Famous Homosexual In History
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I am sometimes asked, ‘But does it really matter that some historical figure, for example Tchaikovsky, was gay? Do we really need to assemble lists of the great queers of history?’ I realize that I am expected to make the liberal answer, ‘No, of course not. The important thing is that he composed great music, and his homosexuality is ultimately irrelevant.’ But I like to pose some questions of my own in response: ‘If it doesn’t really matter, why has society taken such great pains to conceal Tchaikovsky’s sexuality, maybe even murder him for it? If it doesn’t really matter, why has such an inordinate amount of effort been put into the censorship and suppression of queer history?’ Society is happy to benefit from outstanding gay and lesbian writers and artists and musicians, and then has the impertinence to evade the issue of what desire motivates their work.
When people say it really doesn’t matter whether or not some great artist or hero was homosexual, they should consider the attacks upon the Brazilian anthropologist and historian Dr Luiz Mott:
"He had his house and car daubed with graffiti and his windows broken after publishing an article suggesting that a black anti-slavery leader was gay. Mott, who is white and his lover, who is black, were shocked but unhurt and have now asked for police protection. The attack was attributed to anti-gay activists in the Brazilian black movement . . . The subject of Mott’s article, Zumbi dos Palmares, led a community of runaway slaves in the interior of Brazil in the 17th century. In modern Brazil he is a symbol of freedom and resistance for Afro-Brazilians and others. . . . In the past, Luiz Mott has received death threats from elements linked to the military for claiming that the aviation pioneer, Santos Dumont, was gay." (Gay Times, July 1995)
Mott’s historical research into the records of the Portuguese Inquisition has brought to light, for example, the story of the Brazilian woman Felipa de Souza who was convicted and tortured in 1591 for having sex with other women; and the queer love letters written around 1664 by Francisco Correa Netto (‘Francisquinha’), the sacristan of the Cathedral of Silves in southern Portugal, to his boyfriend the guitarist Manoel Viegas. Mott is concerned about the history of ordinary queers as well as the great queers, but his revelations about previously unknown figures have not provoked an outcry. It is the suggestion that an important historical figure is also a great queer of history that is felt to be threatening and subversive. Why? Because most people appreciate that a person’s homosexuality really does matter.
The best-known paradigm of queer cultural history is the list of famous homosexuals. Often this consists of merely a list of names, without any further details, such as a well-known cartoon by Rick Fiala in the 1970s showing a bearded man wearing a T-shirt on which are printed the words ‘Walt Whitman Oscar Wilde Sappho Alexander the Great Gertrude Stein Cole Porter Radcliffe Hall Socrates Leonardo Da Vinci Colette Valentino George Sand Tchaikovsky . . . and Me’. Fiala satirizes the slightly preposterous effect of ordinary gay people including themselves in the company of the great queers. Kate Charlesworth similarly parodied the idea of a gay ethnic/cultural identity in her large full-page cartoon titled ‘A Short guide to Britain’s gay heritage’ (in Gay News 170, 1979), prompted, I believe, by my column in Gay News headed ‘The Gay Heritage Guide to Britain’. Charlesworth draws a map of the United Kingdom with arrows pointing to gay sites illustrating, for example:
Bradford – Where Blondes Have More Fun. Birthplace of David Hockney, Artist
Sheffield – Edward Carpenter Lived near here. A must for all gays, socialists, vegetarians, playwrights & Thesis-Writers
Clouds Hill – T. E. Lawrence’s cottage
Reading – Scene of The Incarceration of Oscar
Chelsea – Home of Q. Crisp, noted Stately Homo
Cerne Abbas – Site of ‘Unabashed’ iron age chalk figure, Cerne Giant. Gay men will be fascinated by the proportions of their forbears.
It has to be admitted that the search for our forebrothers and foresisters can be a bit naive. One feels that Gay Men and Women Who Enriched the World (Cowan 1988) really ought to be complemented by a companion volume on Gay Men and Women Who Have Grown Rich from the World (e.g. William Beckford the plantation owner, Krupp the arms manufacturer, etc.), or even 100 Gay Monsters and Queer Serial Killers (e.g. Gilles De Rais, the Marquis de Sade, Countess Erzsébet Báthory, Fritz Haarmann the ‘werewolf’, etc.) One wonders how well these would fit into works such as Martin Greif’s The Gay Book of Names (1982) or the series of short biographies published by Chelsea House on gays who have made significant ‘contributions’ to society. When we look at the output today by Alyson Publications – The Alyson Almanac, Lavender Lists (Fletcher and Saks 1990), Lesbian Lists (Richards 1990), and the superb collections by Leigh W. Rutledge, The Gay Book of Lists (1987), The Gay Fireside Companion (1989), Unnatural Quotations (1988) – we may feel that such collections are a fairly modern product of popular queer culture.
But the assumption that these are entirely products of modern popular culture would be mistaken. Initially such homophile apologetics were seen as an important historical argument for the decriminalization and destigmatization of homosexuality. Freud himself objected to the simplistic definition of homosexuals as ‘sick’, and asked in 1905: ‘Should we not then have to classify many great thinkers and scholars of all ages, whose sound minds it is precisely that we admire, as sick men?’ Freud cites a list of famous homosexuals in his Letter to an American Mother (1935), to show that her son is in good company and therefore to reassure her that he is not ‘sick’. Benkert in 1869 pointed out that if the Prussian law had prevailed throughout Europe in the past, many leading figures would have been imprisoned, such as Charles IX, Henry II, James I, Pope Julius II, Napoleon I, Louis XVIII, Frederick the Great, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Bazzi (Il Sodoma), Shakespeare, Mazzarin, Molière, Newton, Winckelmann, Cambacérès, Byron, von Platen, and Eugène Sue (Lauritsen and Thorstad 1974).
Though we smile at the occasional odd entry in the list, the standard ‘homophile’ use of the list is neither naive nor irrelevant, as in this classic statement from a 1957 article by Jim Kepner in ONE Magazine: ‘If perhaps the proportion of degeneracy among homosexuals in our present society seems high, it is because society forces most homosexuals into the role. The names of Ruth and Naomi, Plato, Sappho, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, Carpenter, and Gide are testimonials to the fact that homosexuality is not synonymous with degeneracy’ (Legg 1994). Christopher Isherwood remembers seeing in 1930 the film Gesetze der Liebe (Laws of Love) (1927), a re-make of the banned Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), a film about the blackmail of homosexuals made in cooperation with Hirschfeld in 1919 as a plea for repealing the German law against homosexuals, in which one dream sequence shows a ‘long procession of kings, poets, scientists, philosophers and other famous victims of homophobia’ moving sombrely across the screen, heads bowed, passing beneath a banner inscribed ‘Paragraph 175’. (The Nazis destroyed all copies of the film, though a partial print was discovered in the Ukraine in 1979 (Miller 1995)). The same reflection was made by Jeremy Bentham as early as 1774: ‘What would have become of Aristides, Solon, Themistocles, Harmodius and Aristogiton, Xenophon, Cato, Socrates, Titus – the delight of mankind – Cicero, Pliny, Trajan, Adrian, etc., etc. – these idols of their country and ornaments of human nature? They would have perished on your gibbets.’
Bentham’s views are part of the rational Enlightenment tradition (Greenberg 1988). In the second year of the French Revolution a group that Hallam (1993) calls ‘the Sodomite Liberation Front’ published a pamphlet, Les Petits Bougres au manège (The Little Buggers’ Reply), which defended the taste for buggery according to the principles of individual liberty, demanding equal rights for ‘orders of being, to whom a kindly nature has given senses that they might use them in the way best corresponding to their tastes and inclinations. . . . my prick and my balls belong to me; and . . . whether I put them in a cunt or an arse, no one has the right to complain of the use I make of them.’ Though this last phrase defends sodomy rather than queers, the pamphleteer refers to a ‘class of creatures’ and ‘orders of being’, and illustrates these by an accompanying list of famous homosexuals, from Socrates through to modern French generals. A somewhat earlier pamphlet, Les Enfans de Sodome (1790), a petition addressed to the Assemblée Nationale containing proposed Articles of Association for a Society of Sodomites, also contains a list of prominent Sodomites.
Most of the modern English-language lists are traceable to two sources: Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (German 1896, English 1897), particularly the sections assembled by John Addington Symonds, a specialist in Renaissance art history and enthusiast for Greek art and literature; and Jonathan to Gide: The Homosexual in History by Noel I. Garde (pseudonym of Edgar Leoni) (1964). Jonathan to Gide has been rather unfairly characterized as naive, but it serves as a useful tool, in giving short biographies of some 300 important political or cultural figures cited in various books as having had homosexual relations. For every biography he gives, Garde is scrupulous to cite an exact reference containing the ‘allegation’. (Garde’s principal sources include Anderson and Sutherland’s Eros, An Anthology of Friendship (1961); C. J. Bulliet’s Venus Castina (1933); Sir Richard Burton’s Terminal Essay, Part D, ‘Pederasty’, in his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (orig. pub. 1885 or 1886); Edward Carpenter’s Iolaus (1929) and The Intermediate Sex (1912); Allen Edwardes’, Jewel in the Lotus (1959); Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1922 ed.); Dr Jacobus X’s Crossways of Sex (1935 ed., orig. pub. 1890s); the 1909 volume of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, which ‘contained a compendium of various lists from various sources on famous homosexuals, the chief contributors being named Kertbeny, Ferner and Frey’; Otto Kiefer’s Sexual Life in Ancient Rome (1953 ed.); Hans Licht’s (pseud. of Paul Brand) Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (1953 ed.); Xavier Mayne’s The Intersexes (1908); and, last, J. V. Nash’s Homosexuality in the Lives of the Great (Girard, Kansas: Little Blue Book No. 1564, n.d.).) Most of the lists of the great queers of history are ultimately traceable to seven books: Albert Moll’s Berühmte Homosexuelle (Famous Homosexuals) (1910), Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Homosexuality in Men and Women) (1914), Ivan Bloch’s Das Geschlechtsleben in England (3 vols, 1901–03, one-vol. trans. by M. Eden Paul as The Sexual Life of Our Time, 1908), Marc-André Raffalovich’s Uranisme et unisexualité (Uranism and Unisexuality, 1896), Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Forschungen zur mannmännlichen Liebe (Researches on Love between Males) (several volumes published from 1864 to 1870), Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex (1908), and Heinrich Hoessli’s Eros: Die Männerliebe der Griechen: Ihre Beziehunger zur Geschichte, Erziehung, Literatur und Gesetzgebung aller Zeiten (Eros: The Male Love of the Greeks: Its Relationship to the History, Education, Literature and Legislation of All Ages) (two volumes, 1836 and 1838; material for a third volume was not published).
Although full-length books about famous homosexuals seem to be a product of a homosexual emancipation agenda, non-book-length lists of the great queers of history go back much further than the nineteenth century. These lists are by no means limited to the modern period, nor are they found only in homophobic contexts (both of which would be required by the social constructionist premise). The pornographic poem Don Leon (c. 1836) cites Virgil and Alexis, Epaminondas and Cephidorus: ‘How many captains, famed for deeds of arms, / Have found their solace in a minion’s arms!’ Voltaire in the article on ‘L’Amour nommé Socratique’ in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) records a list of famous pederasts. Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin (1595–1670), self-styled ‘King of Sodom’ – usually called a libertine but more rightly called a proud and self-identified queer – defended homosexuality in his verse, based partly on imitations of Martial, and once sent Condé a poem declaring that ‘Caesar was as great a bougre as you, but not so great a general.’ In 1623 Théophile de Viau (1590–1626) – one of the most interesting premodern queers, unfairly called merely a ‘libertine’ – addressed an obscene poem ‘Au marquis du Boukinquan’, i.e. James I’s lover George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, relating that ‘Apollo with his songs / debauched young Hyacinthus, / Just as Corydon fucked Amyntas, / So Caesar did not spurn boys. / One man fucks Monsieur le Grand de Bellegarde [a friend of Viau], / Another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre. / And it is well known that the king of England / Fucks the Duke of Buckingham.’ Such a list is prima facie evidence of the existence of queer identity during the early seventeenth century: de Viau clearly uses here the conceptual framework of members of a group of people with something in common. Any argument that this establishes a group of sodomites rather than a group of queers quite misses the point: it is a group of persons rather than acts.
Carl Miller in Stages of Desire (1996) devotes an entire chapter to ‘the roll call of sodomites’ in various Tudor plays. The most famous example occurs in Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II:
The mightiest kings have had their minions;
Great Alexander lov’d Hephaestion,
The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept,
And for Patroclus stern Achilles droop’d.
And not kings only, but the wisest men;
The Roman Tully lov’d Octavius,
Grave Socrates wild Alcibiades.
In John Bale’s A Comedy Concerning Three Laws of Nature, Moses and Christ, Corrupted by the Sodomites, Pharisees and Papists Most Wicked (1530s) there is a long list of idolaters/sodomites recited by the allegorical figure of Sodomy on behalf of himself and Idolatry, including Noah’s son Ham, Onan:
We made Thalon and Sophocles,
Thamiras, Nero, Agathocles,
Tiberius and Aristoteles,
Themselves to use unnaturally.
I taught Aristo and Fulvius
Semiramis and Hortensius
Crathes, Hyliscus and Pontius
Beasts to abuse most monstrously.
Even in this example, which is intentionally insulting, we can see that the social constructionist view that before modern times there were only acts rather than people, sodomy rather than sodomites, is wide of the mark. The essence of any list is that it establishes the commonality of those included – otherwise there is no point in assembling a list. A list of apples, peaches, pears, lemons, etc. functions as a list precisely because it establishes or exploits the abstract or generic meaning of ‘fruit’. These Renaissance lists, and especially the more positive catalogues of Faithful Friends, establish queer identities in exactly the same way that medieval literary catalogues of Good Women or Wicked Women are designed to establish the character of certain personality types. Negative lists tend to create stereotypes, while positive lists tend to create amalgams or composites – the latter are specifically offered as models for behaviour.
We can slowly work our way backward in time. Sixteenth-century Spanish chronicles cite Juan II, Álvaro de Luna, and Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba as famous homosexuals. There is a list of homosexual pairs amongst the gods in Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum (1375), which influenced later writers. Several twelfth-century debates between Ganymede and Helen or Hebe cite the loves of Jupiter and Ganymede, Apollo and Hyacinthus, Silvanus and Cyparissus (Boswell 1980). When Benvenuto Cellini was called a ‘dirty sodomite’ by one Bandinelli, he humorously replied: ‘I wish to God I did know how to indulge in such a noble practice; after all, we read that Jove enjoyed it with Ganymede in paradise.’
Premodern defences of homosexual love were not limited to pagan precedents. When James I made his boyfriend George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham in 1617, he had to defend himself in response to the Privy Council’s remonstrations against such blatant favouritism:
I, James, am neither a god nor an angel, but a man like any other. Therefore I act like a man and confess to loving those dear to me more than other men. You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else, and more than you who are here assembled. I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had his son John, and I have my George.
It is possible that James was consciously using a queer tradition about Christ and St John the ‘beloved disciple’. St Aelred of Rievaulx, who had several same-sex unions, called the relationship of Christ and St John a ‘marriage’. The blasphemous view that Christ and John were lovers was consolidated during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the view was claimed to have been held by Francesco Calcagno, investigated by the Venetian Inquisition in 1550, by Christopher Marlowe in an accusation of 1593, by Manuel Figuereido in a Lisbon Inquisition trial of 1618, and by others.
So what is the purpose of these lists? The social constructionist argument is that lists of the great queers of history are compiled primarily, or even solely, by an oppressed minority in order to refute the stigma attached to homosexuality by mainstream heterosexual culture. In other words, a queer person’s sense of shame or inferiority is diminished by identifying a link with people widely admired by society, and the list is therefore constructed entirely in reaction to external society.
The most famous example of this kind of motivation is found in Oscar Wilde’s famous defence of himself during his trials, when he compared ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ to the love of David for Jonathan, and defended its nobility and beauty with reference to works by Plato, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It was a theatrical tour de force, but did not stand up to the testimony of boy prostitutes. Wilde of course lied throughout much of his trials, and this particular line of defence was perhaps hypocritical and well-rehearsed, but Wilde really did believe himself to be part of the ancient and noble tradition of paederastia. Wilde used such lists to position himself in relation to queer culture, and this was really more important than any other motivation: Wilde was first and foremost culturally/aesthetically identified. In particular, he referred to past gay artists, thus declaring himself to be part of a cultural elite, as opposed to heterosexual modern philistines. In the last years of his life, exiled, bankrupt, with no more need to defend his character, he said to Frank Harris: ‘What you call vice, Frank, is not vice. It is as good to me as it was to Caesar, Alexander, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare. It was first of all made sin by monasticism, and it has been made a crime in recent times by the Goths – the Germans and the English – who have done little or nothing since to refine or exalt the ideals of humanity.’
The Wilde defence should also be seen in the context of queer cultural elitism that was an important factor in some branches of the gay emancipation movement in the 1890s. For example, Adolf Brand, who objected to the ‘third sex’ theory with its effe
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