On Homosexuality and History

Is everybody in history gay? No, of course not. Take Charlemagne for example: the man started out with a woman to whom he may or may not have been married, but did bear his son; then he ran through through three legally-married wives (in sequence, not parallel), and fathered eleven legitimate children and potential heirs through them.

It’s hard to read much into that record other than downright enthusiasm.

About ten percent of the world is gay, a figure that doesn’t change much with location or time in history. Most of the people you learned about in school were, in fact, as straight as your teachers made them out to be. But that leaves the remaining, tantalizing 10% of people in history who were people like us. You and I can find the Friends of Dorothy down at the shopping mall, boarding an airplane, or at a family reunion; and if you read history with the same eyes through which you see the contemporary world, you’ll find gay people all through it, on all sorts of levels.

While the reviews are bits of fluff, the books themselves are serious history. Their authors have done the hard work of researching original sources and creating long-form sustained narratives of the past. I am grateful to every one of them for that work. And each and every one of them would be horrified to know he is represented on this site, although inclusion is meant as a compliment. And certainly nothing should be inferred about the authors’ sexualities or necessarily about their opinions of sex in history. I certainly don’t…we’ve never met, they never even sent me a drink. Unless otherwise noted, the opinions are mine alone.

The selection of books is highly idiosyncratic, as you will discover. What they have in common is motivation, a serious desire to accurately represent past events honestly and with a minimum of gloss, narrative, and ideology. Many books fail that test: within recent weeks I’ve tossed into the trash two large, heavy, glossy works with the imprint of big-name universities on the cover, and complete, festering garbage inside. I don’t make these judgments lightly, mainly because I buy the books myself…The Curmudgeon is not plied with advance copies, so if one hits the bin, I pay for the pleasure. Footnotes and end notes are not absolute requirements in the subject works, but so far any book that has been worth the read has included them.

Which matters. Like an awful lot of us, I learned by rote my list of Famous Gay Figures (Wilde, Michelangelo, Stein…) and have ticked them off when the occasion merited. But I’ve always had a lurking doubt: in a world where we secretly hope that all the pretty actors are gay, just how reliable was that list? I can’t fully answer that question, but these reviews do highlight the gay themes in serious works of history; you can read the books themselves to see if you agree with my assessments. And you can follow those authors’ footnotes back to the original sources, should you want to check. Or write a Master’s thesis on the topic, come to that.

The books reviewed here are not about gay history per se. I’ve read many, but since I’ve lived through a lot of that history, I’m an unduly tough audience for those works. And so far, anyway, I’ve resisted reviewing pure gossip “memoirs” and such. Delightful as they can be. (Oh, all right…the best two, hands down, are Johanna Fiedler’s Molto Agitato and Diana Vreeland’s D.V. But sadly, neither reviewed here.)

Everyone seems to traffic in trigger warnings these days, so here, God help us, are mine. First, there is nothing even vaguely Politically Correct on the site, for the good and simple reason that there is nothing at all PC about history. Second, I use the term “gay” for the same reason we adopted it in the first place: it’s short, sweet, makes no apologies, and offers no explanations. It is possible to root for the entire team without having to list the full roster of names each and every time. And third, I use the convention of B.C./A.D. It’s a convention, not proselytization, one that you’re used to if you read history at all...you can always do a Find and Replace if you crib any of this material for a class. And one final warning: some of this stuff isn’t even gay at all. Some of it is just absurd or interesting or maybe even illuminating.

Because say what you will, a third century B.C. Egyptian pharaoh named Ptolemy III married to a woman named Bernice is funny as all hell.