The sociology of the university played a role here, at least in France: a large number of French historians who taught during the postwar years had often been shaped by
communism
or Christian democracy, which contributed to their disinterest in issues related to sexuality. Evidence of their persistent narrow-mindedness is not lacking: in the 1950s and 60s, the poor reputation accorded to French anarchist Daniel Guérin is much more due to his homosexuality than to his leftist politics. Additionally, the exceptional historian Georges Dumézil could not admit his homosexuality until near the end of his life, in 1986. Examples of French historians contemptuous indifference include François Bluche’s derisive article on the “ultra mundane
vice
” in the
Dictionnaire du Grand Siècle
(1990), and the conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in justifying his hostility to the
PaCS
(Pacte civil de solidarité; Civil solidarity pact) in
Le Figaro
(October 19, 1998). The timidity of historians to deal adequately with the issue of homosexuality gave a platform to pseudo-historians and scandal mongers, such as gay diplomat and writer Roger Peyrefitte; their personal, historical chronicles with homosexual undertones were principally disinterested in the historicity of their work; as a result, they were mediocre, and then reinforced the idea that homosexuality was not a serious or respectable topic for historical discussion.
It is in the field of ancient history, notably Greek history, that the taboo of studying homosexuality was first removed, but at the expense of a strictly homophobic exegesis. At the end of the nineteenth century, historians found it very difficult to pretend that Greek or Roman homosexuality had not existed: their positivist approach rested on reading original texts from the period, which exposed students to at times shocking passages (let us think of the works of Plato, Xenophon, Euripides, Plutarch, Cassius Dio, Virgil, Catullus, Suetonius, and the
Histoire Auguste
). Ancient history courses were thus, for a long time, the only places in society where non-medical discussion of homosexuality took place, and where homosexuality was presented as a social phenomenon (certainly, still aberrant, but on the other hand characteristic of a prestigious civilization). This discourse, however, was in fact as tortured as it was restricted: students were told (as E. M. Forster recalled of his years at Cambridge) that ancient Greek behaviors were “unspeakable,” which prevented further discussion, or it was affirmed that Greek love was in fact not sexual, which had the double advantage of morally salvaging classical humanities and preventing contemporary homosexuals from claiming an ancient model. Without going as far as to lie, Marrou revealed the same kind of pedagogical trouble in the 1950s and 60s by exaggerating the spiritual dimension of Greek love, linking its physical manifestation to the “weakness of the flesh” in a very Christian way.
Under such biases, the historic reinterpretation of the issue of homosexuality was slow and extremely difficult. It started in British circles at the end of the nineteenth century, doubtless due to the importance of burgeoning gay subculture in large British universities. It is significant that the first modern historian to be interested in homosexuality was an Oxford professor, John Addington Symonds, who wrote
A Problem in Greek Ethics
in 1873 and published it in 1883: one of the first essays to defend homosexuality in the English language, Symonds stated that it was at the heart of Greek morality; further, that its warlike nature disputed Victorian views that it was effeminate, and that it was a healthy moral component that refuted claims that it was an illness. Nevertheless, censorship of such views was common: due to his poor reputation, Symonds was not elected to Oxford’s poetry chair, and he published only ten copies of his essay in 1883; it was included in Havelock Ellis’s book
Sexual Inversion
, published in 1897, but Symonds’ dependents (Symonds had died in 1893) bought the entire print run to make it disappear, then demanded that Symonds’ name be removed from the second edition of Ellis’s book. After such a difficult birth, homosexual historiography was rare (Oxford and Cambridge did not become centers for gay studies again until after 1970). There were a few historical (essentially biographical) research projects on 1897–1933 Germany, given the role of Magnus Hirschfeld and his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (which he established in 1897), but nothing had any legitimate scientific ambition, and in the end twentieth-century homosexual culture was documented less by history than by
literature
.
From the 1970s onward in Europe and North America, the situation changed due to many factors. The introduction of a politicized gay movement, various changes to the law, and the fact that the medical community no longer considered homosexuality an illness all contributed to removing academic prejudices against the subject and forcing historians to reflect on it from a new perspective. As a result of the growing interest in social history, particularly the history of women, the issues of sexuality and gender became more legitimate, as did the study of private lives, or what was called “the extraordinary lives of ordinary people” (micro-history based on studies of individual cases, a phenomenon which resulted in first-class works on the history of homosexuality which could serve as models for other sectors of historical research). In the United States in the 1960s and 70s, a renewed interest in the history of slavery provided analytical tools with which to better understand the resilience and resistance of a community subjected to legal, social, and psychological oppression. Everywhere,
anthropological
literature outlined the relatively common occurrence of homosexual rites in traditional societies (it was said that French academics’ positive reception of the serious work of Bernard Sergent—1984’s
L’Homosexualité dans la mythologie grecque
(
Homosexuality in Greek Myth
) and 1986’s
L’Homosexualité initiatique dans l’Europe ancienne
(Initiatory homosexuality in ancient Europe)—was in part because Sergent “ritualized” Greek homosexuality, and in so doing, set it apart from contemporary concepts of it as hedonist). More and more historians stressed that homosexuality as studied could not be reduced to private behavior but had to be interpreted as a collective phenomenon, thus identifying a specific sociality that is always evolving. From this perspective, the investigative terrain of homosexuality is based on its long repression—religious, social, and legal—the heights of which may arguably have been attained by the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. But the history of homosexuality cannot be limited to this repression, as there have been positive experiences as well, particularly during the period between 1890 and the 1930s (e.g., the Weimar Republic). Furthermore, one ultimately discovers that each historical period constructed and reconstructed its own sexual identities and social roles, and also had its own concepts of what was lawful and unlawful; as a result, the main threat that the historian must watch out for is essentialist anachronism.
However, these indisputable advances, which allow for new perspectives on the entire history of sexuality, are poorly received at times by the historian establishment, particularly as a result of historians on the subject who are homosexual themselves and increasingly unwilling to hide their orientation. This provided a lazy defense for those embarrassed or made to feel guilty by these radically new studies: their authors were considered more militants than historians, or their research methods were considered unsound. The reproach is sometimes warranted, as in the case of John Boswell’s 1980 book
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality
, which was tainted by a certain number of methodology errors; one must note, however, that the most severe criticisms against Boswell were leveled by gay historians, offering evidence that gay academics, whether their enemies like it or not, do not act in tandem with one another. On the other hand, the debate that surrounded this book was useful to help clarify the differences between “essentialists” (e.g., Boswell) and “social
constructionists
” (e.g., Michel Foucault). Conservative historians (the adjective having nothing to do with their political choices, given that some are actually socialist), at the same time, continued to expose their homophobic prejudices by repeatedly denouncing gay historians as pseudo-militants (or accusing gay and lesbian studies of excessive political correctness) and refusing to acknowledge the concept of “minority politics.” In any event, it is difficult to reproach homosexuals for their interest in the history of their peers; as gay historian George Chauncey commented that if the hunger for historic knowledge is so strong among gays, it is because homosexuality’s history has been negated for a long time. That is, it was not in school curriculums and it could not benefit from any oral transmission within the family, unlike what could happen in other marginal groups. In other words, if heterosexual historians who were, in theory, “unprejudiced” had been interested in the topic or had done better research, gay historians wouldn’t have had to do all the work. Finally, it is important to note that gay and lesbian studies are not by definition militant: social constructionists, by identifying the diachronic variability of sexual categories and by refusing to include great figures from the Middle Ages and Renaissance in the all-encompassing and stable category of a homosexual
sub specie aeternitatis
, contradicted a great number of gay militants who were anxious to include personalities like Richard the Lionheart and Michelangelo under their banner, and who are fearful that the “social constructionist” approach dominating current academic trends only serves to strengthen the Christian-based belief in conversion (reparative) therapy for homosexuals.
In any event, it is clear that the most important recent research on the history of homosexuals has been conducted in Britain and the United States (by, among many others, Allan Bérubé, George Chauncey, Madeline Davis, David Halperin, Jonathan Katz, Elizabeth Kennedy, Esther Newton, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jeffrey Weeks). In particular, the power and wealth of the gay movement in the US has allowed for a comprehensive system of research tools, including oral, the establishment of historical centers and archives (e.g., the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York and the LGBT Historical Society in San Francisco) and the publication of important books and documents (e.g., Jonathan Ned Katz’s 1992 book
Gay American History
and the 1978 publication of the
Buffalo Women’s Oral History Project
and the
San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project
). In the same way, under the influence of Foucault, the work of American historians on the subject of homosexuality is generally more sophisticated than elsewhere (and includes discussions on the definition of sexual activity, the vocabulary of identities, the sexual meaning of gender or cross-dressing, or class differences that cross into sexuality). Additionally, there are now gay caucuses present in almost all of the large American academic associations (such as historians, art historians, sociologists, and anthropologists) which encouraged the development of new study topics and scientific questions. In France, Florence Tamagne wrote the excellent
Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe: Berlin, Londres, Paris, 1919–1939
(
The History of Homosexuality in Europe in the Inter-War Period: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919–1939
), but the fact remains that the best study on homosexuality in nineteenth-century France was published in Britain (
Homosexuality in Modern France,
published in 1996 under the direction of Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan Jr). Further, it is also revealing that the first in-depth work written on the history of the French gay and lesbian movement
Le Rose et le noir
was by a journalist and not a scholar in the strict sense. This being said, Chauncey has noted that even in the so-called “liberated” United States of the 1980s and 90s, numerous young historians decided not to make homosexuality the main topic of their study for fear of compromising their professional future. In the US and elsewhere, it remains easy for academic authorities, under the guise of scholarly study, to overlook openly gay historians for new positions, especially when candidates are numerous and almost of equal quality, which is often the case.
—Pierre Albertini
Bluche, François. “Relativité du vice ultramontain.” In
Dictionnaire du Grand Siècle
. Edited by François Bluche. Paris: Fayard, 1990.
Boswell, John. “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories.” In
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
. Edited by George Chauncey, Martin Duberman, and Martha Vicinus. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Celse, Michel, and Pierre Zaoui. “Négation, dénégation: la question des ‘triangles roses’.” In
Conscience de la Shoah, critique des discours et des représentations
. Edited by PhilippeMesnard. Paris: Kimé, 2000.
Chauncey, George, Martin Duberman, and Martha Vicinus.
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Dowling, Linda.
Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford
. Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994.
Eribon, Didier. “Georges Dumézil, un homosexuel au XXe siècle,”
Ex aequo
, no. 4 (1997).
———.
Michel Foucault
. Paris: Flammarion, 1989. [Published in the US as
Michel Foucault
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991.]
———.
Réflexions sur la question gay
. Paris: Fayard, 1999.
———. “Traverser les frontiers.” In
Les Etudes gay et lesbiennes
. Paris: Ed. du Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1998.
Fassin, Eric. “Politiques de l’histoire:
Gay New York
et l’historiographie homosexuelle aux Etats-Unis,”
Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales
, no. 125 (1998).
Foucault, Michel.
Histoire de la sexualité
. Vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard, 1976–84. [Published in the US as
The History of Sexuality
. New York: Vintage Books, 1985.]