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