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Review: Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform
Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform
by Charles Upchurch
University of California Press; (April 22, 2009), 288 pages
This is a very important book. It may even be a historic book, one with which gay history can arm itself with more sufficient factual veracity as to start vanquishing at last the devil known as queer studies. Queer studies is that stuff that is taught in place of gay history and which elevates theory over facts because its practitioners, having been unsuccessful in uncovering enough of the hard stuff, are haughtily trying to make do.
Well, here is a healthy dose of the hard stuff. Charles Upchurch, an assistant professor of history at Florida State University, and an American, has spent ten years of his life researching this book. It shows it. It overflows with case after case of hard, factual, irrefutable evidence that Englishmen did with other Englishmen pretty much what same-sex couplings do with each other all over the world to this day. The big difference here is that Upchurch begins his extraordinary documenting of these cases with the early nineteenth century, i.e. 1800 onward, heretofore not known as a time in history where such undeniable facts have made themselves known in such a crystal-clear way. (Upchurch reports to have collected over 1000 published newspaper articles documenting cases.)
Certainly nothing like this has appeared in America, thus allowing queer and gender studies to pretty much swamp, nay drown, the gay history field with their gobbledygook theorizing of what might have happened. This ludicrous state of affairs prohibits making statements such as: "they did then what we do now," without the wrath of queer theorists raining down insults of an uncommonly vitriolic nature. You don't have a right to say that! say they. You can't prove it! say they. It's been here all along since the beginning of history, say many others of us. Well now it can be said, and proved, in Britain at any rate, thanks to Upchurch. Indeed, "an aching gap has been filled," British sexual theorist Jeffrey Weeks, proclaims in one of the blurbs on the back cover. Indeed.
One reads this book with grateful amazement. Here is a scholar, an academic, who has really done his homework. He has read, it would seem, almost every applicable British newspaper and court record from the early 1800's until about 1870. The amazing thing, of course, when his "findings" are excavated and exposed to the bright air of daylight, it can be seen that all this information has been there since it was created, in the files of The Times, in the court records of cases that The Times and other papers reported, quite often rather non-judgmentally, it is also interesting to note. Men accused of sodomy, attempted sodomy, of "indecent assault," at various times punishable by death, of cross dressing, of hustling, of cruising, of trying to set up house, of cohabiting in any way, of trying just to say Hello, oh all those things that gay men know all about and take for granted today.
It is not only breathtaking to read this all in a work the likes of which so many Americans long to have written about our own gay history, but when one finishes reading it, one utters an audible huge sigh of relief. Of course this is how it was! Why did we all not know and accept this instinctively without having to create and/or buy into the Foucaultian and Butlerian (to name but two) nightmares with the obtuse vocabularies they invented and demanded be utilized to pierce their dark inchoate spectacles of a world of their own imaginings. Homosexuality did not exist because there was no word for it, say they. What bushwa.
Well, one hopes, those days are fading fast. With more books like this one and more scholar/academics like Upchurch, we might one day even be able to say, unapologetically, and very out loud, that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, to name but two, were our brothers in love. Would that American academics would hit those stacks like Charles Upchurch did.
(For futher elucidation on these arguments, see my essay on Huffington Post "Homo Sex in Colonial America" and my essay on The Daily Beast, "Yale's Conspiracy of Silence.")
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Do a Google search for Tomb of the Diver and another one for the Warren Cup. While a lot of historical artifacts have been destroyed for religious censorship, there are some that survived.
You want documentation as good. Try getting access to Vatican records. Yeah, try. .
I don't think anyone with half a brain needs documentation that there have always been Gays with the exception of the few whackos who don't believe it and nothing is going to convince them. There's plenty of books that document it. One I read was about British convicts sent to Australia and then eventually settling it, and there's one description by a British government higher-up mentioning how surprised he was and saddened even, (now that's unuusual) by the affection and love he saw between two male prisoners. It was the first time I had read something like that where someone actually felt empathy for Gays in that period. I wish I could remember the title of the book. It was published sometime between the 1980's and the 1990's. Was quite popular too.
Words are ruined by misuse...queer is someone with three arms...or two noses.
Gay is someone who is in a happy mood.
I guess same-sex union is all that is left to use....
I know there are several really bad names...but, there are several bad names for anything!
Words change, as hopefully as people do. "Gay" used to be someone in a happy mood and just the like term, "Gay Nineties" to descibe the last decade of the 19th centuries, it's archaic. We might stil luse the term "swell head" for someone with an overbloated ego but the the word "swell" is hardly used any more as in, "Gee, that's great!', except if you're someone living on applesauce at the farther end in assisted living.
To those of us of another generation the "queer" word might sting, but If young Gays want to refer to themselves as "queer" as a form of protest, go for it.
By the way, I understand the reference to Lincoln (Joshua Speed) but where is there any evidence that Washington was gay?
Was Kramer being "punny" with talk of "an aching gap" finally being filled by "something hard?"
Sounds like very interesting history for anyone interested in history proper.
There are many manifestations of homosexuality (sexual acts, sentiments, attractions, relationships, etc., etc.), and a spectrum of sexualities. Rather than reduce a lot of scholarship to a simple either/or proposition or continue a war between the two camps, it might be more useful to explore those manifestations and spectrum of sexualities in a specific historical context. Did women who found themselves attracted to other women regularly enter the convent in medieval/early modern Europe? Did other societies and other eras “have a space” for intense same-sex bonding and relationships even if “unnatural acts” were punished severely under religious and civil law? Have modern Western societies set up distinctions between romantic love, filial love, and friendship unknown in the past? Were activities and attributes now deemed masculine and heterosexual (“macho”) such as aggression, prowess in battle, etc., at one time seen (accepted) as homosexual (or at least homosocial)?
Upchurch’s book is contemporaneous with dramatic changes in English law, definitions of crime, and severity of punishment. Were there simultaneous (perhaps related) redefinitions of sexuality in this same period?
Some of these women may have even become queens. There's no proof but what we know about England's Elizabeth I (The Virgin Queen) is what she wanted us and what those who came after her who wanted to sustain that image wanted us to know.
As to men wearing feminine type clothing throughout history, most were hetersosexual, as men who like to dress up in woman's garb are today. They have sex with women etc and that's a book that needs written. An 18th century governor of New York State had his portrait painted in full drag! The history of pirates are full of swaggering men in frills and skirts and as far as I know theres one who posed as a an and was one of the great pirates of the period. As to anyone doubting that Gays have always been around, just look to the greatest general of all time--Alexander the Great.
--Have modern Western societies set up distinctions between romantic love, filial love, and friendship unknown in the past?
This is a fascinating question that until recently humanities scholars weren't encouraged to explore. Sexual activities haven't changed much over the years, but the meaning attached to them, and how their practitioners thought about them may have. I agree with Kramer that historical scholarship is more useful in exploring this question than theory.
BTW, the "Homo Sex in Early America" link is worth reading, if you are interested in this kind of thing.
It's true there were relationships and public ones in the past where men might be perceived today as lovers. It's also true some of them were lovers. Western society didn't have to set anything up becaue these distinctions always existed and well known. History is full of misconceptions and deceit though. For a long time the the west and especially the California Gold rush period was seen as a man's preserve without women. It wasn't yet there were also Gay relationships and in the tents at night as has been documented.
I remember my mother dancing the waltz or a fox trot with other women friends at parties and that was a very european tradition she carried forth. No one thought it unusual and it wasn't. There was nothing sexual in it. Just look at some of the old b&w on-the-scene films from pre-war Germany and you can see this.
Historical context does matter, but so do facts, examples, and case studies (based on methodical research), and words, concepts – language in general – have to contextualized. Shakespeare’s “get thee to a nunnery,” for example, is not a self-evident command to go poste-haste to a convent, but rather a reference to a brothel.
Opponents of same-sex marriage have asserted a transhistorical, universal definition of marriage as “one man, one woman” with elements of religion, law, and biology the basis of its foundation. We know that it is not true – not even in Western societies. Marriage without benefit of clergy or legality (so-called “secret marriages”), plural marriages, sanctioned infidelity (as in “official mistresses,), concubinage, arranged marriages, familial alliances, economic transactions, etc., etc. were as more than norm than the VERY MODERN idea of heterosexual marriage as a love-match, for reproductive purposes. Even so, were there deeply loving marriages with sex, romance, partnership, and a desire for children? Absolutely.
Larry Kramer’s putting a spotlight on an “academic” book with potential real-world significance is welcome – especially one from the discipline of history! (How-to/self-help books and exposés get the lion’s share of attention in today’s media.)
Mr. Kramer may go too far in setting up a rigid dichotomy between those who emphasize the cultural construction of homosexuality (Foucault, the “queer theory crowd”) – and emphasize its modernity -- and those who posit a transhistorical homosexuality (or even transhistorical same-sex identity). And, at the same time, practitioners of queer theory have gone too far in the past positing the same dichotomy, especially when reducing the scope of a book (or books or scholarly focus) into an article, speech, or sound bite.
It's short-sighted of those who reflexively call it 'revisionism' when gay people search for other historical homos, because it assumes that prejudice against us is so new (which we know it isn't) that it couldn't possibly be implicated in 'revising' us *out* of history in the first place. Or are we to naively believe that biographers 100 or 200 years ago weren't influenced by their own agendas and ideologies about what would make for "acceptable" biographical material and what wouldn't? If it wasn't revisionism when (if) someone was edited into the closet, why is it so when a later researcher tries to liberate them from that closet?
As for splitting hairs over terminology (a la "there was no such word/cultural-construct/idea as 'gay' when men were lusting after each other a century ago), it seems as though that outlook willfully ignores the fact that, as another commentator said, "things change." The affects and styles and labels that non-hetero-oriented people have loosely adopted as a group have shifted over and over just in the last few decades; but for most of us that innate 'knowing' that we were different-- the feeling of not quite 'fitting in with the guys/girls,' being (part of) something peculiar but not unique either-- isn't new, and predates our learning the words and labels. I'm skeptical that whether they had an archetype to identify with in the past, that feeling (and its incumbent 'gravitation' towards others) has always been similar.
In the minds of homophobes for so long, Gays were nothing and they were happy to keep us that way. Once you take control over how you're defined, those who wish to control you lose that control. We weren't clinical homosexuals but then we 'nancys, poofs and queers. Now we're Gays. Better something and certainly Gay than nothing.
Sounds like a great read, and I read a lot. I wish there would be a scholarly examination of the letters between Washington and his younger aide de camp Alexander Hamilton, I heard they go WAY beyond comrades and friends.
Kramer betrays himself by saying how much he has longed for such a theory to be spouted about hoe male sex has always been a cosmic truth. What an absurd idea. Travel to any part of the non-western world and male sex is a different thing in a different context expressed different ways. Hell, the 70's and the 2000's are worlds apart in male sexual expression. There is a great account of a boy who had sex with Walt Whitman - no, Larry, male sex has not always been the same. What an absurd idea. How desperately those who hold this idea - and many gay columnists do - want to justify their universality. Things change. Of course they do.
Larry,
I hope you'll allow this post, of a simple primer of FIERCE for Obama's administration
http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2006-8/1210139/fierce2.jpg
thanks for all your courage, I wouldn't be here without the drugs you got approved.
Oh, Larry, Larry, stop bashing your queer brothers and sisters.
Thank you!
As a gay man,I really wish that others would stop using and stop accepting the word queer. It is
used by homophobics as a term of derision. In the mouths of gay men it sounds like a term of
shame. To me it has the same negative feeling as the N word and, like that despicable word,
should not be used. By not objecting to it, gay people have given license to the straight world
to use it indiscriminately as on that silly stereotyping TV show. And finally, since it also means odd or unusual, it is totally inappropriate since homosexuality is,and always has been, extremely common.
the n word is not the same as qu eer.
find your own travesty to martyr
Read what the man said. He said TO HIM. He didn't speak for you or for anyone else.
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