‘Monsters, Margeries, and Pooffs’
The sexual customs of a society always look strange to an outsider. A gay gentleman from the Victorian Age, delivered by time machine to a modern Western city, would be amazed by what he saw: same-sex couples making out in public, gay bars and cafes ignored by police, and the semi-naked bodies of “sodomites” on billboards advertising perfume and underwear. In bookstores, he would find entire sections devoted to what was once called “the crime not to be named among Christians.” He would discover that falling in love with other men could be the basis of something called a lifestyle. If the time machine landed in the right place at the right time, he could even marry a 21st century man.
Then, should the time traveler and his new mate return to the Victorian Age, the man from the 21st century might find some surprising similarities between then and now. In almost every big city in Europe and the United States, there were districts where “uranists” and “similisexuals” could meet safely. London and Amsterdam had some lively “molly houses” (male brothels) where ministers performed homosexual weddings. In Paris, the Champs-Elysees and many cafes and restaurants of Montmartre were lesbian haunts after 10 p.m. In New York, there were clubs and dance halls for “pansies” and “fairies.” The waterfront in San Francisco was so popular with “inverts” that the city was sometimes known as “Sodom by the Sea.”
Gay love is often thought to be a recent development. For centuries, however, people have been saying that homosexuality is more prevalent than ever before. In mid-Victorian London, a gay guidebook disguised as a moral diatribe lamented “the increase of these monsters in the shape of men, commonly designated Margeries, Pooffs, &c.;, of late years, in the great metropolis.” (It also told its readers exactly where to find these “monsters.”) Seven centuries before, St. Anselm said much the same thing: “This sin is now so frequent that no one blushes for it anymore.”
Homosexuality has always existed. The real changes are in the reactions of society. In this respect, the age that stands out is not the maligned Victorian era or the supposedly tolerant present, but the mid-20th century, when, as Quentin Crisp put it, the police thought of homosexuals as Americans once thought of bison and began to “cast about for a way of exterminating them in herds.” In the U.S. and Britain, thousands of gay men were arrested every year. If criminal statistics are a guide to the quality of life, a homosexual man was better off living in Spain under the Inquisition than in London or New York in the 1950s. In Germany, when Nazi death camps were liberated, many of the prisoners who had been forced to wear the pink triangle were sent straight to prison.
The openness of gay life today is a testament to the power of love and perhaps too to the power of market forces. It is not, however, a sign that prejudice is dying out. Public etiquette has changed, but private attitudes are much what they were a century ago. Homosexuality is still often considered to be a “condition” with a cause: emotional deprivation, moral inadequacy or a gene in the Xq28 region of the X chromosome. Psychiatrists still offer spurious cures for it. Few people now believe that gay men and women tend to be left-handed and are unable to whistle, but many still agree with the Freudian notion that homosexuals are produced by weak or absent fathers and overprotective mothers. Far from identifying a cause, this simply describes a common parental reaction to gay sons: Mothers sympathize, fathers sever all ties.
Legislators and moral campaigners still have the power to make a certain form of love a cause of misery. If the Victorian time traveler left the big city and explored the provincial hinterland, he would find evidence of familiar loneliness and grief. Most gay men and women still marry a person of the opposite sex. Most of them never come out, even to themselves. Gay time travelers should be extremely careful when setting the coordinates of their time machine.