ABSTRACT

The German distinction between the erotic/aesthetic and the purely sexual, its emphasis on mentoring and inter-generational relationships, on elite and misogynist in-groups, with little distinction made between gay and bisexual, or, given its art and symbolism, the Way of Eros and Ganymede. The last flowerings of the way of Eros belong to the George Kreis, a circle of men and youths gathered around poet, Stefan George, whose Maximin poems describe and semi-worship an avatar of male beauty, Maximilian Kronberger, who died at eighteen. The woman and liquid nature associated Dionysus merely obliterates the Western eye and its artificial, rationalizing, Apollonian, organization of life and its cult of beauty. Gays, it emerges, often incline to the Apollonian, and Western cults of beauty have been 'persistently homosexual'. Whatever the truth about individuals, in Florence gays appear to have 'homosexuality' to the model of constructionists and Christian moralists, namely, as personal invention and choice, or as self-indulgence and social contagion respectively.