Taking pride in a gay century

This is a wonderfully sensible book on a subject still capable of engendering vast nonsense. Biographer Graham Robb has written a social historian’s survey of the mores of the richly populated European and American gay world of the 19th century. His object is to demonstrate that world to have been a perfectly natural one. This may dismay not only same-sex champions who exult in what they conceive of as their exceptional place in the cosmos but also those who still think of homosexuals as an undesirable aberration. When writing his distinguished biographies of Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo and Arthur Rimbaud, Robb recognized the importance of sexuality in their lives. It is equally important, he reminds us, for the less famous among us, whether homosexual or heterosexual; Robb has written a work of enormous value.

Robb found when he embarked on this book that, despite the present day’s supposedly enlightened attitude toward homosexuality, people who ought to know better, don’t. One librarian whispered that he had requested “naughty books” and “acquaintances volunteered ancient ideas about homosexuality as if blandly introducing a pet dinosaur or a Cro-Magnon parent.” A good many of his friends asked “which famous people I was hoping to ‘out,’ usually with the implication that my suppositions would be wrong,” or wondered if the book “would be ‘for’ or ‘against.’ ” And wished him safely back to biography.

When he does go back, it will be after doing his fellow biographers who deal with the 19th century -- or any century, for that matter -- a good turn. We will be walking on firmer ice, more confident that we can give our subjects their full due. There is no need for an author’s personal agenda to intrude, but there is every need for recognition of the importance of sexuality in understanding any person’s life, with neither made-up versions nor discreet omissions.

Robb dismisses any notion that the early Victorian Age was hopelessly unenlightened in comparison with our own. There was repression then, but the “overall picture ... is not unremittingly bleak. Nineteenth century homosexuals lived under a cloud, but it seldom rained.” Anti-sodomy laws existed, but there were few prosecutions: “As far as law enforcement is concerned, it was in the 20th century that the Dark Ages began.”

Robb’s scorn for that century more properly applies to its first two-thirds; he does not acknowledge how much of the virulent organizing of anti-gay sentiment in the century’s last third -- and in the present -- is in backlash to very real gains. But it has to be said that he tells of no 19th century horror to match a beaten gay college student left to die tied to a Wyoming fence in the last decade of the 20th.

Cities like London, Paris and New York had seemingly innumerable haunts -- bars, baths -- where the gay world gathered in the 19th century. Robb gives the impression of vast numbers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of eager men on the prowl, only casually scanning for the cop around the corner. What we do not learn is what complex matters competed for the attention of these men. For many, if not most, the tension among the imperatives of life, including the sexual, was more the norm than headlong hedonistic pursuits.

Leery of historical “outings,” Robb is surprisingly gentle in his dealings with the triumphalism of gay historians who find their like in every bed, appreciating that they too have been trying to tell us that homosexual love has always existed. Yet he is skeptical. He says the story that Abraham Lincoln shared a bed with Joshua Speed for four years “justifies their inclusion in Jonathan Katz’s ‘Love Stories: Sex between Men Before Homosexuality’... although the only approximation of ‘genital contact’ that can be cited is Speed’s advice to Lincoln on where he can ‘get some’ [i.e. sex with women].”

The question of whether sexual orientation is there from the start or is chosen is endlessly argued. For Robb, where the urge comes from doesn’t much matter. It simply is. “Theories ... can make the gay past seem ... more dismal than it already is.” He cites a recent study in Britain that concludes “that the chief distinguishing characteristic of homosexuals (other than their sexual orientation) was that they wanted to be in London.” Such science explains nothing other than the obvious to Robb, who points out that such “internal migration has been going on for at least 200 years and probably as long as large settlements have existed.” A city is often where one can express one’s individuality, in this case his or her sexual identity, without the restrictions a more closed-in environment might well impose.

Robb does credit Michel Foucault with usefully bringing history and sociology into the discussion. He finds that Foucault’s contention that homosexuality was not considered a disease until late in the 19th century “popularized the view that gay people have no real heritage before the 1870s.” Robb writes, “In its extreme form, the social constructionist approach suggests that ‘homosexuality’ did not exist until the word was invented.”

Robb does not subscribe to the idea of homosexuality as a construct of capitalism. He states simply that “there always were people who were primarily or exclusively attracted to people of their own sex.” They could recognize this in themselves and in others -- and, what is more, the wider society always recognized them as well. For example, he argues that the old story that Queen Victoria could not be brought to support legislation against lesbianism because she “did not believe such a thing existed” proves, instead, that she knew perfectly well that it did exist and legislation would not make it go away.

Turning to hints of homosexual activity in literature, Robb briefly traces sources from the 17th century to the 19th, finding ample evidence of familiarity with the subject from Jane Austen on. Melville, for example, called oceangoing vessels “wooden-walled Gomorrahs of the deep,” and his readers knew what he was talking about. In pursuit of the written word, Robb makes some startling and bold findings. There will be considerable hue and cry from those on the religious right, homosexuals’ most ardent foes, when they find Robb reading the Bible and finding suggestions that Jesus, some 1,900 years away from Robb’s time frame, might have been gay.

Robb’s most intriguing exploration is of detective fiction. He finds that homosexuality is crucial, even essential, in establishing the character of the detective, although lusty heterosexual exceptions come to mind. Usually unmarried, the one who cracks the mystery is the consummate outsider -- the stranger -- who, with relish, intrudes and exposes a murderer who has masked his or her behavior.

Throughout, Robb suggests that the absence of evidence of ordinary people in love with others of their own sex is, in fact, the evidence. In a society that frowned on homosexual love, those drawn to it for the most part left no record. But some did. He focuses more on men than on women and does not do full justice to the plentiful evidence in diaries and love letters of how rich were women’s emotional and sexual attachments to one another.

Robb writes in a relaxed, witty way that is emphatically uncharacteristic of literature on this subject. And his greatest contribution is a matter not of data but of grammar. His is not a book about a clinical, perhaps scabrous, condition: the noun “homosexuality.” Rather the subject of “Strangers” is the adjective “homosexual” and the noun it modifies. His subject, finally, is love. *