Homintern by Gregory Woods

Author:Gregory Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300218039
Publisher: Yale University Press

The Intolerant South

If Englishmen ventured south in search of a touch of Greek love, many southerners looked northwards for their sense of an environment in which such things were openly tolerated. Speaking of French writers during and after the First World War, Theodore Zeldin writes:

There were many minor novelists who wrote about England as though it was an island of poetry, aesthetes and athletes, beautiful young men and no women: in Paris, Oscar Wilde was its representative, and when English females did appear in French novels, they were usually simply French governesses, the ‘miss’. This kind of England enabled Frenchmen steeped in the classics to reconstruct a sort of mirage of ancient Greece.

He adds that ‘Moeurs oxfordiennes became synonymous with homosexuality.’ In Vita Sackville-West’s novel The Edwardians (1930), set in 1906, the Italian ambassador teases Sebastian about Oxford’s sexual segregation and young Englishmen’s lack of interest in women. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), Cara, Lord Marchmain’s Italian mistress, speaks to Charles Ryder about his relationship with Marchmain’s son Sebastian. ‘I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long.’ Her implication is that Charles and Sebastian’s friendship has reached the limit of its value.46

The fact is that the southerners’ South was not always what the northerners thought it was. A good deal was allowed, but the authorities in southern countries were far from being endlessly indulgent to the whims of northern travellers and expatriates; still less to those of their own nationals. A certain basic level of discretion was required of foreigners, but that was often the first thing that alcohol or drugs undermined. In Tennessee Williams’ play Suddenly Last Summer (1958), partly based on the end of Hart Crane’s life, Sebastian Venable travels from his native New Orleans to ‘Cabeza de Lobo’, where he is devoured by the boys whose sexual favours he has been soliciting. In even the most tolerant nations, the authorities would periodically purge the more disruptive elements, closing down especially lively venues. As his drug use, his drinking, his sexual behaviour and his tendency to cause public scenes became more obtrusive, early in the 1950s, Brian Howard was successively expelled from Monaco, France, Italy and Spain. And major cultural or political changes could demand the complete suppression of previously liberal conventions (as we shall see in the case of Tangier).

Individuals who managed to evade punishment found that being known as homosexual could initiate a lifelong relationship with homophobic authorities, who found a duty in harassment. Of all the modern artists, Pier Paolo Pasolini must have the dubious distinction, far in advance of the relatively untouched Oscar Wilde, of having had the most encounters with the law. By the end of his life they had given him reserves of experience and resentment that informed all of his public statements about the workings of the Italian state. Investigated for his active homosexuality and his active communism

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