It must be confessed that, since I fell into the habit of bringing my boyfriend along to book launches, where he proves a great favourite with publicity ladies, publishers have long thought that I would be absolutely fascinated to read a novel about homosexuality, or a history of homosexuality, and I am generally too polite to disenchant them. But, in the end, this is a mildly interesting social fact, among many others, and it takes more than most writers think to turn it into an interesting book.
Graham Robb, that excellent biographer of Victor Hugo, Balzac and Rimbaud, has written just such an interesting book, which is about as much as one can bear to hear about the subject. It is funny, enterprisingly researched, and undertaken with few apparent preconceptions. Best of all, it makes it absolutely clear that the subject here comprises the responses of heterosexuals and homosexuals to the homosexual condition, and not the condition itself.
For some reason, everyone has always been obsessed with finding causes for homosexuality, and Robb provides us with a splendid list. Lack of physical exercise, or on the other hand excessive riding of horses; too much meat-eating, or possibly anaemia; impotence or sexual overindulgence; plebeian brutishness or aristocratic refinement; too many available women leading to satiety or too few leading to lack of opportunity; lack of parental love or excess of same; celibacy or marriage; in the end, you wonder why everybody isn’t homosexual, so all-encompassing and unavoidable is the list of causes.
Homosexuality was not really defined until the later 19th century, and some theorists have suggested that it didn’t actually exist before it was named; that before the doctors gave it a label it was something which simply offered a series of possible sexual acts to anyone. There is more in this than Robb allows, and certainly some surprising people gave it a go. Flaubert had sex with a boy in Cairo, and Voltaire thought it worth trying, once: when his partner in joy suggested a repeat experiment, Voltaire politely turned him down, saying, ‘Once, a philosopher; twice, a sodomite.’
This philosophical motive gave some more committed practitioners a useful excuse. When Casanova walked in on Winckelmann, the German hellenist, lying naked on top of a handsome young man, Winckelmann explained that he was trying to enter the minds of the ancient heroes, and Casanova did not reply, ‘Yeah, right.’ The fact is that although sexual preferences were more fluid than they are now, there were certainly people who felt themselves entirely committed to same-sex relations. This book is about them.
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