Gay tittle-tattle

The Comintern was the name given to the international communist network in the Soviet era, advancing the cause wherever it could. The ‘Homintern’, a wry play on that, was first coined at Oxford by Maurice Bowra and gladly passed on by Cyril Connolly, Auden and others, inferring an international homosexual network of mutual interest and support. Gregory Woods, in his very first sentence, defines it thus: ‘The Homintern is the international presence of lesbians and gay men in modern life.’ A few pages later he says: ‘There was no such thing as the “Homintern”.’ So which is it to be? And what does Woods mean by ‘modern life’? The opening chapter, which is a suave yet bracing demolition of homophobia, leads one to suppose that these vital questions will in due course be answered.

But the next few hundred pages merely collate writers and artists who happened to be gay. Most of them are from the late-19th to the mid-20th century. There is no doubt that the cultural vanguard, from Oscar Wilde onwards, has included a very large number of gay and bisexual people, and not only in Europe and America. Gide, Proust, Cocteau, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Strachey, Auden, Isherwood, Thomas Mann, Pessoa, Cavafy, Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Aragon, Jean Genet, Lorca, Pasolini, Fassbinder, Mishima, Patrick White, Francis Bacon, Benjamin Britten, Aaron Copland, John Cage… one could go on and on. And Gregory Woods does, presenting a hectic parade of major and minor figures, in what amounts to a gay gazetteer divided into geographical regions, supported by literary references and social tittle-tattle.

Much of this is fascinating if you don’t already know it. But most of it is already well-covered in a host of candid biographies, as well as in Woods’s own A History of Gay Literature.