Hidden Years (1948) by Travers Otway and Quaint
Honour (1949)
by Roger Gellert in more or less covert form. It is typical that England's two
favorite authors of comedies and musicals, Noel Coward (1899-1973) and
IvorNovello (Daniel Davies, 1893-1951), whose sexual orientation was common
knowledge in theatrical circles, remained closeted to the general public; the
campiness of their works was put down to "sophistication." The same
held true for such important playwrights and actors as Somerset Maugham,
Terence Rattigan (1911-1977), Michael Redgrave (1908-1985), Charles Laughton
(1899-1962), Emlyn Williams (1905-1987), Esme Percy (1887-1957), Ernest Milton
(1890-1974), GwenFfrangcon-Davies (b. 1896), and John Gielgud (b. 1904) (even
after Gielgud had been arrested for public indecency), as well as for the
powerful producer Hugh "Binkie" Beaumont (1908-1973) and the
influential critic James Agate (1877-1942). At the end of his career, Coward,
who had put a chorus of "pretty boys, witty boys" wearing green
carnations into Bitter Sweet (1929) and hinted at a bisexual triangle in Design
for Living (
1933), ventured abit more frankness in A Song at Twilight (1966), ostensibly based on Maugham and Max Beerbohm;
Rattigan also made the exploitation of a pederast central to his late play Man
and Boy (1963).
William Douglas Home (b. 1912) is a mainstream playwright who has been willing
to deal with the taboo subject throughout his career, from his prison play Now
Barrabbas (1947),
to his comedy about a transsexual, Aunt Edwina (1960), to his drama David
and fonathan (1984).
When the Nazis came to power in Germany, the leading man Adolf Wohlbruck
(1900-1966) had to flee to England, where he became known as Anton Walbrook; so
did Conrad Veidt, who eventually wound up in Hollywood. Less lucky colleagues
perished in the camps. The immensely popular Gustav Grûndgens (1899-1963) was forced to marry and suppress his propensities to retain
the favor of his masters; after the war, he persisted as the leading director
and classical actor in West Germany, but his survival tactics were attacked by
his former friend Klaus Mann in the novel Mephisto.
After World War II. During
the post-war period, the French theatre was dominated by Jean Cocteau's circle,
including the stage designer Christian Bérard (1902-1949)
and the actor Jean Marais
(b. 1913); the bisexual Gérard Philipe (1922-1959) was everyone's favorite leading man. The foremost
members of the Comédie
Française, such
as Jean Weber and Jacques Charon (1920-1975), were familiar faces at gay
salons. Julien Green's monumental Sud (South, 1953) clothed his doomed love story in Civil War
garb and veiled suggestion; the agony of unrequited affection went even deeper
in Henry de Montherlant's La Ville dont
le Prince est un
Enfant (The City Whose Prince Is a Child, 1951 ), set in a
Catholic school where an obsessive priest roots out the special friendships of
the students. Typically, the secretive and suicidal Montherlant considered it unsuitable for public performance by boys.
New Openness in the Sixties. The drag-ball scene in John Osborne's play about the
Austrian spy Alfred Redi, A
Patriot for Me (1965),
proved one of the nails in the coffin of official British censorship, whose
demands for cuts showed up its absurdity. Joe Orton
was another strain for it,
for, like Wilde, his sense of paradox and sly verbal innuendo informed all his
work, making it not so easy to cut offending passages: Entertaining
Mr. Sloane (1964),
with its bisexual protagonist, the amoral male couple in Loot
(1966), and the polymorphous
perversity of the entire cast of What the
Butler Saw (1969)
could not be neutralized by excision. His camp sensibility led him to include
arcane references within standard farce set-ups, couched in impeccably elegant
utterance; and his successes emboldened him, in rewriting his radio play The Ruffian
on the Stair for
the stage in 1967, to strengthen the sexual bond between the two male
characters.
Three plays of the 1966/67 season continued the tradition of homosexual as
lonely outsider: Frank Marcus' (b. 1928) cruel lesbian comedy The
Killing of Sister George, Charles Dyer's (b. 1928) bleak duet Staircase,
and Christopher Hampton's
[b. 1946) examination of adolescent alienation, When
Did You Last See My Mother! Hampton's next play, Total
Echpse (1968),
was a skillful exploration of the Rimbaud/Verlaine
relationship. At least one
homosexual was to be found as local color in performances by Joan Littlewood's
group [A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney and The Hostage
by Brendan Behan, both
1958). The plays of Peter Shaffer (b. 1926), beginning with Five
Finger Exercise (1958),
generally concern the uneasy relationship between an older man and a younger;
and Simon Gray (b. 1936) played with pathetic same-sex desires in Wise
Child (1967) and Spoiled
(1968) before presenting
a witty bisexual protagonist (but one who is abandoned at the end) in Butley
(1971). Alan Bennett's (b.
1934) plays have been both more open and more fun.
In the United States, Tea and Sympathy (1953) by Robert Anderson (b. 1917) encapsulates a
prevalent American attitude: the sensitive hero could be cured of his
reputation as a sissy by the love of a good woman. The stage image of the
homosexual as outrageous fairy or doomed psychotic was challenged by Ruth and
Augustus Goetz' adaptation of Gide's The
Immorahst (1954);
imperfect in its reasoning, it nevertheless presented a man with homophilic
tendencies as intelligent and sympathetic. It was, however, less significant
than the prominence of Tennessee Williams in the American theatre. In Williams'
early drama, explicit homosexuality remained marginal; the flashback into
Blanche's marriage in Streetcar Named
Desire (1947),
the Baron de Charlus episode in Camino
Real (1953), and the lesbian
undercurrent in Something Unspoken (1958). It became more crucial as the hidden motivation in Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof[ 1955)
and the central secret in Suddenly
Last Summer (1958),
but in a standard mode: the protagonists are both victims, of desires suppressed
and expressed, respectively. In later plays like Small
Craft Warnings (1972)
with its transvestite husband, and Vieux
Carre (1977), the types
are grotesque but the motives are somewhat less disguised.
Such themes remained covert in William Inge [The
Boy in the Basement, 1962,
Natural Affection, 1963) and Edward Albee (although The
Zoo Story, 1959,
is cryptic only to those who cannot spot one of its two characters). This did
not stop hostile critics from declaring that Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolfl (1962) was really about two gay male couples. Albee's savage hostility
to the nuclear family struck them as symptomatic of a perverted imagination;
they were outraged by the musky and enigmatic eroticism of Tiny
Alice (which one claimed
was gay slang for the rectum). Albee's choice of fiction to dramatize - Carson
McCullers'
Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1963) and James Purdy's Malcolm
(1966) - also seemed
intent on glorifying the freakish outsider. As homosexual characters
proliferated on the Broadway stage, this critical hostility grew until, in the
mid- and late 1960s, such widely read pundits as Stanley Kauf f mann, Walter
Kerr, and Robert Brustein were positing a homosexual conspiracy in the American
theatre, which "often poisons what you see and hear." They argued
that homosexual playwrights camouflaged their concerns in the guise of
heterosexual relationships; also implicit was the fear that show business was
in the hands of perverts, from costumers and choreographers to producers. A
decade later this paranoia was echoed in Canada, where the actor John Colicos
complained "the faggots have taken over."
Canada was the breeding-ground for John Herbert's (b. 1926) harsh play of
prison life, Fortune and Men's
Eyes (1967), which
pivots on the sexual politics of the cell-block; and the Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay (b. 1942), with his drag-queen soap operas La
duchesse de Langeais [ 1969)
and Hosanna (1973). Tremblay, a master of local patois, was also
influenced by the French thief-turned-prose-stylist Jean Genet, whose dramas,
although they explore the mysteries of personality, are less explicitly
homoerotic than his novels. His first play, Les
Bonnes (The
Maids, 1947), did not get the all-male cast Genet desired in its premiere
production, but since then the two sister-maids and their mistress have
frequently been played by men. Similarly, Herbert's play may owe something to
Genet's Haute Surveillance (Death Watch, 1949), a more oblique and lyrical treatment
of sexual subservience in confinement.
The American critics' demand for homosexual honesty in packaging was answered
by Mart Crowley's (b. 1935) The Boys
in the Band (1968);
drenched in self-pity, predictable in its stereotypes, carrying on the
tradition of the deviant as victim of his own deviance, it nevertheless
presented a half-world independent of heterosexual concerns. Its commercial
success, which opened the flood-gates to similar confessional dramas, was due
in part to its confirming the general public in the view that such a life was
emotionally barren. Although Boys in
the Band did
include a campy sissy in its roster, at least it eschewed the drag queen who
remained a constant in drama of this period (Lanford Wilson's Madness
of Lady Bright, 1964;
Frederick Combs' The Children's Mass, 1973). A rash of commercial farces erupted, using the
homosexual as a trendy type in the hackneyed comic situations; in the West End,
Spitting Image (1966) by Colin Spencer (b. 1933) presented a gay couple
about to have a baby; in New York, Norman, Is
That You! (1972)
by Ron Clark (b. 1933) and Sam Bobrick (b. 1932) and Steambath
(1971) by Bruce Jay
Friedman (b. 1930) exploited coming-out and cruising areas for their crude
cartoons. (The British critic Kenneth Tynan noted that Broadway humor derived
exclusively from Jews and homosexuals.)
The "Liberated" Seventies. In Paris, the phenomenally successful La
Cage aux Folles (Cage
of Queens, 1972) by Jean Poirier ran for four years, its popularity also due to
its reinforcing misconceptions with broad caricatures of glamor drag queens,
ghettoized in a showbiz setting. (When the actor Michel Serrault was asked how
he dared go on in net stockings and ostrichboa at his age, he explained that he
put a spot of red on his nose, and so was not playing a homosexual but a clown
in drag.)
Gay dramatists attempted to infuse the boulevard farce with insider knowledge,
as in A. J. Kronengold's Tub Strip (1973), James Kirkwood's (1930-1989) P.S.
Your Cat Is Dead (1975),
and Terrence McNally's (b. 1939) The Ritz (1975). But the drag queen remained the favored protagonist,
cropping up again in Torch Song Trilogy (1983), three plays by Harvey Fierstein which were evolved
in a gay theatre and then transferred successfully to Broadway to win a Tony
Award. Significantly,
Fierstein's only popular success since was his libretto for Jerry Herman's (b.
1933) musical comedy version of La Cage
aux Folies (1983),
which coarsened an already simplistic sitcom to suit the tired businessman.
Heterosexual playwrights like David Rabe and David Mamet seemed unable to get
beyond the notion that same-sex affection spelled doom, a collapse of
personality. Meanwhile, homosexual dramatists were moving beyond such clichés. It is noteworthy that Robert Patrick and Lanford Wilson (both b. 1937)
first gained recognition on the New York stage in 1964 with oppressed
characters: the obsessed older man in Patrick's The
Haunted Host and
the suicidal drag queen in Wilson's The
Madness of Lady Bright. After treating other themes for more than a decade, they then took a
less hysterical approach to the subject: Patrick in Kennedy's
Children (197'3)
offered a homosexual as a type of his times, and by 1983 was writing
specifically for gay audiences in such plays as Blue
Is for Boys. Wilson
matured to present homosexual relationships and characters as natural features
of the American landscape in The Fifth
of fuly (1978)
and Burn This (1987). Similarly, Albert Innaurato (b. 1948) could
balance his obese and pathetic freak in The
Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie (1977) with a humorous, boy-next-door seduction in Gemini (1977).
It was the "worthiness" and remoteness of the subject and the familiarity
of its treatment which dictated how the general public would react to plays
about gay life. Bent(1978) by Martin Sherman, an overwrought picture of
persecution in Nazi Germany, couched in the prose of Masterpiece Theatre, was
acclaimed; Forty-Deuce (1981) by Alan Bowne, a much more authentic and original
piece of work concerning the teenaged hustlers and their Johns who hang out
around Times Square, was reviled. Black American playwrights tended to define
homosexuality as a decadent white threat to their virility. The work of Imamu
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones, b. 1934) grew more homophobic as his political radicalism
increased: The Toilet (1964), a self-styled "play about love," seems to
sanction the embrace of the white "queer" and the black youth, yet
Baraka's public statements have attacked homosexuals violently. James Baldwin
(1924-1987), excoriated by the radical black community for
"collaboration," never ventured on a theatrical equivalent of Giovanni's
Room. Ed Bullins (b.
1935), who portrayed a stereotypical "bull dyke" in Clara's
Ole Man (1965),
boasted that his directors were not "twisted and trying to find the latest
fad that the faggots are trying to make a new Hair
out of."
The reference was to the "hippie" musical Hair
(1967), which, with the
pseudo-sophisticated revue Oh!
Calcutta! (1969),
presented unorthodox sexual practices as natural variants; but the notion of
homosexual as villain persisted even in a counter-culture phenomenon like the
rock musical Jesus Christ
Superstar (by
Andrew Lloyd Webber, 1971): the disciple who loves Christ most ardently turned
out to be Judas, and Herod is played as a sequined screamer. Exclusively gay
musicals could not redress the balance: Al Carmines' (b. 1936) The
Faggot (1973),
meant as a populist and ecumenical plea for love, was scorned by activists for
stereotyping, and the novelties Boy Meets
Boy (by Bill Solly and
Donald Ward, 1975) and Lovers (1975) enjoyed no particular shelf-life. However, The
Rocky Horror Show (1973)
by Richard O'Brien, especially in its cult film avatar, revealed how familiar psychopathia
sexualis had
become to a youthful mass public.
More vital was the explosion of "low camp" transvestitic theatre that
emerged from New York's underground, in tandem with Andy Warhol's Factory.
Characteristically, the earliest of these playwrights were Warhol hangers-on:
the transvestite actor Jackie Curtis (b. 1947) with Glamour,
Glory and Gold: The Life ofNola Noonan, Goddess and Star (1967), and the scenarist Ronald Tavel (b. 1941) with the
jungle extravaganza Gorilla Queen (1966). An important hothouse was John Vaccaro's Theater of
the Ridiculous, which forged one major talent in the person of Charles Ludlam
(1940-1987). The basic technique of the Ridiculous style was pastiche, trashing
Western civilization by mingling high culture and popular totems, and lacing
it all with genital humor and gender switches. Ludlam's plays, beginning with When
Queens Collide (1967),
and culminating in his own Ridiculous Theatrical Company [Bluebeard,
1970; The
Grand Tarot, 1971;
Camille, 1973; Stage
Blood, 1974,
etc.) were virtual palimpsests, shrewdly inlaying classical allusions and
quotations into pop art. A consummate comedian, best known for his portrayals
of Marguerite Gautier and Galas (a monster diva based on Callas), Ludlam was
surrounded by lesser talents whose ineptitude made its own comment on the aspirations
of the professional theatre. His influence is strong on such an epigone as
Charles Busch (b. 1955), whose Vampire
Lesbians of Sodom (1985)
and Psycho Beach Party (1987) are less cultured, less threatening, and therefore
more accessible than Ludlam's work.
In the wake of the political events of 1968, feminist and gay liberation politics
gave rise to a number of agitprop groups, and by the mid-1970s, theatre
collectives and "coming-out" plays burgeoned. In London, Gay
Sweatshop, organized by Ed Berman in 1975, staged luncht ime bills of short
plays dealing with identity, censorship, and relationships; the actors were
professionals, many of whom, such as Simon Callow and Anthony Sher (both b.
1949), were to become highly articulate luminaries of the establishment stage.
In 1977, the Sweatshop divided into men's and women's groups, the latter
tending to revue-like formats. In Holland, the Rooie Flikkers (or The Softies)
became prominent.
New York counterparts likes TOSOS (The Other
Side of the Stage, New York, 1972-77] and the Stonewall Theater were both more
polemical and less professional in their achievements; they developed their
own playwrights, such as Doric Wilson (b. 1939], William M. Hoffman (b. 1939),
Philip Blackwell and Arch Brown, who preached to the converted, but provided a
sense of cultural solidarity. Jonathan Katz' docudrama Coming
Out! (1975) supplied a useful history
lesson for the newly aware. The Glines Theater (founded 1976) nurtured talents
likeFierstein, whose early work, such asFlatbush
Tosca (1975), made comment through reductive
comedy; and the gifted Jane Chambers (1937-1983), whose Last
Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980) has
become a staple in lesbian theatre. The proliferation of similar groups in other
cities led to the creation of a Gay Theater Alliance in 1978 to provide a
network. Gender-fuck troupes like The Cockettes and the Angels of Light in San
Francisco and Centola and the Hot Peaches, another Warhol-sponsored enterprise,
in New York, combined shock tactics, high camp, glitter rock, and reverse
glamor to achieve their effects. They have been succeeded by less strident,
more recondite performance artists like Tim Miller and Holly Hughes.
Lesbian Troupes. A
score of lesbian ensembles quickly sprang up in the wake of feminist theatre
groups, among them the Lavender Cellar in Minneapolis (founded 1973), the Red
Dyke Theater in Atlanta (founded 1974), and the Lesbian-Feminist Theater
Collective of Pittsburgh (founded 1977). Although they produced plays by
Chambers, Pat Surcicle [Prisons, 1973),
and the poetic imagist Joan Schenkar, their repertories, as in England,
emphasized satiric revue. This was especially the case at the WOW Cafe in New
York's East Village, founded by Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw in 1982; Alice
Forrester's subversive parody Heart of
the Scorpion and Holly Hughes'
self-regarding satire The Well of Horniness
(both 1985) were typical offerings.
Developments in World Theatre. Australia,
perhaps because of its willfully macho image, tended to dramatize homosexual
life in transvestite terms, equating the gay male with the drag queen. The
best-known examples are Peter Kenna's (b. 1930) Mates
(1975), whose catalytic character is yet
another depressed and depressive nightclub performer; and Steve J. Spears' (b.
1951) The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (1976),
a one-character tragi-comedy of a middle-aged cross-dresser who gets too close
to a student and ends up all but lobotomized. A Gay Theater Company was formed
in Sydney in 1979 to present a more balanced picture of the varieties of
homosexual experience.
Outside the English-speaking world, homosexuality has not played a pre-eminent
part in mainstream drama. Even Mishima (1925-1970) did not choose to treat it,
although his own sado-masochistic penchants surface in his Kabuki play The
Drawn-Bow Moon (1969), in which a
naked samurai is tortured on stage. In Germany, Martin Sperr's (b. 1941) fagdszenen
aus Niederbayem (Hunting Scenes from
Lower Bavaria, 1966), showing a young mechanic destroyed by his narrow-minded
provincial community, created a stir and was filmed. The German-language
theatre, on the whole, seemed to equate homosexuality with violence. The
Austrian dramatist Wolfgang Bauer (b. 1941) in Magic
Afternoon (1968) had two
layabouts indulge in kissing to torment a young woman, and in Change
(1969) a gay art-dealer has his face shoved
in broken glass. In Bodo Strauss' Der Park (The
Park, 1985), Cyprian, the type of the creative artist, is brutally murdered by
the black park-attendant he fancies. Rainer Fassbinder used his films more than
his plays to express his concepts of social and interpersonal exploitation.
Although Parisian audiences flocked to a boulevard farce like La
Cage aux Folles, a more select public
has appreciated the absurdist plays of Argentinian-born Copi: he has played in
his own works,
such as Lehomosexuel
ou La difficulté de s'exprímez (The Homosexual or The Difficulty of Self-Expression, 19 71) and Le Trigo (The Fridge, 1983). The Soviet theatre, reflecting its society, has
diligently avoided the subject; productions of Williams' Stieetcai and Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, lor instance, cut all allusions to homosexuality. In Italy, on the other hand,
the fashionable theatre and opera have been dominated by elegant
director-designers like Luchino Visconti and his disciple Franco Zeffirelli (b.
1923). They were responsible for introducing Williams and Albee to Italy, but
their flamboyant wielding of high style was often vitiated by a penchant for
garish melodrama and maudlin sentimentality.
The AIDS crisis has spawned a number of nonce dramas, modern versions of the
problem play, where the message is more important than the medium: Larry
Kramer's The
Normal Heart, William
M. Hoffman's As
Is, Rebecca Ranson's Warren, Robert Chesley's Night Sweat, and the Theater Rhinoceros' dramatic collage The AIDS Show
(all 1985). They affected
the audiences that sought them out, but when they entered the reportory of regional
theatres, subscribers often stayed away, refusing to confront the problem of
"others." AIDS also had an impact on the theatre by decimating its
ranks, its victims including Ludlam and the director-choreographer Michael
Bennett (1943-1987), along with dozens of rank-and-file members of the
profession. The glaring gaps left in the performing arts by these deaths reveal
how dependent they have been on homosexual talent.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Stefan
Brecht, Queer Theatre,
Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1978; Kaier Curtin, We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians': The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men
on the American Stage, Boston:
Alyson, 1987; Terry Helbing, Gay Theater Alliance Directory of Gay Plays, New York: JH Press, 1980.
Laurence
Senelick
Thebes
Site of the Mycenean
citadel of Cadmus (legendary personification of the Semitic peoples of the
East), Thebes was the capital of Boeotia in central Greece in classical times.
The Theban cycle, celebrated by Sophocles and other writers, offers several
salient erotic themes. Cadmus' descendent Laius, warned by an oracle that his
son would slay him, forewent sex with his wife locasta. Unaware of the danger
and frustrated, she got him drunk, had intercourse with him, and in nine
months produced the infant Oedipus, whom he ordered to be exposed. Laius was
then exiled to the Peloponesus. Exclaiming "nature compels me," he
then raped Chrysippus, his host's 12-year old son, causing a curse to follow
him to his Thebes when he returned. Oedipus, saved by a shepherd, grew to
manhood, slew his father whom he did not recognize in distant parts, and came
to Thebes. Here he ended the plague, married the widowed Jocasta, and sired
children by her to begin a new round of tragedies including the execution of
his daughter Antigone by her uncle Cleon for burying her rebel brother.
After Crete and Sparta, from
which institutionalized pederasty was imported about 600 b.c.,
Thebes became the place
Greeks most often named as the locus for the formalized of pederasty. In
Plato's Laws,
the Athenian declares that
in Elis and Boeotia (including Thebes) they practiced pederasty uninhibitedly,
each adult male living together with the boy he loved. The greatest pederastic
poet, Pindar, resided in Thebes. When Alexander the Great destroyed the rebel city, he left Pindar's house standing to
demonstrate his love of culture. After Sparta and Athens exhausted each other
in the great Peloponnesian War, Pelopidas and Epaminondas, in exile in Athens,
formed an aristocratic conspiracy to liberate their city.
Bravely surprising the Spartan garrison, they organized the Sacred Band (later
copied by the Carthaginians) of 300 pairs of lovers, which defeated Sparta at
Leuctra (371 b.c.) and Mantinea (362 b.c) and liberated Messenia, ending Spartan hegemony.
Epaminondas was slain at Mantinea with his second eromenos
(beloved) bravely falling
at his side. During the three-cornered struggle that ensued between a
leaderless Thebes, a crippled Sparta, and an Athens that had not fully
recovered from the Peloponnesian War, Persians interfered and Macedonians encroached.
The Greeks were defeated at Chaeronea in 338 b.c.,
when the Sacred Band died
fighting to the last man, and even Philip of Macedonia, the victor, paid
tribute to their valor: "Let no man speak evil of such heroes."
Plutarch, a hereditary Theban noble who held a priesthood at Delphi, recorded
the careers of notable pederasts in his Parallel
Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans, and his Dialogues on Love debated the relative merits of women and boys.
The ancient city of Thebes possessed two gymnasia, one dedicated to Heracles,
the other to Iolaus, often regarded in classic times as his eromenos.
At the latter place pairs
of male lovers were accustomed to pledge their troth. About three miles outside
the city lay the Kabeirion, the shrine of a mystery cult revolving around the
god Kabeiros and his Pais ("boy"); here modem archeologists have
found votive offerings depicting a man and a boy, who is often portrayed
holding an animal - a traditional courtship gift.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Nancy H.
Demand, Thebes
in the Fifth Century, Boston:
Routledge &. Kegan Paul, 1982.
William A. Percy
Theocritus (ca. 301-ca. 260 b.c)
Hellenistic philologist and
poet. A native of Syracuse, he sojourned in southern Italy and Cos, but having
failed to win the patronage of Hiero of Syracuse, he finally won that of
Ptolemy II, the founder of the Museum and Library that together with his
munificent patronage made Alexandria the
intellectual center of the Hellenistic monarchies.
In the famous controversy about the Argonauts, he sided with Callimachus
against Apollonius of Rhodes, both of whom resided in Alexandria and sang of
pederasty.
Though set in Sicily, his bucolic poems were written after he moved to the
east, perhaps while he tarried on Cos. He composed his mimes mostly in Alexandria.
Like most other Hellenistic poets, he preferred short, polished, erudite,
contrived poems. He often chose exotic or at least novel themes and made fresh
observations and descriptions. Besides pastoral heterosexual love, he
dramatized the love of Heracles for Hylas. Eight of his thirty Idylls,
the authorship of two of
which is uncertain, treat boy love exclusively.
Theocritus used two archaic terms: for lover eispnelas
(inspirer), employed in
Alcman, and for beloved the non-Dorian Thessalian aites,
(inspired), employed by
Alcman to meafl "pretty girl" in the feminine. The idyll on Hylas
(XTA), Heracles' beloved, gave Theocritus an opportunity to express his
personal feelings on boy-love. It is not just mortals, but the immortals as
well, who suffer the pangs of love. Heracles is determined to educate the
curly-haired boy with whom he is enamoured, to make a brave and renowned man of
him, and to bring him up as a father would his son.
In Idyll XXIX Theocritus gives advice to a boy that follows strictly the lines
earlier drawn by Theognis: the youth is urged to be faithful to his lover, not
to play the coquette or exploit his admirer in a venal manner. Youth is
fleeting, but with manhood love will yield to a solid and enduring friendship.
Idyll XXX depicts a man who has reached the age that disqualifies him for
conquests in love, but cannot suppress the passion that he feels for a boy who,
while not particualrly handsome, has undeniable personal charm. This piece may
well contain genuine autobiographical elements.
The two idylls in which shepherds and goatherds compete in song about their pédérastie loves differ: in VTJ it is poets disguised as shepherds who display
their rival skill, in V the speech belongs to genuine rustics, direct and even
slightly coarse. Idyll V1TJ, which may not belong to Theocritus, presents two
youths at the very onset of puberty, one in love with a boy, the other with a
girl. This poem therefore treats homosexual love between early adolescent
agemates, which in the eyes of at least some Greeks was perfectly legitimate.
Inspired by the poetic tradition of male love begun by Ibycus, Anacreon, and
Pindar, Theocritus' work proves that the old motifs and values of paiderasteia
remained alive, at least
in literature, into the Hellenistic era.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Félix Buffière, Eros adolescent; la
pédérastie dans la Grèce antique, Paris:
Les Belles Lettres, 1980,-Hans
Licht, Sexual
Life in Ancient Greece, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932.
William A. Percy
Theognis (fl. ca. 544-541 b.c.)
Greek elegiac poet. Many
of the 1,390 lines, often cited in later works and inscribed on vases,
attributed to him are but slightly altered versions of verses by Tyrtaeus,
Solon, and other early poets, along with repetitions that seem to come from a
different hand. In addition, references to people and events in the Theognidea
extend from 580 to 490,
and the surviving verses differ from those cited by the tenth-century Greek
lexicon of Suda. Consequently, the extant works seem to be a highly popular
Athenian collection made in the fifth century to be sung at symposia, and it is
difficult to tell which ones originated with Theognis himself.
The gnomology (collection of maxims) addressed to Cyrnus, the poet's beloved
boy who appears in many of the poems, may be genuine. With a clear aristocratic
bias, Theognis berated the boy, whom he was trying to improve, for flirtations
and infidelities. Full of advice on friendship, loyalty, and other conduct
befitting a gentleman, Theognis is often taken as the model for the supposed
old-fashioned one-to-one erotic relationship used as the basis for paideia
(instruction). Theognis'
collection of maxims, of which the last 158 deal exclusively with boy-love,
served in antiquity as a manual of ethical conduct. The poet could not fail to
"fawn on" the boy so long as the boy's cheek was beardless. Others,
however, find his constant carping and complaints, his reproaches to ungrateful
or self-interested boys, distasteful, especially in comparison with the free
love advocated by his contemporaries Ibycus and Anacreon. Called by some the
father of gnomic poetry, Theognis (whom Sir Kenneth Dover unconvincingly dubs
the most important early pédérastie
poet), taught ethics and
statecraft in a context of male love, and otherwise emphasized the intellectual
and moral formation of the youth as well. His verse thus reflected the role of
pederasty in the golden age of Hellenic civilization. In elegies that he
composed to be sung accompanied by the flute at symposia, he claimed (probably
an interpolation after the fact) that his verse had given Cyrnus immortality,
and that youths at symposia would always sing of him: "Woe is me! I love a
smooth-skinned lad who exposes me to all my friends, nor am I loath; I will
bear with many things that are sore against my liking, and make it no secret;
for 'tis no unhandsome lad I am seen to be taken with."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Kenneth
Dover, Greek
Homosexuality, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1978; Thomas J. Figueira and Gregory Nagy, eds., Theognis ofMegara: Poetry and Polis, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
William A. Percy
Third Sex
The notion that
homosexuals constitute a third sex, intermediate between the poles of the
heterosexual male and the heterosexual female, became popular in the nineteenth
century. Yet it has some interesting forerunners and analogues. In the myth
recounted by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, the
androgynous double beings are termed the "third race," the irony
being that these are presented as the archetypes of heterosexual persons who
in their present sundered state are always seeking to reunite with their lost
half of the opposite sex. Somewhat more to the point is a usage that may have
been influential: according to his biographer in the Scriptoies Historiae Augustae, the Emperor Alexander Severus (reigned a.d. 222-235) spoke slightingly of eunuchs as the teitium hominum genus (third class of men). The idea is modeled on Latin grammar
which recognizes three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter. There is also a
grammatical category called epicene, for
a noun capable of designating either sex; from this technical usage derives
the sexual meaning of that word. A satirical attack on the court of the
effeminate Henri lu,
L'île des Hermaphrodites (1605), states that in the language of that imaginary country only the
common gender (epicene) is known.
Historical forerunners notwithstanding, the use of the concept of the third
sex to designate homosexuals seems to have first taken hold in
nineteenth-century France. While for Théophile Gauthier in Mademoiselle
de Maupin (1836) the expression "troisième sexe à part" refers to a woman with the qualities of a man (but not a
lesbian), in Splendeur
et misère des courtisanes (1847), Balzac
equates "le troisième sexe" with the slang term
"tante" - homosexual.
The German equivalent, drittes
Geschlecht, was
introduced by the homosexual reformer K. H. Ulrichs [Vindex, 1864). At the turn of the century the notion enjoyed a great vogue in
Germany, owing in part to the fact that it accorded well with the Zwischenstufen (intermediate) theories
of Magnus Hirscbield and
his circle, who amassed data ostensibly showing that homosexual subjects on
many indices fell halfway between the normal man and the normal woman.
Hirschfeld himself wrote a book on the gay subculture of Wilhelmine Berlin under
the title Berhns
drittes Geschlecht, and
the Committee prepared for mass distribution a pamphlet Was soil das Volk vom dritten Geschlecht wissen! (What Should the People Know About the Third Sex?).
However, a considerable number of homosexual men and women deviate from the
norm for their gender solely in their sexual orientation, so that even sympathizers
of Hirschfeld dismissed the label as untenable. Although the name The Third Sex was conferred on the American release of a 1957 West German film about
homosexuality, the expression is now relatively uncommon and enjoys no
scientific credence.
While the theory under discussion is now obsolete, in other realms of
discourse the overarching conceptual process of enlarging an original binary
opposition into a trichotomy may be a valid procedure. Anthropologists, such
as Claude Lévi-Strauss,
have observed the transformation
of dichotomies into trichotomies in the mythology and social organization of
tribal societies. In European civilization, the Anglican church has sometimes
claimed to occupy a third position between the poles of Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism. The democratic socialism of Sweden has
similarly been extolled as a "middle way" between capitalism and
communism. In other instances the third element is not an intermediate wedged
in the interstice between an original pair, but the last in a series (e.g.,
Moscow as the "third Rome"; old age as the "third age"). In
today's political language the case of the Third World is ambivalent; it may be
regarded as intermediate between the other two worlds (neutralism) or set
apart from them by reason of its dependent and colonial status - in which case
the trichotomy virtually collapses into a dichotomy. The notion was clearly
suggested by the analogy with the Third Estate which at the end of the Old
Regime was demanding its share of the political power previously monopolized
by the clergy and the nobility.
The French philologist Georges Dumézil has argued that tripartition is an archetypal component of the original
institutions and religious ideas of the Indo-European peoples, who think in terms of the three functions of
sovereignty, power, and fecundity. However this may be, the examples cited
support the view that formations in terms of threeness are characteristic of
human institutions - or of the cultural interpretation of biological givens -
but rarely of the biological world itself. Thus our bodies have either one
organ [the heart, the nose) or two (eyes, kidneys, arms); never three. So the
"third sex" was in the last analysis a social more than a biological
reality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Claude
Courouve, Vocabulaize
de Thomosexuahté masculine, Paris: Payot, 1985, pp. 212-16.
Wayne R. Dynes
Tibullus, Albius (50-17 b.c.)
Latin elegiac poet. Apart from
his own writings, a poor anonymous biography and references in Horace and Ovid
furnish the only data on Tibullus' life. In the tradition of poetic lovers that
the Latins borrowed from the Greeks, he complained of poverty and failed to
gain Maecenas' patronage. Only the first two of the four books ascribed to
Tibullus are actually his. Book One celebrates impartially his love for his
mistress Delia and for his boyfriend Mar a thus. Book Two contains poems to
another mistress, Nemesis. Occasional pieces in the two books honor his patron
Massalla. The third book contains six brief poems by Sulpicia and poems about
her that are perhaps by Tibullus himself. Quintilian termed Tibullus, who
combined deceptive simplicity with refinement, the "most terse and elegant"
of Latin elegists.
A frequent subject of Tibullus is the puei delicatus, the boy who, in the Hellenic tradition, would be young, handsome, and
even girlish, that is to say, with none of the repellent coarseness of the
adult male. But the Roman counterpart, or those of the Hellenistic monarchies, is cruel, unfaithful, and mercenary, closer to the
Alexandrian or modem hustler or kept boy than to the classical eromenos. Marathus, Tibullus' love, conforms to type: endowed with beautiful hair
and a fair complexion, somewhat femininely preoccupied with his physical
appearance and the use of cosmetics. He torments his lovers, lies to them, and
is unfaithful to them. At one point Tibullus considers terminating the unhappy
affair with its psychologically sado-masochistic overtones. Yet Marathus
himself, when he falls in love and is repaid in the same coin, is reduced to
childish whining and tearful bewilderment. In all these respects Roman
pederasty as depicted by Tibullus, like that of Alexandria, came nearer than did the Hellenic antecedents to certain modern
unedifying variants of the homoerotic liaison.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. P.
Murgatroyd, "Tibullus and the Puer
Delicatus," Acta
Classica, 20
(1977), 105-19; Amy
Richlin, The Garden ofPriapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman
Humor, New
Haven: Yale
University Press, 1983.
William A. Percy
Tilden, William T., II (1893-1953)
American tennis player.
Also known as Big Bill and Gentleman Bill Tilden, he was voted the most
outstanding athlete of the first half of the twentieth century by the National
Sports Writers Association, ahead of such notables as Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey,
and Johnny Weissmuller. He was the first American to win at Wimbleton and
during the 1920s he remained undefeated in any major match for seven years. He
revolutionized the game of tennis and some of his writing on the subject (The Art
of Tennis] is
still considered to be authoritative. Tilden was known as a theatrical tennis
player and was very popular with spectators.
He had a great interest in the arts and wrote a novel, Glory's
Net, many short stories,
a silent film, Hands of Hope, and an autobiography, My
Story. He
had an intense interest in the theatre and made frequent unsuccessful attempts
at acting, often producing his own shows, starring himself.
He was well known for living a lavish life, driving expensive cars, staying in
elegant hotels and socializing with the rich and the famous - he was a good
friend of Charlie Chaplin. He often traveled with an entourage of handsome
teenaged male tennis proteges. When his homosexuality became better known, he
was ostracized from the tennis world and was banned from the most prestigious
tennis courts. Eventually, he was convicted of contributing to the delinquency
of a minor and sent to jail in 1947. Although it was clear that the young man
with whom he was caught having sex had no objection to the sexual relations,
the court decided to make an example of the famous tennis player. He served six
months of a one-year sentence. Tilden died of a heart attack, impoverished, in
relative obscurity six years later.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Frank
Deford, Big
Bill Tilden: The Triumphs and the Tragedy, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975; Arthur Voss, Tilden and Tennis in the Twenties, Troy, NY: Whitson, 1985.
Brian Pronger
Toilet Sex
Most men who patronize
public toilets view them as repellent places that are to be utilized and left
as quickly as possible. Yet urination requires the taking out of the penis and
lingering is sometimes a legitimate aspect of answering the call of nature (or
can be made to appear soj, so that it is not surprising that sexual activities
might occur there. A common pattern is for one man to stand for a time at a
urinal and show his erect penis,- another will then touch it, an implicit
contract is accepted - usually wordlessly - and the sexual act is expeditiously
completed. Others prefer the somewhat more private toilet stalls, though here
it may be somewhat harder to lure others to join in the action. Some of the
more commonly used places have the institution of the "watch queen,"
who through a cough or some other clear signal will indicate the approaching
presence of outsiders who may be offended.
The notion, found in some popular books on sex, that gay men are inveterate
cruisers of toilets is an overstatement; many homosexuals report a pronounced
distaste for undertaking any sexual activity in such places. In fact, Laud
Humphreys' classic monograph showed that the overwhelming majority of the
sexual customers of the Illinois toilet he studied were bisexuals leading
outwardly "normal" heterosexual lives. Such men may be reluctant to
frequent gay bars or saunas, but do not regard public toilets as gay-identified
social space. No equivalent lesbian practice is known.
Toilets that are known for their sexual activities are described colloquially
as "tea rooms." In England the practice of visiting these
establishments is termed "cottaging." Some are found on university
campuses, in train and bus stations, and at highway rest stops. Appropriate
graffiti may signal the possibility of sexual activity, so that someone
visiting during an off hour may be alerted to return. Such graffiti may also
alert isolated homosexuals to the existence of others, previously unsuspected.
Occasionally, overcrowding may cause legitimate complaints on the part of
straight patrons, but often a single scandalized visitor will demand police
action. Regrettably, many toilet visitors, some caught by enticement methods
initiated by members of the police force, have had their careers ruined
through being detected in the process of "tea-room trade."
Insignificant as the offense may have been, the publicity attending the arrest
and eventual trial, and the inclusion of the offender's name in centralized
files of "known sex deviates," were enough to stigmatize the
individual for life. Sometimes the authorities attempt to discourage sex in
toilets by removing the stall doors or modifying the structures architecturally
so that privacy will be reduced.
A special adaptation of toilets for sexual purposes is often found in the form
of "glory holes," openings surreptitiously drilled or carved into the
partitions separating the stalls. These serve for the insertion of the erect
penis which is then fellated by the occupant of the other booth. This practice
combines anonymity, a sense of concentration on the affected organ, and an
element of danger that goes even beyond the usual one of employing the public
John for sexual purposes. The problem of being unpleasantly surprised was obviated
in the glory-hole clubs, commercial establishments that enjoyed some
popularity in the late 1970s. With the rising awareness of the need for safe
sex, these clubs have largely faded away. Not so, however, the do-it-yourself
glory holes in public toilets: despite an often relentless campaign by
custodians to close these apertures, they mysteriously keep reappearing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edward W.
Delph, The
Silent Community: Public Homosexual Encounters, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1978; Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, Chicago: Aldine, 1970.
Ward Houser
Trade
As a term of gay slang,
this word is the modem parallel of ancient Greek, Latin, and Old Norse terms
for a male who remains strictly in the active role of penetrator, and who
usually considers himself heterosexual or bisexual, an attitude which also
perpetuates archaic concepts under which only the receiver or pathic
was considered to be
departing from gender norms of appropriate sexual behavior. The modem slang
usage probably derives from the association with young male prostitutes,
engaged in "the sex trade," who are only available in the penetrator
role. Trade is generally a term which is not self-applied, but only used by the
receptive partner or by uninvolved homosexuals.
The prevalence of trade behavior is usually underestimated since its adherents
seldom write books, join organizations, or fill out survey questionnaires.
Nevertheless, it may well be that, from a global perspective that includes Mediterranean,
shamanistic, pederastic, and Asian patterns, there are more "trade"
men than reciprocating homosexuals, and even in advanced western societies this
may be the case for members of the working class, where the sense that only
the passive partner is homosexual is best preserved. Certainly there are
extensive areas of sexual encounter outside prostitution in which trade
behavior is not only common in western industrial societies, but expected by
the receptive partner: cruising military men, seafarers, truck drivers,
hitchhikers, teenagers, patrons of toilets frequented by the general public,
frequenters of interstate highway rest areas, those involved in interracial
sex, and men in jail or prison.
The trade pattern seems to serve as an intermediate stage of coming out often
enough to have engendered the widespread homosexual saying "Today's trade
is tomorrow's competition," but it would be a mistake to draw too broad a
conclusion from this saying, which may also reflect the tendency which causes
some homosexuals to label anyone and everyone a queen. It is not a saying with
much currency among those homosexuals who prefer trade for various reasons and
who are perhaps more knowledgeable about their patterns. Those who are familiar
with scenes in which "situational" trade homosexuality can be
observed over a longer period of time (prisons, military areas, boarding
schools] do not see much evidence to support the validity of the saying; if
anything, they would report that "today's trade is tomorrow's married
heterosexual."
"Rough trade" is a term denoting a potentially dangerous or ruffian
male, virtually always self-defined as heterosexual, and who often
demonstrates feelings of guilt or remorse after ejaculation which can erupt
into violence directed at his partner. Nevertheless, there are not a few
homosexuals who find rough trade particularly appealing. Many professional
male prostitutes are termed "rough trade" because of their image as
"tough guys" even though their actual potential for violence is low,
a few highly publicized exceptions notwithstanding.
Research on homosexuality in this century has tended to avoid role analysis and
focused instead on self-defined homosexuals rather than occasional
participants. Clearly, the trade phenomenon needs a great deal more research
before investigators can contemplate closing the books on the phenomenon of
same-sex relations.
Stephen Donaldson
Tragedy
See Theatre and Drama.
Transsexualism
Transsexualism is the wish
for change of sex. This longing may be defined as a gender identity disorder
characterized by the subject's intense desire for transformation by hormonal
or surgical means, or both, into the gender opposite his original one at birth.
This insistence is grounded in complete identification with the gender role of
the opposite sex. The transsexual is thus the ultimate form of what has come to
be known as the gender dysphoria syndrome.
Such individuals seek to deny and reverse their original biological gender and
cross over into the role of the opposite gender. Transsexuals emulate the
characteristics of the opposite gender in behavior, dress, attitude, and
sexual orientation, and aspire to attain the anatomical structure of the
genitalia of the opposite sex. The request for the so-called sex-change operation
becomes the obsessive goal of the transsexual's life and brings him to the door
of the physician, but in their request for sex reassignment surgery (SRS) they
present themselves to the surgeon, not the psychiatrist. They reject the
implication that psychiatric referral is required, since they do not conceive
their dilemma in psychiatric terms but as a consequence of having been bom into
the wrong body. In a sense, transsexualism may be considered iatrogenic, in
that advances in surgical technique and hormonal therapy now permit the
realization of longings for sexual metamorphosis that once belonged to the
realm of mythology and fairy tales.
History. This fact became known to the public after the famous
Jorgensen case in 1952, in which the reporting endocrinologist received
letters from hundreds of individuals requesting SRS. A former sergeant in the
American army was transformed from a male into an externally functioning
female by a Danish plastic surgeon, Paul Fogh-Andersen, in Copenhagen, and Christine
Jorgensen, as the individual was subsequently named, made headlines throughout
the world. Controversy and criticism erupted almost at once and have continued
to the present day, as some psychiatrists branded the whole procedure as
medical malpractice.
However sensationalized the case may have been, it called public attention to
the fact that surgical relief was available to the sufferer from gender
dysphoria, and thousands of such individuals came forward to demand the sex
change operation. Many of these individuals were referred to Harry Benjamin
(1885-1987), who promoted the term transsexualism
in an article published in
the International Journal of Sexology in 1953, and continued to provide evaluation, hormone
treatment, and referral to medical centers in the United States who would
perform SRS. He culminated his years of research and therapy with gender
dysphoric patients with the publication of a landmark monograph on the
subject, The Transsexual
Phenomenon (1966),
and to pursue his work the Harry Benjamin Gender Dysphoria Association was
founded. Between 1969 and 1985 nine international gender dysphoria symposia
were held, at which some 150 investigators from a variety of disciplines met
to share their findings. Apparently the term transsexual, in its modern
meaning, was introduced by the popular editor David O. Cauldwell in 1950.
Psychological Aspects. The relationship between homosexuality and gender
dysphoria, particularly in the extreme form of transsexualism, requires
clarification. Most homosexuals are satisfied with their sexual orientation
and lifestyle, and like normal heterosexuals they have no wish to lose their
genitalia. For both male and female homosexuals their genitalia are a source of
intense pleasure. However, there are some whose primary homosexuality is so
unacceptable to their egos that they cannot bear this sexual orientation. The
transsexual frequently states his strong aversion to homosexuality and resents
such an identification. Such a self-stigmatized, ego-alien, homosexually
oriented gender dysphoric subject sees sex reassignment as the way out of his
dilemma. SRS is more ego-integral to such an individual, and the surgeon
treating him, than is homosexuality. Some 30-35 percent of those requesting SRS
fall into this category.
By contrast, there are also gender dysphoric individuals who demonstrate a
fixed and consistent cross-gender identification. Such patients establish
themselves as primary transsexuals and successfully pass the "real
life" test of cross-gender living and hormonal therapy for one to two
years. Some are actively engaged in psychotherapy before and after this trial
period, but all undergo an evaluation process by a professional in the mental
health field. Only then is it appropriate to recommend the patient to an
experienced surgeon for SRS. Even after this careful screening process, some
10-15 percent of operated patients are thought to have an unsatisfactory
outcome from SRS. Most of these probably had an unsatisfactory surgical reconstruction
or were improperly selected. Interestingly enough, none of the female
transsexuals who were rejected as candidates renounced their gender dysphoria
or their pursuit of SRS; they are a more homogeneous diagnostic group than
their male counterparts and generally better candidates for SRS.
Medical Aspects. The surgical procedure involves the removal of the penis,
scrotum, and testicles, and the creation of a functional neovagina. A successful
psychological outcome is largely dependent upon a good functional result,
which includes the ability to engage in sexual intercourse without pain or discomfort.
The breast enlargement secondary to estrogen therapy is usually not sufficient
to preclude breast augmentation mammoplasty, while other forms of plastic
surgery are occasionally requested to improve the feminine appearance.
For female-to-male transsexuals the surgical techniques are not so well
developed. It is easy enough to remove the breasts by mastectomy, while in the
genital area total hysterectomy, salpingo-oophorectomy, and vaginectomy may be
performed initially. The creation of an artificial penis is a very complicated
and multistaged procedure, which may not allow for functioning that includes
penetration. The difficulties inherent in the surgical construction of a penis
have not yet been overcome.
Conclusion. Transsexualism remains an object of controversy within the
segment of the medical profession that is concerned with the problem. Some clinics
now uniformly refer the patient to psychotherapy in the belief that the desire
for change of sex is intrinsically pathological, while others maintain that
SRS is the treatment of choice for carefully evaluated, genuine, primary
transsexuals. The broader dimensions of the problem lead into the question of
gender identity and the manner in which it is defined by a particular society
and experienced by the individual suffering from gender dysphoria. See
also Hermaphrodite.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Harry
Benjamin, The
Transsexual Phenomenon, New York: The Julian Press, 1966; Anne Bolin, "Transsexualism and
the Limits of Traditional Analysis," American Behavioral Scientist, 31 (1987), 41-65; Ira B. Pauly and Milton T. Edgerton,
"The Gender Identity Movement: A Growing Surgical-Psychiatric
Liaison," Archives
of Sexual Behavior, 15
(1986), 315-29.
Warren Johansson
Transvestism (Cross-Dressing)
Most human societies
recognize a basic polarity in clothing that is deemed appropriate for men and
women. In some tribal cultures the distinction takes the form of the material
used for the garments: animal products for men, plant fibers for women. Modern
industrial societies have adopted a paradigm stemming from the early Middle
Ages in Europe in which men wear trousers while women wear dresses. These
distinctions are not always rigidly applied so that, after initial disapproval,
the adoption of some types of trousers by women in contemporary society has
been taken as a matter of course. As a cultural symbol transvestism, sometimes
termed cross-dressing, becomes effective only when it is recognized that a norm
is being transgressed. In our society, male transvestites are more
"marked" than female, and thus more likely to encounter censure.
Psychosocial Aspects. A popular opinion identifies transvestism with homosexual orientation.
This perception reflects the stereotype that homosexuals are driven to adopt
the conduct and sensibilities of the opposite sex ("inversion"). Yet
modern sociological studies have determined that many - perhaps even a
majority - of men who engage in cross-dressing are heterosexual. There are married
men who insist on wearing female undergarments. Other men join clubs where they
can dress in full drag, basking in the company and approval of like-minded
fellows. Both forms are relatively private, contrasting with the public display
of the more flamboyant drag queen. Although the dynamic of heterosexual
transvestism is not yet fully understood, it surely reflects in part a
fetishistic attachment to the garments characteristically worn by women, whom
the cross-dresser idolizes.
Transvestism, especially when found among male homosexuals (drag queens), is
often confused with transsexualism or change of sex. Of course many
preoperative transsexuals adopt women's dress as a way of gradually acculturating
themselves to the identity they are to assume. Yet most homosexual
transvestites have no desire to change their sex: the cross-dressing is an end
in itself. Not all transvestites strive to achieve a perfect mimicry of the
attire of the opposite sex. Some don only some components of the other gender's
garments and make up, in modes that range from gentle mockery to the harsh
parody of gender roles known as "gender fuck." In the view of some
feminists, male transvestism stems from hatred of women, but most men who
engage in full transvestism would affirm that they admire women, and that they
are trying to bring forth the woman within themselves. Drag queens, who stand
at the opposite end of the spectrum from leather adepts and the macho clones,
have also evoked some hostility from non-cross-dressing gay men.
Terminology. The word transvestism (which became the standard term in
contrast with Havelock Ellis's preference for "eonism") was introduced by the
German sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld in
1910. Until then investigators of sexual deviation had classified the
transvestites who came under their observation as homosexuals. Among his 7000
homosexual subjects Hirschfeld found 19 who had the urge to cross-dress while
remaining heterosexually oriented, and on this basis he concluded that
transvestism is a separate condition distinct from homosexuality.
Perhaps because it is sometimes confused with transsexualism and because of its
clinical sound, the term transvestism is rejected by some in favor of "cross-dressing."
The latter term was first proposed by Edward Carpenter in 1911.
Historical Development. Among some tribal peoples, their exists an intermediate
gender category filled by men who dress as women. These transvestite men do women's
work, and sometimes have priestly and medical powers. They often, though not
invariably, engage in homosexual activity with "full men." Amongthe
peoples of eastern Siberia these individuals are known as shamans, in North America as berdaches, and
in the Polynesian cultures of the Pacific asmahu.
In ancient Athens the
festival of the Cotyttia was celebrated by men in women's clothing; in its
later form it was characterized by homosexual orgies. Other cross-dressing
festivals were celebrated at Argos, Sparta, and other places. Greek mythology
knows figures who change their sex, and similar traditions are found in India
and Africa. During the Roman empire men were sometimes forced to wear women's
clothing as a form of humiliation. Before their martyrdom in 303 the
soldier-saints Sergius and Bacchus were required to don women's clothing by the
emperor. The purpose of this punishment seems to have been as a reprisal for
their perceived violation of the requirements of military valor, and not for
homosexuality, as one modern scholar has claimed.
The adoption of Christianity introduced an element of religious disapproval
of transvestism, as seen in Deuteronomy 22:5: "The woman shall not wear
that which pertaineth to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment;
for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God." Despite this
prohibition medieval men and women still continued to cross-dress, though such
activities tended to be restricted into such zones of licence as Mardi Gras or Carnival, when the "world was turned upside down." Over
the centuries women travelers have often donned men's clothing for convenience
and protection. Thus Sts. Pelagia and Marina assumed men's clothing, and even
entered monasteries.
In the theatre
throughout early modern
Europe women's parts were taken by boys. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
century the lavish clothing styles of the upper class seem to have stimulated
desire for unusual clothing, so that men, not necessarily homosexual, could
affect women's clothing as "fancy dress." The French nobleman
Francois Timoléon
de Choisy (1644-1724)
began dressing in female attire as a boy,- in adult Ufe, though heterosexual, he often appeared at parties as a woman. The
diplomat Charles d'Eon de Beaumont (1728-1810) found dressing as a woman an
asset to his career as a spy. In North America Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, who
was governor of New York and New Jersey from 1702 to 1708, was a heterosexual
transvestite.
From eighteenth-century England come a number of reports of women who
cross-dressed as men, in most instances to practice trades or enter the army.
Henry Fielding's The Female Husband (1746) is a fictionalized account of the case of Mary
Hamilton, who was convicted of fraud for posing as a man and subsequently marrying
a woman. In the nineteenth century several women cross-dressed in order to
become physicians. The woman known as James Barry (1795-1865), not apparently a
lesbian, rose to become senior Inspector-General of the British Army Medical
Department. As these examples and other instances suggest, care is needed in
assessing the sexual orientation of such individuals, who should not be
assumed to be homosexual or lesbian without further evidence.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries cross-dressers have taken their
cue from popular entertainment, including vaudeville, pantomime, nightclub
entertainers, and television "impressionists." At certain points
particular types of transvestism may engage the public's attention - as the
"mannish lesbian" of the 1920s - and the publicity thus engendered
may be picked up by gay men and lesbians and incorporated into their sense of
self-presentation. That is to say, some gay people take up cross-dressing
because that is the way they assume "they are supposed to be."
At its best, transvestism is a form
of ludic behavior that causes
society to take a fresh look at gender
conventions. In the
1980s, when a whole
branch of inquiry known as "gender
studies," has
emerged, the role of transvestism has been
evaluated in new perspectives that point
to a more complex understanding of the phenomenon.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Peter
Ackroyd, Dressing
Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979; Vem L. Bullough, "Transvestism in the Middle Ages: A Sociological
Analysis," American
Journal of Sociology, 79
(1974), 1381-94; Rudolf
M. Decker and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989; Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. Ill, part 2, New
York: Random House, 1936,
pp. 1-110; Deborah Heller Feinbloom, Transvestites and Transsexuals, New York: Dell, 1976; Magnus
Hirschfeld, Die
Transvestiten, Berlin:
Alfred Pulvermacher, 1910;
Julia Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the
Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness, London: Pandora, 1988; Annie Woodhouse, Fantastic Women: Sex, Gender, and Transvestism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
Wayne R. Dynes
Transvestism, Theatrical
The androgynous shaman or berdache
who, in primitive
cultures, serves an important function as intermediary with the numinous, is
considered by some scholars to be sublimated, in civilized societies, into the actor.
The shape-changing powers of the shaman include sexual alternation as
"celestial spouse," and it has been suggested that fear of this magic
resides in the lingering prejudice against the "drag queen." The
intermediate between shaman and drag queen was the performer: the German term Schwuchtel
("queen,"
"fairy") originally meant a player of comic dame roles, and the cultural
historian Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenburg links it with the Latin vetula,
a frivolous music maker.
Among the Taosug people of the South Philippines of the Pacific, most musicians are bantut or homosexuals, expected to take the female role in
courtship repartee; this association of performance and gender reversal
implies a shamanistic origin, and confirms the close link between effeminate behavior and a special caste of performers.
Historical Origins. The origins of theatre in religious cults meant that women
were barred from performance, a prohibition sustained by social sanctions
against their public exhibition in general. Therefore, in Europe, before the
seventeenth century, and in Asia, before the twentieth, female impersonation
was the standard way to portray women on stage, and was considered far more
normal than females playing females. The Greek theatre, devoted to the cross-dressing
god Dionysus, was virtually transvestite by definition. Modern feminist
theory argues that this usurpation of the female role by men was an act of
suppression, which allowed a patriarchal society to transmit a false image of
Woman. However, the Russian classicist Vyacheslav Ivanov, as far back as 1912,
considered that the exclusion of the ecstatic maenad from the stage, by diminishing
energy, enabled the necessary shift from rite to performance. (It has also been
noted that, later, the entrance of women on the French stage under Henri IV and
the English stage under Charles II signaled a descent in drama from the epic
mode to the domestic or social mode.)
The Roman theatre accepted the convention, and scandal arose only when an
emperor lost caste by becoming a performer. Suetonius tells us that Nero
enacted the incestuous sister in the mime-drama Macaris
and Canace, giving
birth on stage to a baby that was then flung to the hounds; according to Aelius
Lampridius, Heliogabalus played Venus in The
Judgment of Paris with
his naked body depilated.
In the Oriental theatre, the transvestite actor, as Roland Barthes has said,
"does not copy woman but signifies her. Femininity is presented to be
read, not to be seen." Most Southeast Asian dance and drama forms kept the
sexes apart in performance, allowing a certain amount of cross-sexual casting;
what was to be impersonated had as much to do with aesthetic distinctions
between coarseness and refinement as with physical or social gender
definitions, so that women often played elegant young princes and men played
abusive old women. In Bali, the powerful witch Rangda was always impersonated
by a man, because only a man's strength could present and contain her dangerous
and religiously empowered magic. These categories have become somewhat blurred
in our time, with the admission of women into hitherto closed spheres of
activity. By the 1920s, women had taken over the Indonesian dance opera Aria,
but audiences still
prefer all males in the operatic form Anja. Similarly, boys dance their own versions of the highly
feminine seduction dances, inciting male audiences to caress them after the
performance. In popular Javanese drama,
ludruk, the
transvestite, who off the stage may be a male prostitute, is an important
figure, related to the androgynous priesthood of the past. He classifies
himself as a woman, presenting not a realistic but a stylized portrait.
China. As early as a.d. 661, Chinese actors were segregated into exclusively
male or female companies. Ch'en Wei-Bung's
love poems to a boy actor in the seventeenth century are well known. The tan
or female impersonator of
Chinese opera, instituted ostensibly for moral reasons in the reign of Chi'en
Lung (1735-1796), received a seven- to ten-year training and had to be an
exceptionally graceful dancer, adept at manipulating his long sleeves. The emploi
is subdivided into ching
or cheng
tan (virtuous woman); hua
tan (seductive woman); lao
tan (old woman), the
most realistic; and wu tan (military woman). The great Mei Lan-fang (He Ming,
1894-1961), voted the most popular actor in China in 1924, combined virtuous
and seductive elements in his portrayals; although he married and fathered a
family, in his youth Mei had been the lover of powerful warlords. The clapper
operas featuring tan had been, from their inception by Wei Ch'ang-cheng in the
1780s, considered by some a danger to public morals; but the first serious ban
was imposed in 1963, instigated in part by Mao Tse-tung's wife Chiang Ching.
When the Cultural Revolution ended, the tan returned, but no more were to be trained. A curious
footnote is the liaison between the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and the
opera dancer Shi Pei Pu, in 1964, which produced a child; in 1983, it was
discovered that the dancer was a male spy and the diplomat had been truly
hoodwinked in their darkened bedroom. As M.
Butterfly (1988),
this incident was wrought into a successful Broadway play.
Japan. In Japanese No
drama, although all the actors are male, sexual differences are not stressed,
the same voice being used whether the role is masculine or feminine. In Kabuki,
however, the on-nagata (female impersonator) or oyama
(literally, chief
courtesan) is an extremely important line of business, with its sharply defined
conventions. Originally, Kabuki was played by female prostitutes who often
burlesqued men, particularly foreigners; in 1629 women were banned from the
stage for reasons of morality. They were soon replaced by boys between eleven
and fifteen {wakashu) who dressed like courtesans and were particularly beloved
for their bangs; they acted out homosexual love affairs or methods of
purchasing prostitutes. The increase in sexual relations between the boys and
their admirers led to a new ban in 1652, and mature men with shaven foreheads
had to take over the female roles. Although this brought about a more refined
art, it did not alter the ambience: in the 1680-90s, 80 to 90 percent of the onnagata
sprang from the ranks of
catamites at the iroko or sex-boy teahouses. Despite the formalized grace and
abstract femininity of the onnagata, an inherent characteristic of Kabuki has remained, as
Donald Shively points out, "the peculiar eroticism with its homosexual
overtones."
The Ayamegusa of Yoshizawa Ayame (1673-1729), the standard handbook,
insisted that female impersonators behave as women in daily life, and blush if
their wives are mentioned. Even a modem, married actor, Tomoemon, has declared,
"One must be the woman, or else it is merely disguise." This helped
maintain the homosexual tradition; boys in training often had relations with
one another, while the actors, although lowest on the social scale, were much
in demand as lovers (Minanojo, in particular, was the pederasts' beau
ideal). Women
sought to imitate the ideal of femininity they incarnated, and the beauties
depicted in classical woodcuts are often onnagata.
A dramatic genre known as
hengemaro or the costume-change piece was created around 1697 to
showcase their skills and perhaps nourish the clothing-fetishism that is a
feature of Japanese culture. Lewdness in love scenes intensified between 1800
and 1840. With the Westernization of Japan, onnagata
played in Ibsen and other
modem dramas, but after World War II actors stopped being exclusive and played
both male and female roles in Kabuki, the great exception being Nakamura
Utaemon VI (b. 1917). Bando Tamasaburo (b. 1950) is one of the great cultural
heroes of modern Japan; well-known as a homosexual who has had affairs with his
leading men, he has extended his repertory to Lady Macbeth and Desdemona.
In 1914, a railway magnate founded the Takarazuka Revue Company outside Osaka
to attract tourists; soon four troupes, made up entirely of unmarried girls,
were performing in repertoire and touring the Pacific. Fifty girls are accepted
annually after examinations in diction, singing, Japanese and western dancing,
and then subjected to rigorous training; if they marry, they must leave the
troupe. Their shows include both Western musicals and traditional folk plays,
and their audiences are over 70 percent female; the otokoyaku
or male impersonator is
the star and idol of schoolgirls, who avidly read the fan magazines. The
Takarazuka's popularity gave rise to the all-female Shochiku Revue, which
resembles a lavish Las Vegas lounge act. Although the Takarazuka prides itself
on its purity, in 1988 two of its graduates were involved in a failed
love-suicide pact.
Tiansvestism in the West. Men dressing as women, particularly obstreperous women, was
a tradition of saturnalia, Feasts of Fools, and medieval New Year's
celebrations, and came to be used in political protest, allowing them to
abnegate masculine responsibility and invest themselves with feminine
instinct. Cross-dressing is a common accompaniment of carnival time, when norms
are turned upside down; men giving birth was enacted at some Hindu festivals,
and even Arlecchino in the late commedia
dell' arte was
shown birthing and breast feeding his infant.
But Christianity, from its inception, could not countenance such letting-off
steam (John Chrysostom condemned cross-dressing in his Easter sermon of a.d.
399), and Western
civilization has remained distrustful. By the nineteenth century most large
European and American cities had enacted laws making cross-dressing a
misdemeanor.
Early English Theatre. Gender confusion drama was brought to England from Italy.
One of the earliest and most intriguing examples was John Lyly's Galathea
(1585), in which two girls
disguised as boys fall in love with one another, and Venus promises to
transform one into a male, to implement their romance. This was complicated by
the fact that both girls were played by boys. Just as the Catholic church
attacked unruly carnivals and mardi gras celebrations, Protestant clerics and
Puritans censured the "sodomitical" custom of the boy-player on the
Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. William Prynne in Histriomastix
(1633) condemned the
practice as "an inducement to sodomy." Boy companies dominated the
English theatre until 1580; tradition has it that Portia was created by James
Bryston, Lady Macbeth by Robert Goffe, Rosalind by Joseph Taylor, Juliet by
Richard Robinson, Ophelia by Ned Alleyn, and Desdemona by Nathaniel Field, who
was coached by Ben Jonson. Edward Kynaston (1640?-l 706) was the last of the
line, playing well into the Restoration when Pepys noted in his diary (1659):
"Kynaston as Olympia made the loveliest lady that I ever saw in my
life." At the same time in France, Louis XTV had no qualms about appearing
in court masques as a bacchante (1651) and the goddess Ceres (1661).
The tradition of the boy actor had arisen in schools, and enjoyed a resurgence
in the nineteenth century. The Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard (founded 1844),
the Princeton Triangle Club, and the Mask and Wig in Philadelphia still thrive,
even though the gender assumptions that inform them no longer obtain.
Cambridge had organized an all-male dramatic society in 1855, Oxford in 1879;
when Cambridge's Footlights company tried to insert women into its comic revues,
a storm of protest forced them to revert to their original practice.
Comedy. Women were members of commedia
dell'aite troupes
from the 16th century, but the comic characters occasionally donned petticoats
to the delight of audiences, and this travesty aspect (already present in
Aristophanes) grew more important as actresses gained popularity. If beauty
and sex appeal were to be projected from the stage by a real woman, the
post-menopausal woman could as easily be played by a comic actor; parts like
Mme. Pernelle in Moliere's Tartuffe and the nanny Yeremeevna in Fonvizin's The
Minor were conceived as
male roles, and Nestroy's mid-nineteenth-century farces contain several of
these "dame" parts. The theatre historians Mander and Mitchenson have
even suggested that "to camp" derives from Lord Campley, who
disguises himself as a lady's maid in Richard Steele's The Funeral (1701). The
comic dame had become a fixture of English pantomime by the Regency period, and
the great music-hall comedian Dan Leno was responsible for the dame elbowing
out Clown as the chief comic performer in panto, opening the way for George
Robey, George Graves and others to flourish. Some performers like George Lacy
and Rex Jamieson ("Mrs. Shufflewick," 1928-1984) played nothing but
dames. A similar tradition was upheld in American popular plays by Neil Burgess
(1846-1910) as Widow Bedotte, Gilbert Sarony (d. 1910) as the Giddy Gusher, the
Russell Brothers as clumsy Irish maids in vaudeville, George K. Fortescue (1846?-1914)
as a flirtatious fat girl in several burlesques, and George W. Monroe (d. 1932)
as an Irish biddy in a number of musical comedies. In France, Offenbach's
operetta Mesdames de la Halle (1858) created three roles of market-women to be sung by
men.
The Circus. In the circus cross-dressing was a means of enhancing the
seeming danger of stunts: the Franconis in an equestrian version of Madame
Angot were allegedly the
first to do so in the Napoleonic period. The American equestrian Ella Zoyara
(Omar Kingsley, 1840-1879) and the English trapezist Lulu (El Niño Farini, b. 1855) were celebrated Victorian examples. Kingsley's
personal sexuality is questionable. There is no question about Emil Mario
Vacano (1840-1892), Austria's most important and prolific writer on the circus,
who had appeared as an equestrienne under the names Miss Corinna and Signora
Sanguineta, and was the lover of Count Emmerich Stadion (1839-1900). The Texan
aerialist Barbette (Vander Clyde, 1904-1973), who performed a species of striptease
on trapeze, ending his act with a dewigging, became the toast of Paris, and
was taken up by Jean Cocteau.
Such performers were said to be "in drag," a term from thieves' cant
that compared the train of a gown to the drag or brake on a coach, and entered
the theatrical parlance from homosexual slang around 1870. "Dragging
up" provides the central plot device in Brandon Thomas' Charley's
Aunt (1892), William
Douglas Home's sex-change play Aunt
Edwina (1959),
and Simon Gray's Wise CMd(1968). The German equivalents were Theodor Korner's Vetter
aus Bremen and
Die Gouvemante (both 1834). A comedy which created a scandal in New York
in 1896 was A Florida Enchantment
by Archibald Clavering
Gunter, in which a magic seed turns a young woman (played by a woman) into a
man and a man (played by a man) into a woman; what shocked was the woman's
masculine amorous propensities displayed while under the influence of the
seed.
Female Transvestism. For unlike female impersonation in the theatre, women
dressing as men had little sanction from ancient religion or folk traditions;
it has usually been condemned as a wanton assumption of male prerogative. But
when women first came on the Western stage, costuming them in men's garb was
simply a means to show off their limbs and provide freedom of movement. This
was certainly the case during the Restoration, when Pepys remarked of an
actress in knee-breeches "she had the best legs that ever I saw, and I was
well pleased by it." Between 1660 and 1700, eight or nine plays presented
opportunities for women in men's clothes. Nell Gwyn, Moll Davis, and others
took advantage of these "breeches roles," but few could, like Anne
Bracegirdle, give a convincing portrayal of a male. Often the part travestied
was that of a young rake - Sir Harry Wildair in The
Constant Couple and
Macheath in The Beggar's Opera - the pseudo-lesbian overtones of the plot's situation
providing a minor thrill.
After the French Revolution, there was a passing fad for historic dramas about
women who went to war as men, usually to aid their husbands or lovers. These
dramas included Pixérécourt's
Charles le
Téméraire, ou le Siège de Nancy (1814), Duperche's
Jeanne Hachette, ou l'Héroïne de Beauvais ( 1822) and a few
about Joan of Arc; Mlle.
Bourgeois who specialized
in such roles was praised for her "masculine energy." The leading
English "breeches" actresses of the early nineteenth century, Mme. Vestris and Mrs. Keeley were, on the other hand, noted for their
delicacy, and made an impression less mannish than boyish. It was said of
Vestris in her best part, in Giovanni
in London, or The Libertine Reclaimed (1817), "that the number of male hearts she caused to ache,
during her charming performance of the character . . . would far exceed all the
female tender ones Byron boasts that Don Juan caused to break during the whole
of his career."
The first "principal boys" in English pantomime were slender women,
but became more ample in flesh throughout the Victorian period, no real effort
made to pretend they were men. Jennie Hill on the music halls and Jennie Lee as
Jo in various adaptations of Bleak House, Vernet in Paris and Josephine Dora and Hansi Niese in Vienna,
represented the proletarian waif, a pathetic or cocky adolescent, not a mature
male. But the Viennese folk-singer Josefine Schmeer always wore men's clothes
off-stage as well. Peter Pan (1904),
incarnated from its premiere by a series of outstanding actresses including
Pauline Chase, Maude Adams, and Mary Martin, benefitted in the National Theatre
revival of 1981 from being played by a young man.
Another aspect of male impersonation is the assumption of Shakespearean men's
roles by actresses. It was long a practice to cast women as children and
fairies. More ambitious was the usurpation of leading parts, with Kitty Clive
alleged to be the first female Hamlet. The powerful American actress Charlotte
Cushman (1816-1876) played Romeo to her sister's Juliet and later aspired to
Cardinal Wolsey; her Romeo was viewed as "a living, breathing, animated,
ardent human being," distinct from most ranting Montagus. Women have
undertaken Falstaff and Shylock on occasion, but Hamlet has proven to be
irresistible. The most distinguished female Dane was Sarah Bernhardt, who,
according to Mounet-Sully, lacked only the buttons to her fly; but, according
to Max Beerbohm, came off tres grande dame. (Sarah
had a penchant for male roles, also playing Lorenzaccio and L'Aiglon.) In our
time, Dame Judith Anderson and Frances de la Tour have tried the experiment,
but it has proven unacceptable to contemporary audiences.
Glamour Drag. A
new development arose in nineteenth-century variety with the glamorous female
impersonator and the "butch" male impersonator. The former might be a
comedian who was dressed and made up to resemble a woman of taste, beauty, and
chic. Glamour drag had originated in the minstrel show, where the
"wench" role was usually invested in a good-looking youth. The foremost
"wenches" like Francis Leon (Patrick Francis Glassey, b. ca. 1840)
and Eugene (D'Ameli, 1836-1870) maintained elaborate wardrobes and were
regarded as models. The first white glamour drag performer appears to be
Ernest Byne, who, as Ernest Boulton (b. 1848), had featured in a sensational
trial for soliciting while dressed in women's clothing.
Male impersonation was first introduced on the American variety stage by the
Englishwoman Annie Hindle (b. ca. 1847) and her imitator Ella Wesner
(1841-1917), both lesbians, in the guise of "fast" young men,
swaggering, cigar-smoking, and coarse. They performed in the English music-hall
as well, but there a toned-down portrayal aimed at a more genteel audience was
affected by Bessie Bonehill (d. 1902). With her mezzo-soprano voice, she
blended the coarsegrained fast man with the principal boy into a type that
could be admired for its lack of vulgarity. Her example was matched by the
celebrated Vesta Tilley (Matilda Alice Powles, 1864-1952), whose soprano voice
never really fooled any listener,- her epicene young-men-about-town were ideal
types for the 1890s, sexually ambiguous without being threatening. Even so, at
the Royal Command Performance of 1912, Queen Mary turned her back on Tilley's
act.
These minstrel and music-hall traditions lasted longest in black American vaudeville,
where the performers' private lives often matched their impersonations.
Female impersonators included Lawrence A. Chenault (b. 1877), who played
"Golden Hair Nell," and Andrew Tribble (d. 1935), who created
"Ophelia Snow." The best-known male impersonator in Harlem was Gladys
Bentley, aka Gladys Ferguson and Bobbie Minton (1907-1960), alleged to have had
an affair with Bessie Smith; later in life, she married and publicly repented
her lesbian past.
Musical Comedy. Critics objected when glamour drag entered musical comedy,
but succumbed to the success of Julian Eltinge (William Dalton, 1882-1941).
The large-boned baritone usually selected vehicles that allowed him quick
wardrobe as well as sex-changes,- this "ambisextrous comedian," as
Percy Hammond called him, wore costumes that rivaled those of female
fashion-plates. Better liked by female than by male audiences, Eltinge worked
at a butch image, regularly picking fights with insulters and announcing his
coming marriage. But his sexual preferences remain a mystery, despite rumors
of an affair with a sports writer.
Bert Savoy (Everett Mackenzie, 1888-1923) introduced an outrageous red-haired
caricature, garish and brassy, gossipping about her absent girlfriend Margie
and launching such catch-phrases as "You mussst come over" and
"You don't know the half of it, dearie." His arch camping, performed
with his effeminate partner Jay Brennan, influenced Mae West. Francis Renault
(Anthony Oriema, d. 1956), billed as "The Slave of Fashion" and
"Camofleur," sang in a clear soprano and appeared in Broadway revue;
Karyl Norman (George Podezzi, 1897-1947), "The Creole
Fashion-plate," switched from baritone to soprano voice, alternating sexes
in his act.
Modern Male Impersonators. With the radical changes in dress and manners that followed
World War I, the male impersonator became a relic, although the tradition
persisted in Ella Shields ("Burlington Bertie from Bow") and Hettie
King. Ironically, contemporary feminist theatre groups have revived the type
for political reasons, as in Eve Merriam's revue The
Club (1976), Timberlake
Wertenbaker's New Anatomies (ICA Theatre, 1981), and German ensembles like Bruhwarm.
The economic necessity of wearing male dress was the motive force of Sim one
Benmussa's The Singular Life of
Albert Nobbs, whose
heroine must live as a waiter, both masculine and subservient, and of Manfred
Karge's Man to Man (198 7), in which a widow adopts her husband's identity to
keep his job as a crane operator.
In a work like Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine
(1979), sexual
cross-casting is an important aspect of the play's inquiry into gender roles.
Lily Tomlin, in her one-woman show, has created a male lounge singer, Tommy
Velour, plausible even to the hair on his chest.
Postwar Revues. During World War II, all-male drag revues were popular in
the armed services and, in the postwar U.K., survived as Soldiers
in Skirts and
Forces Showboats. Despite the military titles, these were havens for
homosexual transvestites, and, perhaps in reaction to wartime austerity,
perhaps in nostalgia for a wartime stag atmosphere, the postwar period
burgeoned with clubs and revues specializing in glamour drag. In fact it had
been the rise of the nightclub in the 1920s which gave female impersonation its
reputation as a primarily homosexual art-form.
In the United States, the Jewel Box revue, founded in Miami in 1938 by Danny
Brown and Doc Brenner, enjoyed an eight-year run in the postwar period and
launched a number of major talents before folding in 1973; its "male"
m.c. was the black female cross-dresser Storme De-Larverie. Similar enterprises
include Finocchio's in San Francisco, Club 82 in New York, My-Oh-My in New
Orleans and the Ha Ha Club in Hollywood, Florida; in Paris, Chez Madame Arthur
and Le Carrousel; in West Berlin, Chez Nous and Chez Romy Haag; and in Havana,
the MonMartre Club. In London, licensing laws forced professional drag into
after-hours clubs and amateur drag into local pubs, just as local interference
by the Catholic Church and witch-hunting town councils legislated many of the
smaller American clubs out of existence. Club transvestites were often eager to
be taken for women: a Parisian star, the Bardot clone Coccinelle
(Jacques-Charles Dufresnoy), pioneered with a sex-change operation and legal
maneuvers to be accepted as a woman.
Many gay bars or pubs provided at least a token stage, and the female impersonator
became almost exclusively what Esther Newton calls "performing homosexuals
and homosexual performers," a relatively young, overt member of a distinct
subculture. But the show-business ambience could often neutralize the sexuality
for a mixed or heterosexual audience. One of the most successful means of
"passing" with such a public is to give impressions of female
super-stars, usually including such gay icons as Mae West, Bette Davis,
Tallulah Bankhead, and Judy Garland. T. C. Jones (1920-1971), a veteran of the
Jewel Box, was introduced to a general public in New
Faces of 1956 and
toured his own revue.
Craig Russell (b. 1948) has been both the most widely known and the most
versatile in this crowded trade, although Charles Pierce's impersonations make
up in vitriol what they lack in accuracy. Many of these performers disdain the
appellation "impersonator": Pierce and Lynn Carter (1925-1985)
preferred to be known as "impressionists," Jim Bailey as a
"singer-illusionist," Russell as a "character actor," and
Jimmy James (James Johnson, b. 1961) insists that his heavily researched
replication of Marilyn Monroe is a kind of possession. (More original and
unnerving is the Dead Marilyn, created by former Cockette Peter Stack, aka
Stakula.)
The mid-60s to 70s saw a resurgence of female impersonation as an article of
theatrical faith. Danny La Rue's (Daniel Carroll, b. 1928) club in Hanover
Square (1964 - 70) was a resort of fashion, and he became a major star of
popular entertainment; despite a homosexual lifestyle well known within the
show biz community, he still promotes an aggressively "normal"
image. Drag mimes, lip-syncing to tapes, became ubiquitous and reached an
elegant apotheosis in Paris' La Grande Eugene. But the "radical drag
queens" Bloolips (founded in London in 1970) sent up this forced glamor
and other cliches of variety entertainment to make wide-sweeping political statements
about social misconceptions of gender.
"Gender-fuck" and Glitter Rock. More anarchic uses of "gender-fuck" resulted
from the emergence of gay liberation from the West Coast hippy scene. The
Cockettes and the Angels of Light of San Francisco were among the first to use
campy pastiches of popular culture for radical ends; the Cycle Sluts and,
later, the street-theatre group, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, parodied
traditional drag by mixing the macho of beards, leather, and hairy chests with
their spangles, false eyelashes, and net-stockings. Despite the flaunted
faggotry of these groups, the outrageousness appealed to heterosexual rock
musicians as a new means of assault; the extreme makeups and outfits were
adopted by Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls, and Kiss, among others, a school
which came to be known as "glitter rock" and
"gender-bending." English society, with its own more delicate
tradition, gave rise to David Bowie, who presented an androgynous allure. This
approach reached a logical terminus in Boy George, whose early publicity touted
him as asexual or tamely bisexual.
Drama. Although Goethe preferred to see a young man as Goldoni's Locandiera
(The Mistress of the Inn),
for fear lest a woman be as forward as the role demanded, female impersonation
did not return to serious drama for a long time. The Russian actor Boris
Glagolin (1878-1948) did attempt to play Joan of Arc in St. Petersburg. But in
modern times cross-dressing became a serious aesthetic principle in the
interpretation of classic texts with both the Lindsay Kemp company and the
Glasgow Citizens Theatre. Kemp (b. 1940?), an original dancer and mime, won an
international reputation with Flowers, an homage to Jean Genet and his versions of Salome
and A
Midsummer Night's Dream, amalgams of camp sensibility with oneiric imagery. (One Kemp follower
who went off on his own was Michael Matou [1947-1987], the Australian dancer
and designer, who founded the Sideshow Burlesco in Sydney in 1979.) The
Citizens Theatre, under the leadership of Giles Havergal, Robert David
Macdonald and Philip Prowse, cast men as Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Marguerite
Gautier (in CaminoReal), and so forth, to stress the irreality of gender identification
and the conventionality of the theatre form; they were the first to introduce
a male Lady Bracknell, an innovation which has since become endemic. Less adventurous
was the Royal Shakespeare Company's all-male As
You Like It, since
it cautiously avoided casting adolescents in the leading parts.
Dame Comedy. Before the war, dame comedy had been sophisticated by
Douglas Byng (1893-1988), who performed in London supper clubs, cabarets and in
revue. Comedy persisted in clowns like Pudgy Roberts who appeared in glamour
drag revues, in the all-male Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (founded 1974)
and the Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet, and their operatic equivalent the Gran
Scena Opera Co., founded by Ira Siff in 1982, with men singing the soprano
roles. Formidable dames carry on: Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage and
piano-entertainers Hinge &. Brackett (George Logan and Patrick Fyffe). In
the 1980s, "alternative drag performance" could be seen at clubs and
pubs in Britain: standard glamour drag was trashed by such as Ivan the Terrible
and The Joan Collins Fan Club (Julian Clary and his dog Fanny), who combined
self-abuse with attacks on audience expectation.
Drag has also become a component of contemporary performance art, as in John
Epperson's Ballet of the Dolls (La MaMa, New York, 1988), a confrontation of pulp fiction
with the cliches of romantic ballet. This trend has its roots in the
"Ridiculous Theatre" movements of the 1970s, which launched Charles
Ludlam, and the Andy Warhol Factory which housed Jackie Curtis and Holly
Woodlawn. The 300-lb. underground film star Divine (Glen Milstead, d. 1988) was
featured in a number of of f-off-Broadway plays, most memorably as the prison
matron in Tom Eyen's Women Behind Bars. A leading exponent is Ethyl (neRoy) Eichelberger (b.
1945), whose one-man Tempest and focasta,
or Boy-Crazy are
both in the minstrel-vaudeville tradition and the shamanistic current (he
sports a tattoo to assert his masculinity whatever his attire). Gender
confusion is also the main theme of Los Angeles comedian John Fleck (b. 1953) (I
Got the He-Be She-Be's, 1986; Psycho Opera, 1987).
Breeches in Opera. In early baroque opera, a favorite plot was the legend of
Achilles disguising himself as a maiden on the island of Scyros to avoid
involvement in the Trojan war; in this equivocal disguise he was wooed by the
king and wooed the princess. The subject was treated seriously by thirty-two
operas between 1663 and 1837, and comically by John Gay (Achilles,
1732) and Thomas Arne (Achilles
in Petticoats, 1793),
and survived as dramatic material as late as Robert Bridges' Achilles
in Scyros (1890).
Both as a legacy from eighteenth-century castrato singing and for reasons of
vocal balance, breeches parts have persisted in opera, and it takes little time
for an audience to adjust to sopranos impersonating libidinous youths like
Cherubino and Octavian. Musical comedy has utilized the male-female disguise
gimmick at least from Franz von Suppe's Patinitza (1878), but without adding anything of distinction to it,
at least not since Eltinge. Danny LaRue's appearance as Dolly Levi in a West
End production of Hello, Dolly! coarsened an already coarse creation. Sugar
by Jule Styne and Bob
Merrill (1972) was simply an overblown remake of Some Like
It Hot, just
as La Cage aux Folles by Fierstein and Herman tarted up the French farce for the
Broadway marketplace.
See also Castiati; Dance; Music, Popular; Theatre and Drama;
Transvestism (Cross-Dressing); Variety, Revue, and Cabaret Entertainment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Roger Baker,
Drag: A History of Female
Impersonation, London:
Triton, 1968; Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, Dei Weibmann, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1984; A. Holtmont, Die Hosenrolle, Munich: Meyer &. Jessen, 1925; Kris Kirk and Ed Heath, Men in Frocks, London: Gay Men's Press, 1984; Laurence Senelick, "The Evolution
of the Male Impersonator on the 19th Century Popular Stage," Essays in Theatre, 1:1 (1982), 31-44.
Laurence Senelick
Travel and Exploration
In this context, the
literature of travel and exploration refers to books written by Europeans or
Americans about what came to be known as the "Third World" - Asia,
Africa, the islands of the Pacific, and to a certain extent the Americas (as
relating to Amerindians). It would not include work in the field of anthropology.
This literature of travel and exploration (and conquest) begins around the
time of Columbus and goes onward until the early twentieth century, when tourism
began to make the whole world a replica of the West and nothing was left to be
explored.
Travel Literature. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, it was possible to write about "sodomie" with some
frankness. Accordingly, there are numerous candid references to homosexuality
in the various writings of travelers which were collected in massive
multivolume anthologies by Richard Haklyt, Samuel Purchas, and John Pinkerton.
Purchas (the source of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan") even has a unique
reference to the homosexuality of the Emperor Jahangir of India. Many other
travel books during this period not collected by any later editor also contain
data of this kind.
As the eighteenth century drew to a close, a slow tidal wave of puritanism and
prudery rolled over the West, and by 1835 it had ceased to be safe to make open
references to homosexuality in books intended for general use. Here and there
in France and Germany, scholars during the nineteenth century were able to
write articles or even books about homosexuality, or to mention it in passing,
but in the English-speaking world there was an almost absolute taboo against
mentioning such an "unspeakable" subject at all. Travelers therefore
either simply did not mention what they saw in foreign lands with regard to
homosexual behavior, or else they mentioned it in veiled phrases ("vice
against nature," "abominable vice," "unnatural
propensities," and similar expressions). This sort of nonsense went on
until the veil was rudely lifted by Arminius Vambery and Sir Richard Burton in
the late nineteenth century, Vambery being a Hungarian traveler who had visited
the court of the pederastic Amir of Bukhara in Central Asia, and Burton being
the notorious explorer of Asia and Africa who wrote a whole essay on pederasty,
which provoked howls of "moral" outrage. But the Oscar Wilde trials
in 1895 put the lid back on until after World War I, and even to a certain
extent until after World Warn.
Another problem was that the Asians and Africans themselves - and this is a
problem faced also by anthropologists - realized that the Western travelers
were hostile to homosexuality, and therefore kept it out of their sight as
much as possible. The Japanese after the beginnings of modernization in the
late nineteenth century are a case in point. One need only look back to the
clandestine nature of homosexual society in the United States up until the
1960s to realize how easy it is to hide a flourishing homosexual subculture
from the general public, much more so from passing tourists.
The present writer can attest that homosexuality, so widespread in Morocco,
remains totally out of the view of tourists who are not looking for it.
Nonetheless, there have been some travelers who were allowed to see homosexual
behavior going on right in front of them. In the 1950s, Wilfred Thesiger and
Gavin Maxwell visited the tribes in the marshlands of southern Iraq (since,
alas, ravaged by war), where the young boys were all stark naked, and there
were dancing-boys who act as prostitutes. The Arabs made no secret of this to
Thesiger and Maxwell, but whether they would have made a secret of it to other
visitors is hard to say. The fact that Maxwell was a pederast may have made a
difference.
Homosexual Questers. There is a second aspect of travel, namely the travels of
homosexual men (rarely lesbians) in search of some place on earth where the
taboos of the Christian West have no validity. As Kipling put it, "Ship
me some-wheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there
ain't no Ten Commandments, and a man can have a thirst." The idea that
somewhere "east of Suez" there was a paradise where "a man can
have a thirst" for the forbidden is a powerf ulmyth that took over the
imagination of many homosexual men. How many explorers were actually, deep in
the recesses of their minds, looking for this paradise? The wanderlust of many
an explorer and traveler doubtlessly had been inspired by cravings that they
hardly dare admit even to themselves. The fact that travel and exploration
generally involve being in the company of other men, to the total exclusion of
women, and requiring the company of friendly local boys as guides and servants,
is bound to have a much stronger appeal to homosexual than to heterosexual men.
Even in paradises famous for their women of easy virtue, such as Polynesia, it
was homosexual men like Herman Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard who led the
way, and in Bali, an island famous for its bare-breasted women, there was a colony of European homosexuals in the 1930s
(driven out by the Dutch).
Some homosexual (usually pederastic) men have practically made a career out of
wandering around the globe in search of exotic boys: Walter B. Harris, Michael
Davidson, and Roland Raven-Hart, to name a few. If one was not too adventurous,
a simple trip to France or Italy (Venice, Capri, Sicily) would suffice, and
there has long flourished a homosexual colony in Tangier, exotic but near to
Europe.
In the 1970s there were several Asian nations whose great poverty caused a
sharp rise in the prostitution of young boys (and girls), but a public outcry
forced the otherwise amoral police to crack down, or pretend to crack down, on
the numerous tourists who came in just to patronize the local boys. This sort
of prostitution was flourishingin Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Thailand, and the
Philippines, where the town of Pagsanjan turned pederasty into its main
industry. As far back as 1903, General Hector Macdonald, a hero of the British
Army, had committed suicide after having sexual relations with boys in Ceylon.
The fondness for travel among modem homosexuals has led to the publication of
various "gay guides," the most complete one being the Spartacus
International Gay Guide (Berlin: Bruno Gmünder Verlag, 1989). The idea that "the grass is greener on the other
side" has helped to send thousands of homosexual men in search of sexual
freedom or gratification in foreign lands. To a certain extent, this is a
glorified version of the sexual encounters that the heterosexual businessman
has on trips to other cities - he dare not risk exposure in his home town, but
nobody knows him in the other city, he is anonymous.
Local Attitudes and Foreign Myths. The question of whether the people of Asia and Africa are
more liberal about sex remains to be answered. Islam is more puritanical than
Christianity, but its customary sexual segregation provokes widespread
homosexuality, at least of the situational sort that flourishes in boarding
schools or prisons if not the "real" sort.
And poverty creates the desperate amorality that breeds prostitution of all
kinds. These are not the best bases for a sexual paradise, even if sexual
freedom is more widespread under stich conditions. But a lot of men don't care.
Hence the sexual "Meccas" - how totally unlike the purity of Mecca! -
of the East.
In a sense, the sexual bazaars of the East are an artificially created response
to the "east of Suez" image that many Westerners are looking for, and
the supply is created to meet the demand. Thus, the image creates its own
realization. The modem situation is totally unlike the earlier one because the
invention of jet airplanes increased the number of tourists to Asia. In the
1930s, a slow boat to Shanghai to taste the vices of the mysterious Orient was
no easy matter, but now one can fly to Asia in one day. The availability of
sex and the liberalism of sexual attitudes can often be seen in amusing and
ironic comparisons made by people who think that "here" it is hard
but "there" it is easy. Some Americans think that Rio de Janeiro is a
sexual paradise compared to the United States=the sex more available and the
attitudes more liberal - while the Brazilians are thinking that their own
country is puritanical and that America is the sexual paradise! But the myth
keeps provoking people to travel to other countries in search of better sexual
hunting grounds. (This myth also applies to the American image of Scandinavia.)
Not long ago, East Baltimore was the Pagsanjan of America, but people continue
to think in terms of paradises being far away.
Perhaps in the future, when wealthy Asians are common and the AIDS crisis will
have been solved, one can expect the United States to be visited by homosexual
tourists from Japan in search of the large and virile Western male of the
cowboy and detective films they see at home.
See also Resorts, Gay.
Stephen Wayne Foster
Tribade
The Greek term for
lesbian, tribas - from the verb tribein, "to rub" - implies that the women so designated
derived their sexual pleasure from friction against one another's bodies. Male
imagination supplied further embellishments. Friedrich Karl Forberg, in his
commentary on classical sexual mores entitled De
figuris Veneris (1824),
asserted that "the tribades ...
are women in whom that part of the genital apparatus which is called the clitoris
attains such dimensions that they can use it as a penis, either for fornication
or for pedication.... In tribades, either by a freak of nature or in
consequence of frequent use, it attains immoderate dimensions. The tribade can
get it into erection, enter a vulva or anus, enjoy a delicious
voluptuousness, and procure if not a complete realization of cohabitation, at
least something very close to it, to the woman who takes the passive
role." He adds that the term was "also applied to women who in default
of a real penis make use of their finger or of a leather contrivance [dildo]
which they insert into their vulva and so attain a fictitious
titillation." According to some ancient sources, a pet garden snake could
also double for the virile member.
The word tribas appears comparatively late in Greek, in astrological authors
and satirists of the second century of our era, yet its occurrence in the work
of the Roman poet Martial at the end of the first century shows that it must
have existed in vulgar speech, if not in literature, well before that time.
Phaedrus (iv, 14) even equates tribades with molles
mares (effeminate males -
homosexuals) as individuals exhibiting disharmony between their genitalia and
the direction of their sexual desires. The Latin language formed its own word frictrix
or fricatrix
from fricare
"to rub" on the
model of the Greek expression. Preserved by the texts of classical authors
whose manuscripts survived into the Renaissance, the word tribade
found its way into the
modern languages, for example in Henri Estienne's Apologie
pour Heiodote (1566),
where it remained the usual term for lesbian well into the nineteenth century.
The author of the satiric poem entitled The Toast,
in Latin and in English,
described it as giving an account of "the progress of tribadism in
England," and Forberg mentions colleges of tribades called
"Alexandrian colleges" in late eighteenth-century London.
Beginning in French in the mid-nineteenth century, the term lesbian
gradually supplanted tribade
(and sapphist)
in learned and popular
usage, so that today the word occurs but rarely as a deliberate archaism or
classical allusion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Friedrich Karl Forberg, Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris), New
York: Grove Press, 1966.
Warren Johansson
Trick
This slang term for a
casual sex partner stems from the expression "turn a trick." The use
of the word in cardplaying, where a succession of tricks determines one's final
score, has been a continuing influence on the sexual usage, for cards involve
cognate elements of competition and winning and losing. The word's popularity
reflects the high visibility of the "promiscuous" lifestyle, or
sexual pluralism, among male homosexuals. The verb "to trick" is
often used for "to have sexual intercourse with" or "to
make" in the sense of attaining a sexual conquest.
A trick is often called a "number," expressing the concept that each
individual partner is just one in a long series stretching back to the first,
and to be prolonged indefinitely into the future. A single sexual encounter,
unlikely to be repeated, is termed a "one-night stand." In fact,
during the pre-AIDS era a substantial number of gay men reported a history of
multiple partnering involving thousands of men. This prodigious activity has no
counterpart among women (except perhaps for prostitutes, which is another
matter), nor among heterosexual men, for Don Juan types rarely, if ever, attain
such records.
Tsvetaeva, Marina (1892-1941)
Russian poet. The daughter
of a professor of art history at the University of Moscow and founder of the
first museum of the fine arts in Russia, Marina Tsvetaeva was educated both at
home and then in boarding schools in Switzerland and Germany. Her poetic talent
was instinctive and precocious; she began to write at the age of six, and the
first book of her collected juvenilia, Evening
Album (1910), earned the
notice of some of the most important Russian poets of the day, one of whom, Max
Voloshin, introduced her to literary circles. In the spring of 1911, at
Voloshin's celebrated home in Koktebel on the Crimean coast, she met her future
husband, Sergei Efron, whom she saw as a high-minded and noble man of action.
Among her constant heroes were strong and virile characters, men and women with
romantic ideals and the will to act on them - Napoleon, Goethe, Rostand, Sarah
Bernhardt, Maria Bashkirtseva.
In 1916 the poet Osip Mandelstam fell in love with her and followed her across
Russia in an unsuccessful campaign to win her - an event both celebrated in
their poetry. In Moscow in 1917, she witnessed the Bolshevik seizure of power.
Her husband joined the White army as an officer, while she was stranded in the
capital and did not see him for five years. Her sympathies were on "the
other side," and she composed at this time a cycle of poems entitled The
Demesne of the Swans, glorifying
the Tsar and the white forces.
With the war at an end, Tsvetaeva decided to emigrate in order to rejoin her
husband, and headed for Prague (a Russian emigre center in the interwar years)
by way of Berlin. The literary life of the first emigration, as it is now
called, was exceptionally active, and Tsvetaeva had many plans of her own. Even
though she had left the Soviet Union, the frontier was not yet closed, and her
most famous collection, Mileposts
I, was published there
in 1922. For three years the couple resided happily in Prague, then in 1925 she
moved to Paris - another émigré
center - and lived there
for fourteen years, taking an active and welcome part in the cultural life of
the Russian community. However, unknown to her, her husband had been converted
to communism and was working for the Soviet secret police. Now rejected and
ostracized by the other émigrés,
Tsvetaevaresolved to
return to the Soviet Union in the wake of her husband, but when she arrived
there in June 1939, she was even more hopelessly out of place. To boot, her
husband was arrested and shot as an enemy of the people - because he knew too
much. Evacuated to Elabuga in the Tatar Autonomous Republic, she committed
suicide by hanging herself on August 31, 1941.
It was in Paris at the end of the twenties that Tsvetaeva was introduced to
Natalie Clifford Barney and invited to Barney's celebrated literary salon at
20, rue Jacob. A model for lesbian characters in almost every novel of the
first three decades of the century, Barney ( 1876-1972) kept one of the most
elegant salons in Paris, where the Russian poetess, impoverished, shabbily
dressed, and unknown to English and French readers, must have cut a strange
figure. The nickname Amazon had been given to Barney by her male admirer, Remy
de Gourmont, and she appropriated it for the title of her book Pensées
d'une Amazone (1920),
to which Tsvetaeva replied in turn in her essay "Letter to an
Amazon," written in November and December of 1932 and revised at the end
of 1934. Part essay and part narrative, it sets forth Tsvetaeva's thoughts on
lesbian love based on her personal experiences at various moments in her life.
Love between two women is beautiful and rewarding; God is not opposed to it,
but Nature rejects it in the interest of perpetuating the species. A typical
lesbian affair - between an experienced older women and a younger partner whom
she seduces and initiates - runs onto the rocks when the younger woman feels
the maternal instinct and abandons the older one to pursue her biological
destiny in the embrace of a man who can give her children. The two part
company, and the older partner searches vainly for someone to replace her lost
love, but the younger one has become indifferent and is unmoved by the news,
years later, of her death. This scenario parallels Tsvetaeva's own liaison with
Sofia Pamok. The piece is a poetic and often moving prose rhapsody about a
dimension of sexual experience which the poetess could not reconcile with the
rest of her erotic personality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Simon
Karlinsky, Marina
Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World and Her Poetry, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985; S, Poliakova, Tsvetaeva i Parnok, Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1982.
Evelyn Gettone
Turing, Alan (1912-1954)
British scientist. Alan
Turing was bom into a social rank just between the British commercial classes
and the landed gentry; his father served in the Indian Civil Service and Alan
spent much of his childhood separated from his parents. He showed an early
talent for science, and maintained this interest through his career in the British
public school system, where science was simply referred to as
"Stinks."
He seems to have been a brilliant, awkward boy whose latent genius went
unnoticed by all his teachers; he also had no friends until his very last years
at Sherborne. Then he fell in love with a fellow science enthusiast,
Christopher Morcom: the Platonic friendship was returned, and Alan Turing was for
the first time in his life a happy young man. He had dreams of joining
Christopher at Trinity, to pursue science together,- unfortunately, Christopher
Morcom suddenly died (from a much earlier infection with bovine tuberculosis).
The effect on the young Turing was shattering.
He went up to Kings College, Cambridge, and embarked on a brilliant
mathematical career; his first substantial contribution was his important
article on the computable numbers, which contained a description of what is
still known as the "Turing machine." He was made a Fellow of Kings at
the very young age of twenty-two.
Turing spent two years in America, at Princeton University, and, on his return
to Britain, was drafted into British cryptanalysis for the war effort. Turing
was already unusual among mathematicians for his interest in machinery; it was
not an interest in applied mathematics so much as something which did not
really have a name yet - "applied logic." His contribution to the
design of code-breaking machines during the war led him deeper and deeper into
the field of what would now be called computer programming, except that
neither concept existed at the time. He and a colleague named Welshman designed
the Bombe machines which were to prove decisive in breaking the main German
Enigma ciphers. For his contribution to the Allied victory in World War II
Turing was named an Officer of the British Empire (O.B.E.) in 1946.
He also possessed one of the many brilliant minds of his era which independently
conceived of the computer - to be precise, of the automatic electronic digital
computer with internal program storage (the original "Turing machine"
was a predecessor). The earliest inventor of such a device was the eccentric
nineteenth-century Charles Babbage, who could not obtain the necessary hardware
to implement his ideas. But in the 1940s the idea became feasible, and the
"real" inventor of the computer was an international network of
mathematicians and engineers which included John von Neumann and Alan Turing,
among many others.
In the post-war era, Turing became fascinated with the concept of artificial
intelligence, and was a pioneer in exploring this new domain. (The "Turing
test" is still a current phrase among computer scientists.) He was
elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951.
A lifelong homosexual, Turing's Ufe took a bad turn when he reported a burglary to the police. The officers
were quick to sniff out the possibility of an "offense against
morals" which soon preempted the burglary investigation; Turing gladly
described what he had done with a young man in his bed, thinking that a
commission was currently sitting to "legalize it." He was brought to
trial and sentenced to a year's probation under the care of a psychiatrist, who
proceeded to administer doses of female hormone to his patient, this being the
current "wonder-therapy" which replaced castration as an attempt to
kill the sexual instinct. For the entire year, Turing underwent the humiliation
of femininization ("I'm growing breasts!" he confided to a friend),
but emerged seemingly intact from the public ordeal. He committed suicide in
1954, by eating an apple he had laced with cyanide.
Turing did little or no theorizing about homosexuality, and his life
accomplishments had nothing to do with the question. He does stand out as an
example of a gay man whose talents were clearly "masculine" in
nature. His love of young men was as simple and unpretentious as the rest of
his Ufe. If there is an object lesson in his career, it is perhaps
this: this harmless English homosexual atheist mathematician made a huge
contribution to winning World War n, and
his reward was to be hounded into suicide by the forces of British prudery
within eight years of that victory.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Andrew
Hodges, Alan
Turing: The Enigma, New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.
Geoff Puterbaugh
Turkey
The history of same-sex
love is almost coterminous with the Turkish state. At the Seljuk court of Konya
there flourished the great Sufi poet Jelal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273), whose life
was decisively marked by his passion for the youth Shams al-Din of Tabriz. Not
himself ethnic Turkish, Rumi prepared a path for many other figures who were.
Sufism, which continues to flourish in Turkey, incorporates a tradition of the
beautiful youth or Beloved as the channel of Divine Love. The cultivated school
of divan poetry, which includes such masters as Kadi Burhanettin
(1344-1398), Seyhi (d. ca. 1430), Nedim (1681-1730), and Seyh Galib
(1757-1799), stems from this source, though sometimes inflecting it in secular
directions.
Quite early in Turkish history, its rulers discovered the pleasures of sensual
boy-love, and Bayezid I (1360-1403) sent his soldiers to comb the conquered
areas to find the most delightful boys for his harem. His example caused the
practice of taking boys for sexual purposes to spread in the army, among
government officials, and through the nobility. During their wars of conquest
the Turkish sovereigns did not fail to renew their supply of slaves -
especially beautiful, highly desired European youths. This levy as much as
anything else contributed to European hatred of the Turks.
Mehmed II, who captured Constantinople in 1453 and made it the capital of the
Ottoman Empire, is described as a notorious boy-lover. To rouse his troops to
assault the city he painted a glowing picture of the booty that awaited them -
especially the gentle, beautiful, aristocratic boys, enough for all. The
historical accounts of the fall of the city abound in tales of rape and
atrocity, as the Greek nobles were murdered and their children enslaved, with
the 200 most handsome going to the Sultan's harem. At the battle of Mohacsin
1526, the Turkish victory caused the entire Balkan Peninsula to fall under
Ottoman rule. The Croatian Bartolomej Durdevic has left an eloquent description
of the boys enslaved after such conquests and sold as catamites or male
prostitutes.
The boys chosen for the service of the ruler ranged in age from 8 to 16; they
received a geisha-like training to make them both entertainers and skilled bed
partners. When the Turkish Empire ceased to expand, the Sultan imposed an infamous
"child tax." Every four years the Sultan's agents would visit each
village in European Turkey to select the most handsome boys between 7 and 9
for the army corps, the palace pages' school, and the labor corps. European
boys were typically not castrated, but feminized in training, manners, and
costume "to serve the lusts of lecherous masters." Much has been
written on boy-love in the court of Ali Pasha, the Turkish governor of Ioannina
in Greece, whose agents roamed the dominion in search of beautiful children,
even killing parents who refused their sons to the governor. Ali and his son
are said to have engaged in sadomasochistic practices reminiscent of the
writings of the Marquis de Sade, both torturing the boys and presenting them
with gifts.
Even after Mehmed IV (1641-1691) abolished the "child tribute," the
supply of boys was maintained by an active slave traffic into the Turkish
Empire. In the 1850s Circassian slave dealers supplied large numbers of
children - often sold into slavery by their own parents. Again in 1894, large
numbers of the handsomest Armenian boys were taken for sexual purposes. Perhaps
no city has ever been so famous for its boy brothels as Istanbul, where boys of
various nationalities were once available as freely as girls. The anonymous
English poem Don Leon falsely attributed to Byron (1836) tells of "seeking
a brothel where ... The black-eyed
boy his trade unblushing plies." To the extent that this tradition
survives in modern Turkey, the brothels have preserved the arts cultivated to
their peak in the Sultans' harems.
Yet even with their excesses - which were in fact exaggerated by hostile
European commentators propagating the stereotype of the "cruel and lustful
Turk" - the Ottomans were also capable of man-boy love, and European boys
were all the more desirable because of their capacity for affection and erotic
response which the more familiar Near Eastern boys were thought to lack. The
boy used for sexual purposes could graduate from his master's bed to become the
manager of an estate, the steward of a household, even a general, court
official or governor if his protector were powerful enough. Since the homoerotic
side of Turkish life was omnipresent and inevitable, those who could take
advantage of the opportunity thrived and climbed the social ladder.
Modern Turkey has actually suffered from Europeanization in that the Christian
attitudes became part of the political mentality of the Republic, with the
familiar practice of raiding gay bars, arresting the patrons, and subjecting
them to humiliation and even torture. Yet despite this, the Istanbul of today
is thought to have nearly half a million homosexuals, who concentrate in the
Beyoglu (Pera)
district, especially the
Cihangir quarter. A majority must still conceal their homosexuality from their
families and colleagues at work. Arslan Yüzgün's study of 223 homosexual men in Istanbul showed that 56.1 percent are
both active and passive, 30.9 percent are passive only and 13 percent are
active only. On the whole they are more educated than the average of the
Turkish population. However, the traditional stigmatization of the passive as
opposed to the active homosexual lingers. The active homosexual is esteemed and
can even boast of his ways, the passive homosexual is despised and persecuted
by the police even in the absence of laws against his behavior.
The Western gay rights movement has finally reached Turkey, and in April 1987
the terror tactics employed by the police in Istanbul sparked a resistance
movement in which eighteen homosexuals sued the police as a group for the
first time, submitted a petition to the Attorney General, and later staged a
hunger strike in Taksim Square. Thus another segment of the international gay
community has achieved the stage of political consciousness that enables it to
organize and fight for its human rights.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jonathan
Drake, '"Le Vice' in Turkey," International Journal of Greek Love, 1:2 (1966), 13-27; Nermin Menemcioglu and Fahir Iz, eds., The Penguin Book of Turkish Verse, London: Penguin, 1978; Arslan Yüzgün, "The Fact of Homosexuality in Turkey and the Problems Confronting
Turkish Homosexuals," Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality! Amsterdam: Vrij Universiteit, 1987, 181-91 [summarizes some
of the findings of his Türkiye'de E^cinsellik (Dim, Bugiin), Istanbul: Hüür-Yüz
Yayincilik, 1986].
Warren Johansson
Twilight Men
InKenilworthBruce's 1933
novel, Goldie, the hero joins a prototypical (and fictional) gay rights
organization, The Twilight League. This reflects the title of Andre Tellier's
popular homosexual novel, Twilight
Men (1931). It is
doubtful whether the term enjoyed much real currency, but images of shadows and
of darkness were common in the fiction of the period - and, given the
obligatory tragic ending, all too appropriate.
In the nineteenth century the adjective "crepuscular" enjoyed some
vogue to designate a declining civilization, because of the allegory of
civilization following a quasi-solar course of ascent, zenith, afternoon
fullness, and then descent into twilight; hence crepuscular trenches with fin-de-siecle
and decadent. Richard
Wagner's 1874 opera, Die Gotteidammerung (The Twilight of the Gods), was very popular in this
period.
Recently, the term "midnight cowboy," from fames Leo Herlihy's 1965
book and the subsequent film, has had some currency. (For reasons not
altogether clear, much homosexual social life begins only after ten or eleven
in the evening.) Presumably real cowboys have to be up too early in the morning
to be out until midnight.
Twin Studies
The study of twins is a
useful tool for determining if a given trait or condition has a genetic
component. Inasmuch as the sophistication of these studies has increased
markedly over the past few decades, their value is increasing. Scientists have
learned that such studies should be carefully conducted, and they are normally
a helpful, if somewhat unexciting, discipline.
Yet peace and quiet did not attend the first attempts to conduct twin studies
in homosexual behavior. Early research (Kallmann) indicated a very high concordance
for homosexuality, and these results provoked cries of "Nazi" and
"fascist" from the opposite camp, which was convinced that
homosexuality was caused by the environment, specifically child-rearing
practices. Clearly, ideology was getting entangled with science during these
early years (and not for the first time).
So these twin studies must be approached with some care, and one must not
automatically expect careful and impartial research in what is still, for many,
an essentially contested area. "Concordance" is the degree to which
two people share the same trait, John and Peter, not related, may be
concordant for blue eyes, if they both have blue eyes. It is easy to determine
concordance for eye color. But homosexual behavior is a more complex
phenomenon. It may have several distinct subtypes (the effeminate, the
pederast, the loving comrade, and so on). People may also lie about the facts,
for obvious reasons.
Despite these problems, it is difficult to read the twin literature on homosexuality
without some surprise. "Fraternal" twins come from two sperm and two
eggs, and are therefore no more closely related than any other siblings, while
"identical" twins come from one sperm and one egg (the egg dividing
after fertilization). Recent research has shown that these
"identical" twins may not be complete twins in their gene
complements (due to unknown factors in the egg-splitting process). One would
expect no concordance at all for either fraternal or identical twins, if the
strong environmentalist argument were to hold.
But that is not the case. There is no (or very little) concordance for fraternal
twins. For identical twins, the concordance rate is approximately eighty or
ninety percent, or even higher. This evidence would seem to suggest that
people are simply born homosexual, just as they are born with green or blue
eyes.
Yet the fact that these people seem to be bom with a genetic predisposition to
homosexuality carries no necessary implication that all homosexuality results
from genetic factors. This may ultimately prove to be the case, but the twin
studies do not prove it in and of themselves. In addition, a high concordance
rate for homosexuality among identical twins does not mean that such twins are
more (or less) likely to be homosexual than anyone else. Finally, there is no
evidence at all in the twin studies which indicates that a particular subtype
(for example, the effeminate homosexual) is genetically dominant at the expense
of other homosexual subtypes.
The twin evidence presents some problems for future research. First, the acid
test is the case of identical twins raised apart. There are not yet enough such
twin-pairs in the literature. (It would also seem mandatory to obtain more
longitudinal data on twin pairs.) Second, there is no clear idea of how this genetic component interacts with the
surrounding environment to produce the fairly wide spectrum of human social
behavior recorded by anthropology and history. Third, much larger twin studies
need to be performed: the total periodical literature covers under a hundred
pairs. Fourth, lesbianism and male homosexuality may not be the same sort of
thing at all, if early research (Eckert et al.) holds up.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. E. D. Eckert, T. J. Bouchard,). Bohlen, and L. L. Heston,
"Homosexuality in Monozygotic Twins Reared Apart," British Journal of Psychiatry, 148 (1986), 421-25; Franz J. Kallmann, "Comparative
Twin Study on the Genetic Aspects of Male Homosexuality," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 115, (1952), 283-98; Geoff Puterbaugh, "Bom Gay? Hand
Preference and Sex Preference," Cabirion, 10(1984),
12-18.
Geoff Puterbaugh
typology of Homosexuality
A valuable conceptual tool
in seeking to understand a wide-ranging phenomenon or related group of phenomena
which show both commonality and diversity, typology is the arrangement or
classification of the elements under study so as to highlight both points of
similarity and points of difference. Typology traces its roots back to the
biologist's taxonomy, or classification of species, a practice which stems
ultimately from Aristotle and his school.
In 1922 the great sociologist Max Weber applied the notion of
"ideal types" to social behavior. These types were characterized as
hypothetical constructs made up of the salient features or elements of a social
phenomenon, or generalized concept, in order to facilitate comparison and
classification of what is found in operation. Psychology, linguistics,
anthropology, the history of science, comparative religion, and other
disciplines have since made considerable use of such tools, often called
"models" or "paradigms."
Once a typology has been constructed, it becomes an aid in the interpretation
of a variety of concrete phenomena, but it can be misused to distort reality,
as the features selected to compose them may acquire a distorted importance or
concreteness, leadingto the neglect of other factors. Hence typologies must be
continually subjected to reexamination as new data become available, and
revised as the understanding of the phenomena becomes more sophisticated.
Typologies are most helpful in preventing the ascription of traits in one
subgroup of the phenomena under study to other subgroups where they may not
belong, and in underlining points of commonality which may disclose historical
influences or causal factors that otherwise might not have suggested themselves
to the investigator.
In natural science, the term "paradigm" has been used since Thomas S.
Kuhn's widely read book The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to
designate the prevailing system of understanding phenomena which guides
scientific theorization and experimentation, and which is held to be the most
useful way of explaining the universe, or a part of it, until that paradigm is
eventually overthrown by new data and replaced by a newer paradigm. As Kuhn
has pointed out, paradigms may function without the conscious adhesion of
those who employ them, and in the broadest sense they often form part of the
unvoiced inner structure of human existence.
Popular Paradigms and Homosexuahty. A somewhat different use of typologies may refer to the
models or conceptual schemes held up to groups of people or the public at large
in order to assimilate difficult or strange phenomena. When these models
substantially guide the concepts and behaviors of the people most involved with
them, they take on a normative reality which goes far beyond the theoretical
utility of the academic model. Thus, it is one thing for the anthropologist to ascribe monogamous marriage to tribe A and
polygamous marriage to tribe B; it is another if the only model of marriage
known to the members of tribe B is the polygamous one, so that they react in
horror to any suggestion of monogamy.
In the field of homosexuality, such popularly adopted typologies or paradigms
have become extraordinarily powerful, though seldom of universal application.
One of the great issues remaining in the study of homosexuality is how such
popular paradigms are adopted by a culture and how they are lost or
overthrown. A puzzling historical example is the paradigm shift in England and
other industrializing Western countries which occurred from the seventeenth to
the nineteenth centuries, such that male homosexual relations came to be seen
as usually involving two adults rather than an adult and a boy. A current
example is the emergence in countries like Japan and Thailand and in much of
Latin America of a new paradigm (mutual androphilia or relationships between
two adults, both male-identified) to compete with traditional paradigms such as
pederasty and the model of "normal" males pairing with effeminate
surrogate females.
Earlier Attempts to Create Scientific
Paradigms of Homosexual Behavior and Relationships. In classical antiquity a major division was drawn
emphasizing an active-passive contrast in sexual behavior, with the active
(penetrating) partners considered "manly" and the passive (penetrated)
role reserved for boys, slaves, foreigners, those vanquished in battle, and so
forth. Beyond this simple dichotomy, little thought was given to typology.
Those, like K. H. Ulrichs and K. M. Kertbeny, who initiated serious comparative
scholarship on homosexuality in the nineteenth century tended to view all
homosexual behavior in essentially monolithic terms. They were largely unaware
of the degree to which same-sex activity in other times and climes differed
from that with which they were familiar. This tendency to assimilate all
homosexual conduct to a single model has survived into the present day in what
is sometimes called "naive essentialism," evident in the tendency to
speak of ancient personalities such as Plato and Alexander the Great, or even
mythical figures such as Hylas and Ganymede, as "gay," thus (in this
instance] obscuring the difference between ancient pederasty and modern mutual
androphilia.
An advance occurred with the more detailed research published by many scholars
in the fahrbuch für
sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1899-1923) under the editorship of Magnus Hirscbield.
In his own comprehensive
work Die Homosexualitat des
Mannes und des
Weibes (1914), Hirschfeld outlined a typology based on the age of
the love object of the homosexual subject: pedophiles,
who are attracted to
pre-pubic children; ephebophiles, whose love object is from 14 to 21 (in current usage, from
17 to 21); androphiles, who prefer those from maturity to the beginning of old
age; and gerontophiles, who like older people. Equivalent terms for lesbian
relationships given by Hirschfeld were korophile, parthenophile, gynecophile,
and graophile.
In addition to these schemes, which reflect object choice, Hirschfeld drew up a
typology of homosexual acts which distinguished four major categories: manual,
oral, intracrural, and anal.
Hirschfeld's older contemporary Richard von Kraf
ft-Ebing advanced
a typology based on the time of life of homosexual activity, thereby
emphasizing adolescent experimentation, "temporary" (situational)
homosexuality, and
late-blooming homosexuality,- this latter concept relates to the notion of "latent
homosexuality."
In 1913 Hans Bliiher, who was influenced by Sigmund Freud,
distinguished three basic
types: the "heroic-male" form, characterized by individuals who are
markedly masculine and not outwardly distinguishable from heterosexuals (and
may in fact be bisexual); the type of the effeminate invert; and latent
inversion, in which the longing for one's own sex is unconscious, rising to the
surface only on particular occasions or not at all.
In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey and his associates developed a sevenfold scale of
sexual orientation, but this was not a true typology since there were no clear
criteria dividing, say, those in group II from those in group HI. In fact,
Kinsey viewed this fluidity as an advantage since he opposed what he regarded
as overrigid classifications.
Toward a Contemporary Typology. None of these writers sought to develop a more global
typology which might encompass the full range of cultures and time periods, in
part because they had no access to or were not inclined to deal with
ethnological and other data regarding societies apart from their own. As gay
studies began to expand horizons, however, the need for more comprehensive
typologies which included a wider range of popular paradigms became evident.
One of the major flaws of earlier typologies was their tendency to concentrate
on a single linear axis, producing two-dimensional structures. Inevitably,
these schemes left out major lines of differentiation and similarity. More
sophisticated new typologies might be drawn on three or even more axes, making
them difficult to state simply in words (though sometimes more easily in
diagrams), but probably more realistic. One must, of course, stop somewhere, or
one ends up with the 687,375 types posited by the Dutch writer L.S. A.M. von
Römer in 1904. (Most of these are theoretical, von Römer admitted, with only a
tenth of them really viable. But even restricting oneself to male homosexuality
as such, one would have more than 11,000 types.)
For their part, anthropologists have ascertained, during the first half of the
twentieth century, that there are some 3,000 living cultures. The rapid
progress of acculturation will probably prevent anthropologists from learning
the native organization of homosexuality in the majority of them. Records of
the past, however, permit one to add data from many cultures that are now dead,
but are sufficiently known for their systems of sexual organization to be
catalogued. If there truly were 11,000 same-sex types available for
distribution, each culture could have one of its very own - a conclusion no
doubt pleasing to the social constructionists, who believe that cultural
differentiation inevitably produces differentiation of the forms of homosexual
behavior. John J. Winkler has claimed that "almost any imaginable
configuration of pleasure can be institutionalized as conventional and
perceived by its participants as natural." Empirical research has not
borne out this universal-polymorphous hypothesis, for there are only a handful
of basic types. The conclusion is inescapable: since cultures are legion but
sexual arrangements are few, there can be no one-to-one correlation of culture
and sexual-orientation typing.
As Stephen O. Murray notes, "There is diversity, intraculturally as well
as cross-culturally, but there is not unlimited variation in social
organization and categorization of sexuality. Despite pervasive intracultural
variability which is highlighted by [the] anthropological tradition of seeking
exotic variance, relatively few of the imaginable mappings of cognitive space
are recurrently used by diverse cultures." [Social
Theory, Homosexual Reahties, New York, 1984, p. 45).
Why such a limited repertory of types? Although progress in this realm is
probably linked to the still-unsolved riddle of the biological and
constitutional underpinnings of homosexual behavior, some conclusions may be
offered.
A Triaxial Typology.
Keeping in mind the wealth
of data now available, and the necessity for clear and simple principles
governing the definition of ideal types or paradigms, can one construct a
useful typology of transcultural and trans-historical homosexual relationships?
Yes, but only alongmultiple axes. One of these needs to acknowledge that there
is more than one gender, and moreover that homosexuality does not always exist
in strict isolation from heterosexuality. At one end of the "gender
axis" both partners are exclusively male homosexual. Moving toward the
middle, at least one of the males also relates heterosexually, then both also
relate heterosexually. At the other end of the gender axis one finds two
exclusively homosexual/lesbian females, with intervening positions for one or
both of the females also to relate heterosexually. In the middle, so to speak,
one could place an exclusively heterosexual relationship, but with that position
one is no longer concerned. Drawn out, the gender axis might look like this:
A second dimension, the "role axis," can account for the major
division between relationships which are role-oriented (generally along
active-passive, penetrator-penetratee lines of sexual activity) and those
which are significantly sexually reciprocal (with the partners exchanging
sexual roles frequently if not customarily). The role axis would have
gender-differentiated relationships at one end, followed by age-graded relationships;
at the other (reciprocal) end is mutual androphilia. In between but still on
the role-oriented side are to be found most forms of situational homosexuality;
near the middle and tending to straddle the line are adolescent sexual
experimentation (which can be mutual or one-sided) and ephebophilia (which
shows many role characteristics but can be sexually reciprocal).
A third dimension, the "time axis," needs to be added to show the
major division between those homosexual relationships which are necessarily
temporary, or time-limited, and those which have at least the potential for
relative permanence. On this axis one finds gender-differentiated and
androphile relationships at the "permanent" end; situational and
adolescent experimentation at the "temporary" end (some might add
one-night stands and anonymous encounters here), with ephebophilia and
age-differentiated relationships also on the "temporary" side. A
graph combining these two axes looks like this:
Role-oriented
T |
Age-differentiated |
Gender- |
P |
e |
Situational |
differentiated |
e |
m |
Ephebophilia |
|
r |
p |
|
|
m |
o |
Adolescent |
|
a |
r a |
experimentation |
Mutual |
n |
r |
|
Androphilia |
n |
y |
|
|
t |
Reciprocal
Features of the Types Noted. Some basic features of these paradigms merit notice,
bearing in mind that variations of a relatively minor nature can easily be
found.
In the age-differentiated type, as seen in ancient Greek and in Islamic
pederasty, Spartan korophilia, pedophilia, Japanese Samurai, the apprentices of
the Middle Ages, and perhaps the initiatory homosexuality of tribal Melanesia,
the older partner has something, namely adulthood and the knowledge that goes
with it, that the younger is seeking to acquire. Accordingly, there is a sense
of passage of power from the one to the other, aptly symbolized by the fact
that the older is the penetrator and the younger the receiver. This state of
inferiority that the protege finds himself in is, however, only temporary,
since he will pass to adulthood and penetrator status. The modern term
"irttergenerational sex" is misleading, since in many societies only
a difference of a half or a third of a generation is typically found. The adult
in this relationship may often relate to opposite-sex adults or children as
well.
The gender-differentiated type is seen among the berdache of the North American
Indians, the shamans of Siberia, the mahu of the South Pacific, the butch-fem lesbian pair, the
Indian hajira, the homosexual transvestite, the Thai katoey,
the kadesh sacred
prostitutes, the argr of medieval Scandinavia, and the "straight trade"
who goes with "queens," and can be found in many
Mediterranean-derived cultures today. In these cultures the penetrated partner
in male relationships relinquishes his male identity and the prerogatives of
manhood for various compensations, which range from relative freedom of dress
and manners to the magical powers of shamans. It is not necessary that the
passive partner be reclassified as a full woman, though this sometimes occurs;
he may be termed "not man" or some approximation to "third
sex." What is important is that he is not considered to be of the same
gender as his partner. Berdachehood means lifelong commitment to the role; it
is not a career stage, as occurs in the age-differentiated type. The other,
penetrating partner is in the gender-differentiated model considered to be a
normal or typical male who might as easily bond with a female. Female
counterparts found in the Amazon type relinquish feminine identity and
sometimes become warriors, perhaps marrying a "true" female. The
"masculine" partner in a male relationship or "fern"
partner in a lesbian one will usually relate to the opposite sex also, though
the "changed gender" partner does not, leaving two spaces open on the
gender axis.
In both of the above models, the gender- and age-differentiated, two distinct
roles are assumed, with virtually no overlap or reciprocity; the two partners
are also viewed as distinctly unequal, if complementarity so.
Mutual androphilia, the third major type, is relatively recent, found as a
widespread model only in the industrialized societies of Western Europe and
North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (though it was probably
a marginal practice in many earlier complex societies). In mutual androphilia
both partners are adults and neither relinquishes his manhood or her
womanhood. Sexual reciprocation and sexual role reversal are generally honored
if not universally practiced, and in theory the partners are equal. However,
the relationship is only relatively
egalitarian, since other
differentials, such as those of race or class, may play a part.
Adolescent sexual experimentation usually does not lead to an adult homosexual
relationship. It may be either reciprocal, especially in the form of mutual
masturbation, or it may be role-oriented, depending on the power relationship
preexisting between the youths concerned; generally the horny adolescent male
seems to prefer to maintain a dominant role but may accept reciprocation if he
is unable to persuade or coerce his partner into a submissive role. The teenage
girl, however, seems more willing to reciprocate in experimental play.
Ephebophilia shows characteristics that relate it in some respects to
age-differentiated relationships, such as age difference itself, social role
differences, and transfer of knowledge, while in other respects it reveals
marked contrasts. The ephebe concerned, rather than being penetrated, may take
the "male" role as "trade," considering his older partner
to be "less than male," or there may be reciprocity as in
androphilia.
Perhaps the most amorphous type in this schema is situational, a category which
frequently shows some overlap with the gender-differentiated because the
heterosexually identified participants apply the heterosexual paradigm known to
them to the previously unfamiliar homosexual experience. In situations such as
prison life, this is particularly marked. Because situational homosexuality
usually takes place where access to the opposite sex is denied (on shipboard,
in army camps and barracks, harems, and boarding schools), there may be no
actualized relationship to the opposite sex, though heterosexual feelings are often
expressed. Male slaves
and prisoners of war as
well as victims of rape and those subjected to sexual forms of enforcing
dominance find the role orientation to be emphasized; these victims commonly
relate to the opposite sex as much as their penetrators. Still other instances
of situational homosexuality involve initiations and rituals, usually
emphasizing both role and transience.
Male prostitution should not be seen as a unitary phenomenon, but it is
occasionally situational (in which cases it is usually role-oriented and highly
transient), and in the case of transvestites is clearly gender-differentiated.
Most commonly it seems to follow the ephebophilic model.
Conclusion. The triaxial schema presented above seeks to accommodate
the current state of knowledge, but doubtless it will be subject to criticism
- no typology being able to account for the great diversity of human sexuality
- and, as knowledge deepens, will eventually be revised. Nevertheless, it
should be helpful in making clear not only the diversity of paradigms
encountered in any comprehensive study of homosexuality, but also the limited
number of lines or axes of difference which serve as the main features
delimiting one model from another.
Stephen Donaldson and Wayne R. Dynes