Gay is usually reserved for male homosexuality. Female homosexuality—lesbianism, to use the term still ignored in the 1971 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary—has a vocabulary and career of its own. In spite of the prejudice that views all unconventional sexualities as part of the same herd of sinners, and in spite of the common political force that results from being the object of such a prejudice, male and female homosexualities differ in their public image, their vocabularies, and their histories. Lesbianism, for instance, is empowered by its association with feminism—gay males have no such support from any equivalent male group—and lesbian acts are ignored in certain heterosexual codes of law; Britain’s notorious anti-homosexual laws of the past century were designed exclusively for males, as Queen Victoria (tradition has it) refused to believe “that women did such things.” In most countries, female couples are considered “respectable” while male couples are unthinkable except as an abomination, perhaps because in the heterosexual male imagination that dominates most societies, two women living together do so only because they haven’t been able to acquire a man and are either to be pitied for this shortcoming or praised for undertaking on their own tasks that are normally a man’s responsibility. Similarly, lesbian images are accepted — in fact, encouraged—in heterosexual male pornography, the fantasy being that these women are making love among themselves in expectation of the male to come. The heterosexual male code of honor is thereby preserved.
A person not complying with these preset codes seemingly threatens the received identity of the individuals who uphold them in their society. In order to dismiss the transgressor with greater ease, it is best to caricature him (as the success of such pap as La Cage aux Folles seems to prove), thereby creating the myth of the Good Homosexual. The Good Homosexual, as in Harvey Fierstein’s Torchsong Trilogy, is the man who deep down inside wants to be like his mother—have a husband, have a child, putter around the house—and is prevented from doing these things by a quirk of nature. Underlying the myth of the Good Homosexual is the conviction (upheld by the American Psychological Association until 1973) that a homosexual is a heterosexual gone wrong: that with an extra gene or so, a little more testosterone, a dash of tea and sympathy, the homosexual will be cured, become “normal.” And if this cannot be achieved (because in some cases the malady is too far advanced), then the best thing for the creature to do is assume the other, lesser role designed by society in its binary plan, that of an ersatz woman. I remember a psychological test set for my all-boys class by a school counselor concerned with “particular friendships.” A previous class had warned us that if we drew a female figure, the counselor would assume that our fantasy was to be a woman; if we drew a male figure, that we were attracted to a man. In either case we would be lectured on the terrors of deviancy. Deviants, the counselor had told the other class, always ended up murdered by sailors on the dockside. When my turn came, I drew the figure of a monkey.
THE FOREST IN HISTORY
And warming his hands to the fire exclaimed, “Now where would we be
without fagots?”
Sir Walter Scott, Kenilworth
Homosexuality is not always socially condemned. In other societies human sexuality was known to cover a larger spectrum. In ancient Greece and Rome, no moral distinction was made between homosexual and heterosexual love; in Japan, gay relationships were formally accepted among the samurai; in China, the emperor himself was known to have male lovers. Among the native people of Guatemala, gays are not seen as outsiders: “Our people,” said the native leader Rigoberta Menchú, “don’t differentiate between people who are homosexual and people who aren’t; that only happens when we go out of our society. What’s good about our way of life is that everything is considered a part of nature.”
In European society, hostility against gays did not become widespread until the mid-twelfth century. “The causes of this change,” wrote the Yale historian James Boswell, “cannot be adequately explained, but they were probably closely related to the increase in intolerance of minority groups apparent in ecclesiastical and secular institutions throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.” And yet in spite of this hostility, until the nineteenth century the homosexual was not perceived as someone distinct, someone with a personality different from that of the heterosexual, someone who could be persecuted not only for a specific act contra naturam but merely for existing. Until then, noted Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality, “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”
With the invention of the species “homosexual,” intolerance created its quarry. Once a prejudice is set up, it traps within its boundaries a heterogeneous group of individuals whose single common denominator is determined by the prejudice itself. The color of one’s skin, one’s varying degrees of alliance to a certain faith, a certain aspect of one’s sexual preferences can and do become the obverse of an object of desire — an object of hatred. No logic governs these choices: prejudice can couple an Indonesian lawyer and a Rastafarian poet as “colored people” and exclude a Japanese businessman as an “honorary white;” revile an Ethiopian Jew and an American Hassid, yet pay homage to Solomon and David as pillars of the Christian tradition; condemn a gay adolescent and poor Oscar Wilde, but applaud Elton John and ignore the homosexuality of Leonardo da Vinci and Alexander the Great.
The group created by prejudice comes into existence not by the choice of the individuals forming it but by the reaction of those outside it. The infinitely varying shapes and shades of sexual desire are not the pivot of everyone’s life, yet gay men find themselves defined through that single characteristic — their physical attraction to others of the same sex—notwithstanding that those who attract them run the gamut of the human male: tall, short, thin, fat, serious, silly, rough, dainty, intelligent, slow-witted, bearded, hairless, right wing, left wing, young, old, with nothing in common except a penis. Once limited and defined by this grouping, the quarry can be taunted, excluded from certain areas of society, deprived of certain rights, sometimes arrested, beaten, killed. In England the promotion of homosexuality was illegal until recently; in Argentina, gays are routinely blackmailed; in the United States and Canada their inclusion in the armed forces is contested; in Cuba they are imprisoned; in Saudi Arabia and Iran they are put to death. In Germany many homosexuals who were victimized by the Nazis are still denied restitution, on the grounds that they were persecuted for their criminal, not political, activities.
A group, a category, a name may be formed and transformed throughout history, but direct experience of this is not necessary for a writer to express that experience in artistic terms — to compose a poem, to write a novel. Many stories touching on a gay theme stem from writers forced to exist within the gay ghetto. But many others have been written by men and women who have not been condemned to such enclosures. As works of fiction, they are thankfully indistinguishable from one another.
VARIATIONS IN THE LANDSCAPE
Variety is the soul of pleasure.
Aphra Behn, The Rover, Part 2