Gay Life and Culture

The TLS says Gay Life and Culture is a worthy addition to queer studies:

Foucault insisted that the homosexual man was invented around 1870 as the result of a single medical article – an article which, as Graham Robb has argued in his excellent Strangers: Homosexual love in the nineteenth century (2003), it is doubtful that Foucault bothered to read. Foucault concocted the spurious idea that “the sodomite had been a sinner” until the 1870s, but then became “a species”. His version devalued all same-sex experience before 1870, and arrogantly abbreviated or denied any cultural heritage or emotional continuities for gay or lesbian people before that date. His bluster, though, has been finally discredited by Louis Crompton’s Homosexuality and Civilization (2003). Marshalling a wide array of evidence from (inter alia) ancient Graeco-Roman culture, medieval Islam, feudal Japan, and early modern Europe, Crompton argued that “sodomites” had long possessed a distinct and minatory identity, and judged cultures outside the Judaeo-Christian traditions to have been less cruelly oppressive than, say, those of early modern Europe or of the Western Enlightenment.

Robert Aldrich, who is Professor of European History at the University of Sydney, has conceived the bold idea of a truly international synthesis of all this recent research. He has recruited historians from eight different countries – France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA – to contribute surveys which summarize the evidence and historical orthodoxies on same-sex relations and cognate themes in classical antiquity, medieval and early modern Europe, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and colonial America. Individual chapters “illustrate”, Aldrich writes, “romantic attachments and carnal pleasures through the ages: the paiderastia of ancient Greece, the friendships of medieval monks, the multifaceted sexual world of Renaissance humanists, the mignons of Louis XVI’s court, women who passed as men to emancipate themselves from social expectations”, the sexual customs of the Antipodes and the Pacific, the impact of gay militancy in the 1960s, and much else. There are two discrete chapters on lesbians in early modern Europe and in the modern world, and a necessarily rather generalized final chapter on “The Gay World” since 1980.

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