A history of gay literature
From Sappho to Stonewall, and beyond: how fiction tells LGBTQ+ history
Fiction tells us so much about the time we live in – and LGBTQ+ writers have been writing since the early days of literature. Their stories contain often, but not always, been marginalised, but they have always said something about the era in which they were first told or published. Here, we take a observe at the evolution of queer fiction across the ages – for brevity’s sake, focusing on the Western world – and what it reflects about that moment in history, from Sappho, to Stonewall, and beyond.
Queer stories in antiquity
Madeline Miller’s hit The Song of Achillesis a moving queer retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of young prince Patroclus that simultaneously reflects pride in same-sex relationships (Achilles remains adamant throughout that he and Patroclus be seen together) and modern anxieties about adj relationships and masculinity – how men can be gentle, how to handle family expectations.
But being queer wasn’t always coded as different, and many myths don’t require retel
A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition
Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (Yale University Press, )
'A work of stunning scholarship and intelligence, a core requirement for every library in the field' - Gert Hekma, Sexualities
'Breath-takingly well-informed' - George E. Haggerty, American Literary History
'Woods is a prodigious scholar who appears to have browse more than Samuel Johnson and Harold Bloom combined' - Louis Bayard, Washington Post Book World
This manual examines a broad range of literary texts, from many different cultures and periods, that might be amenable to ‘gay readings’. In a flood of positive reviews, it was variously described as a 'monument', a 'landmark', a 'masterpiece', 'magisterial', 'herculean' and even 'superhuman'.
The chapter headings are: 1: The Making of the Gay Tradition. 2: The Greek Classics. 3: The Roman Classics. 4: The Christian Middle Ages. 5: The Orient. 6: The European Renaissance. 7: Christopher Marlow
A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition - Hardcover
Reviews
Woods's (Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry) dense but rewarding history has a lofty aim: "queering the canon." Starting with the man-boy verb of Greek classics, this academic text focuses on homoeroticism in the literary imagination. But Woods does more. By analyzing attitudes about homosexual men, he looks at the homophobic ideologies that poetry and prose have encouraged throughout history. While there is not enough information on the role of religion in classifying sodomy as sin, Woods demonstrates that as early as the 12th century, hostility against man-to-man love was evident. But despite the linking of homosexual love with shame and repentance, it formed a culture?described by writers as diverse as Aristophanes, Rumi, William Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Langston Hughes and Jane Austen?that held on. Woods's commentary about the Nazis and about the popular postwar belief that fascism developed because of Germany's tolerance of "sexual perversio
Roaming the Greenwood
In his essay ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, Borges wrote that the Argentine writer, and the South American writer, by virtue of being distant and adjacent at the same occasion, had more ‘rights’ to Western culture than anyone in any Western nation. He went on to explore the extraordinary contribution of the Jewish artist to Western culture and of the Irish writer to English literature. For them, he argued, it was ‘enough, the reality of being Irish and different, to be innovators within English culture’. Similarly, Jewish artists ‘work within the culture and at the same time act not feel tied to it through any particular devotion’. His essay was written around , a long time before any clear view emerged of the gay writer’s place in literary tradition, and before the idea emerged that Irish, Jewish or gay (or, later, South American) writing was itself the centre rather than the periphery renewing the centre.
Borges was, in many ways, a conservative man, and a prudent critic. He would contain been interested in