Contemplations on an Unknown History

Business as usual.

2010-07-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

Been away. Moved across the country. Most of my books are in storage, though I did pay a visit to Wild Iris Books, my local lesbian feminist Ye Olde Crystal Shoppe slash bookstore. I got a second copy of Lillian Faderman's famous Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America; That Furious Lesbian: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta by a Robert A. Schanke (what a wonderful name! when he writes nasty reviews, one can say they got Schanked! hee!); Re-orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World by Chilla Bulbeck; and finally Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden.

This last promises to tell me "why Darwin was wrong about sexual selection." I'm no geneticist, but do try to know a thing or two, so this should be interesting.

On a front that looks more like history, I'm currently doing research for my new SCA persona. I don't know her name yet, but she's a Bogomil woman living during the Second Bulgarian Empire in its capital city of Tarnovo. I picked the Bogomils because they're the same heresy family as the earlier Manicheans and the Cathars farther west. Bulgaria was infamous as a total rockin' hotbed of sodomy (say the word Bulgar quickly a few times and see what you get) and the Byzantines conquered and occupied it from 1018-1185 partially on the grounds of stomping it out. Persecution was officially fairly constant until they were conquered by the Ottomans, though it looks like the Bulgarians were also at war against other would-be conquerors the entire damn time so I don't know how much they could focus on internal troubles.

The other thing with this heresy, though, is that they thought women were entitled to equal rights legally and religiously. Way awesome, but of course everyone who heard about this contemporaneously had HUGE FITS. Women's Rights? In MY Middle Ages? It's more common than you think! There's no way I can't be all over this.

The book I'm currently reading to get a good handle on all the pieces is The Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman E. Cantor. Textbook style, no post-chapter questions or anything but a good solid overview type thing. More specific books I have lined up are The Cathars by Sean Martin which looks like it has good coverage on the evolution and spread of the beliefs, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages which I have not yet personally touched a copy of but Cantor recommends it, and some other ones on interlibrary loan that I can't remember which may or may not be useful. I'm hoping some cultural and social data shows up rather than just the theology, which is most of what I've got so far.

Cantor also recommends Boswell! I knew I liked him.

Dirty jokes: The Pearl

2010-02-03T18:22:00.000-08:00

Yeah, scraping the barrel. Been doing a lot of non-gay history reading lately.

The Pearl, a dirty Victorian magazine, ran between July 1879 and December 1880, when it was forced to shut down for obscenity. I found a 1968 edition that collected the issues, including all the poetry and jokes, and on my initial flip through I found a reference to Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, two young men who enjoyed traipsing around London in drag in the 1860s and 70s, and who were arrested and tried for 'attempt to commit sodomy' in 1870. There's quite a bit of info about them on the web, including news pieces (go a little ways down the page, or ctrl-f), their letters, and even the complete trial record. Here is a blog post with a good summary, complete with pictures. Anyways, that's background. This limerick is another sign of mass media, popular culture, and the love of a dirty joke, all alive and well in Victorian England:

There was an old person of Sark,
Who buggered a pig in the dark;
The swine, in surprise,
Murmured "God blast your eyes,
Do you take me for Boulton or Park?"

It's also interesting that the author/submitter would expect people to remember a non-celebrity scandal that occured almost ten years before, and the names involved. I haven't studied the progression of our modern short attention spans and quick-aging references.

The other joke I found while searching through the book for that. (I eventually resorted to Google Books, our new evil overlord.) It's not related, except in its reference to sodomy.

"An old and favoured servant of two maiden ladies had been frequently reprimanded by him for his free behavior with the female servants. Caught one day in flagrante delicto, he was summoned to their presence, and while the girl was sacked, he was told that if he did not do better and turn over a new leaf, much as they valued him- his next escapade would be the last. He promised amendment and matters went on very well for a time. One evening, he was not to be found when wanted, and on a search being made, was discovered in the beer-cellar, buggering the page boy.
"How now," he was asked, "is this your amendment? You promised to turn over a new leaf." "So I have,", said he, "only I have begun at the bottom of the page!"
History does not give the conclusion of the matter."

Amazon, if you're interested; it's cute and full of the old staples of erotic stories like fake lesbians and men named Mr. Loveshaft. One reviewer says there are stories with male homosexuality, but I haven't read it through.

History in the making: Perry vs. Schwarzenegger

2010-01-21T08:47:00.000-08:00

Perry vs. Schwarzenegger is going on right now in California. The case is two same-sex couples who were denied marriage licenses last year against Proposition 8 and its defenders (wikipedia). Schwarzenegger's name is on it technically- he and his legal counsel refused to support Prop. 8, and the defendant in the case is ProtectMarriage.org, which makes this case gloriously direct. The Good Guys vs. The Bad Guys.

Here is the Prop 8 Trial Tracker, hosted by some dedicated people at Courage Campaign to bring day-by-day coverage of the trial. I've been following along with wide eyes and bated breath- for this is, indeed, history in the making, and may result in gay marriage bans being ruled unconstitutional in the United States. There are a lot of prayers, emotions, and tears all over the country right now. Their site has all the in depth legal info about what makes this case historically interesting (besides the obvious) such as comparisons to the tactics of Brown vs. Board of Education. The issues at stake are not just marriage, but gay rights in general and federal recognition of the oppression of gays as a class of people. Three states have ruled gay folk a "suspect class"- people discriminated against as a group, including California.

Go there and read it, and possibly take a break to cry of joy. Read the comments to each post too, if you have the time; there are a lot of stories and memories there that people have shared.

Review: Here and Always Have Been

2009-09-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

I don’t usually deal with modern fiction on this blog, but the very nice Kenneth “Craigside” offered to send me his book to review (free book! For free!). How can I resist? Here and Always Have Been is a collection of erotic and semi-erotic short stories ranging in time from prehistoric cavemen to the 1950’s.

I have to say first that I liked a lot of the little things and the plots. He displays a lot of original thought. There are a lot of funny bits that made me smile or laugh out loud. Clearly he did some research and at least knows his way around a list of dead white queers. I was disappointed that there was not really a lot of historical detail for him to have gotten wrong, though- it wasn’t the emphasis, merely the setting.

The porny bits are not really to my taste, which is partly biological on my part and partly the style and tone, which somehow manages to be coy and clinical simultaneously. The settings, actions, and characters are not very realistic, not because he didn’t do his research but because they’re driven by sexual fantasy rather than true character development. I like emotion powering my sex rather than kink, which takes a pride of place in many stories. I think my favorite story was “The Ballad of Sadie”, which has no sex but only innuendo, and in the others I liked such as “The Last Roman God”, “Saladin’s Loom”, and “Will’s Best Bed” it was the ideas I enjoyed more than the execution. (Saladin's men kidnap Richard Lionheart with a sexy plan to get him out of the Holy Land? Tell me more!) A lot of these stories were disappointing because they have such potential and I didn’t see it filled the way I’d like.

Overall impression: it’s clear to me he’s new to the genre. He sent me the book for my history perspective, and I had no problems there, but the writing is unpracticed. I enjoyed it at first, but it wore thin after reiterations of the same thing over and over with different names and kinks. Very possibly a lot of my critique comes of my not being the target market- I don’t generally enjoy the style of mainstream erotica.

All that said, I’d like to read his next work, if he chooses to continue on this path. I love witnessing people improve, and Kenneth Craigside shows some promise.

Go buy it. Maybe you'll like it.

LJ options

2009-09-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

So I totally could have made an RSS feed and been versatile, but Livejournal is what I know, so I made an LJ to crosspost everything at:

http://hyakinthia.livejournal.com

Fun! Icons! A better user interface (imho)! Go. Put me on your friends. And even if I go months without posting, there one will come one day, like a surprise present. It'll be great.

"New" schools of thought on Puritan sexuality?

2009-06-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

I have a really good book here by Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America. His first chapters detail the research into Puritan sexuality (and, following logically, homosexuality), which I found pretty surprising, though I hadn't really looked into the subject that much. He cites Nathaniel Hawthorne as creating or at least spreading the image of the dry, strict, hardhearted Puritan.

From page 77:
"Ministers encouraged their flock to feel Christ's love as a romantic, voluptuous experience. 'Here he comes,' rhapsodized [Samuel] Willard, 'to give us the caresses of his love, and lay us in his bosom and embraces. And now, oh my soul! Hast thou ever experienced the love of a savior?' The redeemed would 'ly in Christ's bosom, and be ravished with his dearest love, and most intimate embraces.'"

Earlier in the chapter he quotes some Edward Taylor.
Page 53:
"In poetry written between the 1680s and 1720s, Taylor envisaged Christ as "a spotless male in prime" and addressed his savior in language of utter infatuation:
Thou art the lovli'st object ever spread
With brightest beauty object ever wore
Of purest flashes of pure white and red
That ever did or could the love allure.
Lord make my love and thee its object meet
And me in folds of such love raptures keep."

Cotton Mather is quoted of the phrase "heavenly ejaculations". Not really scientific, because he also meant "spontaneous prayer", but it did give me a little pause.

It occurred to me that the Ganymede metaphor for souls going up to Christ makes an odd sense in this new light. Also this is a really short version of his stuff, go read the book, there's a lot more where this came from and it looks less sketchy when you don't read it on the internet.

Oh yeah! Katz! His comment is less funny now that I've gone and looked it up. But it does indicate that the above short statements were pretty well accepted historical fact even in the 1980s. His footnote, from page 43 of Gay/Lesbian Almanac: "My reading of the documents, and my stress of the Puritans' negative valuation of erotic lust (as opposed to child production), contradicts the now generally accepted interpretations of Edmund Morgan, William and Mallerville Haller, and other historians responsible for the revisionist line that the Puritans were not as "Puritanical" as the popular stereotype would have it. The stereotype, I think, is closer to reality than the prevailing revisionism."

DAMN YOU, REVISIONISM. DAMN YOU.

In which our hero returns from the grave

2009-06-03T21:22:00.000-07:00

Been in Florida. Sorry.

I have a couple topics for posts lined up. Uno: the Epic (and funny) Historian Infighting between Gary Leupp and Paul Schalow, as documented in Monumenta Nipponica. Dude, you guys are two of the (maybe) four (white) people in this field! I thought you'd be buds or something. Dos: 17thC Puritan homoerotic visions of Your Relationship With Jesus Christ, and the following cries of "Revisionism!", especially coming from Katz where I hadn't expected that much vitriol. That's a fun sentence. When did you last see "Puritan" and "homoerotic" in the same place?

Book

2008-09-29T08:42:00.001-07:00

Homosexuality in Modern France edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. (Not to be confused with its counterpart by the same editors, Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection, because both Amazon and LibraryThing seems to think they're the same book, or the same person is uploading the wrong cover. For the latter, the cover on my copy shows a statue of Ganymede and the eagle.)

It's a good book! There's ten good essays by smart people, covering the Enlightenment, the French Revolution (one is specifically on the pornography starring Marie Antoinette that was published against her), legislature and its lack in early and mid 19th century Paris, a murder case from 1877 involving a gay couple, the medicalization of "inversion", working class lesbian subculture at the turn of the centuty, Gide's Corydon, and Foucault in the context of French history and politics.

I always remember the things I complained about better. Have some funny excerpts.

"Invisible Women", Sautman, page 186: "According to Julien Chevalier, homosexuality was an aberration rare in high society, "regarded with horror" by the working class, and completely unknown in country areas. It was a vice in which only the "cafe society and theater" engaged. In something of a contradiction, Chevalier argued that gender nonconformity in physical appearance led directly to sexual inversion and that women from the working class and peasantry were more likely to display virile aberrations. Because of promiscuity in servants' quarters, the nervous tension resulting from working in a sitting position too long, and the "physiological harm" caused by the sewing machine, Ali Coffignon also saw women workers as being particularly prone to sexual corruption."

Sewing machines=lesbianism. Got it.
Later in the same essay there's some translation failure: a phrase from Jean Lorrain's La Maison Philibert (1904) is translated as "fags and lezzies". The footnote is only a citation, and there's no modern edition that I can find. "Lezzies" might be gougnottes (girlfriends), as used elsewhere in the text with better notes, but I have no idea what "fags" was originally. It irritates me when liberal translations show up in academic works. If that's the best connotative selection, make a note and explain your choices.

"Natalism, Homosexuality, and the Controversy over Corydon" by Martha Hanna is very interesting and has a lot of stuff I was glad to learn. In one part, discussing (at the time) modern reactions to Greek homosexual practices, there's a paragraph on Dr. Riolan's 1909 Pederastie et homosexualitie that's just comedy gold:
"Unlike modern pederasty, which Riolan characterized as the predilection of dissipated older men bored by heterosexuality, Greek pederasty was, he argued, a culturally specific aesthetic response to the ugliness of Greek women. "In Greece, pederasty was the result of the admiration the Greeks professed for beautiful forms. Like all women of the Orient, Greek women quickly lost their youthful shape, and the citizen of Athens, returning from the Olympic Games, could not help but compare the women whom he saw in Athens to the athletes he had applauded in the arena." If, as Riolan suggested, pederasty was understandable in those societies where women quickly lost their sexual allure, it was neither understandable, permissible, nor defensible in a nation like France, famous for its beautiful- and desirable- women. Riolan was not the only medical expert convinced that beautiful women constituted a nation's best protection against homosexuality."

I think my housemate's reaction was "Oh my god, there's so many things wrong with that I don't even know what to say!"

Maybe I need an "adventures in stupidity" tag.

GLBT History Month; research for class

2008-09-16T18:15:00.000-07:00

the GLBT History Month site

I'm doing it again! This time with official resources, a booth in the student union, and hopefully much more success. Last year I shot myself in the foot several times, not preparing well enough, not advertising well enough, etc. In lieu of shiny printed logo-bearing things I made a couple of picture boards that are pretty cool (I will take and post pictures soon), a fact sheet-timeline thing, and a bibliography for the curious. I may post PDFs if my updates to these things turn out spiffy. Updates as they come.

I am also doing more of the "tie in queer history to every class I take ever" thing for my Feudal Japan class. Paper 1 is a historiographical book review (The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality by Tsuneo Watanabe and Jun'ichi Iwata), paper 2 is topical (same-sex relationships and structures in Buddhist monasteries- a huge topic! there's a whole genre of literature!), and paper 3 is a term research project carrying the grade for the final (same-sex love poetry and literature in historical and political context- still working on the boundaries of that one, just got the initial proposal back today).

Things I'm reading for that aside from Watanabe:
Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan by Gary Leupp, Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender edited by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, which has an essay I need by Paul Gordon Schalow and hopefully some other good stuff (but I don't know, because the interlibrary loan system hasn't spit it out yet), a couple of essays out of Monumenta Nipponica on the Chigo Monogatari ("tale of the acolyte", the aforementioned Buddhist genre of same-sex love poetry, literature, and sermons) and Kitamura Kigin's Tokugawa poetry collection Iwatsutsuji ("Wild Azaleas"). The class does not cover the Tokugawa era, but all of these sources include information and insight on former eras if they don't focus on them. Iwatsutsuji, in particular, is very interesting because the items it collects are all pre-Tokugawa expressions of ideal nanshoku- male love.

Things I will not be covering: kabuki theater or Ihara Saikaku, even if I have Schalow's cool translation of The Great Mirror of Male Love. Both distinctly Tokugawa. Those are the two things that are invariably mentioned on this particular topic, and it's probably good that I'm restricted to the earlier, more obscure material.

Related to nothing, apparently when I took this same prof's East Asia class last year I did a short review of Passions of the Cut Sleeve, which I totally do not remember and contains the telltale phrase "in conclusion", which means I wrote it the morning it was due after drinking too much coffee and bullshitting with Prism people into the wee hours. Good book. Terrible paper. What was I thinking?

Dept. of News To Me

2008-09-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

Ancient Near East C. 3000-330 BC, pg 147: “Another story, composed in either the early New Kingdom or the late Middle Kingdom but still circulating in the eighth to sixth centuries, concerns King Pepy II and one of his generals. Unfortunately, it is very fragmentary, and only two episodes have been partially preserved; in one the king is sneaking around secretly at night to visit the general with whom he is in love. It is impossible to reconstruct the story: it may have been a comic tale or one reflecting Egyptian disapproval of homosexuality.”
In a discussion of how stories reflected Pharaohs and their antics or flaws.

This one's not new to me, but I do sometimes wonder if some translator is putting the world on: possibly the first same sex couple as a matter of historical record, Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, the "overseers of the manicurists in the palace of the king". Old Kingdom.

11th~10thC German Love Letter

2008-05-02T00:36:00.000-07:00

To G--, her unique rose,
A-- sends the bonds of precious love.
What strength have I that I may bear it,
That I may endure your absence?
Is my strength the strength of stones
That I can wait for your return?
I never cease from aching, night and day,
Like someone missing a hand and foot.
Without you anything happy or delightful
Seems like mud trod underfoot.
Instead of rejoicing I weep;
My spirit never seems joyful.
When I remember the kisses you gave me,
The way you refreshed my little breasts with sweet words,
I would like to die
Since I cannot see you.
What should I, most wretched, do?
Where should I, most poor, do?
O, if my body had been committed to earth
Until your longed-for return,
Or if I could go on a journey like Habakkuk,
So that just once I could come to where
I saw the face of my lover,
Then I would not care if I died that very hour.
For there is no one who has been born in the world
Who is so lovable and dear,
No one who without feigning
Loves me with so deep a love.
Therefor, I ache without end
Until I am allowed to see you.
According to one wise man, the worst misery
Is to be far from someone one cannot live without.
As ling as the world endures,
You will never be blotted out from my heart's care.
Why do I linger with so many words?
Come back, sweet love!
Don't put off your journey any longer.
Know that I can no longer endure your absence.
Farewell--
Remember me.

Stehling 113, found in Gay and Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology from Sappho to Michelangelo, edited by James J. Wilhelm.

Shakespeare's Birthday

2008-04-23T01:52:00.000-07:00

I love my nerd friends. Not even an hour after midnight, and they're already digging up their favorite obscure quotes and YouTube clips. In standard form, I cannot find the passage where Sebastian from Twelfth Night compares himself to his mother while flirting with Antonio.

In Richard II, the main conflict is based on the title monarch's inability to separate his favorites from his politics, and partly on his wife's suspicious lack of children. At the beginning of Act III, Scene I, Sir John Bushy and Sir Henry Green, two of Richard's favorites, have been taken prisoner as traitors by Henry Bullingbrook, whose exile they were responsible for. He's back, though, and he's pissed. The politics have much more going on than beds, but when it's the loyalties around the king that are at issue, it's revealing what becomes significant.

Bull. Bring forth these men.
Bushy and Green, I will not vex your souls--
Since presently your souls must part your bodies--
With too much urging your pernicious lives,
For 'twere no charity; yet, to wash your blood
From off my hands, here in the view of men
I will unfold some causes of your deaths:
You have misled a prince, a royal king,
A happy gentleman in blood and lineaments,
By you unhappied and disfigured clean;
You have in manner with your sinful hours
Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him,
Broke the possession of a fair queen's cheeks
With tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs...

The queen's unhappiness would be totally immaterial if not for the implication that Richard is sexually involved with his favorites. Kings and nobles took mistresses and locked their wives up in towers or worse all the time.

Richard's real crimes seem to consist of being selfcentered and not knowing who he needs to keep happy. He's just Some Dude who happens not to make a very good king. Which, okay, a lot of people wouldn't.

That wasn't very fun. Why did I pick that? Thinking of more lighthearted things to post about brings me to Showtime's The Tudors, wherein Hollywood makes up an affair between Thomas Tallis and William Crompton, of all people. Seriously? Shift historical figures towards the gay? Does that ever happen? Villainous effeminacy, maybe, but actual sex is crazy talk, much less a sympathetic relationship.

Holy cow you guys!

2008-04-20T23:58:00.000-07:00

Read this blog. Right now. The Drummer's Revenge.

It's a gay history essay blog focusing on Canada, going back several centuries and very detailed. I haven't even read it all yet, I'm so excited to tell you it merely exists. The author is excellent from what I've seen so far, and I dream of being that productive- the first post was two months before mine.

Book rec

2008-04-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

A book I finished recently and enjoyed: Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748-1914 edited by Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt. Many of the stories were published in the mainstream, but the "hidden" part mostly refers to who was interpreting the subtext and how. Most of the selections by well known authors are lesser-known ones people are less likely to run into (such as "I and My Chimney" by Herman Melville instead of an excerpt from Moby Dick or Billy Budd, etc). I hadn't even heard of many of the pieces, such as Louis Wilkinson's pastiche of Henry James, or Joseph and his Friend: A story of Pennsylvania by Bayard Taylor. There's the moderately well known Lord Strutwell part in Smollett's The Adventures of Roderick Random, which I've read before but still like. Edward Prime-Stevenson's "Out of the Sun" is printed in entirety, as is Alan Dale's A Marriage Below Zero, which is nice because the most recent edition seems to be the original one (1889). I have to say I enjoyed that last a lot more than I expected to; it's most commonly interpreted as pure homophobic evil but that seems to depend on taking the (extremely bitter) female narrator at her face value.

The introductions to each author by the editors are quite witty and informative, but sometimes threw me. So much research has clearly been done, but neither of them bothered to find out who said "Once a philosopher, twice a sodomite"? The text blithely asks, "Was it Rousseau?" No, it wasn't. It was Voltaire (maybe not even reliably; the closest origin I can find right now with my quick-n-dirty methods is Richard Burton, writing more than a century later in 1886, and I can't remember what book I originally read the story behind it in). Another story- Tobermory by Saki, about a cat who is taught to speak and reveals many indiscretions on the parts of some garden party attendees- I have no earthly idea why it was included. The intro claims that the tomcat that kills Tobermory was some "rough trade" afraid of him talking? I read it about three times and still missed it, and I'm basically the Queen of Subtle References.

This is me nitpicking, though, and on the whole the book is a very well researched and edited collection, worth finding a copy.

The Third Kalandar's Tale (The Arabian Nights)

2008-03-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

The world really needs an edition of homoerotic tales from the Arabian Nights. Androphile.org has a few, centering on the 8th century Islamic rake and poet Abu Nawas. My book of selected stories, a battered 1959 hardbound edited by Bennett A. Cerf, has The Third Kalandar's Tale, which, in part, details the trials of a king stranded on an island.

But while I was pondering my case and longing for death behold, I saw afar off a ship making for the island; so I clomb a tree and hid myself among the branches. Presently the ship anchored and landed ten slaves, blackamoors, bearing iron hoes and baskets, who walked on till they reached the middle of the island.
[They dig up a trapdoor and open it, then return to the ship for food, furniture, decorations, and other household goods, and put them underground. An old man disembarks, escorting a young man:]
And the Shaykh held by the hand a youth cast in beauty's mould, all elegance and perfect grace; so fair was he that his comeliness deserved to be proverbial; for he was as a green bough or the tender young of the roe, ravishing every heart with his loveliness and subduing every soul with his coquetry and amourous ways...
[They bury the boy in the underground dwelling.]
When they turned away to depart, I came down from the tree, and going to the place I had seen them fill up, scraped off and removed the earth; and in patience possessed my soul until I had cleared the whole of it away. Then appeared the trap-door which was of wood, in shape and size like a millstone; and when I lifted it up it disclosed a winding staircase of stone. At this I marvelled and, descending the steps till I reached the last, found a fair hall, spread with various kinds of carpets and silk stuffs, wherein was a youth sitting upon a raised couch and leaning back upon a round cushion with a fan in his hand and nosegays and posies of sweet scented herbs and flowers before himl but he was alone and not a soul near him in the great vault. When he saw me he turned pale; but I saluted him courteously and said, "Set thy mind at ease and calm thy fears; no harm shall come near thee; I am a man like thyself and a King to boot; whom the decrees of Destiny have sent to bear thee company and cheer thee in thy loneliness. But now tell me, what is thy story and what causeth thee to dwell thus in solitude under the ground?"
When he was assured that I was of his kind and no Jinni, he rejoiced and his fine colour returned...
[The boy explains that he is his elderly father's only child, but that a prophecy foretold he would live fifteen years only to be killed by a man named Ajib, son of King Khazib. This man was also fortold to shoot down the horseman of yellow laton on top of a mountain of magnet, already accomplished earlier in the story. Of course, our hero is Ajib himself, reported drowned- the boy's father will come back in thirty days to fetch him, with the assumption that Ajib is dead for sure and no longer a threat. Ajib does not declare himself, but swears an oath not to harm the boy- indeed, to serve him and keep him company until the time is over, at which point he'll ask the boy's father for an escort to his own kingdom. The boy is glad, they eat dinner, and go to sleep.]
Next morning I arose and warmed a little water, then lifted him gently so as to awake him and brought the warm water wherewith he washed his face and said to me, "Heaven requite thee for me with every blessing, O youth! By Allah, if I get quit of this danger and am saved from him whose name is Ajib bin Khazib, I will make my father reward thee and send thee home healthy and wealthy; and, if I die, then my blessing be upon thee." I answered, "May the day never dawn on which evil shall betide thee; and may Allah make my last day before thy last day!" Then I set before him somewhat of food and we ate; and I got ready perfumes for fumigating the hall, wherewith he was pleased. Moreover I made him a Mankalah-cloth; and we played and ate sweetmeats and we played again and took our pleasure until nightfall, when I rose and lighted the lamps, and set before him somewhat to eat, and sat telling him stories till the hours of darkness were far spent. Then he lay down to rest and I covered him up and rested also. And thus I continued to do so, O my lady, for days and nights and affection for him took root in my heart and my sorrow was eased, and I said to myself, The astrologers lied when they predicted that he should be slain by Ajib bin Khazin: by Allah, I will not slay him. I ceased not ministering to him and conversing and carousing with him and telling him all manner takes for thirty-nine days. On the fortieth night the youth rejoiced and said, "O my brother, Alhamdolillah!-praise be to Allah- who has preserved me from death and this is thy blessing and the blessing of thy coming to me; and I prayed God that He restore thee to thy native land. But now, O my brother, I would thou warm me some water for the Ghusl-ablution and do thou kindly bathe me and change my clothes." I replied, "With love and gladness;" and I heated water in plenty and carrying it to him washed his body all over, the washing of health, with meal of lupins and rubbed him well and changed his clothes and spread him on a high bed whereon he lay down to rest, being drowsy after bathing. Then said he, "O my brother, cut me up a water-melon, and sweeten it with a little sugar-candy." So I went to the store-room and bringing out a fine water-melon I found there, set it on a platter and laid it before him saying, "O my master hast thou not a knife?" "Here it is," answered he, "over my head on a high shelf." So I got up in haste and taking the knife down from its sheath; but my foot slipped in stepping down and I fell heavily upon the youth holding in my hand the knife which hastened to fulfil what had been written on the Day that decided the destinies of man, and buried itself, as if planted, in the youth's heart.

Of course the same sex relationship is not the main point of the story, but that it appears so casually in a group of stories holds cultural significance. Later in the same story Ajib finds a palace with forty beautiful maidens in it, with much the same enthusiasm, but a different moral.

Miscellaneous Observations, and some half-assed research

2008-03-08T17:18:00.000-08:00

Richard and Robin Nursery Rhyme
First of all, there’s two versions of the last two lines:

Robin and Richard were two pretty men,
They laid in bed till the clock struck ten;
Then up starts Robin and looks in the sky:
"Oh, brother Richard, the sun's very high!
The bull's in the barn threshing the corn;
The cocks on the hayrick blowing is horn"

and

You go before, with the bottle and bag,
And I will come after on little Jack Nag.”

Somewhere there is a forum with an individual complaining about how “inappropriate” this rhyme is for their child, but I can’t find it again. I did find a fiction piece with the same title in Harper’s Magazine from December 1894- with the subjects “artists” and “bachelors”, I’d eat my hat if it’s not about (or inspired by) Wilde and co. But I don’t feel like paying for a year to read this one piece. *tears hair* Do any of you beautiful friendly readers have a subscription? It would be totally amazing if you could email me the PDF.
Google searches come up with Robin Hood and Richard Lionheart. The closest there is to even a discussion of this rhyme is a comment on one site that this is a “lost” rhyme with an unknown history.
After a short trip to the library, at least I have an “around by” date now: 1765, the year Mother Goose’s Melody: or, Sonnets for the Cradle was first published (first Mother Goose published ever, actually). Quote: “What lazy rogues are these to lie in bed so long, I daresay they have no clothes to their backs, for Laziness clothes a man with rags.”
Supposedly later versions have Alfred and Richard, “two lazy men”, instead, but this book (The Annotated Mother Goose, Baring-Gould, 1962) has an extreme lack of clear citations. The shift in terms in a later version may indicate some editor had the same hunch as me, that the two men are in a relationship. I can’t find any other evidence for the Alfred and Richard claim in my admittedly limited resources. Although, on that note, NAU finally has JSTOR access! Whee!

On a totally unrelated tack, this is a very interesting quote from John Keay's India: A History, referring to the medieval Muslim conquests in India (1293~1310) by Ala-ud-din Khalji:
"Among Cambay's seized assets the most prized was a Hindu captive who would add particular lustre to the Khalji sultanate. A eunuch and a slave, he quickly espoused Islam but retained the nickname 'Thousand-dinar Kafur', presumably a reference to his original valuation. 'His beauty,' says Barani, 'captivated Ala-ud-din' who thereafter trusted him implicitly and appointed him a Malik-naib, or senior commander."

Barani is Ziau-ud-din Barani, an important contemporary historian.

The other thing I'm sharing because it's hilarious. It's taken from the notes on Robert D. Tobin's essay in Outing Goethe and His Age, edited by Alice A. Kuzniar.
"13. This incident may have origins in the adventures of the two Counts Stolberg, with whom in 1775 Goethe first visited Switzerland and who enjoyed bathing in the nude so much they were eventually asked to leave the country (Eissler 1:373)."
The "incident" in question is Werther's narcissistic admiration of his friend Frederick's nude bathing body in Johann Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. This note has no other context or explanation, which is why it's so funny.

The same essay inspired me to look up Goethe's Roman Elegies ("...August Wilhelm Schlegel objected to a passage in Goethe's tenth elegy that, in a list of great warriors, included Frederick the Great along with Alexander, Caesar, and Henry IV, who would gladly exchange their victories for a night in bed with the speaker's lover." Tobin 98) The context is clear that the shared trait is intentional on Goethe's part, except for Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, who was/is called the Great, but I can find no evidence of him having homoerotic inclinations. The gender of the speaker's lover in the Elegies is fluid, sometimes female and sometimes appearing to be a representative Cupid, who would be a third party except for passages describing him as the object. The original objection would seem to indicate a larger understanding of the lover as male. Was there ever a German tradition (queer or mainstream) of Henry having had male lovers? I don't know.

Obscure Chinese lesbian stories, and also some poetry

2007-11-20T09:57:00.000-08:00

Well, "lesbian". Insert generic explanation of the narrow cultural context surrounding the concepts of lesbianism and homosexuality in general here.

Last semester I took a history course, Women In Asia. One of our required readings was Jonathan D. Spence's The Death of Woman Wang, a charming, emotional, and very well-written portrait of China's tiny T'an-ch'eng Province during the 17th century. One of Spence's sources is P'u Sung-ling, a Chinese historian and storyteller living in the local city of Tzu-ch'uan at the time. This short story was included by Spence as an example of works satirizing virtuous women and widows.

An old widow was spinning one evening when suddenly a young girl pushed open the door and said with a laugh, "Old woman, aren't you tired?" The girl looked eighteen or nineteen; her face was beautiful, her clothes were bright and elegant. Startled, the old woman asked where she came from, and the girl replied, "I pitied your lonely life and came to keep you company." The old woman suspected that she had run away from some wealthy home, and kept on questioning her insistently. But the girl said, "Old woman, don't be afraid. I am alone in the world, just as you are. Admiring the purity of your life, I came to be with you; if we stay together, we can avoid lonliness--isn't that the best thing?" The old woman suspected that she must be a fox spirit, and stayed silent and suspicious. The girl climbed up onto the frame and started spinning in her place, saying, "You don't have to worry. I'm good at making my own living in this way, and you won't have to support me." When the old woman saw how friendly and helpful she was, and how sweet, she felt at ease.

When it grew quite dark, the girl said to the old woman, "I brought with me my covers and pillow, and they are still outside the door. When you go out to relieve yourself, please bring them in for me." The old woman went out and found a bag of clothes, and the girl laid them out on the bed; they were of some kind of brocaded fabric, incomparably fragrant and soft; the old woman laid out her own cotton quilt and lay down on the bed with the girl. Hardly had the girl slipped off her silken dress than a strange scent filled the room; and as they lay there the old woman thought to herself, What a shame to be next to such a beauty and not to have a man's body. From her pillow the girl smiled and said, "You're an old woman of seventy, how can you still have such restless thoughts?" And the old woman replied, "I wasn't." The girl said, "If you are not having reckless thoughts, why were you wishing that you were a man?" The old woman was now all the more sure that she was dealing with a fox spirit, and grew frightened. At which the girl smiled again, saying, "You are the one who wants to be a man, how can it be that you are afraid of me?"

In the same class, another reading dealt with love poetry, ostensibly heterosexual. The reading introduction introduced this poem as celebrating the historic freedom of Chinese women- but that's certainly not what I got out of it, and my judgment was verified by the poem's inclusion in the introduction of Bret Hinsch's book Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China.

"Splendid"
How splendid he was!
Yes, he met me between the hills of Nao.
Our chariots side by side we chased two boars.
He bowed to me and said I was very nimble.

How strong he was!
Yes, he met me on the road at Nao.
Side by side we chased two stags.
He bowed to be and said "well done."

How magnificent he was!
Yes, he met me on the south slopes of Nao.
Side by side we chased two wolves.
He bowed to me and said "that was good."

This poem, obvious by itself in this context, was even more apparent next to the other selections, which emphasized the woman's loving subservience and contained feminine imagery rather than "Splendid"s egalitarian masculinity. We had an interesting in-class discussion in which my (correct) opinion was held to be equal to other arguments that this poem predated strict gender hierarchy, that the "woman" speaking was someone like the female general we had recently learned about, or that equality of spirit was more common than traditional Confucianism would have us believe, when all I could do was call bullshit. At least we agreed that the repeated "he met me" seemed to have a sexual undertone.

I didn't update for two months? Really? Well, it won't happen again. Watch this space!

2007-09-13T17:18:00.000-07:00

Murray’s introduction to Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, page 11: “Up until that time, most European words for homosexuality were derived from mythical originators and precedents—sodomy from Sodom, catamite from Ganymede, lesbian from Lesbos. The new taxonomy—Urning, homosexual, transvestite—labeled people in terms of intrinsic psychic and physical traits they were believed to possess, which categorically distinguished them from others.”
Except “Urning” comes from Aphrodite Urania, the aspect of the Greek love goddess ruling over male love. Murray must be one of those people who thinks Ulrichs was actually a scientist or something.

“Urning” is “Uranian” in English. If your first thought was purile humor you are not alone. Oh multilingual coincidence, how I love you.

An unrelated Urania is the Muse of astrology and astronomy. Uranus, Father Heaven, was the grandfather of most of the Olympic gods, so “of the heavens”, “heavenly love”, et cetera.

A Sapphick Epistle

2007-09-06T20:22:00.000-07:00

Oh, you wanted some lesbians? Oh, okay. Here you go. This is an excerpt from an anonymous 1778 satire entitled A Sapphick Epistle. Don't let anyone tell you people in the past didn't know what lesbians were. That person is wrong. Now, whether or not they believed they actually existed- another story for another time, I guess. On to the poetry.

Curse on my stars, that I was born,
In such an age of lust and scorn.
Oh, Sappho, had'st thou been
Alive in these rude, filthy days,
Thy verses had been all in praise
Of me and beauty's queen.
Oh! had it been my wretched fate
That Phaon had made me his hate,
What then had been my case?
Like D[amer] I had scorn'd the youth,
Kiss'd every female's lovely mouth,
And followed every face.
Look on that mountain of delight,
Where grace and beauty doth unite,
Where wreathed smiles must thrive;
While Strawberry-hill at once doth prove,
Taste, elegance, and Sapphick love,
In gentle Kitty Clive.
...
Ye Sapphick Saints, how ye must scorn
The dames with vulgar notions born,
Who prostitute to man:
Who toil and sweat the tedious night,
And call the male embrace delight,
The filthy marriage plan.

Happy Belated Birthday, Karl!

2007-09-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I forgot Karl Heinrich Ulrich's birthday! He turned 182 last Tuesday (August 28th). Tragically, he's been dead for 112 of those years.

Other birthdays:
Susan B. Anthony- February 15, 1820
John Addington Symonds- October 5, 1840
Edward Carpenter- August 29, 1844
Jane Addams- September 6, 1860
Magnus Hirschfeld- May 14, 1868
Radclyffe Hall- August 12, 1880

Addams and Anthony were feminists first and lesbians second, I know; but the thing about lesbian rights is that there have to be women's rights first.

Also I was going to include Havelock Ellis, who wrote Sexual Inversion with Symonds (Symond's name is not on it cause his family bought up all the copies of the first edition and burnt them), but I discovered just now he thought male homosexuals were fine and dandy, they're following their nature, but that lesbians were a product of feminism and they should suck it up and be good little wives. Bastard.

Bits and Bats Part One

2007-08-31T09:24:00.000-07:00

Several things here- first, that my internet is fixed, uh, again. Classes have started this semester (as well as other things I have foolishly volunteered for, like being Prism's office manager, or doing a certain book review- I'm rereading! hang in there!), and though my goal was to post something here every day or every couple of days, that's clearly not realistic.

I have a a couple of things for you today. The first is that I was emailed a couple weeks ago by a fellow wishing to know about homosexuality in early colonial Canada- not a subject I have researched (yet!) but an Amazon hunt turned up Homosexuality in Canada: A Bibliography, Gay Studies from the French Cultures, and The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada. Looking at France, which may also have been/be helpful in a similar search, there is Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection and Homosexuality in French History and Culture.

He emailed me back with elaborations on his search (white child/Indian child trading for translating and culture purposes, Canadian berdaches), and I remembered the very first entry in Katz's Gay American History. It's a record of the story and execution of a French interpreter by the Spanish in Florida in 1566:

"Alonso Menendez [Marques], the Adelantado's nephew, and [ensign] Vasco Zabal had told him [the Adalanto] that the French interpreter who was there [at Guale] was a Lutheran and a great Sodomite; that when the Adelanto had departed thence for Santa Elena, he went to the Indians [telling them] that they should kill them [the Spaniards]; and that through Guillermo [a French Catholic working for the Spaniards] he could inform himself of what was happening in this [matter], so that he [Guillermo] could speak with 2 Indians with whom he [the interpreter] was living, one of whom they said was the caique's [chief's] eldest son.
...
Alonso Menendez said that he would much regret staying, but since his lordship ordered it, he would do so, on condition that the Frenchman should be killed, or the Adelantado would take him with him; for otherwise nothing would be accomplished, and the Indians would slay him [Menendez] and those who remained with himl that the son of the caique had more authority than his father, and loved that interpreter very much; that if they killed the interpreter [openly], the Indians would be angered and again break out in war.
...
Then Caique Guale dispatched that interpreter in a canoe, with 2 of his Indians, that they might go and return immediately. The son of the caique showed much sorrow because the interpreter was going, and prayed him, weeping, to return at once."

I've had this window open for a while now and can't remember what else I was going to talk about, but I did find a reference to Ganymede in an 18thC ditty sung by London "mollies" (this version recorded in 1728 by James Dalton):

Achilles that Hero great,
Had Patroclus for a mate;
Nay, Jove he would have a Lad,
The beautiful Ganymede,
The Beautiful Ganymede.

Hee.

Oh yes! Glenn has put me in charge of GLBT History Month in October. >.> I guess I have to come up with movies or activities or something interesting to nonacademics. It just has to be better than last year, in which we played a bingo game suffering from severe Famous Dead White Guy Syndrome. I was going to hunt up Homosexuals in History on Amazon and show you guys the back cover as explanation of queer history done badly, but Amazon does not have the edition we have in the Prism office. On the other hand, see this, which has its exceptions (haha Cody! Mehmet II is on there!) and certainly a number of women, making it not quite the blatant atrocity I'm thinking of, but is mainly still- huh!- a list of famous dead white people. Thankfully, I think most people taking the time to sit down and write gay history books these days are aware of that kind of trap, but I see it a lot in people's casual speech. Alexander the Great, Oscar Wilde, occasionally James I, Frederick the Great if you're in a European history class; you'd think that there weren't any other gay people in history ever.

Play a game in the comments: name a deceased nonwhite or female gay person (besides Sappho).

Lesbian Sex=Boneless Babies

2007-08-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, you guys. I have two stories from two totally different cultural backgrounds (Vedic and Amerindian) with the same idea: Lesbian couples can magically have their own babies, but the child won't have any bones. Just how common is the connection between erections and bone? Also, do any of you have anything to add here I don't know?

From the Ramayana (Vanita, Same-Sex Love in India, pg 101): "The two wives of Dilipa took a bath. They lived together in extreme love. After some days, one of them menstruated. Both of them knew one another’s intentions and enjoyed love play, and one of them conceived.
"Ten months passed, it was time for the birth. The child emerged as a lump of flesh. Both of them cried with the son in their lap: ‘Why did the three-eyed one bless us with such a son? He has no bones, he is a lump of flesh, he cannot move about.'"

From The Assiniboine (Katz, Gay American History, pg 320): "He saw his sister nursing the child. Approaching he asked, 'Which of you has seduced the other?' His sister answered, 'Your wife persuaded me to elope with her.' The infant was continually crying. It looked like a football; it had no bones in its body, because a woman had begotten it."

Cody says, "Thesis!"

Edit 7-29-09: I've thought about this some since then, though haven't done any extensive research or anything- possibly a true coincidence and I should look into unauthorized female sexuality, proscribed sex acts, and birth defects? Woman on top, adultery, sex while pregnant, etc. I know I've seen things along those lines too. Still interesting to pull these two examples out and compare them, though.

Obscure Elizabethan Poets

2007-08-23T11:04:00.000-07:00

I love Richard Barnfield more than you can possibly know. Author of two books of poetry, The Affectionate Shepherd and Cynthia (available in one nifty volume from Amazon), he is sadly neglected in the shadow of such giants as Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Johnson. He is also, as far as I can tell, the only poet of his time to publish blatantly homoerotic and sometimes even sexually explicit verses. From The Affectionate Shepherd (absolutely not to be confused with Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to his Love):

Oh would to God he would but pitty mee,
That love him more than any mortall wight;
Then he and I with love would soone agree,
That now cannot abide his Sutors sight.
O would to God (so I might have my fee)
My lips were honey, and thy mouth a Bee.
Then shouldst thou sucke my sweet and my faire flower
That now is ripe, and full of honey-berries:
Then would I lead the to my pleasant Bower
Fild full of Grapes, of Mulberries, and Cherries;
Then shouldst thou be my Waspe or else my Bee,
I would thy hive, and thou my honey bee.

Barnfield: Subtle As A Frying Pan To The Face.

"Fee" refers to come, one term in an extensive collection of Elizabethan erotic puns (coin, purse, treasure (famously seen in Shakespeare's sonnet 20), spending, the last of which is still in common use). Bees and honey as references to sex with boys are at least as old of the Romans; Catullus calls his boyfriend Iuventius "mellitus", or honeylike. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, writing in the 19th century, uses "my little bee" as a reference to a boyfriend.

Sonnet 11, from Cynthia:
Sighing, and sadly sitting by my Love,
He ask'd the cause of my hears sorrowing,
Conjuring me by heavens eternall King
To tell the cause which me so much did move.
Compell'd: (quoth I) to thee will I confesse,
Love is the cause, and only love it is
That doth deprive me of my heavenly blisse.
Love is the paine that doth my heart oppresse.
And what is she (quoth he) whom thou do'st love?
Looke in this glasse (quoth I) there shalt thou see
The perfect forme of my faelicitie.
When, thinking that it would strange Magique prove,
He open'd it, and taking off the cover,
He straight perceav'd himselfe to be my Lover.

Also, I totally lied. Ganymede is mentioned in Barnfield's sonnets several times- sometimes in the same context as The Affectionate Shepherd and clearly a specific boy, sometimes in a double reference to the myth and a boy simultaneously. In at least one case, "ganymede" is used as a noun for an admired boy: "Two stars there are in one faire firmament, (Of some intitled Ganymedes sweet face)..."

The poetry itself is not the only reason Barnfield is special: his books, with these poems, were published in London in 1594 and 1595 (respectively) without fuss or outrage related to their content. There was some furor over his choice of dedication, the Lady Penelope Ritch, but in the preceding note for Cynthia he says, "...the last Terme there came forth a little toy of mine, intituled, The affectionate Shepheard: In the which, his Country Content found such friendly favor, that it hath incouraged me to publish my second fruites." More research needs to be done to decipher the common attitudes that inspired this peaceful addition to the queer canon.

In unrelated news, Erastes would like me to do reviews of gay historical fiction for his collaborative blog Speak Its Name. I plan to start off with Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys. Keep a lookout, and wish me luck!

Whitman: Why He Rocks

2007-08-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

I have internet again! Everybody cheer!

Today's post is brought to you by the discussion I had with my cousin in Borders the other day about Whitman, the greatest embarrassment to conventional democracy in American history. (Somebody else said it first, possibly Norton. He imprints on me like that.) When I got home this afternoon and went to pick a poetry book, hey! there's Leaves of Grass right on my shelf. I have the new Norton Critical Edition, Amazon does not have it listed but it's lovely. Original pronouns, differing edition notes, more footnotes than you can shake a stick at, plus essays in the back.

Anyway. Poetry. If you didn't click the link as you should have done (quick! there's still time!), Whitman believed in democracy as upheld by the "love of comrades". The section of poems entitled "Calamus" is the most blatantly homoerotic, at least with the pronouns in their proper places, and while not as well known (see: not read in school) they are still quite powerful. Sometimes you find people who are determined to read these poems as purely "platonic"; for those people and others who have never seen the plant I provide this picture.

Here are two poems I like from "Calamus". My favorite is too long (When I Heard at the Close of the Day).

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
(What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large that dents the water,
Without edifices of rules or trustees or any argument,
The institution of the love of comrades.

---

Recorders ages hence,
Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior, I will tell you what to say of me,
Publish my name and hang up my picture of that of the tenderest lover,
The friend the lover's portrait, of whom his friend his lover was fondest,
Who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him, and freely poured it forth,
Who often walk'd lonesome walks thinking of his dear friends, his lovers,
Who pensive away from the one he loved often lay sleepless and dissatisfied at night,
Who knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he lov'd might secretly be indifferent to him,
Whose happiest days were far away through fields, in woods, on hills, he and another wandering hand in hand, they twain apart from other men,
Who oft as he saunter'd the streets curved with his arm shoulder of his friend, while the arm of his friend rested upon him also.

And one more, in case you had begun to think everything was gung-ho hunky-dory for Walt:
Earth, my likeness,
Though you look so impassive, ample and spheric there,
I now suspect that is not all;
I now suspect there is something fierce in you eligible to burst forth,
For an athlete is enamour'd of me, and I of him,
But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me eligible to burst forth,
I dare not tell it in words, not even in these songs.

P.S. I almost titled this post "Whitman: Meter Is For Pussies" but luckily decided against it.

"What's the game plan here?"

2007-08-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

I'm on vacation right now, away from most of my books, but when I return to campus I shall be posting poetry and bits-and-bats, pieces of interesting documents, quotes, that sort of thing. I may, if the notion is still interesting when I get back, also do book reviews. Starting with Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization, which has been sitting on the shelf waiting for my ecstatic glowing praise for some time now.

Drove to Cody's house. He lent me some primary source books on Byzantine history, in case they should prove useful in our search the Byzantine homosexuality he wants me to do a post on- nobody has done any studies as of yet. About the extent of it in academia is comments on how Theophanes accuses Constantine V of every vice under the sun ("effeminacy and summoning of demons pleased him, and ever since he was a boy he had partaken of every sort of soul-destroying practice"). These sort of comments are what caused me to get all excited about this book as potentially useful. Most of the things it's actually talking about in reference to homosexuality are actually references to the laws of Justinian, boo. He did lend me The Chronicle of Theophanes, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, Women of Byzantium (in regard to which Blogger is being an ass and won't let me link), and the Annals of Niketas Choniates. I suspect these will not actually be helpful, but are rather Stage 2 of Cody's dastardly plan to get me to study his field.

On the other hand, he did buy me John Addington Symond's translation of Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, so I guess he's off the hook for now.

No, wait, Cody, come back! You know I love you.

Ganymede- Just Another Pretty Boy?

2007-08-11T13:23:00.000-07:00

So. Ganymede. Jupiter's largest moon. Which are named after... girlfriends, right. Io, Callisto, Europa, Ganymede. Ganymede's the odd one out. He's the boyfriend. According to the myth, he was kidnapped while hunting or tending sheep by a great eagle, usually said to be Zeus in bird form but which sometimes is merely Zeus's servant. Zeus (or Jupiter, or Jove) fired Hebe, the cupbearer of the gods, and put Ganymede to work in her place. Hera was so angry and jealous that he was eventually turned into the constellation Aquarius.

Mentioned in passing in the Iliad, it makes him one of the older myths in the repertoire. He appears in a discussion of the ancestors of Hector: "In the beginning Dardanus was the son of Jove, for Ilius was not yet established on the plain for men to dwell in, and her people still abode on the spurs of many-fountained Ida. Dardanus had a son, king Erichthonius... Erichthonius begat Tros, king of the Trojans, and Tros has three noble sons, Ilus, Assaracus, and Ganymede who was comeliest of mortal men; wherefore the gods carried him off to be Jove's cupbearer, for his beauty's sake, that he might dwell among the immortals." (This makes him Zeus' great great grandson, for those of you keeping score at home.) It's been variously argued that Homer did not intend their relationship to be a sexual one. One of my sources contains this quote from another historian: "the earliest surviving testimony to Zeus' homosexual desire for Ganymede is Ibykos, where the ravishing of Ganymede was put into the same context as the rape of Tinthonus by Dawn, who did not want a wine-pourer [but a sexual partner]."

Where did he come from? Plato says in his Laws, "The Cretans are always accused of having invented the story of Ganymede and Zeus, which is designed to justify themselves in the enjoyment of such pleasures by the practice of the god whom they believe to have been their lawgiver." I wasn't sure if this had reality behind it, or was another case of Everybody-Blame-Crete. Percy, the author of Pederasty and Pedagogy linked above, says "The number of ancient writers who support, directly or indirectly, a Cretan birthplace for pederasty is impressive" but names no names. Traditionally the boy is said to have been taken from Mount Ida near the city of Troy, but the Chalcidians claimed he was abducted from Harpaigon, a myrtle grove near their city. Here's a good list of ancient references.

The boy appears in later Greek poetry as a measure of the beauty of the mortal boyfriends of poets. Sometimes the fear is expressed that Zeus will trade one for another:
If Zeus is still the god who kidnapped Ganymede
to have a boy to bear the cups of nectar,
then I will hide the fair Myiscus in my heart
before the god eludes me and swoops down on him.
--Meleager (Musa Puerilis, Greek Anthology)

And, of course, he shows up many times in Greek art.

Ganymede's Roman name is Catamitus. (Those of you with large vocabularies can sort of see where this is headed.) Roman Homosexuality has a section devoted to the Romanization of the myth, starting with his appearance in Etruscan mythos as Catamit but quickly moving onto two mentions of him in Virgil's Aeneid: once near the beginning in a list of reasons Juno is so angry at the Trojans, and again appearing decorating the cloak given to Aeneas as a prize at Anchises' funeral games. The casual noun form (catamite) of Ganymede's name was used by Cicero to insult Marc Antony. Hadrian's equally famous boyfriend Antinous and Domitian's eunuch Earinos were frequently compared to him. He had already become a type of his own: "...the figure of Ganymede appears throughout Roman literature as the archetype of the beautiful, sexually desirable male slave as prerequisite of wealth and privilege..." (Williams 56) Martial twice irreverently calls Ganymede "the Trojan cinaedus", assuming not only his sexual services but also effeminacy, which would be seen again later.

Williams says Ganymede was "extremely popular" in Roman art, but this is about all I can find linked on the Internet, sorry. Many of the statues may have been copies of Greek originals in any case (there was one placed in the Forum at one point).

This is an 18th century translation by Thomas Heywood of Plutarch's Dialogue concerning Zeus and Ganymede; my favorite version, but read it anyways, because it's comedy gold.

There is a column depicting the Rape in the Cathedral of St. Madeleine de Vezelay in France, built in 858.

Ganymede shows up again in a twelfth century dialogue between he and Helen: heterosex or homosex? Helen wins so the moral can be delivered properly, with the argument that sodomy is murder because of the sperm wasted. Ganymede is portrayed as haughty, selfish, mercenary, and viciously misogynistic. Helen calls him a monster, and Nature is angry that he dares enter the palace because "She considers him neither her son nor her heir". At the end, having lost the argument, Ganymede asks for Helen's hand in marriage.

Our Hero returns with a vengeance in the Renaissance. Many artists drew, painted, or sculpted Ganymede and the eagle as a matter of course: Michelangelo, Cellini, Correggio, Gabbiani, Peruzzi, and Mazza, to name a few. Cellini actually defended himself against the charge of 'sodomite' with the bold statement: "...would God I knew how to practice such a noble art, for one hears that Jove used it with Ganymede in paradise, and here on earth the greatest emperors and kings in the world use it." (Roche, Forbidden Friendships, 136)

Rembrandt did a painting of Ganymede- but his version clearly indicates his own thoughts on the subject. Rubens did two different versions of the boy and eagle.

So much for the paintings. In England, the boy we're following shows up in the literature: In Shakespeare's As You Like It Rosalind disguises herself as a boy, calls herself Ganymede, and is flirted with by Orlando. In the poem Venus and Adonis, Venus is described in active masculine terms, and at several points the comparison to Zeus's eagle and Ganymede's passivity is brought to the surface:
"Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh, and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring in all haste,
Till either gorge be stuff'd, or prey be gone;
Even so she kiss'd his brow, his cheek, his chin,
And where she ends, she doth anew begin.
...
Upon this promise did he raise his chin,
Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave,
Who being look'd on, ducks as quickly in;
So offers he to give what she did crave,
But when her lips were ready for his pay,
He winks, and turns his lips another way."

Turning to Christopher Marlowe, the boy shows up most notably in his Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, in which he is portrayed as a prostitute trading gems for embraces in the very first scene. He is mentioned in Edward II by Isabella as she compares him to Gaveston ("Like frantic Juno will I fill the earth/ With ghastly murmur of my sighs and cries,/ For never doted Jove on Ganymede/ So much as he on cursed Gaveston.") and in the narrative poem Hero and Leander as Neptune mistakes Leander swimming across the Hellespont for Ganymede escaped from Olympus:
"Leander strived; the waves about him wound,
And pulled him to the bottom, where the ground
Was strewed with pearl, and in low coral groves
Sweet singing mermaids sported with their loves
On heaps of heavy gold, and took great pleasure
To spurn in careless sort the shipwrack treasure.
For here the stately azure palace stood
Where kingly Neptune and his train abode.
The lusty god embraced him, called him "Love,"
And swore he never should return to Jove."

The lesser known Elizabethan poet Richard Barnfield wrote the long homoerotic poem The Affectionate Shepherd (Containing the Complaint of Daphnis for the love of Ganymede.) There are no direct references to the myth itself aside from the name, but it's a potent reminder of the poet's intent by itself. A complete version is not available online, but here is an abridged version.

In Giles Fletcher's 1610 poem Christ's Triumph after Death, the people watching Christ's ascension to Heaven are compared to the frightened onlookers who witnessed the taking of Ganymede. The myth was Christianized further elsewhere by stripping it of sexual aspects and making it a metaphor for innocents in Heaven: "...the rapture of Ganymede had long since been widely spiritualized as a Christian allegory of the devout soul’s ascent to God. Indeed, as Leonard Barkan notes, Claude Mignault, the commentator on Alciati, goes so far as to align Jupiter’s love for Ganymede and Christ’s invitation to "Suffer little children to come unto me." Thomas Traherne used similar metaphors in his poetry to describe his relationship with Christ. (Rambuss, Queering the Renaissance, 273)

Make no mistake, "ganymede" was still used as a derogatory noun. (Somewhere there's a quote from an Elizabethan moralist about the "ingles and ganymedes" in the theater, but I can't find it. Expect an update when I do.) The English Earl of Sunderland, held partly responsible for the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, was portrayed in the vicious 1721 satire The Conspirators, or the Case of Cataline as immoral and vice-riddled: "'Tis certain, however odd and unnatural his Lewdness was, (yet it was a notorious Practise among some great men of that Age) and some of his Ganymedes were pampered and supported at a high Rate at his Expence." This is likely also a reference to Beau Wilson, who the Earl may have kept twenty years earlier before Wilson's untimely murder.

Samuel Drybutter (scroll down), "toyman" or merchant of books, jewelry, and other miscellaneous sundries, pilloried for selling copies of Cleland's Fanny Hill, was compared to Ganymede in several contemporary satires against him.

More miscellaneous art. One of the pictures on that page has the note that Ganymede was in fact used as a metaphor for the innocent being carried into Heaven, corroborated by my two sources above. I have not been able to find anything in depth on this subject- make of it what you will.

Ganymede used in early Budweiser commercial.

Gilbert, a character from the 1976 manga Kaze to Ki no Uta, dressed as Ganymede. Anyone who's read that series or seen the OVA knows what an apt comparison this is.

He's still alive and kicking in the collective imagination. He's used as a metaphor in Thomas Mann's novel Death in Venice. He's in works of fiction online. Keep a lookout, folks.

My bookshelf

2007-08-07T16:36:00.001-07:00

Why yes, yes my books are in the closet. That's where the shelf is. My LibraryThing

Two other books I'm reading right now are from the library- Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination by Ruth Vanita, who also wrote the completely fabulous book Same-Sex Love in India, and The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period by Michael Goodich.

Next post: Ganymede, the archtypical gay boy, through history.

Homosexuality and the Color Green

2007-08-07T13:36:00.002-07:00

Sometimes you come across a reference that keeps popping up, here and there, in unexpected places. And even though it's being referenced, no one is actually talking about it at any length. I came across a 1974 interview with Barbara Gittings, one of the founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, in Katz's Gay American History. She mentions that in her search for material on homosexuality after she first realized what she was, "there'd be pop-level material which said "the homosexual's favorite color is green." That upset me, because my favorite color was blue." (pg 421, 1992 edition)
And then elsewhere in the same book, discussing a character from Helen R. Hull's 1923 book The Labyrinth: "Hull goes so far as to emphasize Margaret's green dress, green hat, green coat, green eyes, and green identification card, a color symbolism, no doubt intended as an "in" clue to Margaret's sexual orientation-- green being one of those colors traditionally associated with homosexuality." (pg 539) The footnote here discusses Oscar Wilde's green carnations and a 1933 Broadway play called The Green Bay Tree.

Green? Why green? I kept seeing it: Chauncey's Gay New York mentioned it several times: a man wearing a green suit in NYC during the 1920's could be beaten up or killed. Drag queens wore green dresses at the city's huge drag balls of that era. Cornelius Willemse, an investigator who infiltrated Bowery resorts and set up raids on gay bars, entitled his autobiography Behind the Green Lights-- a reference, also, to the theater, which at the time still used limelights.

Strangers (Graham Robb):
pg 59: “Medical concepts like ‘contrary sexual feeling’ and ‘the intermediate sex’ were the template for tales that could make sense of life in all its details: the shape of one’s hand, the behavior of one’s parents, a predilection for the color green.”
pg 151 (on tokens): “The carnation was a traditional symbol of the anus, and the colors green and red had a long association with homosexuality. Pinkness seems to have acquired consistently homosexual connotations only in the 1900s, but green had been a gay color for centuries. Effeminate men in Ancient Rome were called galbinati because of their fondness for the color green.” (The note here directed me to Martial and two works in French. Helpful, thanks.)
pg 226:“Edward Prime-Stevenson’s character Dayneford, in ‘Out of the Sun’ (1913), has a small library in his villa on Capri, its walls ‘tinted in the significant green’…”

Gay L.A. (Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons):
pg 59: “[Rudolph] Valentino’s style—his clothes, his grooming—were iconographically queer, and they created an absolute panic among homophobes, as a Chicago Tribune column revealed in 1925 when Valentino visited Chicago wearing what the writer sardonically described as “a symphony in green.”"

I went to other sources. They told me variously that green was associated with Venus and Aquarius (Ganymede- surprisingly telling), that a person who wore green on a Thursday during the 1960s was gay, that it was considered unlucky in various British traditions for being a faerie color or associated with the Celtic underworld, that it marks characteristics ranging from love, the "base desires" of man, witchcraft, the Devil and evil, loss of virginity or worldliness (Greensleeves), and prostitution. See this picture, or Chaucer, wherein the Devil wears green, not Prada.

I went to the library and dug up the artbooks. In medieval art, certain people wear green: witches and promiscuous women, Jews, people making fun of Christ on the cross, at least one of the Magi at any given portrayal of the Adoration, and (oddly) the apostle John in more than one portrayal of the Last Supper. The Beloved Disciple he may be, lover of Jesus in a certain distinctive medieval and Renaissance tradition, but as far as I was aware he was not usually portrayed as effeminate.

A friend I enlisted to help me dig for links turned up this version of the Hanky Code. Kelly green: hustler if worn on the left, john if worn on the right.

None of these discoveries are very surprising. Homosexuality has been associated with prostitution for quite some time, even looking at slang. "Gay" was originally attached to promiscuous women at the end of the 19th century. In the 18th century, a "quean" was a prostitute. The colorful phrases "he-strumpet" and "he-whore" were attached to gay men by people who could not imagine the sex practices involved being for fun rather than money. Going centuries earlier, sodomy tended to be lumped in with heresy and witchcraft rather than being a separate consideration-- look up the fate of the Knights Templar.

Why isn't the association with green around anymore? Gay men wear pink now, supposedly. Just watch Jeffrey. I only came close with this page, which claims that prior to WWII, pink was for boys (related to red, a strong manly color) and blue was for girls (suggestive of the Virgin Mary, and supposedly softer and daintier). I believe that part, the poster provides several magazine quotes from that time. But it does not really explain why Germany and unspecified "neighboring countries" switched and began associating pink with girls in order to label homosexuals in the Nazi concentration camps with the pink triangle.

An Introduction

2007-08-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

Y hello thar Internets. My thots, let me show u them.

It's been slowly dawning on me for a while now that I need a place to talk about my studies. I have a Livejournal, but I use it primarily for its journal feed feature as a reading list. I talk to my friends, but honestly, the primary reaction to sudden spoutings of factoids from gay history is complete incomprehension (unless you're Cody or Ashley). I need a place I can explain things, show sources, and just possibly teach someone something.

I'm a student at a university. I study queer theory and history. There's no program for that here, which is probably a sign that I need to transfer, but whatever. I started studying this sometime in high school- not seriously, because I didn't have the resources to find the books, but online. This man was my gateway drug. He's on my list of people whose brains I have absurd and inappropriate crushes on. His books- Mother Clap's Molly House, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, and My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries are all available used through Amazon.

As a freshman, I wrote bits and bats of gay poetry and other things on the whiteboard on my dorm room door. Classy. I wrote an essay for english on the historical identities of gay men, and another for my Women in Asia class on lesbianism in India. I have successfully become That Girl. But it's not enough. I want to become a professor of queer studies. I might as well start teaching right here, right now.

This blog will be mostly about my sharing poetry, newspaper articles, bits from trials, satires, book reviews, anything, along with the appropriate historical context. There will be no laundry lists of famous dead white guys here. I'm against that kind of history on principle. History is a tapestry, with threads running from here to there, tangling, affecting each other, stories of how people lived and what they did and where they went and why.

Let's kick off with a short quote demonstrating this principle. This is a quote from an anonymous writer to the London Journal on May 14, 1726.

If the Legislature had not taken prudent Measures to suppress such base and irregular Actions, Women would have been a Piece of useless Work in the Creation, since Man, superior Man, has found out one of his own Likeness and Nature to supply his lascivious Necessities.

Oh, wait, now we're talking about sexism. Weird. So obviously men would pick other men, since obviously men are superior, right?

There's going to be all kinds of stuff on that tack here. Have fun, and hang on, we're in for quite a ride.