Today, as Joan Dejean writes, “Sappho remains a problem.” Either the poet is construed as a lukewarm heterosexual as a consequence of lesbophobic prejudices, or her homosexuality is accepted and she is transformed into a sexually insatiable lesbian, which, in turn, feeds homophobic stereotypes. At the end of the twentieth century, homophobia is apparently expressed by not talking about it: little by little, Sappho, one of the greatest poets in history, has disappeared from collective culture and “Greek love” remains masculine.
—Sandra Boehringer and Anne-Claire Rebreyend
Albert, Nicole. “Saphisme et décadence dans l’art et la littérature en Europe à la fin du XIXe siècle.” Thesis. Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1998.
Dejean, Joan.
Sapho, les fictions du désir. 1546–1937
. Paris: Hachette Supérieur, 1994. [Published in the US as
Fictions of Sapho, 1546-1937
. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989.]
Mora, Edith.
Sappho, histoire d’un poète et traduction intégrale de l’oeuvre
. Paris: Flammarion, 1966.
Parker, Holt N. “Sappho Schoolmistress,”
Transactions of the American Philological Association
no. 123 (1993).
—Debauchery; Greece, Ancient; Heterosexism; History; Lesbophobia; Vice.
SCANDAL
For centuries, the experience of scandal has pervaded gay and lesbian life. Homosexuality has long been associated with devilry and taboo, to the point that its mere possibility instilled terror (one can note that nineteenth-century
medicine
, under an apparent positivism, endorsed a rhetoric of horror and disgust). The discovery of a relative’s homosexuality was often the result of intrusion, followed by a terse repudiation of the relative, either verbal or written. The reaction was always of shock, in the most physical sense of the word, which was manifested in the usual clinical signs of extreme emotion (fainting, crying, convulsions). The outbreak of the
AIDS
crisis exacerbated the scandalous shock, especially in terms of disclosing one’s seropositivity at the same time, exemplified by the furor over the announcement of Rock Hudson’s illness in 1985. During this period, many families were discovering that their relative was homosexual at the same time that they discovered that he was suffering from a mortal illness. This shock of revelation was generally followed by indignation: generations of homosexuals had to deal with being disowned by
family
and rejected by friends. Religious and social morality often played a role in this banishment and forced abandonment of a loved one.
The historical subjugation of women has made the situation of lesbians particularly fragile in case of a public scandal: it was common for families to intervene between women who formed a couple and to force them to separate, which is what happened to the writers Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West in
England
in 1920. In short, millions of gays and lesbians have had to deal with the day when their secret life could or would be destroyed by the intrusion of others.
Many of these scandals had considerable repercussions outside the sphere of familial relations. We can cite some of the most famous, for example, the Marquis de
Custine
, who was assaulted by three soldiers in 1824; the Count de Germiny, who was arrested in a street urinal in Paris in 1876; Oscar
Wilde
, who was condemned to two years of hard labor in 1895; British Major-General Hector MacDonald, who was compelled to commit
suicide
in 1903; and the Prince of
Eulenburg
and Hertefeld of Germany, who was publicly accused of being Count von Moltke’s lover. The list goes on: Alfred Redl, the Austrian colonel who was uncovered as not only a spy for the Russians in 1913 but also a homosexual, which led to his suicide; Ernst Röhm, chief of the SA, who was summarily executed during the Night of the Long Knives on July 1, 1934, by Nazi authorities who had pretended to have just discovered his homosexuality; Guy Burgess, the British double agent whose homosexuality was revealed to the press after he defected to the East in 1951; John Gielgud, the actor, arrested for cottaging (performing homosexual acts in a public toilet) in 1953; Lord Montagu, a British aristocrat prosecuted for gross indecency in 1953–54; British Member of Parliament Ian Harvey, forced to resign from the British cabinet after he was found with a horse-guard in St James’ Park in 1958; Jeremy Thorpe, former leader of the British Liberal Party, who was forced to resign his seat in Parliament after he was accused of homosexuality and attempted murder in the 1970s; and Günter Kiessling, the German general and a commander of NATO forces who in 1983 was regarded as a security risk after being accused of frequenting gay bars, leading to his early retirement.
All of these scandals have common characteristics. For one, they occur more frequently with men than women, given that lesbianism has tended to go unnoticed, was less often criminalized, and was considered less transgressive by the
media
to the extent that women were nearly totally excluded from the public sphere. For another, most of these scandals took place between 1876 and 1960; prior to this period, the taboo of homosexuality overrode any scandal. Details of the Custine affair did not appear in newspapers, but only circulated by word of mouth among the Parisian nobility. After the end of the 1960s, the forces that automatically condemned homosexuality began to falter; Rock Hudson gained more admirers than he lost when he revealed his homosexuality right before he died. For another, many of these scandals occurred in England: the devious tactics of tabloid newspapers, and the prolonged Victorianism prevalent in Great Britain through the “swinging sixties” and even beyond, created a favorable climate for scandal. Homosexual scandals were also frequently linked to very specific contexts: the advent of pious King Charles X in the Custine affair; the 1876 political fights between Republicans and Royalists, at the end of the moral Order, in the Germiny affair; the British Liberals’ desire to hush up rumors about Prime Minister Lord Rosebery at the time of the Wilde affair; the stiffening of French-German relations after 1905 in the Eulenburg affair; the internal conflicts of the Nazi Party and the Hitlerian desire to stop the “German Revolution” and to embrace the values of the dominant classes of 1934; the Cold War and the fear of the “Homintern” at the basis of the British scandals of the 1950s; the ongoing tension of West-East relations at the time of the Kiessling affair in the early 1980s. The victims’ social identity was also often a key element of the scandal; the most sensational ones were those which involved a person of privilege or authority whose fall from grace was unexpected: the Marquis de Custine, whose father and grandfather had been guillotined for being sympathizers with the French Revolution; the Count de Germiny, lawyer for the Jesuits; Oscar Wilde, best-selling author celebrated by all of London; the Prince of Eulenburg, friend of the Kaiser; Edward Montagu de Beaulieu, member of the House of Lords; MacDonald, Moltke, Redl, and Kiessling, all high-ranking officers; Röhm and Thorpe, political leaders; and Gielgud, one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, these scandals were accompanied by a discourse led by the media, an absolutely necessary sounding board, whose denunciation was generally made in moral terms (e.g., as
vice
and decadence) and, increasingly, in medical and psychiatric terms (as
degeneration, contagion
, and depopulation). But they could also be denounced for political ends; the Germiny affair was used by the anticlericals against the right as well as the Jesuits; the Eulenburg affair was used against Kaiser Wilhelm II; and the Röhm affair was used by the Stalinists against the
Fascists
. Media coverage often took the form of degrading or heinous satire; in 1876–77, Parisian newspapers, in deriding the Count de Germiny, referred to street urinals as “
germinyères
,” and pederast relations as “
germinyade
” or “
germinism
.”
The effects of homosexual scandal are considerable: it is why British politician Ian Harvey entitled his memoir
To Fall Like Lucifer
. Indeed, the ramifications of scandal resulted in a major break with one’s previous life: personal and professional estrangement (it was dangerous to show solidarity with accused individuals because of the risk of guilt by association), followed by legal proceedings and
prison
(Germiny was sentenced to two months, Wilde two years, and Montagu one year). There was also social death: Custine remained a
persona non grata
until his death; letters of condolence were sent to Germiny’s wife, as if he had died; Wilde became a social leper, insulted by the public, repudiated by some of his friends, and excluded by his own family; and Harvey, who, while he was officially only accused of breaking city parks laws for having public sex, was no longer acknowledged by his former colleagues of Parliament, and treated as a social pariah (he had to resign from all his clubs, was curtly scolded by his priest, made prejudiced potential employers flee, and rarely received social invitations): in 1971 he wrote, “I can count the number of invitations I received since 1958 on the fingers of both hands.” Scandal also brought about political collapse: Harvey was forced to resign from his appointment at the Foreign Office and his seat in Harrow East, and Thorpe from the leadership of the British Liberal Party. Exile was another consequence: Custine moved about in Europe, Germiny settled down in Argentina, Wilde died in France, and Harvey was advised to start a new life in Canada. Other ramifications include suicide (McDonald, Redl), murder (Röhm), and traumatized silence (Gielgud never spoke about his 1953 arrest, which he thought had cost him peerage in favor of his rival, Laurence Olivier). The families of victims were also profoundly affected by it: Germiny’s family pathetically tried to bribe newspapers, while Wilde’s wife and sons changed their surname to Holland. However, it was homosexuals as a whole who suffered the most from the consequences of scandal, whether it was the media’s promulgation of homophobic sentiment, or the hardening of the stance taken by
police
on the issue. It could be seen in England during Wilde’s trial (many homosexuals fled to France during this time) and that of Lord Montagu (several destroyed compromising documents). In Germany, the Night of the Long Knives, during which Röhm was murdered, was described by Goering and Goebbels to the public as a “purifying thunderstorm” to liberate Germany from “these morbid individuals”; it was followed by an increase of raids on cruising areas.
Such events weighed heavily on the lives of gays and lesbians (“their honor precarious, their liberty provisional,” according to Proust in
Sodom and Gomorrah
), who for generations have been dominated by the fear of scandal: it is what explained the concern for the
closet
(W. Somerset Maugham lived his entire life in fear that his homosexuality would be publicly revealed), the need to live a double life (in 1946, young Alec Guinness saved his career by giving a false name to policemen who questioned him), the extreme caution during sexual encounters (Harvey wrote that he was very careful, during his encounters in the parks of London, to be neither recognizable nor “ransomable”), the forced acceptance of
insults
, injustice, and aggression, and the flight from blackmail (the 7th Earl Beauchamp exiled himself from England in 1931 after being denounced by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Westminster). It is certain that the suicide of many homosexuals, such as Viscount Harcourt’s in 1922, was due to their unwillingness to face imminent scandal. However, one should not forget that the biggest homosexual scandals (Wilde, Eulenburg, Montagu) played a considerable role in the individual and collective awareness of homosexuals and thus in the history of the gay movement. Further, since the 1950s, public opinion became less scandalized by homosexuality than by the injustice of legal and police abuses resulting from it: when John Gielgud returned to the stage a few days after his arrest in 1953, he received a standing ovation (in Liverpool as well as in London) from audience members who clearly showed they were sympathetic.
A type of scandal particular to the twentieth century was the literary one. Major examples include Mikhail Kuzmin’s
Wings
in 1906, Proust’s
Sodom and Gomorrah
in 1921–22, André
Gide
’s
Corydon
in 1924 and
Si le grain ne meurt
(published in English as
If It Die
) in 1925,
Radclyffe Hall
’s
The Well Of Loneliness
in 1928, and Jean Genet’s great works,
Notre-dame des fleurs
(
Our Lady of the Flowers
),
Miracle de la rose
(
Miracle of the Rose
), and
Le journal du voleur
(
The Thief’s Journal
), between 1946 and 1949. This type of scandal, which occurred often in France because of publishers’ relative freedom under the Second Republic, “often goes hand in hand with amused contempt” (Jean-Louis Bory), and enabled both reviewers and the most conservative moralists to denounce the “sulphurous” literature that would put teenagers at risk and to assert the necessity of
censorship
, which led to the French law of July 16, 1949 regarding publications intended for youth. It was not until the 1970s that homosexual scandals in literature diminished, at least in the West (E. M. Forster’s
Maurice
was finally published without controversy in London in 1971, and Renaud Camus did not trigger any backlash with his explicit book
Tricks
, published in 1979). That said, in 1977, Great Britain, having maintained a law against blasphemy, prosecuted James Kirkup, the author and illustrator of a poem (“The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name”) evoking the erotic attraction felt by a Roman centurion for Christ on the cross. In France, the novel
Prince et Léonardours
by Mathieu Lindon was threatened to be pulled from sale by the Ministry of the Interior in 1987, but, in the end, the scandal worked in the novel’s favor and ensured its publicity.
Going against the grain, British tabloids have maintained the habit of both arousing and denouncing (the ambiguity between both notions is important here) homosexual scandals, no doubt because the British public remains fascinated by the sordid details about
private
lives of public figures and the revelations they produce. Recent victims include Conservative Member of Parliament Alan Amos, who was found with another man on Hampstead Heath in 1992, and forced out by his colleagues (three years later, he crossed sides and joined the rival Labour Party); Welsh Secretary of State Ron Davies, was who surprised in a cruising area in October 1998, and obliged to leave the Blair government; Peter Mandelson, an influential friend of Tony Blair and former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who resigned twice, in 1998 and 2001, though officially neither were due to homosexuality, which he never publicly admitted; and Conservative Member of Parliament Michael Portillo, who admitted in 1999 to having had homosexual relations during his years at Cambridge in order to avoid an impending
outing.
These scandals are never totally innocent: the tabloids underlined, with cruelty, that two of Portillo’s previous lovers had died of AIDS complications, and in July 2001, a new fit of frenzy about his gay past contributed to the defeat of his candidacy (by only one vote) for the Conservative Party’s leadership.