That Gay Thread

[Belacqua]

I don’t agree that homosexuals were ever persecuted or “hounded”. Hounded means the authorities or mobs went out of their way to find homosexuals and then inflict punitive measures on them.

This all depends on the time and place. 

First, the word and the concept of homosexuality didn't exist until the 19th century. People thought about and categorized same-sex attraction differently.

So in ancient Rome, for example, they didn't distinguish between gay and straight, they distinguished between penetrating and penetrated. It was considered normal for a Roman to enjoy penetrating someone else, male or female. The penetrated person, however, was considered weaker and not masculine. If you accused a Roman man of fucking other men, that would be considered normal, but if you accused him of enjoying getting fucked, that would be an insult. 

Later Christian Europe didn't think about orientation but about acts. They objected to sodomy. 

That said, men who were known to go in for sodomy, and especially men who encouraged young people to do it, could be hunted down and persecuted. This went on very late. Oscar Wilde, for example, had his life ruined because he was said to have corrupted (seduced to sodomy) the son of a rich man. This rich man, by the way, the Marquess of Queensbury, was an outspoken atheist. 

But if you read about Wilde's life, or about Andre Gide or Proust, it is clear that there is a kind of "community" of men in the know. They know who is welcoming and who isn't, where they can rent summer houses and where they can't, etc. 

It may be that this isn't a "community" in the sense we're using it now. They seldom advocated for their rights or tried to influence public opinion. The world wasn't ready for that. But they supported each other and knew each other. Think of the play-house that the Baron de Charlus has put together for himself and his male friends near the end of Proust's novel. That was a kind of community, though not a political one. 

I was surprised to discover that Tokyo had a thriving gay scene for years, even when America and Europe were behind. Several of the important translators and cultural critics in Japan in the 20th century were gay American servicemen in the post-war occupation who discovered that Japan was safer and more fun for them than back home. Seidensticker and Donald Keene and other names that expats all know. There is a funny story about the guy who translated the Nobel Prize winning Japanese novel into English who got bored at the Nobel banquet in Tokyo and ducked around the corner to a little gay SM club.