Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century
by Graham Robb
(Picador)
“A strangely merry adventure” is how Graham Robb describes the experience of writing this book, and a cheerful mixture of optimism and scepticism colours almost every aspect of it. The effect is enjoyably disconcerting. Robb is under no illusions about the force of residual antipathy towards homosexuality, but he makes one feel how far we have come in the past 30 years.
Brian Reade’s anthology of Victorian gay writing, Sexual Heretics (1970), was one of the first books to explore such territory. One of Reade’s points was that, in British literature, it was only after 1850 or so that homosexual emotions were taken seriously.
It’s hard now, when that subject is so widely acknowledged as almost to have lost its distinguishing interest, to recapture the thrill of those revelations and reclamations. The gay reader wanted more of them, and it was hardly surprising that over the following decades, as gay studies started to take on the heft of a discipline, there were ever bolder attempts to catch bigger writers (Henry James being an eminently recalcitrant example) in what Robb calls “the elastic web of gay revisionism”.
His own book makes little attempt, beyond a brief engagement with Michel Foucault, to situate itself in the context of those 30 years of theory and debate. It is rather the fruit of his own wide and curious search for a vanished gay civilisation, and is marked by his characteristic wit, scholarship and good sense. He makes numerous revisions of his own, and one of the refreshing features of the book is that its story does not culminate in the martyrdom of St Oscar. Robb deals with Wilde’s trial in a few well-judged pages, showing that the notorious Labouchère Amendment of 1885 in fact made no difference to the rate of prosecutions for indecency, and that had Wilde been convicted at any time in the previous 200 years, he would probably have received the same sentence. It is one of Robb’s points, none the less, that the shadow of the Wilde case stretches far over the 20th century, an era glimpsed beyond his survey as a kind of Dark Ages for homosexuals.
As a biographer Robb has been drawn to subjects (Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud) notable for extraordinary energy and for their artistic triumphs over circumstance. In Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century Robb shows a similar respect for the energy and ingenuity of 19th-century homosexuals, of whom Rimbaud was, of course, one.
Robb takes wherever possible the most positive view of their experience. This is often a matter of ironies and paradoxes inherent in attempts to control the invisible “society of strangers”. Just as censorship is well known to be a way of generating interest in a subject, so legal and medical approaches to the punishment or “cure” of homosexuality provided unintended sources of reassurance. Thus the humiliating medical consultation was none the less a unique chance for honest self-expression; and the medical case-history had unintended uses, even if possible excitement was curbed by professorial Latin (“Only occasionally did he dare to socios concumbentes tangere et masturbationem mutuam adsequi”, and so on).
Similarly, the widely reported prosecutions of prominent gay men helped to inform the social identity of others. Press reports in Sydney (which seems to have been the gayest place in the world in the mid-19th century) gave information about where sodomites found companions, and where they took them afterwards — as Robb says, “to the horror of some and for the convenience of others”.
This “silver lining” attitude informs Robb’s succinct and fascinating sketches of the “outing” of various notable figures. The writer Astolphe de Custine was the subject of the first sympathetic novel about a gay man, Olivier (1822), written by his enterprising would-be mother-in-law, the Duchesse de Duras, to explain his mysterious reluctance to marry her daughter. Two years later De Custine was violently queer-bashed. But, as Robb shows, the forcible outing occasioned by the publicity was a kind of liberation for De Custine, who was ostracised by the fashionable but gained a licence of sorts to live as he wanted, to travel and to write his masterpiece, La Russie en 1839 (A Journey for Our Time).
The hero of the book is perhaps the journalist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the only 19th-century person to declare his homosexuality publicly, which he did at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich in 1867. Afterwards, not everyone reacted well, but many were supportive and debated the matter with him further. “For a supposedly futile gesture,” writes Robb, “the speech was remarkably successful.”
If the example of these lives is often moving, the wider treatment of the subject can seem, at times, unduly blithe. In his early chapter on the law, Robb writes that “19th-century homosexuals lived under a cloud, but it seldom rained. Most of them suffered, not from the cruel machinery of justice, but from the creeping sense of shame, the fear of losing friends, family and reputation, the painful incompatibility of religious belief and sexual desire, the social and mental isolation, and the strain of concealment.” That sounds to me like quite a lot to suffer from.
There isn’t a dull moment in Strangers, and one begins to wonder if the history of millions of people living at variance with society, the law and, indeed, themselves can justly be represented in so short and sparkling a survey. The unease is deepened by the summary speed with which the later parts of the book hurtle along. Fascinating matters such as dress codes and terms of endearment are merely glanced at. The glimpse of Stonewallesque rioting in Paris when police tried to close down gay cruising grounds in the Champs Elysées in the 1840s, an episode amazingly eye-catching to the modern reader, surely deserved more than a sentence. — Â