Inspiring Older Readers
Homintern : How gay culture liberated the modern world by Gregory Woods
I seem to be using the phrase ‘an interesting book that ultimately fails to deliver quite what it promised’ a lot recently. Either I’m just on a slightly disappointing run of books or my critical faculties are getting sourer by the month. Poet, Gregory Wood’s Homintern sadly doesn’t break this particular mould – another book with loads of interesting content but which ultimately fails to hang together as a coherent whole.
The premise is, I think, fascinating: is there any truth in the notion that much of our cultural life in the West has been hijacked by an international conspiracy of gay and lesbian artists and opinion-formers? Does it make sense to talk about the existence of a ‘Homintern’ – a concept mashed together from taking the name of the international Soviet-dominated communist network (Comintern) that flourished between 1920 – 1940(ish) and grafting it onto “homosexual”. Quite who was responsible for coining the phrase is contested but it was clearly originally meant to be something of a joke, a piece of clever wordplay that got picked up and transmuted into something more sinister. The notion of an international gay conspiracy has to sit alongside the similar and equally sinister set of ideas about the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy. And in both cases such ideas led to some tragic and frightening outcomes.
Woods gives the idea of the existence of a ‘gay conspiracy’ fairly short shrift but then goes on to speculate on whether this notion of a Homintern might be a useful way of talking about the more general impact of gay and lesbian artists and opinion-formers on modern culture. Using the watershed case of Oscar Wilde as his baseline, Woods gives us a tour of the way gay and lesbian cultures have been targeted and repressed but have, despite that, risen to be influential. The scope of his story is impressive but, at the same time, partial and the integrity of his argument seems to weaken the further into the book we get.
Reviewing the book in The Guardian when it was published in 2016, Caleb Crain picks up a similar point:
“So was there something like a Homintern after all? Perhaps gay people, as members of a stigmatised minority, were in fact more ready than their straight counterparts to jettison tradition and transcend national borders, as the spirit of modernism required. Perhaps the solidarity that grew out of shared oppression did prove of use to ambitious non-straight writers and artists trying to find a foothold.
Instead of trying to resolve the paradox, Woods ambivalently embraces it. He takes the reader on a tour of gay people in the arts during the 20th century, focusing mainly on literature in western Europe and the US, with some attention to dance, painting and music as well. Many stops on the tour will be familiar to those with a long-standing interest in the subject, and the narrative moves too swiftly to permit close scrutiny or any other kind of lingering. “
There are though two aspects of the book that I found especially disappointing. Woods doesn’t really get to grips with whether there is or isn’t something we might call a queer sensibility – a way of thinking or seeing the world that stands as distinct and unique by comparison with the heteronormative world. Woods says:
"the presence of lesbians and gay men in the artistic avant-garde was energizing, precisely because they looked at society from an unusual viewpoint and were apt to undermine previously long-accepted truths of human nature."
But that really isn’t good enough as an analysis – the same claim might be something you could make for any disenfranchised or excluded group.
He talks about the way that Fascism has had its attractions for some distinguished members of this Homitern but he doesn’t really tease out why that might be. He doesn’t, by contrast, spend any time tracking the heritage of the gay influence on Leftist thought – the oppositionalist, counter-cultural element is almost completely ignored and, if my memory serves me, there’s virtually nothing here about Stonewall or the significance of that event.
The second issue that disappointed me is connected to the first but approached from a different perspective. The longer the book went on the more the influence of the homitern became defined not by the meeting of people with shared ideas or world views but by sexual attraction and the physical relationships that bonded people – or split them asunder. As Caleb Crain notes;
“Woods then proceeds, however, to devote the bulk of his book to recounting, and even celebrating, links between gay men in the arts that were half-hidden and often sexual in nature – the same links that he thinks it would be unjust, if not paranoid, to make too much of.”
So, plenty in this to like in terms of an overview and there’s the ammunition here to build a strong case to support the idea that gay culture has been incredibly influential in the 20th and 21st centuries – but has he really made the case for how gay culture ‘liberated’ the world? My answer would be no but you, of course, may disagree……
Terry Potter
January 2019