No Modernism Without Lesbians

Throw over your man

‘The world has always had lovers. And yet as near as I can observe, for thousands of years the concentrated aim of society has been to cut down on kissing. With that same amount of energy […] society could have stopped war, established liberty, given everybody a free education, free bathtubs, free music, free pianos and changed the human mind to boot.’ Janet Flanner

In the decades before the Second World War, many creative women who loved women fled the repressions and expectations of their home towns, such as Washington and London, and formed a like-minded community in Paris. They wrote and published what they wanted, lived as they chose and were at the vanguard of modernism, the shift into twentieth-century ways of seeing and saying.I focus on the lives and contribution of Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein – three were American, one was English. All rebelled against outworn art and attitudes. Sylvia Beach started the bookshop Shakespeare and Company and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no commercial publisher could or would. Bryher, born Winifred Ellerman, daughter of the richest man in England, used her inheritance to fund new writing and film. Natalie Barney aspired to live her life as a work of art and make Paris the sapphic centre of the Western world. Gertrude Stein furthered the careers of modernist painters and writers and broke the mould of English prose. All had women lovers whom they kissed, and they changed the human mind to boot.

Within each of their stories, other women figure large: where would Sylvia Beach be without Adrienne Monnier, Bryher without the imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Natalie Barney without all her lovers, too many to list, or Gertrude Stein without Alice B. Toklas (‘little Alice B. is the wife for me’). And then there were the women friends of the women friends, and the women they kissed too…

They gravitated to Paris and each other, turned their backs on patriarchy and created their own society. Rather than staying where they were born and struggling against censorship and outrageous denials and inequalities enforced by male legislators, they took their own power and authority and defied the stigma that conservative society tried to impose on them. Individually, each made a contribution; collectively, they were a revolutionary force in the breakaway movement of modernism, the shock of the new, the innovations in art, writing, film and lifestyle and the fracture from nineteenth-century orthodoxies.

In 1947 the novelist Truman Capote went to Romaine Brooks’s studio in Paris with Natalie Barney. Natalie’s relationship with Romaine lasted fifty-four years, until Romaine’s death in 1970. Romaine painted many of the lesbians in their set; the portraits were large scale and lined the walls of her studio. Capote called the collection ‘the all-time ultimate gallery of famous dykes’. They formed, he said, ‘an international daisy-chain’.

I call them all lesbians, but the words lesbian, dyke and daisy were not much used by them. ‘Friend’ was the usual catch-all, though Natalie Barney nailed her colours: ‘I am a lesbian. One need not hide it nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage.’ She drew up and signed a bespoke marriage contract with one of her partners, Lily de Gramont, duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre. Its terms would not have been countenanced in her home town of Washington or by the French aristocracy. Gertrude Stein freely called Alice her wife, and Bryher, who chose her own gender-neutral name, viewed herself from an early age as a boy trapped in the body of a girl.

I duck the initialism of the present age: the LGBTQIA, the QUILTBAG (queer or questioning, undecided, intersex, lesbian, trans, bisexual, asexual or allied, gay or genderqueer) plus the +. Added recently are P and K: P for pansexual or polygamous and K for kink. And now there is prescriptive use of the pronoun ‘they’ for a person resistant to he or she. I favour H.D.’s revision: ‘When is a woman not a woman? When obviously she is sleet and hail and a stuffed sea-gull.’ But in French, sleet is masculine and seagull feminine, so where to draw a line?

There are but twenty-six letters in the Roman alphabet and life is short. Gertrude Stein said of her large white poodle, Basket, that of his ABCs he knew only the Bs – Basket, Bread and Ball. With canine simplicity, of my LGBs I use only the Ls – Lesbians and Love. This is not to disrespect all efforts of inclusiveness and search for identity and self-expression. I want a place in the rainbow. But I am a tyro in this language class and when writing of past times, today’s language seems incongruous. I cannot talk about cisgender for Virginia Woolf, call Bryher they, or struggle with No Modernism Without QUILTBAG+. And all the initials in the alphabet will not help in what I hope shines through: the uniqueness, the utter singularity of each individual life. I juxtapose four women within the lesbian category. Their juxtaposition shows the inadequacy of any label. I marvel at how different, original and irreplaceable each one is, formed by their childhood, their nature and nurture, imaginative in their contribution, unique in who they happen to be. Lining them up highlights their differences. For, of course, what matters from A to Z is not what you are, but how you are what you are, and the contribution made.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, censorship laws in Britain and America prevented lesbians from publishing anything in fiction or fact about their love lives. The subject matter was deemed obscene. Sex between consenting men was a criminal act. The 1895 trial and ruin of Oscar Wilde hung in the air of English society. Sex between consenting women was not illegal. Silence was the weapon of its repression.

In 1920, Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West caused a furore when they eloped to France and their respective husbands piloted a plane to bring them back. The following year, a Conservative member of parliament, Frederick Macquisten, a minister’s son, proposed that a clause ‘Acts of Gross Indecency Between Female Persons’ be added to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which indicted Oscar Wilde. Lesbianism, he told the House of Commons, threatened the birth rate, debauched young girls and induced neurasthenia and insanity. His clause was agreed and went to the House of Lords to be ratified.

Their lordships speculated on the effect of breaking silence. Lord Desart, who was Director of Public Prosecutions when Oscar Wilde was indicted, said: ‘You are going to tell the whole world there is such an offence, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamed of it. I think this is a very great mischief.’

Lord Birkenhead, the Lord Chancellor, agreed:

‘’I am bold enough to say that of every 1,000 women, taken as a whole, 999 have never even heard a whisper of these practices. Among all these, in the homes of this country, the taint of this noxious and horrible suspicion is to be imparted.’’

Whispered or heard, ‘these practices’, Birkenhead believed, would cause contagion. In the home of his mind, a woman’s place was on his arm and in his bed.

Then in 1928 came the startling trial and censorship of Radclyffe Hall’s anodyne novel The Well of Loneliness. The only sexy bits in it were ‘she kissed her full on the lips’ and ‘that night they were not divided’, but even such mild lesbian expression was deemed obscene and the book was ‘burned in the King’s furnace’. Radclyffe Hall left England for Paris with her partner, Una Troubridge. Sylvia Beach sold pirated copies of The Well from Shakespeare and Company.

Paris

‘England was consciously refusing the twentieth century’, Gertrude Stein said. America enforced prohibition of alcohol as well as censorship of literature and art. Lesbians with voices to be heard, who would not collude with silence and lying about their existence, got out if they could in order to speak out. Paris was waiting: the boulevards and bars, good food, low rents. It seemed on a different planet from London. Paris was where they formed their own community, fled the repressions and expectations of their fathers, took same-sex lovers, and painted, wrote and published what they wanted.‘Paris’, Gertrude said, ‘was where the twentieth century was’, ‘the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth-century art and literature’. Indigenous Parisians held their traditional views but did not mind these foreigners with alternative lives. Gertrude Stein said they respected art and letters: it was not just what Paris gave, she said, ‘it was all it did not take away’.

Modernism would not have taken the shape it did without the lesbians who gravitated to Paris at that time. There had been nothing like it since Sappho and the Island of Lesbos. Many of them learned Greek to read extant Sappho fragments and wrote their own verse in her honour.

                             Una, Lady Troubridge, painting by Romaine Brooks, 1924

As you were when the autobus called

Freedom of choice in dress and appearance was a crucial assertion. Why should fathers dictate what their daughters could or should wear? ‘As you were when the autobus called’ was a party inspired and orchestrated by Elsa Maxwell, who turned party-giving into an art form and profession.Elsa Maxwell lived for fifty years with ‘Dickie’, the socialite Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon. In interviews, Elsa just said she was ‘not for marriage’, it was ‘not her thing to do’ and that she belonged to the world.

Guests at her as-you-were party were picked up from their homes by bus at an unspecified time. They were to be as they were, dressed, groomed, ungroomed, when the driver sounded the horn. Cocktails were served to those waiting in the bus. For most, their ‘surprise appearance’ was contrived, costumes carefully unfinished: unzipped skirts, a woman with her face half made-up, a man wrapped in a towel with shaving soap on his face. But though guests were provocatively half-dressed, the implicit questions were: What is ‘correct attire’ and true appearance? Who is the real person, unmasked, as opposed to the presented self? Paris allowed candour, and was where pretence could be stripped, expectations confounded, identity fluid, and sexual relationships open. The autobus was a vehicle for transparency, free expression and the breaking of rules.

Modernism

Modernism sent fissures through a whole bundle of myths: that a narrative must have a beginning, a middle and an end, and romance be between a hero and heroine; that art should be representative and music follow familiar notations. The modernist movement questioned orthodoxies: that God made the world in seven days, that Christ was the Son of God, parented by a virgin and a ghost, that there were tangible domains of heaven and hell, that kings were in their palaces by divine right, that man was king of all species, and that war was an acceptable way of resolving conflict between nations.

Money

Virginia Woolf said a woman must have 500 guineas a year and a room of her own if she were to write fiction, plus the habit of freedom ‘and the courage to write exactly what we think’. It was hard for most women to come by one of those things, let alone all. The large bank accounts of Bryher and Natalie Barney came from wealth inherited from their fathers. Both subsidized and financed friends and fellow artists; Bryher in particular was a lifelong and unstinting patron of what was new in the arts. Gertrude Stein was comfortably off, her income managed by her savvy elder brother Michael, who invested in American railroads. Her true fortune was made by indulging her passion for buying paintings to hang on the walls of her rented home. She bought works by Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne while they were still young and unknown. Her collection was soon beyond price; she could not afford insurance cover. Sylvia Beach had no private income – her father was a vicar – and her constant problem was how to glean enough to keep her projects going. Bryher gave her money and so did Natalie Barney. More than the privilege of having wealth was how those with it used it. None of the moneyed modernist lesbians looked for profit. They used money made by men to further the modernist cause.

Escape from patriarchy

Same-sex relationships have always been there, have always been diverse, complex and individual. It was always far past time for the world to recognize that truth. ‘You can’t censor human nature’, was Sylvia Beach’s view. It was always senseless to close the door on benign relationships of the heart, which will express themselves, however brutal, damaging and disheartening any penalties imposed.The Paris lesbians had to free themselves from male authority, the controlling hand, the forbidding edict. They escaped the disapproval of fathers and the repression of censors and law-makers, defined their own terms and shaped their own lives. They did not reject all men – they were intrinsic to furthering the careers of writers, film-makers and artists whose work and ideas they admired. What shifted was the power base, the chain of command.

A community of women who called the shots was no bad idea 100 years ago, nor is it a bad idea now. Why are there still so few works by women in the art galleries, why are their symphonies and songs not filling the concert halls or their statutes defining the laws of the land?

‘It is true that I only want to show off to women. Women alone stir my imagination’, Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930 to the composer and suffragist Ethel Smyth, who had declared love to her. Women needed their 500 guineas, a room of their own and ‘the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think’. Three years earlier, Woolf had written to Vita Sackville-West, with whom she was, in her way, in love: ‘Look here Vita – throw over your man and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head… They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.’

‘Throw over your man’ was quite a call. It might have been a way forward before the cataclysm of two world wars. War tore apart the lesbian web woven by the women in these pages. It might be a way forward now, in the dark, tipsy and in love, in the beautiful garden the world might be, before the moonlight disappears and all the things in women’s heads are lost forever.

‘Throw over your man, I say, and come.’

Excerpt from :  No Modernism without Lesbians. By Diana Souhami.   Diana Souhami.com

  No Modernism Without Lesbians launch video. Facebook , April 4, 2020. 

Diana Souhami has just published a new book titled 'No Modernism Without Lesbians'. Discussions in this episode centre around personal anecdotes and experiences, Diana's unique take on history and lesbian characters, as well as musings on what a post-pandemic future might look like. There are also reflections on the notion of identity and how labels such as, for example, the idea of 'Jewishness', 'Germanness' or 'Queerness' play into this.  Jess W. talks with her.

A Lesbian Affair.  Episode 008 - Diana Souhami. May 22, 2020. 

It was back in the eighties when I went to the British Library to start my research on lesbians which I had discovered in the very coded descriptions of Dale Spenders’ book, “Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them”. I was desperate to discover what lesbians had achieved before me, who they were and how had they acted in the world. I was an angry feminist lesbian trying to make sense of my life under patriarchy. The British Library was not much help. I was befuddled by the Dewey system and requests to the staff asking about lesbians were received with cold looks and little help.

However, I did discover the coterie of lesbians who went to Paris in the early 20th century to escape the strictures of the USA and Britain. I was both excited and shocked by what seemed to me then, their rather hedonistic, self-centred and privileged lifestyles.

I have read most of Diana Souhami’s previous books about several of these women. She enabled me to re-evaluate the legacy of these lesbians such as Gluck, Stein and Trefuse and to recognise that their lives were not as self-indulgent as I had thought.

This book, “No Modernism without Lesbians” forces me to further consider the roles of these lesbians in forming a cultural movement. Diana has chosen four lesbians to spotlight: Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Bryher and Natalie Barney.  In her introduction Souhami quotes Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville West, “Throw over your man, I say, and come”. She posits that these women/lesbians/bisexuals/trans and all the others she so skilfully weaves into the book were challenging patriarchy by their very existence and choices.  She also makes the case for considering their roles in nurturing and supporting in many ways, the artistic movement known as ‘Modernism’. To quote Kathleen Kuiper: “Modernism, in the fine arts, a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I.”

The book’s premise, “No Modernism Without Lesbians” is a bold assertion and one that has caused a stir amongst historians.   Diana’s choice of women depicts the variety of ways that these lesbians contributed to and cradled the movement. Bryher and Beach primarily sponsored artists, giving them financial, residential and emotional support. Stein, like Barney held regular salons where artists met, networked and built their reputations. Both women were artists themselves; Stein was a writer and Barney made her life her work of art, as she proclaimed.

Souhami’s wealth of knowledge about all these lesbians and their intricate circles within circles is vast. The index is a who’s who of the rich, famous, infamous and should be knowns, of the times. Souhami makes it easy for anyone to follow up on these lesbians by providing us with a meticulous amount of information, image credits, citations, references all the books she used, and tells us where the archives are. She gives us lists of the works of each woman. This is a gift in itself and I hope will enable and inspire readers to produce plays, films and other writings so these extraordinary lesbians become better known and celebrated. She has enabled us to learn as she says, “to see what lesbians achieved and can achieve when, collectively they dictate their own agenda.”

I am in awe of how she organised all the facts, stories and quotes and then so deftly wove them, so we can see the glittering patch work of interlinked lives, broken threads and startling colours laid out before us. It is a challenging read because of its complexity, and it is a magic carpet that takes you into Paris at an extraordinary time of creativity and hedonism. It was the perfect book to read now, as I sit in quarantine.  It engulfed me in a different century, and I became enthralled with their lives, concerns of the heart and their determination to take some power in the world of publishing.

Gertrude Stein arrived in Paris, 1903, from the USA to join her brother. She was one of the first people to buy a ‘Picasso’ and for a while they were close friends. Picasso’s portrait of Stein took eighty to ninety sittings because they talked so much.  Gertrude thought their artistic intentions were similar – “to change ways or expression in art – she in words and he in paint, to move on from strictures, structures conventions, expectations and limitations to take risks and break moulds.” Her brother turns against them both, calling their efforts “God almighty rubbish,” “haemorrhoids, cubico-futuristic tommy rotting”. Stein disagreed with him and said they sought “to express things seen not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them”.

Together they got to know Matisse, and Cezanne and buy their works.  They also purchased works by Toulouse- Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard, Gauguins and Renoirs. They bought them because as Souhami says, “for Gertrude, their ideas – resonant in their work — new ways of seeing and departure from received forms of expression, echoed her own thinking.” (If you have not read Stein this may not make sense.)

Steins says, “Cezanne gave me a new feeling about composition. I was obsessed by this idea of composition. It was not solely the realism of characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing. This had not been conceived as a reality until I came along but I got it largely from Cezanne.”

Souhami’s chapter on Stein further demonstrates clearly to me how she was both involved and supportive of the new ways of working in the visual arts. She was herself an author of modernistic literature and she supported other writers of her era. She was a great friend to both Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. They sought and valued her opinions of their work.

Gertrude’s work was not always understood or valued by her fellow countrymen and getting it published was often an arduous process. It is worth noting that however, that her ‘Four Saints in Three Acts, became an opera with Virgil Thompson writing the music. It was performed with an all-black cast in 1934, at the Atheneum Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut, a part of the New York metropolitan area. It was a smash hit, and as Souhami says, “while fascism was eating at the heart of European civilisation, ‘Four Saints in Three Acts’ rang out — zany, inclusive, playful joyful and open.”  Such a different America from the one Stein and the others had fled earlier.  Souhami, makes it clear just how hard it was for books we now take for granted, to get printed. So many of them were published due to support of lesbians.

Sylvia Beach also arrived in Paris from America in 1903. But it was not until 1919, after she had discovered A. Monnier’s Bookshop.  Adrienne was to become both her business and life partner. She soon set up her own bookshop across the street in St Germain, the famous ‘The Shakespeare & Co’.  

Diana states “Making money was not the prime consideration. Neither of them was much good at that. Both loved books and their authors. Books were essential to civilised living. Both saw their work as contribution rather than commerce.”  Beach’s intention was to specialise in modern innovative writing in English. The shop acted as a lending Library and a welcoming meeting place for authors.  “Customers did not want to only buy books – she might have made some money if they had. Shakespeare and Company quickly evolved into a bookshop, library, a book club, bank, post office, hotel, referral agency, and a place to meet and talk about books and life and have tea. Her fame lasted for the whole tenure of Shakespeare and Company right up until Hitler’s Nazi army closed it down and interned her in 1942.”

Souhami went into detail about how Sylvia became involved with James Joyce. It was her unfailing support that enabled him to be published. She picked up the torch from other lesbians, Harriet Weaver and Dora Marsden, who had tried to serialize Ulysses in their literary magazine, ‘The Egoist’ which was England’s most important modernist periodical. Two other lesbians, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, had also wanted to serialise the book in their New York magazine, ‘The Little Review’. They published 23 instalments. On no less than four occasions, posted issues containing Episodes of Ulysses were confiscated and burned by the United States Post Office based on allegations of obscenity.

Beach spent years and money she could ill afford to get Ulysses published.  So much time and energy that her relationship with Adrienne was threatened. Bryher sent her money frequently to enable her to stay afloat. Ulysses was finally published in 1920, and banned in both England and the USA. In response to the publication, another lesbian, Harriet Weaver, got involved in attempting to distribute it in England, only to see 500 copies being burned in the ‘Kings Chimney’.

As an unintended consequence, Beach gained a reputation as a publisher and vendor of pornography. Many writers of books, censored as obscene, asked to be published by her. Richard Aldington and Aldous Huxley attempted to persuade her to publish DH Lawrence. She declined.  Diana tells us, “Tallulah Bankhead’s agent asked if she would publish Tallulah’s memoirs.  Sylvia doubted she would have turned that down, but no manuscript arrived.  Tallulah’s name, like Greta Garbo was another link in the daisy-chain of famous lesbians.”

 Souhami tells us, “Bryher felt trapped in the wrong body.  Even as a child she viewed her birth gender as a trick, a mistake.  She saw herself as a boy who needed to escape from the physical cage of a girl.  She was tormented by pressure to have curls, wear frocks, be called by her birth names, Annie Winifred, or her nickname, Dolly….… Bryher did not want the patronymic of her father, the matronymic of her mother or the name of any husband of convenience.  Bryher is one of the Isles of Scilly, off the Cornish Coast, a part of the world she came particularly to love.”

She was born into great wealth which she used to support artists and was a patron of the modernists. Of herself, Bryher says, “I have rushed to the penniless young, not with bowls of soup but with typewriters.” Diana credits Bryher as ‘the rock and saviour of her partner, the poet, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).  She funded the Contact Publishing Company in Paris, supported James Joyce and his family with a monthly allowance, gave money to Sylvia Beach and subsidized Margaret Anderson’s ‘Little Review’, in New York.  She started the film company POOL Productions in Switzerland, financed its experimental films and founded ‘Close Up’, the first film magazine in English. She built a Bauhaus-style home in Switzerland.  She supported the emerging psychoanalytical movement in Vienna, and funded Freud and other Jewish intellectuals hounded by the Nazis to help them get out of Germany and Austria.”  Formidable accomplishments made possible by her great wealth and passion like Beach’s and Monnier’s, “to be of service.”

Natalie Barney, the fourth focus of Souhami’s book, says “Love has always been the main business of my life”. Diana comments, “This main business involved lots of sex.  Natalie went where desire led her.  She shared her bed, the train couchette, her polar bear rug, the riverbank or wooded glade with many women, and not always one at a time. Modernism in Natalie’s life upended codes of conduct for sexual exchange. For Natalie, modernism meant lovers galore. ”Barney was another rich refugee from the puritanical attitudes of the United States.  Like Bryher, she was very wealthy; however, she did not share the same passion to be of service, she was far too busy being busy. As she says, “The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating”. She was, however, a walking visual aid of queerness. Souhami puts it better, “Her inspired contribution was to be transparent about same sex desire in a repressed and repressive age.  Too impatient, privileged and self-occupied to give much time to a task or a cause, she led by candid example. Many women followed and were liberated by her courage.”

The list of her lovers includes many poets, writers and artists of modernism who she brought together to learn of each other’s works and ideas in her regular and extremely popular salons. She had a house in Neuilly and in homage to Sappho staged tableaus there.  Diana says, “she sketched her rules for sapphic love: ‘women were to relinquish ties to family — husbands, children and country — and instead write, dance, compose and act on their love and desire for each other’.”

This was easier for some women than others, of course and possible for her as she had inherited the equivalent of about $75 million in today’s money!  It is perhaps difficult to imagine the world she inhabited and created but as Souhami plainly says, she created “the Sapphic centre of the western world.”

The list of lesbians who frequented her homes is long and what follows is by no means comprehensive: the Hellenist Evelina Palmer, the courtesan Lianne de Pougy, the poets Lucie Dearue-Marrus, Rene Vivien and Olive Constanve, the writers Lily de Gramont, Colette and Djuna Barnes, Dolly Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, the portrait painters Romaine Brooks and Gluck, the patron and socialite Nancy Cunard.  These serve to demonstrate the ‘daisy chain of dykes’ referred to by Truman Capote. The richness of this book is that as well as Souhami’s choice of these four women she included a myriad of other lesbians who were active at the time and in and out of each other’s lives, beds and creativity. It is also a treasure in that she has done so much work in researching and documenting these lesbians and their archives, she deserves our massive thanks. That so many of the lesbians included will be unknown to me and you, is an indictment of our education and media. To bring them all together on one book in such a lucid and entertaining way is a valuable achievement. I am eternally grateful to her in pointing out not only their creativity and roles in birthing modernism, but also depicting their political work. They deserve our admiration for being out lesbians at a time of great oppression, active volunteers in wars caring for the wounded and as rescuers of people from certain death by facilitating their escapes from the Nazis. Diana Souhami has unearthed and brought to life a fascinating, formidable feast of lesbians of whom we can be proud when we look for role models.

“No Modernism Without Lesbians”, by Diana Souhami. By Andrew.  LGBT+ History Month. May 9, 2020.

I like a book that can put its point in four outrageous words and use it as its title. Diana Souhami might be right. Without the women her book is devoted to, literary modernism would have looked very different. A consciously new approach to writing met a body of women who were being heard for the first time; the results were compelling. At the beginning of a novel by one of them, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, the terror of masculine traditions is concisely stated:

‘ Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’, cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.’

If culture were ever to break those bonds of duty and repetition, it might be in the form of women, bonded primarily to other women, and creating objects in prose and verse never conceived of before.

Lesbian women had appeared in Victorian novels, but depicted in a characteristically indirect, deniable way — Dickens describing Miss Wade, for example, or Wilkie Collins’s Marian Halcombe. The law in England never took any account of lesbianism: it wasn’t, contrary to myth, Queen Victoria’s intervention, but the belief of the House of Lords that no woman would ever think of doing such things unless it was brought to her attention by legal proscription.

In French literature, the question had long been addressed with more clarity, at least as far back as Diderot’s La Religieuse; there are unambiguous lesbians in Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or and in Baudelaire. It is sometimes thought that the many lesbian relationships in Proust are rudimentary translations of his male lovers’ heterosexual flings, but to me he seems fascinated by the secretive circles that Albertine and Andrée move in, and to have observed the reality of lesbian society very carefully.

It won’t have escaped notice that all these examples are written by men. It wasn’t until the 20th century that lesbian women started not just writing from their own experiences, but publishing their writing. For the first time, they were in a position to live openly and play important parts in the literary world.

Perhaps encouraged by the long-standing openness of French literature towards their feelings, these women were drawn to Paris, where they made a stir. ‘Ils sont pas des hommes, ils sont pas des femmes, ils sont des Américains,’ Picasso said. Souhami’s book is about four of them, and the circles around them. Sylvia Beach was the founder of Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. Bryher was a poet and novelist, and the partner of the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle, who wrote as H.D. Natalie Barney hosted the great Paris salon of modernism, living until 95 in an atmosphere of inexhaustible scandal. And Gertrude Stein was, of course, a novelist and early collector of Picasso, Cézanne and Matisse.

Two things are immediately apparent. The first is that most of these women were given the possibility of living openly by having independent means — sometimes as a result of immense inherited wealth. Bryher’s father left £36 million when he died in 1933, his legacy enabling her to live more or less as she liked — including building a Bauhaus villa at Vevey on Lake Geneva. She could also afford to heavily subsidise the one woman among them who didn’t have money of her own, Sylvia Beach.

The second point is just how many women mentioned by Souhami changed their names as soon as they were able. Pauline Tarn became Renée Vivien; Anne-Marie Chassaigne became Liane de Pougy. Girlish first names were easily dispensed with: Hannah Gluckstein became Gluck, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette became Colette tout court, and Radclyffe Hall, who started life as Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, went on to be known as John in private. The phenomenon wasn’t limited to lesbians. Cicily Fairfield early on saw how hopeless her birth name was for a woman writer of serious tendencies, and called herself Rebecca West, after Ibsen’s heroine. Like West, Bryher felt that ‘Annie Winifred Glover’ just wouldn’t do. They renamed themselves, and something new began.

Sylvia Beach had no idea how bookshops were run, or how books were published, and everyone was the better off for her ignorance. The first of Shakespeare and Company’s ‘bunnies’, as she called its abonnés, or subscribers, was André Gide, closely followed by Gertrude Stein, who demanded that The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost (‘a sequel to her earlier novel Freckles’) be stocked. Forever afterwards the shop was run in the interests of undeserving writers.

Nor would any publisher have allowed Ulysses to run out of control in the way it did (Souhami says that at least a third of the novel was added at proof stage, enormously increasing the costs). The sad aspect of Beach’s inexperience was that she relied entirely on Joyce, and when he understandably decamped to Random House in 1933 she was emotionally and financially bereft.

Natalie Barney wrote herself — some Pierre Louys-like amorous poems about same-sex love as early as 1900 — but her main significance was as a hostess, and impresario of scandal. Another lesbian hostess, the Princesse de Polignac, formerly Winnie Singer, may have been more culturally impressive, commissioning music from Ravel, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, but Natalie sounds more fun. She described herself without qualification as a lesbian, and may have been the first in modern times to convert a cult of Sappho into a visit to Lesbos — which, even in 1904, was not quite the paradise of myrtle groves and hyacinth gardens of her imagination. (‘An elderly woman cooked their food. Renée gave hers to the dogs.’)

Souhami’s account of Barney’s life, her many affairs and excesses, has a breathless hilarity as one duchess succeeds another in Barney’s passions. (‘In 1922, Liane de Pougy, who had risen up the social ladder to become Princess Ghika, formed a sexual threesome with Natalie and Lily’.) She was still picking up women on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice in her eighties.

Gertrude Stein is at the other end of things; there was no marriage so utterly faithful and based in total mutual devotion as Gertrude’s with Alice B. Toklas. Souhami has already written a wonderfully entertaining joint biography of the two, but her new book places Stein in a more specific context than before. She had enough money to write as she chose, and the results were extraordinarily challenging. Oddly, I find her more readable as time goes on; even The Making of Americans now seems monumental but not impenetrable, and modern in places where Ulysses has an encyclopaedic, even Victorian air. She really was doing something new.

The figure who emerges with considerable credit is Bryher. She has been rather forgotten, apart from her connection with H.D., but she was evidently a clear-sighted and very intelligent woman. A small example: when she bought the magazine Life and Letters in 1935, she stockpiled so much paper in anticipation of the coming war that it could continue publication throughout the shortages.

A larger example might be her absolute clarity — in an article as early as 1933, called ‘What Shall You Do in the War?’ — that the Nazi attempt ‘to exterminate a whole section of the population’ would need to be confronted. ‘I cannot understand how any person anywhere who professed to the slightest belief in ethics could stand aside at such a moment.’

Not every member of a troubled minority has sympathy for the members of another, but Bryher had the sort of vision that often goes with impatience with the expectations of others. She turned up at the London opening of Show Boat at her parents’ demands, entering the Royal Box in a floral chiffon dress with

  ‘what was meant to be a draped cape behind hung down in front as if to conceal pregnancy. Bryher was wearing the dress inside out and back to front. ‘How is one to know?’, she asked.’

Souhami is one of our most rewarding and inventive biographers, and this book is a splendidly hectic and vivid read. She has a novelist’s gift for the deft evocation. Beach’s appearance was ‘sprightly but unremarkable. She was five foot two, thin, with a brisk walk, determined chin, bobbed hair and brown eyes behind steel rimmed glasses.’ Neither Gertrude nor Alice ‘ever wore trousers... on one occasion Gertrude was mistaken for a bishop’. And she is often funny. When quoting a terrible poem by a Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (‘So noble soul so weak a body/Thine body is the prey of mice’) Souhami just says: ‘It went on like that.’

There is a justifiable crusading element here, and there is no doubt that literary history has gone to some lengths to erase the presence, and nature, of lesbians. Souhami quotes with some scorn the absurdly misleading 1983 New York Times obituary of Bryher. Nowadays, these women are likely to be referred to under the euphemistic heading of ‘gender nonconformists’, when they were often absolutely clear about who and what they were. If No Modernism Without Lesbians goes some way towards making us understand how they thought of themselves, and what they did, it will have done some good.

The cult of Sappho in interwar Paris. By Philip Henscher. The Spectator , April 18, 2020

As Diana Souhami sees it, lesbianism is much more than a sexual preference: it extends into an artistic vocation, an enraptured emotional cult and a political campaign that challenges the bullyboy patriarchs who assumed that “women’s bodies belong to men” and should be consecrated to perpetuating the male line. Souhami has written several fine biographies of what Truman Capote once reprehensibly called the “daisy-chain” of “butch-babes”; now, in a comprehensive cultural history, she awards lesbians the credit for modernising art, manners and morals in the early 20th century.

Like a tabloid headline, her book’s title is intended to provoke, and it depends on a somewhat tenuous analogy: “modernism in art upended 19th-century rules of narrative and form”, so why shouldn’t modernity in life revise the “codes of conduct for sexual exchange”, licensing women to defy men or dispense with them and love each other instead? To paraphrase her slogan a little more modestly, what Souhami shows is that there might have been no modernism if the lesbian bookseller Sylvia Beach had not arranged to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in Paris when editors in London and New York, fearing prosecution for obscenity, refused to touch it.

Beach, who founded the Left Bank bookshop Shakespeare and Company, behaved towards Joyce with a wifely devotion that was lacking in his actual spouse, the rebarbative Nora Barnacle. She happily performed the endless editorial chores he set her, and glorified the labour as her “missionary endeavour’. The moment that wealthier backers became available, Joyce of course forgot about her service to him. The ancient female function of helpmeet was hard to shed. Beach’s shop, installed in a former laundry, was a domestic space, furnished with comfortable chairs and vases of flowers; brewing tea or lending books to customers who could not afford to buy them, she officiated as a mother hen.

Another of Souhami’s characters dispensed patronage on a grander scale. Bryher – born Annie Winifred Glover, though she reinvented herself by borrowing a new name from one of the Scilly Isles – was the munificent daughter of a shipping magnate. She bankrolled the artistic whims of everyone she knew, paid Freud a small fortune to psychoanalyse her lover Hilda Doolittle, and presented Edith Sitwell with a house. In her saintlier or dottier moments, she played Lady Bountiful to strangers in the street: she bought new dentures for a woman she found toothlessly chomping in a bread queue, and replaced the ill-fitting wellington boots of a woebegone fireman.

Throughout her book, Souhami rails at the “old-style masculine domination” that results in war, mass murder and sexual repression. As the jack-booted invaders march into Paris in 1940, trampling what was once “the sapphic centre of the western world”, she calls patriarchy “militaristic, fascistic”. Yet power is not an exclusively male preserve, and it lurks in the relationships between women examined here. The painter and poet Natalie Barney appears as a reckless predator who breaks a sofa when pouncing on a supine seducee; the Princesse de Polignac – another heiress, born Winnaretta Singer, whose liberation was bankrolled by her family’s output of sewing machines – brings the skittish Violet Trefusis to heel with a whip.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas act out a paradoxical variant of this power play. Stein was cubistically solid, gruff and glowering, while Toklas, even with her bristly moustache, looked meek and dainty. Alice kept house, cooked, and allowed Gertrude to be a full-time genius, which was hard work because “you have to sit around so much doing nothing”. Yet the apparent weakling in this menage turned out to be the slave-driver, as Ernest Hemingway testified when he overheard Stein beg for mercy as she was tongue-lashed by the partner she called “Pussy”.

Stein made up for such grovelling when she announced her artistic status by declaring that “20th-century literature is Gertrude Stein”. Her self-puffery now sounds absurd, and Souhami’s view of her as “the mother and father of modernism” is not much more persuasive. At best, Stein was the fairy godmother of modernism. Like Beach and Barney, she kept a salon where she performed the traditional role of hostess, supervising the camaraderie of the male painters, writers and musicians who attended; armed with the inevitable private income, derived in her case from San Francisco streetcars, she amassed an uninsurably valuable collection of paintings by Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse, which she left unframed and sometimes casually stashed in closets.

Daunted by Stein’s droning epic The Making of Americans, Souhami has better luck with the avian burbling of her libretto for Virgil Thomson’s all-black opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Here Stein’s verbal tics are subsumed into music, and Souhami writes about the witty, frothy piece with verve. Then, getting overzealous, she claims that Four Saints was more epochal and innovative than Ulysses, if only because Joyce’s novel was still fuddy-duddily “bound within the covers of a book”.

Souhami ends with some blithe mimicry of Stein’s echolalia, rejoicing in a Parisian paradise where “lovers of love and refreshment in life still loved, and loved lovers and loved love”. I abbreviate a long alliterating paragraph of hallelujahs: here is Capote’s daisy chain made of words, though the repetitions hardly erase memories of the miserable childhoods and agonising affairs Souhami has chronicled. Love is lovely and even heavenly, but sex, regardless of gender, can be diabolical.

No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami – review. By Peter  Conrad. The Guardian,

March 24, 2020.

                                  The Parisienne, Painting by Agnes Goodsir, 1924

During the second and third decades of the 20th century, Paris was home to a thriving lesbian subculture. In lively bars in Montmartre and elegant apartments on the Left Bank, women who loved women were forging new identities, innovating artistic forms and taking on centuries-old cultural institutions.

If you were a lesbian in Paris in the 1920s or early ʼ30s, on the lookout for love or something more short term, chances are you would have wound up at Le Monocle.

As a woman of means, you might have strode there in a finely tailored tuxedo, a white carnation in your buttonhole, a cigar between your lips and a monocle perched on your cheek, not a strand of closely cropped hair fluttering in the evening breeze; if, however, you came from the lower ranks of Parisian society, and were likewise inclined towards a more masculine attitude and style, your journey to the bar would likely have been more covert – no matter how stiffly the wind blew, it probably never quite explained the blanket wrapped around you from head to toe. But, once inside, every woman was free to sip champagne and dance with whomever she pleased.

During the interwar years, Paris was among the most liberal cities in the world – not quite as open-minded as Berlin but far more progressive than, say, London or New York – a haven for artists, writers and freethinkers. Against this relatively permissive backdrop, a vibrant lesbian subculture blossomed, out in public, in Montmartre bars like Le Monocle, and in private abodes, more often than not in the swanky apartments belonging to the Left Bank intelligentsia.

Foremost among the elite salons of the day was that of American playwright, poet, novelist and railroad-car heiress Natalie Clifford Barney – or The Amazon, as the poet Remy de Gourmont nicknamed her after she made headlines for riding astride, rather than sidesaddle, as was then customary for women of her standing. From 1909 until her death, in 1972, at the age of 95, Barney hosted her legendary ‘Fridays’ at her home at 20 rue Jacob. There’s not a famous Modernist or lesbian, let alone a lesbian Modernist, living in Paris at that time who didn’t pass through her doors.

Regulars at Barney’s soirées included Gertrude Stein and her long-time partner, Alice B Toklas – themselves hosts of a popular salon, one frequented by the painters, such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, whose careers Stein helped launch – the American painter Romaine Brooks, known for her portraits of women in this particular social circle, the Anglo-American poet Renée Vivien and Colette, the pioneering French author who immortalised the prevailing dandy-esque look of certain, in her (affectionate) words, “mannish women” in her 1932 book The Pure and the Impure.

In 1927, in an attempt to promote women’s writing, Barney founded the Académie des Femmes. She intended it to be a counterpoint to the Académie française, the illustrious council tasked with ruling on all matters pertaining to the French language. Founded in 1635, it didn’t admit its first immortelle (its members have traditionally been known as les immortels, or the immortals, which, besides being more than a little grandiose, is an inherently gendered term in the French), Marguerite Yourcenar, until 1980. In the end, Barney’s initiative was short lived.

Rather than for her literary contributions, either as a writer or a benefactor, and quite apart from her achievements as a society hostess, Barney is remembered for her unashamedly public, and unashamedly numerous, relationships. Blessed with the financial and social security afforded by inherited wealth, she was able to openly pursue prominent women from the literary and art worlds as well as the lingering aristocracies of Europe. Her liaisons, rarely monogamous but typically life-long, earned her depictions in many important lesbian works – most notably as Valerie Seymour in Radclyffe Hall’s groundbreaking novel The Well of Loneliness (1928).

Indeed, it was the visibility and vivacity with which sapphic desire could be fulfilled in Paris (albeit relative to your position in the pecking order) that made it, as far as lesbians were concerned, the queer capital of Europe – even more so than Berlin. Women who had the money and freedom to travel came from the UK, the USA and across Europe to attend salons such as Barney’s and drink and dance in the city’s lesbian bars.

This heyday, however, was tied to the prosperity of les années folles (The Roaring ’20s), and did not last long into the 1930s. The nation’s politics lurched to the right following the Great Depression, and little of Paris’s lesbian subculture survived the German occupation of the capital, which lasted from 14 June 1940 until 25 August 1944.

As much as the Nazi regime drove queer people even further underground, and in many cases sent them to their deaths, it did not wipe them out completely. And, as Europe emerged from the shadow of war, so too did this community rebuild and reassert itself. In 1966, the legacy of Le Monocle, and those who brought it to life, took centre stage when Yves Saint Laurent unveiled his women’s tuxedo, Le Smoking, on a Paris runway. It was at once a radical statement of female empowerment amid the decade’s sexual revolution and a nod, with all the world watching, to the free-living, free-loving lesbians who first donned the look.

Between the Wars, Paris Was the City of Lesbian Love. By Paul McQueen,  an updated version of a story created by Jade Cuttle.  The Culture Trip, July 1, 2019.

Also interesting 

1928: Sapphic Modernity and the Sexuality of History. By  Susan S. Lanser. Modernismmodernity ,  October 25, 2016. 

The Influence of Homosexuality on Western Culture

Like many other English visitors, the artist Robert Medley found the atmosphere of Paris distinctly relaxed: “There were no parents to worry about, and under French law nobody had the right to interfere with our relationship.”

When he and his new lover, the dancer Rupert Doone, went there in May 1926, Medley found that Doone was already well known. He had been a lover of Jean Cocteau’s, a status with which limelight came as a compulsory extra (the affair had ended in 1924). Doone introduced Medley to Djuna Barnes and to another of Paris’s gay, expatriate denizens, Allan Ross “Dougie” MacDougall, who had once been the secretary of Isadora Duncan. In the spring of 1928, Rupert Doone turned down the chance to tour as Anna Pavlova’s partner; but this left him free, in July of the following year, to accept an invitation to join Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes as a soloist.

 Diaghilev had never been particularly effusive with compliments, so Doone treasured the occasion when the great man said to him, even after watching a performance in which Doone had suffered a slight slip, vous ne dansez pas mal. It was, of course, through Doone that Medley met a succession of the great homosexual ballet dancers and choreographers. When introduced to Serge Lifar, he was especially impressed by “his spectacular maquillage, the gold bangles and the varnished crimson fingernails”.

Vincent Bouvet and Gerard Durozoi have written that, in Paris, “homosexuality and bisexuality were treated with relative tolerance in moneyed, cultural and artistic circles, and almost came to be regarded as a badge of modernity during the 1920s”.

This was to change. During the 1930s, the attitude of tolerance and even permissiveness was gradually eroded, however, and records identifying “deviants” were established – giving rise to repressive laws under the Vichy regime.

 In the meantime, there was a gay scene in Paris, to which middle-class men and women had relatively easy access.

In Georges-Anquetil’s 1925 novel Satan conduit le bal, the owner of one Paris bar is quoted as lamenting patriotically: “Isn’t it shameful for Paris to be so far behind: in Berlin they have 150 establishments like this one, and here there are barely ten!” In fact, Paris enjoyed a wide variety of gay and gay-friendly spaces, even if not in such a spectacular abundance as in Berlin. The most famous of the gay venues, although not generally spoken of as such in histories of Modernism, was Le Boeuf sur le Toit on the rue Boissy- d’Anglas.

It opened in January 1922, taking its name from Darius Milhaud’s ballet, based on a scenario by Jean Cocteau, which had been staged at the Theatre des Champs Elysees in February 1920. Among those who performed there were openly lesbian singers such as Dora Stroeva, Yvonne George and Jane Stick. Beverley Nichols reported having come across Cole Porter late one night, sitting alone in a corner of Le Boeuf sur le Toit – “which in those days was a sweetly scandalous institution” – trying to think of a rhyme for “duck-billed platypus” for inclusion in his lyric “Let’s Do It”.

 Gay venues in Montmartre included La Petite Chaumiere, a drag cabaret; Chez Bob et Jean, run by the dancer Bob Giguet and drag artiste Jean d’Albret; and the Brasserie Graff on the Place Blanche, a restaurant that became gay only late in the evening.

On the night of the annual drag ball, the Magic City Ball, the Place Blanche would fill with onlookers who wanted to see the drag queens going into Graff ’s after the dance. Hustlers plied their trade on the rue Germain-Pilon, the Passage de l’Elysée-des-Beaux-Arts and the Boulevard de Clichy.

 The rue de Lappe near the Place de la Bastille was jokingly known as the rue de Loppe (Queer Street, in effect) because one of its dance halls (bals musettes) was gay friendly.  Across the river, in the Bal de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, both lesbians and gay men were welcome. A favourite lesbian haunt, Le Monocle, in Montparnasse, had an all-woman band. The English painter Edward Burra had a particular affection for the Place Pigalle, of which he wrote, in May 1931: “The people are glorious. Such tarts all crumbling and all sexes and colours”. Rupert Doone, Robert Medley, Burra and other gay friends used to congregate at the Select, a cafe in Montparnasse.

The Hungarian photographer Brassaï took many atmospheric photographs of the Parisian underworld in 1931 and 1932. Among his nocturnal shots of marginalised subcultures are those of “Sodom and Gomorrah” – the brazen but somehow also secretive social environment of sexual inversion.

 Some of his written descriptions of what he observed are almost as resonant as his visual images. Of Le Monocle, on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, he wrote: “From the owner, known as Lulu de Montparnasse, to the barmaid, from the waitresses to the hat-check girl, all the women were dressed as men, and so totally masculine in appearance that at first glance one thought they were men. A tornado of virility had gusted through the place and blown away all the finery, all the tricks of feminine coquetry, changing women into boys, gangsters, policemen . . . Even their perfumes – frowned on here – had been replaced by Lord knows what weird scents, more like amber or incense than roses and violets.”

 Brassaï also noted that "these women, their passions slower to ignite, generally looked for more devotion and fidelity in their love affairs than do pederasts, most of whom cruise a lot and are often content with a quick trick". Of the broader nocturnal underworld he photographed, Brassaï said: "I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic."

This is an important point, often overlooked. As we shall see in the case of Berlin, there is an important distinction to be made between venues catering to a local, working-class clientele and the more bohemian and/or touristic venues, more likely to be frequented by foreign visitors. Even Germans who had sampled the delights of Berlin could be taken aback by what the French capital had to offer. When Klaus Mann went there in the mid-1920s he compiled a list of the reasons for his love of Paris, among them "the many pissoirs – they are so convenient", but he did not specify the nature of the convenience. In almost the same breath he praised the atmosphere of the city because "all things concerning sex are handled with that perfect casualness which is the proof of real civilization". He meant, in part, the casualness of casual sex. By contrast, Berlin was more self-conscious and more purposive. More frantic, even.

Besides, it was important for Mann to travel in Europe, and thereby to become an active internationalist. For his generation, he would later write, "to be a young European intellectual – it was an attitude, an ambition: it almost became a programme". The concept of European was meant, and accepted, as a protest against German nationalism, while the term intellectual defied the fashionable idolatry of "blood and soil". Back in Paris again in the spring of 1926, Klaus Mann met René Crevel, a committed internationalist for perverse reasons: "He spent his days with Americans, Germans, Russians, and Chinese, because his mother suspected all foreigners to be crooks or perverts".

Sitting on Mann’s bed, Crevel read out the early chapters of his novel La Mort difficile, with their "venomous" portrait of his mother. On this trip, Mann also met Jean Cocteau ("The hours spent in his company assume in my recollection a savour both of burlesque show and magic ritual"), Eugene McCown, Pavel Tchelitchew, Julien Green, Jean Giraudoux and others.

In the same year, 1926, Klaus’s father Thomas Mann was surprised to find that the whores on the streets of Paris were predominantly male; and he observed striking new evidence of homosexual internationalism on the same streets. That this development should take place in Paris – the home of "Proust and Gide, that friend of Oscar Wilde" – was, he felt, apt. Other young European intellectuals who returned home were less eager than Klaus Mann to sing the praises of Paris and thereby claim the benefits of its cosmopolitanism for themselves.

Witold Gombrowicz, for one, was damned if he would admit to having been significantly bettered by his visit. Returning to Poland in 1928, he deliberately toned down his enthusiasm: ‘It was important to me that people shouldn’t say Paris had changed me – it seemed to me to be in the worst possible taste to be one of those young people who returned from the West civilized.’ Whereas Klaus Mann deliberately travelled against the grain of German nationalism, Gombrowicz was unwilling to replace pride in his own national culture with the self-serving adulation of a scene that most other Polish intellectuals had not had the opportunity to sample.

He felt the adoption of a more sceptical tone was better suited to Polish cultural aspirations. Warsaw was just as civilised as the French capital. Although Berlin later took the laurels, for much of the early part of the century Paris shared the honours as the joint sodomite capital of Europe.

Marc-Andre Raffalovich had published an article on "Les Groupes uranistes a Paris et a Berlin" in 1904, mentioning Les Halles as a particular centre of activity. In an article entitled "Invertis et pervertis" (Le Journal, 2 March 1910), Lucien Descaves expressed strong worries about the extent of male prostitution in Paris.

 Unlike women who became involved in the flesh trade, according to Descaves, the men developed habits of idleness, that most unmanly of conditions. Descaves was especially concerned about the proliferation of vespasiennes, the graffiti in which offered clear evidence that, far from being mere public urinals, these odoriferous constructions had become ‘disgraceful trading posts’.

Andre Gide cut out this article and added it to his own store of evidence, to be collated in the polemic of Corydon. The homosexual magazine Inversions ran for a year – "a few, earnest numbers that dealt with pressing issues and tried to elaborate a homosexual literature" – before it was suppressed at a complex and humiliating trial in 1926. 

The annual Magic City drag balls in Paris were said to be comparable with those in Harlem. In 1933, BrassaÏ attended the last of them: "Every type came, faggots, cruisers, chickens, old queens, famous antique dealers and young butcher boys, hairdressers and elevator boys, well-known dress designers and drag queens . . . Mature men accompanied by youths in drag were the rule. With hair by Antoine, clothes by Lanvin or Madeleine Vionnet, the great couturiers of the period, some of these ephebes on the arms of their rich protectors were extremely beautiful and elegant".

In the Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb’s 1937 Journey by Moonlight (Utas és Holdvilág), Paris is said to have had a reputation in Budapest of being "full of perverts". Erzi, who eventually lives there, apparently finds that its reputation is true, but is at ease with it: ‘it all seemed perfectly natural’

This is an extract from ‘Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World’ by Gregory Woods. Published by Yale University Press.  

Gregory Woods: the influence of homosexuality on Western culture. By Gregory Woods .  The Independent , April 12, 2016.

Gregory Woods  begins his bold and original book Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World with an uneasy joke made by Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx. In an 1869 letter, he remarked that, “[t]he paederasts are beginning to count themselves and find that they make up a power in the state.” “Only the organization is lacking, but according to [the booklet Incubus, by early homosexual emancipist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs] it already exists in secret.” For Engels, the thought of an underground network of queers flexing their political muscles behind the scenes is both absurd and threatening. What, other than their furtive trysts, might these people be plotting in the shadows?

In this wide-ranging study spanning from the Oscar Wilde trials in the 1890s to the gay liberation movement of the late 20th century, Woods demonstrates that this paranoid fantasy of a clandestine queer underground has been a persistent feature of the modern heterosexual imagination. Yet, daring to take it seriously, Woods tells a history of cultural modernity that focuses on interconnected queer cliques and coteries that, taken together, formed the backbone of the modernist movement that revolutionized the visual, literary, and performing arts. Rather than presenting it as an organized conspiracy against hetero hegemony, though, he imagines the 20th-century gay avant-garde as a single transnational network, one with a “consistency of purpose” that “cohere[s] as a single narrative of lives lived against the grain.” Dubbing this the “Homintern,” a play on the “Comintern,” or Communist International organization founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919, Woods grounds his history in a simple yet subtle claim: that ever since the invention of “homosexuality” as an identity category in the late 19th century, and the simultaneous rise of individuals who began to identify themselves as “homosexuals,” those who desire their own sex have been obliged to keep those desires hidden from public view. This forced them to create clandestine connections for intimacy, support, and comradeship. Yet because of this socially enforced secrecy, many straight people came to see homosexuals as deliberately and inherently disingenuous. They seemed to present a deceptively “normal” public image that masked the perverse pleasures they indulged behind closed doors. Much like the communists with whom they were often associated, the Homintern was believed to have no allegiance to any nation or culture beyond itself, and hence was inherently opposed to the State and to the commonly held values that hold society together. “The willingness of gay men and lesbians to associate across national boundaries throughout the last century,” Woods states, “led to extraordinary encounters, some fleeting, others more enduring; some sexual, some social, many creative.”

Rumors of Homintern conspiracies were especially prevalent in the arts, a field where, Woods claims, gays found “a relatively welcome environment” that allowed them “to make strategic use of cultural production, for purposes both defensive and creative.” He finds many accounts of embittered straights who believed they had been systematically excluded from the Russian ballet, the Broadway stage, the London literary world, and Hollywood cinema. The lament of British composer William Walton, a rival of Benjamin Britten’s, that “[e]veryone is queer and I’m just normal, so my music will never succeed,” is typical of this breed of complaint. A common theme of such spurious laments is that homo alliances are attempting to infiltrate the minds of an unassuming public with their subversion, “closeting” their messages through difficult modernist styles that seemed as willfully perverse and menacingly opaque as the queers creating them. Woods cites Gore Vidal on the anti-gay sentiment directed toward midcentury playwrights, who says that once one’s sexuality became common knowledge, “[t]hat meant that all the women were really men in disguise and the relationships were all degenerate ones. At this was a plot — by the fifties it was all a ‘homintern’ plot — to overthrow heterosexuality.”

Woods refutes such claims outright. “The true conspiracy” has always been, he maintains, “that of the homophobes in the less welcoming spheres of life, clubbing together to make life uncomfortable for queers.” He traces the densely interconnected homosexual network in the arts, but establishes that its concerns had nothing to do with the overthrow of straight hegemony. Instead, its most significant effect on modern culture was the cultivation of a “purposeful internationalism,” one that “emphasised, among other things, the tawdry contingency of regional customs and national laws” that attempted to regulate and stifle queer social identities and sexual practices. Accordingly, Woods organizes most of his chapters around loosely defined geographical regions where gay networks congregated and gay people circulated, such as the “Northern Exotic” of Russia and Sweden, the “Southern Exotic” of Italy, Greece, and Morocco, and the “New World” of New York, Hollywood, and South America.

 The author’s erudition is impressively on display in these chapters. Homintern is obviously the distillation of a lifetime of research. Woods, in addition to being a noted poet, also held the world’s first chair in Gay and Lesbian Studies as a professor at Nottingham Trent University from 1996 to 2013. He appears to have read and internalized nearly every academic study, literary work, scientific treatise, biography, and memoir having to do with homosexuality in most of the major European languages, in addition to tracing in painstaking detail the complex affiliations that existed between figures both major and minor across the various genres of modernist art. Only someone with the depth and breadth of knowledge Woods possesses could convincingly demonstrate the importance of queer sociality within a transnational modernist network whose many nodes included Natalie Barney’s salons in Paris, the sexual subcultures of Weimar-era Berlin, the rambunctious queer expat community in Taormina, Paul Bowles and the Beats in Morocco, and the many gay writers who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. These are, he says, “destinations that have accumulated mythic value” not just in the history of modern homosexuality, but in the history of modernity itself. While the existence of queer figures in these groups is not exactly unknown to scholars, or even casual fans, the personal connections Woods highlights among these groups, when they are presented one after the other, make a strong case for the queer network’s centrality in crafting what was distinctly modern about 20th-century art and culture.

Yet despite the scholarly chops on display (including extensive footnotes and a bibliography that, taken together, make up nearly 15 percent of the book’s length), Woods maintains that his is, ultimately, “a poet’s book.” By this, he means that the book “seek[s] to cast an image, or sequence of images, on the reader’s visual imagination, rather than persuade by linear argument.” Those looking for a coherent narrative arc, or even definite interpretive claims, might find themselves frustrated by Woods’s digressiveness and relative indifference to principles of coherent organization — he often leaps from one figure or nation to another, with little in the way of transition. Rather than being a defect, however, Woods claims that he seeks to cultivate in his readers the same disposition Ezra Pound recommended for encountering the Cantos, where “if the critic will read through them before stopping to wonder whether he or she is understanding them: I think he or she will find at the end that he or she has.” I found the experience of reading the book more closely akin to reading through the world’s queerest, most highbrow supermarket tabloid. One is driven to turn the pages of Homintern not because of its compelling narrative arc or strong argumentative drive, but because one is eager to discover the salacious, scandalous details of the lives of one’s favorite gay modernists.

Yet a possible objection to this approach is that it privileges the “merely” personal and trivial above what is truly of value, the innovative and brilliant works of art that have made these figures worthy of note in the first place. Doesn’t focusing too intently on Djuna Barnes’s lesbian dalliances, one might ask, ultimately detract from the innovative stylistic techniques on display in Nightwood, which constitutes her most lasting contribution to modern literature? Woods responds to such critiques by reminding us that queerness, by virtue of its necessarily clandestine existence, is by necessity tied to the discourse of gossip, making it inextricable from the history of queer artistic achievement. “Absent from the official histories, authorised biographies and academic syllabuses, gay people passed alternative narratives from person to person,” he states. “We tell each other some of these stories over and over again for good reason. […] In times of stress or threat, they are reassuring. They lose none of their power, even their urgency, in the retelling.” Woods’s study implicitly defends the fact that when queer people encounter queer art, their desire to know the scuttlebutt surrounding the life the artist is part of their aesthetic experience — a truth that, I believe, any honest gay reader will readily admit. As the first international artistic movement to include a critical mass of practitioners whose identities seem recognizably homosexual to contemporary readers, modernism continues to provide special fascinations for those of us queers who long for an exalted history of innovation and creativity.

Indeed, I would maintain that, if for no other reason, Homintern is valuable as a durable repository of ephemeral moments of bitchiness and sleaze that are otherwise in danger of being buried in the archive. In the midst of his discussion of expatriot gay social life in Tangier, Woods reports that although Jack Kerouac was himself “not averse to receiving the occasional blow job from a man, [he] had little sympathy” for William Burroughs’s pining after Allen Ginsberg.

   With characteristic incomprehension, he asked: “What’s all this love business between grownup men?” He was far more comfortable with Burroughs’ dalliance with a string of boys. Adult male love was another country altogether: “how on earth could they consummate this great romantic   love with Vaseline and K.Y.?”

This homophobic vulgarity might seem, at first, beside the point when it comes the literary achievements of these three men. Yet will anyone familiar with this anecdote be able to read the all-but-explicit homoeroticism of On the Road the same way ever again? How might this attitude toward the merits of cross-generational versus intergenerational gay sex change our understanding of Kerouac’s transformation from a young radical to a late-in-life Catholic conservative? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her groundbreaking work of queer theory Epistemology of the Closet, reminds us that, despite the fact that malicious gossip has often threatened the safety and security of queer people in a homophobic society, it has just as often resulted in “the refinement of necessary skills for making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds of people there are to be found in one’s world.” Woods’s use of gossip in Homintern is in service of just such a project. His loose, impressionistic style teaches his reader to view the world through a new optic, one that categorizes queer alliances not as either a conspiracy or a minor thread within the otherwise “serious” narrative of cultural modernity, but as the story of cultural modernity itself.

This is what makes the book’s subtitle both accurate and problematic. The claim that “gay culture liberated the modern world” implies a kind of heroism grounded in superlative individual effort. Yet this is a form of queer exceptionalism the book actually militates against. Homintern is not collection of stories about singularly remarkable queers. Woods takes pains to specify that gay culture never intended to free the modern world, even if that was ultimately what happened. His insistence that the gay network imagined by nervous straights really did exist is an attempt to undermine a powerful counter-myth, one that even many queers deeply enmeshed in the Homintern themselves believed. This is the notion of the homosexual as an isolated individual, always and inevitably “single” even when in a long-term relationship, who is inherently opposed to collectivity. This myth has resulted in a celebration of “individuality” and “individual self-expression” at the expense of the social orientation of the “black and feminist counterparts” of the gay liberation movement. Although he never says so explicitly, he implies that this internalization of this myth of the isolated queer has resulted in a gay political movement problematically focused on the merely personal freedom associated with bourgeois liberalism and neoliberalism.

This is precisely the critique that has been launched against the mainstream gay liberation movement, especially by socialists and queers of color. In these accounts, the many recent triumphs of the gay rights movement have focused on integration into the cultural mainstream through the fundamentally conservative institutions of marriage and the military, rather than effecting more profound social and economic revolutions. Despite his extensive discussions of lesbian coteries and the world made by African-American queers of the Harlem Renaissance, Woods admits that “[t]he main history available to us, in terms of the modern development of gay identities and their subcultures, is Western. Similarly, it is more male than female, more bourgeois than proletarian, more white than black,” which means that his book features a disproportionate number of middle-class white gay men. Yet his account of how the Homintern renovated the 20th-century cultural world offers a powerful account of how we might imagine a more inclusive and intersectional modern queer movement beyond the limits of liberal individualism. “Isolating [gays] was a way to control them,” he says. “So, one of their best strategies of resistance was to congregate. Networks and groups, no matter how loosely knit and informal, achieved progress without having to devise an actual programme.”

In the current political climate, Homintern provides a timely reminder of the importance of queer solidarity in the face a reactionary social climate. Increasingly large numbers of young people reject traditional labels for their sexual identities, suggesting to some that we are fast becoming “post-gay.” At the same time, however, a recent study shows that the United States’s acceptance of LGBT individuals has gone down in 2017 — to less than 50 percent of the population — likely a result of the legitimacy granted to hate groups of all types by the current administration. Despite increased queer visibility and institutional legitimacy, many heterosexuals are, apparently, still suspicious of those who live outside normative structures of desire. Historical progress is never as linear as we hope it will be, but Homintern shows that this is no reason to give into despair. In the face of a hostile cultural environment, queer collectivity is in and of itself a force for political transformation: the more, the merrier.

The Gay Conspirators: On Gregory Woods’s “Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World”. By Dustin Friedman. Los Angeles Review of Books, February 25  , 2018

More info on the book : Yale University Press

Hello Gregory. Could you tell us exactly what the Homintern was and what on earth people were so afraid of?

It was the idea that there was a secretive network of homosexuals extending across national boundaries. The name was just a camp play on words, a joke (the Comintern, the Communist International, had been founded by Lenin in 1919), but the idea of a homosexual International, or Homintern, was taken seriously in some quarters. It was looked on as a security threat.

How did the idea come about? You discuss those numerous, successive scandals at the turn of the twentieth century... Just how pivotal were they?

Increased visibility at the end of the 19th Century, both in scientific textbooks and in the newspapers as a result of sudden outbreaks of scandal, made a huge difference to LGBT people's lives, both positive and negative. The word 'homosexual' itself dates from this period, but lots of other new words were tried out by scientists who were researching all the sexual variants. The general public started to see that there were a lot of us about. An impossible situation arose. LGBT people were under pressure to keep their sexuality secret. When they did so, they were accused of being secretive, and therefore untrustworthy. Forced into the shadows, they were defined as being shady.

How threatened were people by the idea?

This was a time of intense competition between empires, revolutions against autocracies and monarchies, and increasing polarisation between communism and fascism. There was great suspicion of anyone whose loyalties seemed to be divided. The Jews, in particular, suffered mightily when mere suspicion was turned into active policy. Homosexuals were similarly thought to organise across national boundaries and, to a much lesser extent, suffered from similar policies.

Was the Homintern completely imagined or was the idea based on something in particular?

Lots of gay people have had prominent positions in society, in Britain and elsewhere. The question is whether it matters that the occasional King of Sweden was gay, or a handful of senior Nazis, or a 30s tennis ace, or an influential architect... Does a pair of powerful gay men amount to a conspiracy? And, if so, is it always likely to be subversive rather than supportive of the status quo? There certainly was never a single, powerful organisation of international homosexuals, working against the interests of heterosexual people. If there was ever any real conspiracy, it was the other way round.

Did the paranoia extend to gay women as well as gay men?

Not really. Women were much less likely to be wielding significant power in society. As in other areas, they were not taken as seriously as men. Lesbians were less worth worrying about than homosexual men. Misogyny doesn't make much of a distinction between straight women and lesbians.

Were there any fields in which gay people were tolerated more than others?

The arts, especially the performing arts. Why? Because the arts don't matter, do they? Even so, there have often been complaints that this or that pocket of people working in the arts are largely gay and, seen as a group, likely to be favouring each other. This was especially the case in theatre in the 50s and 60s. Because several of the major American dramatists of the time were gay—Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Edward Albee—there was thought to be a prejudice operating in their favour against heterosexuals. In England, heterosexual dramatists as successful as John Osborne and Simon Gray complained that you had to be queer to get on in the theatre... There are times when you just can't win against this kind of logic. The consequences of the gay presence in the arts throughout the last century are massive and under-recognised. If we could only work out a way of measuring the cumulative effect of (for instance) Camp on the movies, we'd really only be starting to get an impression of this influence. If we could only put a price on it, our cultural history might begin to be taken seriously!

Does the idea of the Homintern still hold any sway?

It does resurface from time to time. The Sun said, in 1998, that Britain was being run by a gay mafia—because four members of the cabinet were gay. But most claims of such an organisation tend to be levelled at the fashion or entertainment industries: Hollywood or the West End theatre. In the face of such claims, I always want to ask: if it's true that the gays are in charge, why is their product so not-gay? If gays have such a strangle-hold on the industry, why is same-sex love so conspicuously absent from the song lyrics and the film scripts, even now?

What do you want people to take away from the book? Does the LGBT community know enough about its history?

No, LGBT people don't know nearly enough about their own history. But this isn't their fault. Blame the education system. When did you ever hear of a school that was properly including LGBT culture in its curriculum? When did you last see a history programme on TV that even mentioned the LGBT population? But it's because of this absence of information, this silence around our lives, that I feel we have to take responsibility for informing ourselves and each other. We need to know about our past, and about our existence in other cultures, for two reasons: both so that we understand there are many ways of being what we call LGBT, and so that we are well armed for anything that may happen to us in the future.

I want readers of my book to laugh with joy at the outrageous antics of the men and women I describe, to admire their nerve and verve, and to deplore the ways in which they were discriminated against. In the end, despite all its tragedies, the story I tell is one of triumph against the odds.

Finally… If you could choose one way in which gay culture has liberated the modern world, what would it be?

It would be something to do with coming-out. In a time of enforced conformity and general secretiveness and embarrassment about sex, gay culture showed that it was possible to be both discreet and brazen at the same time. (Think of Liberace, for goodness' sake!) It was a dangerous game but a rewarding one. Gay people taught the world that love was always worth taking risks for.

How gay culture liberated the modern world. Gregory Woods interviewed by Matthew Whitehouse. i-D , June 2, 2016.

Other reviews 

'Homintern' Is Not as Subversive and Liberating as Its Subject Matter. By George De Stefano. Pop Matters, May 16, 2016.

Homintern by Gregory Woods review – a gay conspiracy in the arts? By Caleb Crain. The Guardian , May 6, 2016.