Finally, let’s say that scandal helps us to define two types of homophobia.The homophobia that uses scandal is clearly supported by the media, which historically has believed in the “name and shame” strategy. Its message is directed at both homosexuals and the whole of society: that under no circumstances should homosexuality be acceptable; and homosexuals who do not want problems should remain invisible (this was, for example, implied by Egyptian authorities behind the spectacle of fifty-two homosexuals on trial in September 2001). One of the most common reasons for disclosing another person’s homosexuality has been blackmail, particularly in Great Britain since the nineteenth century; jilted lovers and political rivals threatened to go to the newspapers with supporting letters and images. Homophobia without scandal avoids turning something into a media event, undoubtedly due to the belief that homosexuality is extremely
contagious
, the use of the word alone producing the effect. Communist
China
provides a lasting example, locking up people so accused and liquidating them without a word; but France also preferred discretion in these matters: until the eighteenth century, files on homosexuals were symbolically burned along with the condemned on the pyre; and silence was the norm in Great Britain before the reign of the tabloids. Silence was and is also a rule in countries or homophobic societies that pretend not to have any homosexuals in their ranks, notably the most conservative Muslim states, some countries in
Africa
, or the
Catholic
clergy. In the West, the age of scandal, in hindsight, appears as a type of final transition between the era of taboo and the era of indifference, between the period of the
crimen nefandum
(“unmentionable vice”) and the period of human rights. It also corresponds to a specific moment in the history of journalism, when new media freedom enabled the introduction of new topics, although their conformist attitude prevents them from going beyond monotheistic prejudice.
Since the gay revolution in the 1970s, gays and lesbians in the West have worked to free homosexuality from scandal in every possible way: through geographical settings that allow people to be openly gay (Oxford and Cambridge; Greenwich Village and Chelsea in New York and Castro Street in San Francisco; Soho in London and the Marais in Paris; Mykonos in Greece and Sitges in Spain); in ending the need for discretion or having to live a double life (coming out is the best response to would-be blackmailers); and in the daily fight to convince media, the legal system, and society at large that homosexuality is commonplace. Today, when gays and lesbians “out” someone
—
which represents a reverse scandal, of sorts—it is not homosexuality they expose, but rather the lack of rectitude of the public figures who refuse to assume it.
—Pierre Albertini
Ahlstedt, Eva.
André Gide et le débat sur l’homosexuality: de L’Immoraliste (1902) à Si le grain ne meurt (1926)
. Gothenburg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1994.
David, Hugh.
On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality, 1895–1995
. London: Harper Collins, 1997.
Ellmann, Richard.
Oscar Wilde
. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
Eribon, Dider.
Réflexions sur la question gay
. Paris: Fayard, 1999. [Published in the US as
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.]
Foldy, Michael S.
The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality and Late Victorian Society
. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1997.
Gury, Christian.
L’Honneur perdu d’un politicien homosexual [Germiny] en 1876
. Paris: Kimé, 1999.
Harvey, Ian.
To Fall Like Lucifer
. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1971.
Hull, Isabelle.
The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888–1918
. Cambridge/London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982.
McLaren, Angus.
Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History
. Harvard: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002.
Morley, Sheridan.
John G:The Authorized Biography of John Gielgud
. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001.
Robinson, Christopher.
Scandal in the Ink: Male & Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century French Literature
. London: Cassell, 1995.
Tamagne, Florence.
Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe. Berlin, Londres, Paris, 1919–1939
. Paris: Le Seuil, 2000. [Published in the US as
A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919–1939
. New York: Algora, 2004.]
Thorpe, Jeremy.
In My Own Time
:
Reminiscences of a Liberal Leader
. London: Politico’s Publishing, 1999.
Weeks, Jeffrey.
Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Time
. London: Quartet Books, 1977.
—Arenas, Reinaldo; Caricature; Closet, the; Custine, Astolphe de; Decadence; Gide, André; Literature; Media; Police; Radclyffe Hall, Marguerite; Rhetoric; School; Shame; Suicide; Treason; Turing, Alan; Viau, Théophile de; Vice; Violence; Wilde, Oscar.
SCHOOL
School is often where gays and lesbians are first confronted by homophobia. It is here that
insults
, bullying, and violence create profound feelings of inferiority and
shame
in those who are targeted. School is also where some individuals display primitive, ultra-violent behavior prior to the discovery of their own homosexuality. The homophobic actions and words of children and adolescents, tolerated by adults even when they reach almost sadistic proportions, seem to serve as a sort of perverse collective education, as American writer Paul Monette points out in his autobiography
Becoming a Man
(1992). He recalls a scene from around 1955, when he witnesses a young eleven-year-old bully force a classmate that he accuses of being gay to swallow his spit. By doing so, the bully means to teach spectators, all children between the ages of ten and twelve, that to be moral, one must not only be not homosexual, but also one must hate them, as they represent the vilest of the vile. For those students who may already feel the pangs of same-sex attraction, this creates the need for absolute
discretion
: “Above all, don’t show it.”
The paradox of the institution of school is that it has played a central role in the history of homophobia in Western society, all the while providing a haven for those harboring homosexual feelings. In
France, police
reports from the eighteenth century mention that many sodomites first acquired “this taste” in high school (
collège
). From the Second French Empire (1852–70), one can find numerous reports from police inspectors and prosecutors similar to this one: “acts of pederasty are very common between the wretched children of this boarding house.” In particular, boarding schools did not allow any input by students’ families, and placed students in close contact with other students of various ages and stages of physical development; sometimes they even permitted some sexual activity so long as it was clandestine, such as touching and dormitory “visits.” Yet, at the same time, homosexuality represented an enormous risk: any students caught red-handed were at risk of being shunned by their classmates and heavily punished by authorities. In France, homosexuality was considered the greatest shame in religious boarding schools as well as the public schools (
lycées
), as can be seen in the biography of writer Henri de Montherlant, who was kicked out of Ste-Croix de Neuilly school for this reason in 1913. In addition, until recently, French military boarding schools considered that any student “found in a bed other than one’s own” was subject to punishment, usually grounding; this was also the case for preperatory students.
Things were not very different at the Ecole normale supérieure (the top university in Paris), despite the fact that students were older. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a
normalien
suspected of homosexuality was treated with violent hostility by his classmates, as revealed by the very homophobic geographer Raoul Blanchard in his memoir. Around 1930, in the same university, the personal habits of writer Robert Brasillach would be more shocking than his neo-fascist ideas (which eventually led to his execution for being a Nazi collaborator); further, it is well-known that Michel Foucault was depressed and suicidal while studying there from 1946 to 1951. But it is in the British public schools where the ambiguity reached its height: homosexuality was quite common-place, because the supervision of boarding school residents was most often carried out by the oldest students, in an adolescent atmosphere of relative autonomy. Yet any discovery by authorities of a physical relationship between students was cause for expulsion; according to student slang, such expulsions were “for the usual thing.” It should be noted here that the enduring development of homosexuality in the public schools of a country long considered homophobic is rather surprising: it is probable that many fathers, having gone through the experience themselves, knew what to expect when sending their own sons to boarding school, and saw it only as a temporary affectation of little consequence (besides, beginning in the 1930s, the spread of Freudian discourse on the homosexual phase of adolescence would reassure even those who were most insecure about it). Boarding schools could also lead to homosexual abuse that was rather ambivalent, often associated with a wrongly assumed homosexuality. This is what Robert Musil recounted in 1906 in his novel
Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torless
(
The Confusions of Young Törless
), where the student Basini is used as a sexual slave by several of his classmates, who scorn him to the point of saying: “There is nothing between Basini and us, other than the pleasure that his groveling gives.” It would also be incorrect to think that school attacks and rapes only occurred between students: Jean-Claude Caron showed that, in nineteenth-century France, a large number of ecclesiastical educators were denounced for
pedophilia
(most, it is true, were teachers in rather modest schools where the students, children of the common people, had no means to defend themselves).
Homophobia inspired many school reforms from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. The concepts of physician Simon-Auguste Tissot (
Onanism: Or a Treatise Upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation
, 1760), and later Ambroise Tardieu (
Etudes medico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs
[Medical-legal studies of assaults against decency], 1857) long influenced school authorities in France. According to Tissot, any sexual act that does not lead to procreation causes physical weakness, while Tardieu believed that the true pederasts, who were few in number, corrupted the rest, who became “occasional” homosexuals. Acting on this, the heads of boarding schools (both public and private) increased the supervision of dormitories (in a way that never took place in England, where it was believed that character was built through self-policing) with the clear intention of preventing all sexual activity. Monseigneur Dupanloup once said that a dormitory supervisor had two obsessions, “special friendships and improper familiarities,” and that he had to maintain at all times the rule of
numquam duo
(never in twos). In 1876, criminologist Cesare Lombroso echoed a similar affirmation in his
L’Uomo delinquente
(
Criminal Man
): “When you see two young men together, be wary, they are probably up to no good.” For her part, author George Sand reminds us that this rule applied also to girls, around the beginning of the nineteenth century: “We were forbidden to go off together in twos, it had to be three. We were not allowed to embrace. They worried about our innocent communications.” Near the end of the Second Empire era, school
sports
were often perceived as a means of channeling adolescent impulses, of increasing their aggressiveness; in short, of making students more masculine, and in doing so, diverting them from the homosexual
peril
.
Conversely, the bullying of boys who did not like or excel in sports or physical activity was without a doubt the most widespread form of homophobia in schools during the twentieth century. The opening scene of the 1996 British film
Beautiful Thing
combines the three homophobic elements common in this kind of situation: rejection (none of the soccer teams want Jamie), verbal abuse (Jamie is called “Hugh Janus,” a rather obscene play on words), and the cowardice of witnesses (including the boy who would later become Jamie’s lover).
It is often forgotten that the concept of coeducation was first put forward in France in 1872 by the chemist Henri Etienne Ste-Claire Deville in an attempt to stamp out
inversion
. To him, groupings of adolescents of the same sex could not help but lead to the “terrible
perversion
of instincts.” In 1932’s
Der Sexuelle Kampf der Jugend
(The sexual struggle of youth), psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich suggested that the best way to fight against homosexuality (which, to him, was the result of an inhibition brought on by social conditioning) was by bringing both sexes together through coeducation. The environment in which coeducation was implemented in France in the 1960s can be aptly summed up by the homophobia apparent in the 1960
Mirguet
amendment, which officially labeled homosexuality as a “social scourge” (across the Channel, some would make the same suggestion of coeducation in order to eradicate homosexuality from schools). A similar dialog took place during the 70s when Oxford and Cambridge Universities became coeducational, and in the 80s when the two Ecoles normales supérieures in Paris amalgamated; it had been implied that there were too many homosexuals in these institutions or that they produced too many “occasional” homosexuals, and that coeducation would put an end to this “unhealthy” situation.
Before long, sex education began to be taught in schools, with the clear goal of reinforcing heterosexual norms. Often conducted by
biology
teachers, it usually tied sexuality to reproduction and, as a result, stigmatized homosexuality, evoking the old medical vocabulary to label it as a perversion. It is interesting to note that the last great vehicle for homophobia in the Soviet Union in the 80s was a sex education textbook written by Antonina Khripkova and Dimitri Kolesov.