Strangers: homosexual love in the 19th century
Graham Robb Picador, 342pp, £18.99
ISBN 0330482238
A work of revisionist gay history, Strangers aims to correct the excesses of modern accounts of homosexual social history written since Stonewall. Partisan narratives, whether gay or lesbian, and whatever the period, are usually generated by militant insiders and take the form of invective, confession, justification, polemic and defence. Graham Robb argues that where there was oppression and persecution there was also tolerance, acceptance, indifference and silence. Robb is sceptical about the existence of widespread paranoid heterosexual conspiracies; he is inclined to argue that the sinister silence is better than mass slaughter. This is to miss the point a little. Every gay man and lesbian knows about the sneer behind the smile and how little it takes for sympathy to turn into savagery.
Robb's expertise on 19th-century French writing and culture, as is evident in his range of references, is a welcome corrective to the Anglo-American bias of many gay social and cultural histories. The Germans are also amply covered. There is some intriguing material on J J Winckelmann, the 18th-century art historian who celebrated the beauty of men and who was murdered by rough trade that he picked up in Trieste, and on Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering gay sexologist whose library was burnt by the Nazis.
Robb begins with the changing medical, legal and social attitudes to homosexuality. A suggestive chapter entitled "Outings" contains some wonderful material on the trial of Boulton and Park, aka Stella and Fanny, who were a Victorian version of Hinge and Bracket, and the exchange of abuse between Heinrich Heine and Count August von Platen in 1829. Platen was rude about Heine's Jewishness and the other poet retaliated by denouncing Platen as a "male tribade" and as one of the "warme Bruder", a gibe still in use which suggests that homosexuals have a higher skin temperature than heterosexuals.
The second part of the book describes the hidden homosexual underworlds and networks, their codes, languages and mores. The last, and in many ways the strongest, section examines the role of gay people in literature and religion, and charts their influence upon "the art of living in the modern world". Robb's reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the rue Morgue" (1841) and his analysis of the plethora of sexually ambiguous detectives make the mean streets all the more interesting. As he casually asserts, "Everyone already knows, instinctively, that Holmes is homosexual." Indeed we do.
There are some splendid stories of heroic mad stands. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs came out to his family in a scary sequence of circular letters and then, after some energetic campaigning for "equal rights for the third sex", became one of the first men to come out in public. Addressing an audience of 500 German jurists in August 1867, he claimed that "Urnings" (Uranians) included "many of the greatest and noblest intellects of our and other nations". He deserves to be celebrated for ever.
Robb makes grand declarations about including lesbians in his survey, but in fact the girls get pretty short shrift. The obvious examples, Anne Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen, are trotted out to prove that lesbian aristocrats were tolerated and their domestic arrangements regarded as a lifestyle of choice in the 19th century, but the lack of formal lesbian organisation proves to be an obstacle. There is a less visible documentary record. While this does, as he writes, simply "reflect the more restricted social life of women", it also means that lesbian networks have to be researched in rather different ways from those of gay men. The blunt truth is that lesbians were more likely to be married. But Geraldine Jewsbury, Edith Simcox and Cicely Hamilton were not exactly closet cases, and contemporary lesbian scholars aren't there in the bibliography. Where is the work of Celia Kitzinger, Diana Fuss, Judith Butler, Judy Grahn? Sheila Jeffreys and the queen of queer studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, are the most serious omissions because both of them write about 19th-century homosexuality. Robb is wary of the manifest connections between lesbianism and feminism, as have been many campaigning heterosexual feminists before him. However, Anna Ruling's claim, voiced in 1904, that "the women's movement would not be where it is today . . . without the active support of the Uranian women" was true then and is true now. The feminist organisations included many lesbians. Some of them even smoked cigars.
The detached academic voice of the narrator is often very funny, and dramatically at odds with the content. This is both the pleasure of the book and its limitation, as the necessary urgency is missing. Too many of the tales end in suicide and despair for this reader to tolerate the irony with equanimity. These men and women were sacrificed because of heterosexual bigotry and violence. But the culprits are not in the dock and no one is on trial.
I missed the delightful, insolent rage of gay histories where the writer's right to life is at stake. There is something special about the women who are sisters rather than strangers and about the camp cheek of an out-and-out, no-holds-barred, bang-it-on-the-table screaming queen.
Patricia Duncker's most recent book is Seven Tales of Sex and Death (Picador)
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