A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition

by Gregory Woods

This important book is the first full-scale account of male gay literature across cultures, languages, and centuries. A work of reference as well as the definitive history of a tradition, it traces writing by and about homosexual men from ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion.

“Woods’ own artistry is evident throughout this elegant and startling book. . . . These finely honed gay readings of selected Western (and some Eastern) literary texts richly reward the careful attention they demand. . . . Though grounded in the particulars of gay male identity, this masterpiece of literary (and social) criticism calls across the divides of sex and sexual orientation.”— Kirkus Reviews (a starred review)

“An encyclopedic mapping of the intersection between male homosexuality and belles lettres . . . [that is] good reading, in part because Woods has foregone strict chronology to link writers across eras and cultures.”—Louis Bayard, Washington Post Book World

“Encyclopedic and critical, evenhanded and interpretive, Woods has produced a study that stands as a monument to the progress of gay literary criticism. No one to date has attempted such a grand world-wide history. . . . It cannot be recommended highly enough.”— Library Journal (a starred review)

“A bold, intelligent and gorgeously encyclopedic study.”—Philip Gambone, Lambda Book Report

“An exemplary piece of work.”—Jonathan Bate, The Sunday Telegraph

Genres: LGBT, Nonfiction, Queer, History, Literary Criticism, Reference, Queer Studies

465 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 1998

Reviews

[Steve]

In 1998, the year of the publication of A History of Gay Literature - The Male Tradition, Gregory Woods was appointed Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University, the first such appointment in the UK. According to Woods' website

http://www.gregorywoods.co.uk/pp003.s...

the then Conservative shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe used the pages of the Sunday Mirror to denounce his career as ‘a phenomenal waste of public money’, while the right-wing British National Party saw the appointment as yet another sign of national decline. Such appointments have become a bit more widespread in the USA and the UK in the meantime, and a cottage industry of Queer Studies(*) has developed. As in many newly minted academic fields, there is a certain tentativeness in the books I've read on the subject which is expressive of a continuing search for the intellectual core and methods of the field, and there is a certain defensive polemicism against the ignorant and hateful libels of various homophobic critics. All of this is quite understandable, but one should be aware of its existence when going into the academic literature. (This book, published by Yale University Press and supplied with over 50 pages of endnotes and bibliography, is definitely academic literature.)

Woods' book would be more accurately titled A Brief History of Gay Literature in the European Tradition, because the small gestures made towards literature in Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Chinese and Japanese are really unsatisfactory and there is no approximation to completeness even within the more narrowly defined confines I indicated. In fact, the bulk of the text and the author's personal interest when engaging with the material are essentially limited to literature in English and French, with brief excursions into ancient Greek and Roman literature where there are no surprises in the texts he chose to discuss.(**)

The first problem Woods had to address is the question 'What is gay literature?' For as Michel Foucault correctly pointed out already in 1976 in his Histoire de la Sexualité, the sexuality currently known as 'gay' did not really exist before modern times. In other cultures and times sexual relations between persons of the same gender had completely different meanings than they do here and now.(***) Though he waffles a bit, I think he finally settles upon literature is gay if it can be read as homoerotic by a gay person now. He mentions this position once among many others, but it seems this is how he makes his selection of texts.

With the exception of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Marcel Proust, to whom Woods dedicates separate chapters, most authors treated in this book receive just a few paragraphs of discussion. In 400 pages he runs from Homer to current popular Gay genre authors such as Armistead Maupin, and all too often what is discussed is how gay is the author?

Besides additions to an already groaning TBR list, is there something new to me that I can take away from this book? Yes, a few things. For example, Woods supports the thesis that there is a kind of gay tradition in English language literature beginning in Elizabethan times, which is based on Plato and Greek and Roman pastoral verse and which is itself expressed primarily through pastoral poems or elegies until the 20th century when it became possible to be addressed more directly in prose.(4*) That intrigues me. When I recently re-read Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard I did not see it in such a tradition. And it is evident from Woods' discussion of Tennyson's In Memoriam that I was deeply unaware of the psychosexual and social tensions expressed in that poem. To mention two only. In the midst of all the names, polemics and gossip, Woods occasionally engaged sufficiently with a text that he helped me to become a better reader. And that means ultimately, as I am sure you fervent readers will agree, to become better able to understand this strange little world and our strange little lives.

Still, it looks like we shall need to wait a while before we can read a History of Gay Literature.


(*) Damn strange choice of adjective, it would seem to me...

(**) However, Woods did manage to convince me to overcome my personal prejudice against pastoral poetry and pick up Theocritus...

(***) And let's face it, even here and now they have multiple meanings - just contrast those for whom the gay relationship is identical in every respect - except one, of course - to that of the Christian ideal of marriage (even procreation, through surrogates, is maintained) with those who want a completely "new" type of relationship involving multiple partners and a family of former and/or current lovers providing love and support around them. There is nothing simple about human sexuality.

(4*) There is another line of "gay" literature Woods discusses, namely the play upon homosexuality involved in characters disguising themselves in the garb of the other gender, and not because they are psychosexually transvestites but for some authorial purpose. The author then has the opportunity to excite the audience/reader in numerous ways with the omnipresent frisson of the forbidden or to engage in some rather crude humor. Some of these walking-on-the-edge-of-the-wild-side plays and novels take the opportunity to look at gender and sexuality rather seriously (like Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin), but in all of these texts it appears that, in the end, the heterosexual order has been carefully maintained, all appearances to the contrary. I'm not sure I would consider these to be exemplars of gay literature at all.

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/950...

[Andrew H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in 1998, A History of Gay Literature is an informative guide. . But in the twenty-five years that have passed since its original publication, much has changed and some of the chapters appear as starting points that have been superseded by more detailed works of criticism. Chapter 5, The Orient is perfunctory and Chapter 17, The Harlem Renaissance only scrapes the surface of a complex period. Also, because of the scope -- from ancient Greece to the 1990s -- much is done with broad brush strokes. And there are some forced themes that do not work, such as Chapter 9, The Pastoral Elegists, which lumps Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, Housman and T.S. Eliot together. The fact that Milton wrote Lycidas for Edward King hardly classes him as gay. Then again, had Woods looked at the sixth erotic epistle to Diodati and the poem written after his death then more might have been established. It has to be said, however, that this is a magnum opus and Woods does succeed in showing the pervasiveness of gay writing and its quality. The final chapter, Poetry and Paradox, ought to be read by every gay poet. It stands as a credo, and is, in some ways, Woods working out the direction of his own poetry: a credo that came to pass in his use of irony and paradoxical tonalities. A wonderful, educative book.

[Luke McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kind of monumental. This is as comprehensive a history of not only gay literature, but gay self-conception, as I've ever read. The book necessarily complicates the idea of a 'gay literature' but in ways that are expansive and stimulating. I came away with a much richer understanding of our writing throughout history, of what our work has meant and can mean, and of what directions it still yet may still go. The final chapter, 'Poetry and Paradox', is just a stunning. If one reads anything from this book, one must read that. A really awe-inspiring, erudite (and at times, wonderfully catty) work of gay criticism that – paradoxically – makes one less certain of what being 'gay' truly means.

[Michael Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exhaustive account of literature by, for, and/or about gay men specifically, over cultures, languages, and from ancient times to just after the AIDS epidemic with a brief look forward in the genre. Setting for itself a very wide definition of what constitutes gay literature, Written by Prof. Woods, an expert researcher in the field, it includes sections on significant periods of cultural history with chapters titled:The Roman Classics; the Christian Middle Ages; the Orient; the Renaissance; Marlowe; Shakespeare; the American Renaissance; Proust; African Poetry, and the AIDS Epidemic, among many others. It covers common themes such as boyhood and puberty, mourning, masturbation and old age). A work of reference as well as a definitive history of a tradition, and various levels of literary status (from icons like Virgil and Dante to popular novelists such as Dashiell Hammett, Clive Barker and Edmund White. It skirts controversy by dealing with writers who were not themselves homosexual or bisexual men but for good or ill touched on the subject. But by not focusing only on the most obvious authors and texts, Woods “succeeds in both widening the gay canon and reminding us of the large variety of gay works within the mainstream.” A highly recommended, extremely readable tome, and it is long, but easy on the brain. Read it. You’ll like it.

[Antón Entenza Martínez · Rating 4 out of 5]

«Es bastante fácil menospreciar este tipo de felicidad gay, pero hacerlo así con un texto es como hacerlo con todos. Una vez que se ha ejercido la censura, ¿a quién le importa si el fragmento es extremada o ligeramente transgresor? En uno u otro caso ha de ser censurado. The Platonic Blow [de W. H. Auden] no era más impublicable, pese a ser tan explícito y despreocupado, que Maurice, de E. M. Forster, texto mucho más circunspecto y angustiado. A los que tienen las tijeras en la mano les importa poco si yo suspiro por el espíritu de un joven o por desear de forma lasciva su pene; si murmuro algo en su oído o eyaculo en su ano: todo es lo mismo para ellos. Mi delicadeza o mi grosería suenan igual, pues hablo la lengua de Sodoma en presencia de los xenófobos. No importa de qué modo soy distinto; simplemente lo soy. Por esto es tan importante para tantos críticos negar el homoerotismo de los poemas de Shakespeare o ignorar el de Auden, pues una vez que el texto es "homosexual" es también, con todas sus consecuencias y para siempre, obsceno».

--------------------------------------------------
Estoy muy contento y satisfecho de haberme entregado durante casi cinco meses a la lectura de este volumen tan interesante. Es verdad que ha sido un proceso lento, y no siempre marcado por la ligereza —pues no es menos cierto que se trata de un libro denso, repleto de información relativa a autores, obras, épocas, movimientos socioliterarios y localizaciones geográficas muy diversos—, pero es que considero que es así, precisamente, como ha de leerse: poco a poco, sin prisas, centrando la atención al máximo para apreciar los rigurosos datos y agudas apreciaciones contenidos en cada uno de los 32 capítulos que conforman la totalidad del texto. Y concediéndose a uno mismo un respiro entre capítulos, también, para que la mente descanse y asimile adecuadamente lo leído.
Lo que más me ha gustado ha sido, sin duda, el estilo de la prosa de Gregory Woods: al fin y al cabo, está al alcance de prácticamente cualquiera que se lo proponga el recabar una cantidad ingente de información acerca de la presencia del homoerotismo en la Literatura a través de los siglos, pero casi nadie podría transmitir dicha información de una manera tan personal, con tanto rigor erudito a la par que con tanto desenfado inequívocamente gay. Este hombre sabe reírse de sí mismo, lo cual es una gran virtud con la que muy pocos cuentan, y logra también que tú te rías de ti mismo, todo ello por medio de una fina ironía, un firme compromiso con lo políticamente incorrecto y una sensibilidad crítica francamente envidiable. Así que, Gregory Woods: algún día me encantaría llegar a parecerme un poco a ti.
Por otra parte, señalaría dos puntos "negativos":
El primero de ellos tiene que ver con que he detectado una inexplicable laguna en lo que a las Letras Hispánicas se refiere: al margen de Lorca (al cual, de todos modos, no se le conceden, ni de lejos, el espacio ni la atención que la grandeza de su figura requeriría), apenas he contabilizado unas poquísimas menciones de pasada a escritores que concibieron originalmente sus mejores obras en español. De veras, es algo que no entiendo, que me desconcierta, y que me deja pensando si habrá existido alguna razón concreta que explique tan flagrante negligencia.
El segundo se refiere a la edición del texto, que, en este ejemplar de Akal que yo he adquirido, cuenta con un formato incómodo, poco manejable, con un tamaño de fuente que te obliga a dejarte la vista y, para más inri, sin apenas interlineado. Un ensayo de tal calidad pide a gritos una reedición en condiciones, que confío (soy demasiado optimista) en que llegue algún día a nuestras librerías físicas.
En fin, mi mesilla de noche añorará que el peso (real y simbólico) de Historia de la Literatura Gay. La Tradición Masculina descanse sobre su superficie, especialmente en estos últimos días del mes del Orgullo en el que, casualmente (a esto le llamo yo perfect timing), he concluido este largo viaje que creo que tanto he sabido aprovechar.

[Jee Koh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gregory Woods is the Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. In A History of Gay Literature, he does not so much as constitute an alternative literary tradition as show the centrality of gay writing (broadly defined) to "mainstream" literature. It is astonishing that so much of what we take as the canon is written by men who loved men. This book then, almost encyclopedic in its scope, is not just for the gay reader who seeks to understand his literary heritage; it is also for the straight reader who wants to discover the sources of his pleasure in this writing.

Like other gay critics and anthologists before him, Woods names names. Many of the names are by now familiar, but others--like T. S. Eliot--are not usually discussed in this context. That is one pleasure of this book: the re-orientation of a familiar waste land. Yet other names still attract debate. The chapter on Shakespeare homes in on the interpretation of Sonnet 20, often used by straight critics to argue that the speaker's interest in the young man is not sexual. Woods points out that, besides the boy's penis, "[m:]uch remains to be made love to." He also quotes the convincing argument raised by Rictor Norton against critics who claim the whole sequence is merely conventional:

The sonnet reveals a man who is nearly obsessed by the fact that his lover has a penis. By expressing this awareness on paper, he had violated all the decorum proper to the missives between a faithful friend and his alter ipse. I can find no other example in Renaissance literature, either in England or on the Continent, in which a gentleman even hints at, much less so blatantly, his friend's genital endowment and its relation to his own pleasure. The tacky dismissal of its usefulness to him raises an issue that should otherwise have gone unnoticed.

I confess it gives me a thrill to hear Woods call Shakespeare's lover his boyfriend.

Besides Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Marcel Proust get their own chapter. Other writers are discussed in chapters on their literary periods or movements, such as The Christian Middle Ages and The Harlem Renaissance. Thematic chapters lend variety to the chronological arrangement. I find the chapter on masturbation "From Solitary Vice to Circle Jerk" particularly exciting. There are chapters too on non-Western writers. I am in no position to judge the treatment of "Black African Poetry" but I think the chapter on Chinese and Japanese writers is too dependent on other specialists.

A poet himself, Woods also argues for the centrality of poetry to the gay literary tradition. His last chapter "Poetry and Paradox" tries to clear a space of difference for gay literature. He locates that difference in the use of paradox (Greek para and doxa, meaning contrary to public opinion). For authority, he refers to Cleanth Brooks who writes in The Well Wrought Urn (1949) that paradox is "the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry." If poetry is paradox, and gay literature is paradoxical, the argument goes, poetry must be an essential part of gay literature.

I am of course oversimplifying a nuanced argument, but reduced to a simpler form the argument appears to me to be at least problematic. The Brooks quotation suggests that all poetry, and not just gay poetry, uses paradox, and so the gay poet has no special claim to it. It also seems strange to me to rely on a New Critical conception of poetry, a conception that seems to me severely limited. Wilde, who appears as the first example, and the exemplar, is known more for his plays than his poetry. "Each man kills the thing he loves" may have a special gay meaning, but is hardly a gay idea.

It's a tricky issue, the gay difference. I am not even sure if there is such a difference, beyond the obvious difference of subject matter and theme. My feeling is that the deeper difference lies not so much between gay and straight writers, but between writers and the rest of society. There is something very queer about someone who retreats from fellow human beings to fiddle around with words.

[Aidan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is quite ambitious, in scope and depth, but I don't feel that the author quite grasps it all so well. He is not so lucid and his perspective is scattered all over the place, rather than a sensible whole. It's deficient in coherency. It's definitely quantity over quality.

And I find Woods extravagantly dense, so much that his point does not come through at all sometimes. He simply does not make sense. He's immersed in his own rambling most of the time. Often, it's not even clear whether the arguments he's making are a third party's (and he's just quoting them) or whether they are his own. It's inexcusable.

The book needs a lot of editing. It needs to be made clearer than it is. Its only worth, for now, is in the titles of gay works it provides.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

'It had become a truth almost universally acknowledged that a young man neither possessed of nor in want of a wife must, instead, be setting himself up to become the tragic victim of his own fate'.

[José M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Título original: A History of Gay Literature. The Male Tradition
Editorial: Akal Ediciones
Colección: Grandes temas
PE: 1998
PE en español: 2001
pp. 428
Lo leí de diciembre de 2012 al 2 de enero de 2013

El libro es un recorrido por lo que el autor llama la tradición gay (hombres gay, casi no se mencionan lesbianas), es decir, una serie de textos y listas de autores que los mismos gays y críticos gay reconocen como canónicos de su identidad; se basa en otros antologadores y estudiosos del tema para seguir su enfoque analítico y ya en materia resulta, más que una serie de reseñas sobre obras gay, en una lectura con esta perspectiva de las obras de cada época de la literatura; es decir, cómo leer o descubrir lo gay en la literatura universal, al menos así es hasta los capítulos finales en los que sí se aboca en la literatura que él llama poststonwell, es decir, la propia literatura gay.

El estudio si bien amplio, es bastante anglocéntrico, pues se estudian con mayor medida la literatura (y más exactamente la poesía, pues el autor además de académico es poeta) de Inglaterra y Estados Unidos y eventualmente de Francia e Italia, dejando a un lado las otras literaturas del mundo, salvo dos capítulos que dedica a la literatura oriental y a la africana respectivamente. Pero sí se lamenta que personajes claves como los españoles o portugueses no sean tratados con más detenimiento, y qué decir de los latinoamericanos de los cuales sólo menciona indirectamente al argentino Manuel Puig, y es muy parco con los cubanos que cita, si bien, sobresale Reinaldo Arenas, pero ningún colombiano, brasileño, chileno o mexicano es mencionado para su estudio.

No sé si se deba a la traducción de Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, pero da la sensación de que gran parte del texto se hace sobre el análisis de lo negativo de la visión gay en la literatura, siendo que los textos gay, antes de la literatura poststonwell, se relegan a los pies de página o a meras menciones. Tal vez sólo sea una impresión personal, surgida de la dinámica del análisis que mencioné y no de un acto homofóbico; en todo caso esto produce gran frustración durante casi las 350 páginas antes de entrar al tema de la liberación gay y su literatura; pese a todo en los momentos en que el análisis es más exultante del valor del arte gay, son momentos de verdadero gozo y dan ganas de leer inmediatamente la obra comentada.

El hecho de seguir un recorrido por épocas de la historia es factible, pero el análisis histórico se queda por debajo del literario, pues es como si el autor diera por hecho ciertas cuestiones jurídico-sociales, o socioreligiosas, o de cualquier otra índole que por mementos dejan al lector fuera de contexto; si bien, cuando hace un análisis detallado, este se vuelve hasta denso, por lo que el estudio yo la recomendaría para lectores especializados, que tenemos ciertas referencias, más allá de lo literario, para poder entender mucho mejor el libro. También, en ocasiones, la correlación entre imágenes y el texto queda un poco desfasada, pero también sirve para llenar ciertos huecos que el autor, supongo yo, da por hechos en el análisis.

Algunos de los asuntos que me parecieron destacados ya sea porque para mí representaron una novedad o bien porque permiten toda una serie de caminos para seguir investigando, son los relativos a la discusión que hace de los textos de Shakespeare, en los que su homoerotismo está inmerso en una serie de cuestiones nacionalistas que ponen en riesgo la heteronormatividad de toda Inglaterra y por tanto de toda la literatura anglosajona; también la presencia de la poesía elegiaca de origen pastoril, que fue antes que la novela, el medio ideal para expresar el homoerotismo entre varones; el descarte que hace de Oscar Wilde como ícono del arte gay, al afirmar que era mal poeta y hasta cierto punto un tímido para defender su propia identidad, pasa algo semejante con Marcel Proust; por otro lado, el análisis de poetas como W. H. Auden o Walt Whitman a los que el autor es tan afecto (al parecer desde sus estudios universitarios, según la biografía que puede hallar en su página web), y que siendo prestonwell son tan definitorios para la posterior explosión de la literatura gay; la discusión en torno a los textos de calidad frente a los textos afirmativos, y los riesgos de estos últimos, ya en la liberación gay, como una respuesta a la crítica homofóbica y la ´época del SIDA como un catalizador de los procesos de gestación de buena literatura; también, su conclusión en el último capítulo, acerca de la paradoja como recurso literario de la poética gay que es un lenguaje reapropiado para hablar y no callar ante las envestidas de la crítica homofóbica, conclusiones por otro lado, que hasta cierto punto conocía por el análisis de Antonio Marquet, acerca de los rasgos genéricos del arte gay. Sería bien interesante saber qué es lo que piensa de lo que ha dicho recientemente David Leavitt (al que reseña brevemente y que al parecer fue su compañero de estudios) respecto a que la etiqueta de escritor gay debe desaparecer, pues ante todo está el escritor como tal, una opinión que también comparte Woods, ya en 1998 cuando aparece el libro, pero que deja claro que también debe haber una militancia comprometida desde la literatura.

Aunque la obra es buena en general y comparto muchas veces el entusiasmo del autor sí me debe algo que no satisface por entero mis expectativas, pero fuera de ello, y en una segunda lectura que pretendo hacer, se convierte en una lista de temas, autores y obras por buscar y leer; en ese sentido es un perfecto texto puente que me llevará seguramente a muchas más lecturas. Para esto, la bibliografía cuenta con las referencias en español de los textos citados, un trabajo oportuno, que debemos agradecer al traductor o al editor.

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, and sometimes prone to less than useful digression, this book is nevertheless essential reading, especially for gay authors (know your history!). When reading, make sure to have your Amazon account open, because there are amazing finds and recommendations in every chapter. My own wish list grew by pages over the course of reading this book.
I'm not completely comfortable with Woods' collapsing boy-loving with contemporary gay identity after WWI, but I see the reasons he does so. I might also say that the level of detail per work in early chapters declines in later chapters until whole stacks of titles are barely summarized in the final chapters. Still, even with these drawbacks, this book is ambitious and useful.
Recommended.