I've just begun reading the new, uncensored, annotated edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, published this year by Harvard University Press. The editor, Nicholas Frankel, has gone back to the magazine publication and Wilde's typescript, which apparently contain more obviously homoerotic content than the book version. That should be interesting, since even some very sensible queer scholars have doubted that Wilde intended sodomitical interpretations of his characters.
But so far I'm still in the introductory material, and damned if Frankel didn't put his foot in it almost immediately. From page 7:
It is worth bearing in mind, however, that in the Victorian era, sexual preference was less clearly seen as an identity; indeed, the word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892, when it was used adjectivally in a translation of Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis (it was first used as a noun in 1912). Wilde and the other men who participated in London’s homosexual subculture, many of them leading secret double lives, would have been viewed by the majority not as homosexuals per se but as men indulging in “unclean” vices. Even so, homosexual acts were generally considered repugnant and deviant – and for the first time, with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, sexual activities of any nature between men were not merely sinful but unlawful. (The criminalization of homosexuality and the example of Wilde’s life and work are widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity.)Here we have the usual confused and contradictory thrashing around. If it is so significant that "the word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892," if it marks some kind of sociocultural watershed, how could London have had a "homosexual subculture" before 1892? How could "homosexual acts" be considered repugnant if they didn't exist before they bore that name, and how could "homosexuality" be criminalized by a law passed seven years before the word entered the language?
Yes, I'm being deliberately pedantic here, but I think it's justified. If "homosexual" uniquely denotes "identity" (a word that neither Frankel nor most other scholars who use it bother to define), it can't be applied to anything that occurred or existed before it passed into the language. It would also be nice if someone explained how the advent of the word "homosexual" magically produced "homosexual identity." As I've said before, talk like this is generally based on a misreading of Michel Foucault, and is more of a genuflection to his influence than a well-founded historical statement.
And no, I'm not being too hard on Frankel. Look again at the latter part of the quotation above:
... for the first time, with the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, sexual activities of any nature between men were not merely sinful but unlawful. (The criminalization of homosexuality and the example of Wilde’s life and work are widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity.)This is clumsily written, but on its face it's false. What changed with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (often called the Labouchere Amendment after the Member of Parliament who introduced it) was that a wider range of genital contact between males became unlawful. Henry VIII's statute made "Buggery either with Mankind or with any Animal" a capital crime; there wasn't absolute agreement as to what constituted buggery, whether it extended to oral-genital contact or was limited to anal penetration -- the law required proof of penetration, and was generally interpreted to refer to the latter. The death penalty was abolished for most crimes in 1828. (I'm drawing here on H. Montgomery Hyde's The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name: A Candid Look at Homosexuality in Britain [Little, Brown, 1970], pages 91-93 and 134-136.) If by "homosexuality" Frankel means "sexual relations between males," then homosexuality had been criminalized centuries before Labouchere; if he means "acts labeled 'homosexual,'" then Labouchere didn't even touch on them.
It can be, and has been, argued that buggery doesn't equal "homosexuality," so under that rather strained interpretation "homosexuality" wasn't criminalized before the Labouchere Amendment. But it it wasn't criminalized after it, either: what the Amendment criminalized were acts, however vaguely specified, not identities. And so matters remained as far as the law was concerned: the "sodomy" laws overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2003 also were about acts, not identities. Most of these laws penalized sodomy between males and females, as well as between males, so they didn't criminalize homosexuality either.
Besides, "bugger" is also an identity. I think it was in a biography of Virginia Woolf that I read that when she began meeting her brother's male friends who did the nasty with other males, she had to learn to refer to them as "buggers," not "sods." Despite their bugger identity, several of them married and sired children; despite their heterosexual marriages, most of these men continued having it off with other men. Probably "sodomite" had functioned as an identity long before that, as Mark Jordan suggested in his The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago, 1997).
Nor is it clear what homosexual or gay "identity" means today, or why it matters. That's what bothers me about discussions like Frankel's: there doesn't seem to be any point in invoking identity here. It doesn't explain anything, and it doesn't make much sense.
