LHMP #538 Reay 2009 Writing the Modern Histories of Homosexual England

This is a historiography article, reviewing a variety of general histories of sexuality and homosexuality and evaluating them. The author sets out a principle that “the most useful sexual histories are those that provide depth of context without either assuming sexual identity or anticipating its complete absence.” The focus is specifically on the 19th and 20th centuries.

In general, the author approves of works that present homosexuality as a loose assembly of related understandings that neither present a unitary theoretical view nor a teleological development towards the modern state. In the covered period, contrary to Foucault’s idea of a “acts >> identity” shift, scholars have found parallel and overlapping understandings of both concepts.

The structure of comprehensive histories cannot help but create the impression of an evolutionary processes, even if none is intended. The differences in the available evidence for different eras (and different genders) can contribute to misleading impressions of the overall picture.

[Note: I feel a tiny bit of personal satisfaction that the author’s comment on Randolph Trumbach is that he is “certainly not the best guide to [the early modern] period,” as this aligns with my opinion.]

Similarly, the act of envisioning or naming a project “gay /lesbian history” itself gives at least the impression of imposing a modern lens on the subject, regardless of the historian’s intent. If—as some historians suggest—we would do better to study homosexuality in terms of a variety of different categories of desire and behavior, how do we assemble those categories in a meaningful way for study without implying a unified concept?

The author continues on to examine works addressing specific components of this “variety of categories,” including friendship (which frequently had socially-acceptable homoerotic dynamics). While male friendship dynamics frequently included cross-class aspects, this is less common among female friendships. Friendships among middle- and upper-class women in the 19th century typically included physical displays of affection and passionate language (e.g., in letters and diary entries). But these friendships existed in a continuum of social arrangements, from marriage equivalents to life-stage attachments, to relationships existing in parallel with heterosexual marriage.

Another element in this multiplicity of categories is the association between cross-gender presentation and homosexuality: i.e., male effeminacy and female masculinity. The author suggests that a pivotal point in these associations came around the turn of the 20th century when Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall became respective icons for male and female homosexuals. [Note: I’m extremely dubious about this assertion. These associations can be traced solidly back to the 18th century, at the least.]

In the early 20th century, public discourse around lesbianism was marked by incoherence and a general avoidance of naming the topic in question, even by those participating in it.