At the beginning of the nineteenth century, that great propagator of
pornography Mary Wilson — whom a contemporary called "the
reviver of erotic literature in the present century" —
strictly forbade the description of homosexual love in any of the
erotic fiction and poetry which she published.
In The Voluptuarian Cabinet she wrote:
Also, and not surprisingly, publishers of whatever complexion generally
seek the "wider audience." "Special fare" for
transvestites, foot fetishists, paedophiles and homosexuals has a
limited audience in even the most tolerant climates. In general,
however, the releative scarcity of homoerotica is due to a genuine
aversion to homosexuality that runs throughout all levels of Western
society. An ancient proverb justifies the most rampant heterosexual
fornicating by the principle that "there's no harm where a good
child's got" — whereas non-procreative intercourse leads to no
children whatever, good or bad.
Indeed, this aversion to homosexuality seems to be well nigh constant
ever since the triumph of Christianity in Western Eruope. The Church,
for example, was responsible for the most wanton act of suppression to
which any creative artist has ever been subjected: the destruction of
the amatory verse of Sappho of Lesbos. Her work had long been
criticized for looseness — particularly for its lesbian content
— and in the fourth century Gregory Nazianzen ordered its public
destruction; the final destruction was accomplished in Rome and
Constantinople in 1073 by Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand). Out of a total
of nearly 9,000 lines, only 50 remain (some of them discovered stuffing
the mouths of mummified crocodiles), and most of these are only
incomprehensible half-lines from mutilated papyri (a fragment is on
display in the British Museum).
The works of Sappho that remain are more amatory than erotic, for
example:
But let us return to the present century. Censorship of course affects
the whole of society, but it is a matter of
particular concern to gays and lesbians
because its victim tends to be the bulk of
gay and lesbian literature whether or not it is explicitly erotic. This
is because a gay subject is automatically reviled as obscene in the
same way that gay people are automatically despised as those who
"indulge in homosexual practices." That is, most people fail
to distinguish between homosexual acts on the one hand and homosexual
persons/feelings/lifestyles on the other; this focus solely upon sex is
perpetuated by the term
"homosexual," though most people
are content with the terms "cocksucker," "bugger,"
etc. (and, in days gone by, "tribade," though for some people
today "lesbian" also has a purely carnal meaning). Thus it
has been difficult to convince some people that gay organizations are
not sex clubs, and to persuade them that "gay rights" refer
not solely to the age at which a man can fuck a boy, but to such thigns
as non-discrimination in employment and child custody.
In England, any talk of non-sexual homosexual topics such as gay rights
was virtually inconceivable until the past two decades. There is not a
single erotic passage in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of
Loneliness (1928), yet instead of being appreciated as a
plea for pity, Radclyffe Hall found herself in court listening to the
debate which successfully declared her novel to be obscene, and on
November 17, 1928, 247 copies of the book were flung into the furnace
in a cellar of Scotland Yard.
This was a landmark in the history of literary obscenity trials, and
proved conclusively that even the least titillating fiction about
lesbians was an intolerable outrage. It was censored not for being
naughty, but for being morally poisonous. A contemporary newspaper
attack reads:
In the United States, in 1929, Radclyffe Hall's novel was declared
not to be obscene; and it fared well in other
countries as well. The difference in "standards" between
England and other countries has changed little in the ensuing years.
British censoriousness is a laughing-stock for many foreign writers, so
much so that they have come to the conclusion that British readers get
the kind of anodyne literature they deserve. Thus at the front of the
UK edition of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge
(published by Anthony Blond in 1968) we read:
These and other "excisions" — all minor (though one
man's trivial may be another man's profound) — mar the brilliant
surface of Vidal's novel, but in all fairness it must be admitted that
the rape scene is nearly complete, and a
highlight of homoerotic literature:
Not that it is easy to get hold of copies of uncensored American
editions. Her Majesty's Customs have standards all their own. In 1976
Gay News tried to import copies of the US
edition of Richard Amory's Frost because the
UK edition had gone out of print. The shipment was confiscated by HM
Customs. The situation was explained to them. They did not appreciate
legal arguments or the irony of refusing entrance to a book that had
previously been published in England. The novel was obscene. It ought
to be burnt. It was burnt.
So also was a single copy of Teleny meant for
the private perusal of GN editor Denis Lemon. There were difficulties
with shipments of Loovis's Gay Spirit, and
similar difficulties with the "Trader Dick" classified
advertising section of The Advocate. Imported
copies of The Gay Liberation Book by Richmond
and Noguera were seized in the early 1970s, either because it had a
photograph of two naked men, or because one frame of a cartoon in it
depicts fellatio. Regardless: it demonstrates how easily even the most
bona fide gay works can be seized and censored without causing a public
outcry. In the later 1970s the Obscene Publications Squad of Scotland
Yard seized a copy of Pasolini's film Salo or the 120 Days
of Sodom, a work based upon, but artistically superior
to, the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom.
The situation has not improved greatly in the past twenty years. Gays
the Word bookstore in London has been regularly raided for importing
gay books, even ones that are published in England and Europe, with a
detrimental effect on its business. In May 1998 an unsolicited German-language
manuscript sent for consideration to Gay Men's Press was intercepted at Dover,
and resulted in a raid by Customs officials on the publisher's offices and
the confiscation of their computers "for investigation," thus
forcing them to cease trading until the return of the computers. Would
the virtual shutdown of a large mainstream (read: non-gay) publisher be
tolerated on such a spurious excuse?
In the British Museum there is a small terracotta figure (Greek, 200
B.C.), titled "Women Gossiping." Dolores Klaich, author of
Woman Plus Woman, had a postcard of this, for
she instinctively felt that "the women, obviously, are not
gossiping," but she put aside her interpretation in the face of
British archeological experts. But "later, when I found that, as
a matter of course, early British translators of a Sappho love poem
rendered the woman with whom the poet had been in love as a man (it
took almost 200 years for the pronoun to be straightened out), I framed
the postcard and began thinking Conspiracy." Quite. And so it will
continue.
Copyright © 1977, 1998 Rictor Norton.
CITATION: Rictor Norton, "High Moral Climates", Gay History and Literature, 16 November 2000 <http://rictornorton.co.uk/moral.htm>
It is much to be regretted, that some of the very best French
works should be deformed by passages descriptive of Socratic love
but it is still more to be lamented that such ideas should ever
be transferred into our language. I speak not merely the feelings
of a woman upon the subject, for were I a man, I should consider
it highly criminal to propagate doctrines, the adoption of which
is attended with such horrible consequences. Let us have all
kinds of orthodox futuition [copulation] but not heterodox
fasions.
This strikingly illustrates that the censorship of homoerotica is
advocated not merely by the Lord Longfords of history, but even by
those who earn their living by disseminating salacious literature. Of
course economic factors are also involved: Miss Wilson, for example,
had a vested interest in such institutions as brothels (she tried to
set up a Temple of Priapus), and one of the "horrible
consequences" of exposure to homoerotica might well mean less
custom for straight houses of ill fame.
(From the translation of Mary Barnard, University of California
Press, 1958). But their paucity has been a blessing to
homophobic scholars such as Edward Marion Cox (The Poems of
Sappho, 1925) who was all too happy to find "not
proven" the "alleged moral derelictions" and "such
scandalous traditions" connoted by the name of the Tenth Muse.
The gods bless you
May you sleep then
on some tender
girl friend's breast
This pestilence is devastating the younger generation. It is
wrecking young lives. It is defiling young souls. ... I have
heard it whispered about by young men and young women who do not
and cannot grasp its unutterable putrefaction. ... this novel
forces upon our society a disagreeable task which it has hitherto
shirked, the task of cleansing itself from the leprosy of these
lepers, and making the air clean and wholesome once more.
The ban against The Well of Loneliness held
firm for more than twenty years, and English literature still has not quite recovered
form the effects of the trial, just as British gay society has not
quite recovered from the effects of the trial of Oscar Wilde. But this
was England, with its high moral climate, where the typical attitude
was: "These things are as old as time and as long as people keep
quiet about them it is entirely their own affair." Although the
English people have a highly developed sense
of privacy, they have enacted no laws to guarantee the
right to privacy, so once people cease
keeping quiet and begin frightening the horses, their affairs become a
matter of public concern.
Wanting in every way to adapt to the high moral climate that currently
envelops the British Isles, the author has allowed certain excisions to
be made in the American text.
To wit: the more explicit passages dealing particularly with gay sex
and sadism have been filleted away. For example, because of censorship,
something seems odd about the following passage (in the Panther
paperback edition, 1976, page 146), when Myra checks Rusty for a
hernia:
"All right. You won't have to remove your shorts ..."
The two typographical errors seem to call our attention to the fact
that the text has been tampered with. Why did Rusty almost throw up?
Because in the text of the American edition there occurs a short
description of how Myra not only squeezed his balls, but forced them
back up into "the ancient cavity" in the pelvis from which
they had originally descended. It is a small "excision," but
it renders incomprehensible Rusty's gag-reflex, and lessens our
appreciation for Myra's delight in sadism, and her tasteless
thoroughness.
He gave a sigh of relief ... too soon.
"However, I shall have to insert my hand inside the shorts."
"Oh." Dismay and defeat.
"I think you'll agree that's a statesmanlike compromise." On
that bright note, I slid my left hand up the inside of his left thigh.
He wriggled involuntarily as I forced my fingers past the leg opening
of the shorts. I took my hand away.
"Jesus," he whispered. "I almost threw up."
"I'm sorry. But I have to be thorough. I'll be gentler this."
[sic] Again my hand pushed past the damp cloth, [sic]
Then I let it drop and removed my hand.
He gave a deep sigh. "I guess that's it."
"Yes, I think so."
I lowered the examination table until it was just two feet from the
floor. "Lie down," I ordered. "On your stomach."
This rite which involves the use of an over-sized dildo, strapped to
the waist of that transsexual virago Myra, but which I shan't bother to
quote further because parts of the scene have been "excised"
by greater pens than mine. The novel is a shocking, outrageous and
hilarious satire on the myths of virility and feminity, and a
masterpiece of bad taste: even worse taste in the UK bowdlerized
version, which is all part of Vidal's "one big joke" attitude
to such matters.
Mystified, he did as he was told. I then tied his bound hands to the
top of the metal table. He was, as they say, entirely in my power.
[...]
"Now then, up on your knees."
"But ..." A hard slap across the buttocks put an end to all
objections. He pulled himself up on his knees, legs tight together and
buttocks clenched shut. He resembled a pyramid whose base was his head
and white-socked feet, and whose apex was his rectum. I was now ready
for the final rite.
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