ABSTRACT
In a society where homosexuals were seen as degenerate, evil, demonic; as gender-traitors, class-traitors, and vicious, dangerous conspirators against health, work and light, those wishing to write about homosexuality as a positive, healthy and productive identity were obliged both to find discreet ways and discrete discourses of speaking about themselves, to each other and the world, and also to invent a literature of their own. Such writing relies on an encoded framework there to be read by those in the know, taking the very best of mainstream culture and turning it to ends that can only be called political. To this is added scientific rationalism, the assertion of observable and verifiable truths about the materially existing world, as a means of providing a defence against moral or spiritual condemnation. Texts which seek to demonstrate how unjustly homosexuals are treated merge classical scholarship with scientific truth, by documenting past examples of political and military heroism and artistic importance, alongside contemporary examples of the pernicious effects of the law on the positive potential of homosexuals who, when they are subjected to the legitimate judgements of science, are seen to be victims, not villains. In three of the texts in this section, Greek myth and scientific classification are allied in the project of promoting the homosexual as a wasted social resource, and of condemning the law as irrational and inhuman. Edward Carpenter’s extended essay, Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society (1894), contains virtually every feature of the cultural/historical argument for the social usefulness and moral decency of the homosexual, which other authors included in this section approach in comparable manner, citing the same examples, reading the same stories in the same way. But Carpenter’s lack of defensiveness is unusual. Where Richard Burton, in the ‘Terminal essay’ to his translation of the Arabian Nights, enters anthropological and classical overload, piling example upon instance of how central homosexuality has been to the history of the world, and John Addington Symonds, in A Problem in Modern Ethics, pleads, constructs fact by careful fact an argument for the defence, Carpenter’s strategies of the collusive we, of sweet reason, of rhetorical questions anticipating a particular answer seem intended to leave the reader no alternative position other than agreement with him, that not only are homosexuals acceptable, they are actually superior. His tentativeness is of a most disingenous kind, in contrast to the more sombre and ponderous 117arguments produced by John Addington Symonds. Carpenter’s use of the words ordinary, normal and natural is both critical and parodic, not least in their repetition, but primarily in the way in which he makes heterosexuality sound so dull. His inclusion of women as a central part of the problem, rather than an extra, or a complete omission, is unusual, though at times he seems to forget they exist. Lesbians are represented in this literature of cultural appropriation solely by Sappho, the poet of Lesbos, and are only to be seen scientifically as morally and physically deficient, even in those texts campaigning for male homosexual equality.
