Gay literature
Gay literature is a collective term for literature produced by or for the gay community which involves characters, plot lines, and/or themes portraying male homosexual behavior.
Overview and history
Because the social acceptance of homosexuality has varied in many world cultures throughout history, LGBTQ literature has covered a vast array of themes and concepts. LGBTQ individuals have often turned to literature as a source of validation, understanding, and beautification of same-sex attraction. In contexts where homosexuality has been perceived negatively, LGBT literature may also document the psychological stresses and alienation suffered by those experiencing prejudice, legal discrimination, AIDS, self-loathing, bullying, violence, religious condemnation, denial, suicide, persecution, and other such obstacles.Themes of love between individuals of the same gender are found in a variety of ancient texts throughout the world. The ancient Greeks, in particular, explored the theme on a variety of different levels in such works as Plato's Symposium.
Ancient mythology
Many mythologies and religious narratives include stories of romantic affection or sexuality between men or feature divine actions that result in changes in gender. These myths have been interpreted as forms of LGBT expression and modern conceptions of sexuality and gender have been applied to them. Myths have been used by individual cultures, in part, to explain and validate their particular social institutions or to explain the cause of transgender identity or homosexuality.In classical mythology, male lovers were attributed to ancient Greek gods and heroes such as Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon and Heracles as a reflection and validation of the tradition of pederasty.
Early works
Though Homer did not explicitly portray the heroes Achilles and Patroclus as homosexual lovers in his 8th-century BC Trojan War epic, the Iliad, later ancient authors presented the intense relationship as such. In his 5th-century BC lost tragedy The Myrmidons, Aeschylus casts Achilles and Patroclus as pederastic lovers. In a surviving fragment of the play, Achilles speaks of "our frequent kisses" and a "devout union of the thighs". Plato does the same in his Symposium ; the speaker Phaedrus cites Aeschylus and holds Achilles up as an example of how people will be more brave and even sacrifice themselves for their lovers. In his oration Against Timarchus, Aeschines argues that though Homer "hides their love and avoids giving a name to their friendship", Homer assumed that educated readers would understand the "exceeding greatness of their affection". Plato's Symposium also includes a creation myth that explains homo- and heterosexuality and celebrates the pederastic tradition and erotic love between men, as does another of his dialogues, Phaedrus.The tradition of pederasty in ancient Greece and later the acceptance of limited homosexuality in ancient Rome infused an awareness of male-male attraction and sex into ancient poetry. In the second of Virgil's Eclogues, the shepherd Corydon proclaims his love for the boy Alexis. Some of the erotic poetry of Catullus in the same century is directed at other men, and in a wedding hymn he portrays a male concubine about to be supplanted by his master's future wife. The first line of his infamous invective Carmen 16—which has been called "one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin—or in any other language, for that matter"—contains explicit homosexual sex acts.
The Satyricon by Petronius is a Latin work of fiction detailing the misadventures of Encolpius and his lover, a handsome and promiscuous sixteen-year-old servant boy named Giton. Written in the 1st century AD during the reign of Nero, it is the earliest known text of its kind depicting homosexuality.
In the celebrated Japanese work The Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu in the early 11th century, the title character Hikaru Genji is rejected by the lady Utsusemi in chapter 3 and instead sleeps with her young brother: "Genji pulled the boy down beside him ... Genji, for his part, or so one is informed, found the boy more attractive than his chilly sister."
Antonio Rocco's Alcibiades the Schoolboy, published anonymously in 1652, is an Italian dialogue written as a defense of homosexual sodomy. The first such explicit work known to be written since ancient times, its intended purpose as a "Carnivalesque satire", a defense of pederasty, or a work of pornography is unknown, and debated.
Several medieval European works contain references to homosexuality, such as in Giovanni Boccaccios Decameron or Lanval, a French lai, in which the knight Lanval is accused by Guinevere of having "no desire for women". Others include homosexual themes, like Yde et Olive.
18th and 19th centuries
The era known as the Age of Enlightenment gave rise to, in part, a general challenge to the traditional doctrines of society in Western Europe. A particular interest in the Classical era of Greece and Rome "as a model for contemporary life" put the Greek appreciation of nudity, the male form and male friendship into art and literature. It was common for gay authors at this time to include allusions to Greek mythological characters as a code that homosexual readers would recognize. Gay men of the period "commonly understood ancient Greece and Rome to be societies where homosexual relationships were tolerated and even encouraged", and references to those cultures might identify an author or book's sympathy with gay readers and gay themes but probably be overlooked by straight readers. Despite the "increased visibility of queer behavior" and prospering networks of male prostitution in cities like Paris and London, homosexual activity had been outlawed in England as early as the Buggery Act 1533. Across much of Europe in the 1700s and 1800s, the legal punishment for sodomy was death, making it dangerous to publish or distribute anything with overt gay themes. James Jenkins of Valancourt Books noted:Many early Gothic fiction authors, like Matthew Lewis, William Thomas Beckford and Francis Lathom, were homosexual, and would sublimate these themes and express them in more acceptable forms, using transgressive genres like Gothic and horror fiction. The title character of Lewis's The Monk falls in love with young novice Rosario, and though Rosario is later revealed to be a woman named Matilda, the gay subtext is clear. A similar situation occurs in Charles Maturin's The Fatal Revenge when the valet Cyprian asks his master, Ippolito, to kiss him as though he were Ippolito's lover; later Cyprian is also revealed to be a woman. In Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, the close friendship between a young monk and a new novice is scrutinized as potentially "too like love". Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla was the first lesbian vampire story, and influenced Bram Stoker's Dracula. Stoker's novel has its own homoerotic aspects, as when Count Dracula warns off the female vampires and claims Jonathan Harker, saying "This man belongs to me!"
A Year in Arcadia: Kyllenion by Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg is "the earliest known novel that centers on an explicitly male-male love affair". Set in ancient Greece, the German novel features several couples—including a homosexual one—falling in love, overcoming obstacles and living happily ever after. The Romantic movement gaining momentum at the end of the 18th century allowed men to "express deep affection for each other", and the motif of ancient Greece as "a utopia of male-male love" was an acceptable vehicle to reflect this, but some of Duke August's contemporaries felt that his characters "stepped over the bounds of manly affection into unseemly eroticism." The first American gay novel was Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania by Bayard Taylor, the story of a newly engaged young man who finds himself instead falling in love with another man. Robert K. Martin called it "quite explicit in its adoption of a political stance toward homosexuality" and notes that the character Philip "argues for the 'rights' of those 'who cannot shape themselves according to the common-place pattern of society. Henry Blake Fuller's 1898 play, At St. Judas's, and 1919 novel, Bertram Cope's Year, are noted as among the earliest published American works in literature on the theme of homosexual relationships.
The new "atmosphere of frankness" created by the Enlightenment sparked the production of pornography like John Cleland's infamous Fanny Hill, which features a rare graphic scene of male homosexual sex. Published anonymously a century later, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain and Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal are two of the earliest pieces of English-language pornography to explicitly and near-exclusively concern homosexuality. The Sins of the Cities of the Plain is about a male prostitute, and is set in London around the time of the Cleveland Street Scandal and the Oscar Wilde trials. Teleny, chronicling a passionate affair between a Frenchman and a Hungarian pianist, is often attributed to a collaborative effort by Wilde and some of his contemporaries. Wilde's more mainstream The Picture of Dorian Gray still shocked readers with its sensuality and overtly homosexual characters. Drew Banks called Dorian Gray a groundbreaking gay character because he was "one of the first in a long list of hedonistic fellows whose homosexual tendencies secured a terrible fate." The French realist Émile Zola in his novel Nana depicted, along with a wide variety of heterosexual couplings and some lesbian scenes, a single homosexual character, Labordette. Paris theater society and the demi-monde are long accustomed to his presence and role as go-between; he knows all the women, escorts them, and runs errands for them. He is "a parasite, with even a touch of pimp", but also a more sympathetic figure than most of the men, as much a moral coward as them but physically brave and not a stereotype.