Gay Life Stories

Robert Aldrich

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780500771303
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A fascinating portrait of gay men and women throughout time and across the globe whose lives have influenced society at large, as well as what we recognize as todays varied gay culture. This beautifully illustrated book gives a voice to more than 80 people from every major continent and from all walks of life. It includes poets and philosophers, rulers and spies, activists and artists. Alongside such celebrated figures as Michelangelo, Frederick the Great and Harvey Milk are lesser-known but no less surprising individuals: the Chinese emperor Ai, whose passion flourished in the 1st century BC; the unfortunate Robert de Péronne, first to be burned at the stake for sodomy; Katharine Philips, writing proto-lesbian poetry in 17th-century England; and Aimée and Jaguar, whose love defied the death camps of wartime Germany. With many striking illustrations including paintings, drawings, photographs and archival documents Gay Life Stories will give pause for thought, entertain and celebrate the diversity of human histories.

1

ANCIENT ANCESTORS

Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum c. 2400 BCE

What are the earliest ‘gay lives’ recorded in history? The question is silly. As even those who have engaged in casual reading of scholarship on sex know, ‘homosexuality’ as a term did not emerge until the 19th century. The ways in which people thought about sex and sexuality – and possibly the ways in which they had sex – varied greatly over time and from place to place. It is probable that some men in almost all cultures have experienced an emotional and physical desire for other men, just as some women will also have felt intimate affection, romance and lust for others of the same sex. Exactly what this meant to them and to others in their societies is seldom entirely clear. A wealth of sources exists that testify to same-sex connections, but the question of how to interpret those documents and artefacts continues to exercise scholars.

One intriguing and very ancient instance of some sort of intimacy between men dates back to 2400 BCE, during the 5th dynasty in Egypt. In 1964 archaeologists discovered a previously unexplored tomb in Saqqara: the burial site of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. Several carvings on the walls showed the men looking each other steadily in the eyes, holding hands and locked in an embrace: Khnumhotep’s arm was around his companion’s shoulder, and Niankhkhnum, in turn, was grasping the other’s forearm. The inscriptions identify them as ‘royal confidants’: one man was a manicurist to the king, and the other the inspector of manicurists at the royal palace. Other images show the men fowling and fishing, and gathered in the company of their wives and children.

Egyptologists differ in their interpretation of the tomb figures. Some see Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum as twins, or brothers, or just friends who wished to continue their friendship in the afterlife. There has also been speculation that the carvings reveal a same-sex relationship of a different order. One historian, Greg Reeder, points out that the pose of two men gazing into each other’s eyes was uncommon in the iconography of the time; that their embrace is particularly intimate; and that the gestures the two men use follow the artistic conventions that generally unite a husband and wife. Khnumhotep’s and Niankhkhnum’s spouses seem to play a lesser role in the monument’s images than might be expected.

It was assumed that men would marry and procreate, but the Egyptologist R. B. Parkinson has inventoried various references to homosexuality in the Egypt of the pharaohs. Official pronouncements expressed disapproval of sex between men (especially the behaviour of the passive partner), while literary texts were somewhat more ambiguous, sometimes revealing good-natured caricature and even humour. ‘How lovely is your backside!’ remarks Seth to Horus in one tale, in what Parkinson calls a very old ‘chat-up line’. Horus’s mother, the goddess Isis, warns him against having sex with his friend. Yet it is written in the so-called Pyramid Texts – Egypt’s oldest religious writings – that Horus and Seth engaged in reciprocal anal intercourse, even if their coitus is described as injurious.

Whether Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were blood relatives, companionable colleagues or lovers is unimportant. They are worth recalling because of the very indefinable nature of their relationship – an illustration of the porous boundaries in many cultures between affection, friendship, intimacy, and sexual yearning and its realization. In ancient Egypt, commissioning a tomb and planning its decoration counted among the essential acts of a man’s life. In the survival of these carvings for over four millennia, the men’s wish to be remembered together has been fulfilled; their names mean ‘joined to life’ and ‘joined to the blessed state of the dead’.

David and Jonathan 11th century BCE

Many specialists of biblical exegesis (including believers in the Judaeo-Christian deity), as well as freethinkers, reject the historicity of the Scriptures. Historians and archaeologists have found so many discrepancies between the narrative and other evidence that, for some, it is difficult to believe what generations of Jews and Christians have considered the inspired word of God, and what fundamentalists still claim as literal truth. Yet even those who do not accept their veracity can read the stories as literary creations of power and drama.

The First Book of Samuel tells of Saul, the first king of the Israelites. After a battle captained by his son and heir apparent, Jonathan, Saul refuses God’s order to kill the vanquished – to ‘slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’. In response, God announces to his prophet that he will choose another as Saul’s successor, an obscure young shepherd named David. Saul, meanwhile, falls into a great depression and summons the shepherd, who is renowned for singing and harp-playing. The King James Bible describes him as ‘ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to’; Saul ‘loved him greatly’, and David becomes his court musician and armour-bearer. With battle between the Israelites and Philistines re-engaged, David, though too young to be a regular soldier, distinguishes himself by felling the giant Goliath with a well-aimed stone from his slingshot. Jonathan befriends the hero: ‘the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul … Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle’. Saul becomes jealous at the acclaim awarded to David and, again struck with depression, twice tries to kill him; he recovers, however, and gives David command of a thousand men and his daughter’s hand in marriage. As bride-price, Saul asks David for a hundred foreskins of the Philistines, covertly hoping that David dies in battle. When a victorious David brings the prize, Saul’s daughter weds him.

Saul then tries to persuade Jonathan to kill David, ‘but Jonathan Saul’s son delighted much in David’. He reveals the plot and ably brings Saul to a change of heart. The good relationship between king and vassal is not to last. Further victories reawaken Saul’s ire, he again tries to down David with his javelin, then attempts to have thugs murder him. David takes refuge with the prophet Samuel, but meets secretly with Jonathan – ‘thy father certainly knoweth that I have found grace in thine eyes’. Jonathan proposes to sound out his erratic father and, if danger still looms, help David to escape. The two swear loyalty.

David and Jonathan, by Cima da Conegliano, c. 1505–10 (National Gallery, London)

When Saul asks after David, Jonathan reports that he has gone home to Bethlehem for a sacrifice. ‘Saul’s anger was kindled against Jonathan’, and he charges: ‘Do not I know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own confusion’, attacking his own son with the handy javelin. The next morning, by a prearranged signal Jonathan warns David, who emerges from hiding for a farewell before his flight: ‘they kissed one another, and wept one with another’. David escapes into the wilderness, with Saul’s agents in pursuit, but rejoices in the occasional secret meeting with Jonathan. David refuses a chance to kill Saul, only cutting off the bottom of his robe because he will not slay his king, then confronts Saul with deference. Reduced to tears, Saul guarantees his goodwill.

Soon the volatile Saul mounts a further assault. David gives up another opportunity to kill his nemesis, and there is reconciliation. In renewed warfare, the Philistines get the better of the Israelites, take David’s two wives captive, kill Jonathan and his brothers, and wound Saul, who commits suicide to avoid capture. A distraught David, hearing of Jonathan’s death, rends his clothes, weeps and exclaims: ‘O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.’

David fulfilled his destiny to become the Jewish king and to sire a dynasty that supposedly stretched down to Jesus. The tangled story of his relations with the half-mad (or demonically possessed) Saul is the stuff of power politics, conspiracies, warfare, plunder, alliances and rivalries for a crown. Some scholars thus have argued that the oaths between David and Jonathan, the love they declare and the feverish nature of their friendship, have more to do with Near Eastern politics and rhetoric than with any homoerotic bond.

Nonetheless, the story has resonated loudly in the homosexual imagination. The shepherd became a figure of legend and art, notably in Michelangelo’s larger-than-life marble in Florence, the Renaissance symbol of perfect masculine beauty. The relationship between David and Jonathan, ‘passing the love of women’, has suggested to many readers of the Scriptures a romantic liaison between two young men sworn to love and parted only by death.

The sex-obsessed Judaeo-Christian tradition has not been kind to homosexuals. The burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, as recorded in the Torah, provided the name for the unnameable sin, and a precedent for God’s punishment. In the New Testament St Paul condemned homosexuality as an abomination – a pronouncement followed by later Christian leaders, who damned homosexual acts and sentenced sodomites to repentance or hell, to rectification of their ways or searing punishments in this world and the world to come.

In light of the homophobia of many churches, gay Christians have frequently sought refuge with congregations that do not condemn their yearnings, such as the Catholic Dignity organization, the Metropolitan Community Church or the French group called David et Jonathan. They have also, in amongst the biblical prohibitions against homosexual acts, found some comfort in the story of David and Jonathan, and in the friendship of Ruth and Naomi (Ruth tenderly declared to her mother-in-law and best friend, ‘whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge’). In the New Testament, they find solace and inspiration in the intimacy between Jesus and his ‘beloved disciple’ – St John, who is often pictured nestling on Jesus’ breast at the Last Supper and as witness to his Crucifixion, where Christ confides his follower and his mother Mary to each other’s care. Although most biblical scholars and (it goes without saying) traditionalist clerics and scriptural commentators reject the notion of a physical relationship, or even intimacy, between these couples, their tales have often given succour to those who strive to reconcile sexual desires with spiritual beliefs.

Sappho BORN c. 612 BCE

What is known about the life of Sappho fills hardly a paragraph, and her surviving poems, many so fragmentary as to extend to only a few words, cover just thirty or forty pages. Yet she occupies a prominent place in history, as the woman who gave her name to what was called ‘sapphism’, and what today is called ‘lesbianism’, after the island of her birth. Well may she have written: ‘I think that someone will remember us in another time.’

The facts remain uncertain, but it seems that Sappho was born near the end of the 7th century BCE on Lesbos, in the eastern Aegean; her family was prosperous, though she was orphaned as a child. She lived for most of her life in Mytilene, the island’s principal centre, except for a period of exile in Sicily, probably occasioned by her family’s political activities, in Sicily. She was married and had a daughter. She had two brothers, and the romantic affair of one of them, who was swindled by a prostitute, troubled her. Legend has embroidered various other details to her biography – that she was unattractive; that she was the head of a school for girls; that she hurled herself off the Leucadian cliff into the sea, suffering unrequited love for a handsome boatman called Phaon – but very little is really known. The suicide, possibly a tardy addition to the Sappho legend, conveniently served those who wished to deny her lesbianism and to suggest that she was a closet heterosexual.

Sappho’s poems, even in the truncated form in which they have come down through the ages, speak beautifully of yearning, love, heartbreak and the sensual delights of the Mediterranean. Invocations of the deities remind present-day readers of a classical religion in which the gods could be summoned to bless rather than damn same-sex affections. Images of ambrosia and goblets of wine, the fragrance of myrrh and frankincense, the sound of flutes and lyres, garlands of roses and crocus – even if they were moderately regular accoutrements of daily life in ancient Greece – are romantically evocative.

The poet loved the beauty of young women – ‘towards you beautiful girls my thoughts / never alter’, she writes in one fragment. She fell in love, and one poem intimates the sexual consummation of her desires. She vividly describes the spine-tingling, sweating, ear-throbbing physical effects of passion. Love also brought pain, and in one of the more complete poems to survive Sappho voices distress that a lover is now drawn to someone else, a man. Elsewhere she addresses a girl several times by name, though with the melancholy of an affair that has come to an end: ‘I was in love with you, Atthis, once, long ago’. She calls upon Aphrodite to bring comfort in her lovelorn solitude and to revive a friend’s affections. She writes about a wedding, congratulating a bridegroom on his beautiful spouse. Writing as an ageing woman, the poet recalls threading love garlands; she realizes that certain sorts of love have now slipped away, yet mischievously reminds those still in the throes of passion that ‘we, too, did such things in our youth’. And she tenderly expresses a hope for her readers in a single-line fragment: ‘May you sleep upon your gentle companion’s breast.’

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sappho and Alcaeus, 1881 (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore)

Much of our limited knowledge about lesbianism in ancient Greece comes, as the historian Leila Rupp has reminded readers, from a few suggestive images on vases and from the random, sometimes disobliging comments of men often found in Greek comedies. The sexuality of women was of little public import, except where it concerned the pleasures and familial obligations of men, and sex without phallic penetration barely counted as sex at all. Women did not show off their bodies in homosocial settings, as men did in the gymnasiums, and philosophers seldom ennobled passionate feelings between women with the same educative or philosophical mission as that accorded to intercourse between noble men and youths. There is some indication from Plutarch, however, that maidens and older women in Sparta entered into lasting relationships. In one of Lucian’s dialogues, a young woman, Lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• About the Author
• Other Titles of Interest
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Ancient Ancestors
• 2 From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
• 3 Founding Fathers and Mothers
• 4 The Fin-de-Siècle and Belle Époque
• 5 Women Who Loved Women
• 6 Entanglements of Sex and Politics
• 7 Visions of Male Beauty
• 8 Love in the Levant
• 9 Japonisme
• 10 Diverse Callings
• 11 Radicals and Activists
• 12 International Lives in The Modern Era
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright