HIDDEN FROM HISTORY? HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

Introduction: Homosexuality and History

The rise of Gay and Lesbian Studies in the early eighties was preceded and accompanied by a rising interest in what was basically seen as gay and lesbian history, i.e. the way in which people could express same-sex behaviour and feelings in history. Homosexuality in history was seen as a history of changing attitudes to an unchanging type of behaviour.

Books such as ‘Homosexuals in History'(Rowse 1977), ‘Homoseksualiteit in middeleeuws Europa’ (Homosexuality in medieval western Europe) (Kuster 1977) bear witness to this attitude. Concurrently the idea was developed that – just as in Gay and Lesbian Studies as a whole – there had been a conspiracy to make gays and lesbians in the past invisible only to wait for the kiss of the gay or lesbian historian to bring them back to life. This was true for the first amateur historians of the reform movements of the fifties, who wrote short biographies of ‘famous homosexuals in history’ to give the reform movement legitimation because people such as Plato and Shakespeare could not have been *that* wrong or morally depraved. This was especially true for early lesbian history, reflecting the long invisibility of lesbians as women and homosexuals (Cook 1979: ‘The Historical denial of lesbianism’). But in fact this sense of ‘reclaiming’ history never went out of fashion since, as recent (sub)titles as ‘Reclaiming Lesbians in History’ (Lesbian History Group 1989), ‘Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past’ show. This last was the subtitle of a compilation of articles on lesbian and gay history called Hidden from History (Duberman e.a. 1991).

But is homosexuality really hidden from history – or rather hidden in history? ‘Before it could become classified information, the love that dares not speak its name first of all had to have a name’ (Smith 1991: 12/13).

The emphasis on matters of legitimation is not strange, if one remembers that ever since E.H.Carr asked the question ‘What is History?’ (Carr 1961) it has been recognized that history has more to do with our own view of the society we live in at any particular time than with an exact knowledge of what has happened in the past. So, questions in history are usually questions of legitimation and support if sometimes hidden under the guise of interest in ‘what has happened’. This idea of contingency, linked to the fact that most historians are averse to ‘grand theories’ might seem to point in the direction of history as the pre-eminently post-modernist discipline, were it not that at the heart of historical method we find a scientific criticism of the information contained within and around the historical source material (known as ‘source criticism’). Therefore at the heart of any historical inquiry there are always specific data about the past which through asking specific questions and carefully considering sources, have become elevated to the special status of ‘facts’.

In the case of the history of homosexuality, the date 1869 is such a ‘fact’ – i.e. the year in which the term ‘homosexuality’ was used for the first time. But what did this ‘fact’ mean? Was it an accident of history, did it encode something – more or less exclusive same-sex acts – that had been going on for quite a long time (if not, in fact, forever?) or was this the beginning of a totally new phase in the history of sexuality, when sexual preference started being regarded as an inseparable part of personal identity? Behind this there is a basic philosophical/epistemologic problem, regarding the role naming a category plays in the existence of that category.

So, tracing the argument about the importance of the fact ‘homosexuality ‘ in this article two lines of inquiry will be followed: one will deal with the importance of the development of discourses about sexuality; and the second one will follow recent publications which historicize the body and sexual identity.

The article will finish by looking at some recent developments and the relationship (if any) between gay & lesbian and mainstream history. Overall, this article will concentrate on the history of European and North-American sexuality. This has to do with the fact that fundamentally, the history of homosexuality today is still the history of western homosexuality. It awaits a comprehensive overview of other sexualities and other cultures.

We will start out however, where lesbian and gay history itself started out, by looking at the role of lesbian and gay icons.

I From homosexuals in history to the history of homosexuality

Early gay and lesbian history was built up around the personal and sexual histories of individuals. These were deployed as figureheads in the legitimization of pre-supposedly early modern and antique forms of homosexuality. Some of these canonic figures were turned into gay and lesbian icons: through their life-histories they started living in the text, and by doing so created examples of gay and lesbian life-styles (Marks 1979). Sappho is an obvious example, but there are many more: Oscar Wilde, Nathalie Barney, Radclyffe Hall.

In her influential book Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick asks the question ‘Has there ever been a gay Socrates? … There have been dozens or hundreds of the most centrally canonic figures in what the monoculturalists are pleased to consider ‘our’ culture’ (Sedgwick 1990: 52).

Of course this is meant as a joke; but it is a very apt joke that points the finger at the crucial question: to ask who was homosexual in a period that had no word for homosexuality is pointless, while at the same time recognizing that the concept of modern homosexuality has eminently been shaped in and through the lives of these icons. Much published material on homosexuality is of a biographic nature and a lot of these biographies suggest that in contrast to earlier studies the hitherto ‘forgotten’ homosexual leanings of the protagonist are brought to the fore. This can lead to strange consequences: there is sometimes wild speculation regarding the supposed homosexual identity of people like Michelangelo, Schubert en Voltaire, to name but three examples. According to the authors, the function of this kind of biography has been of fulfilling feelings of personal hero worship (like Terry Castle did in The Apparitional lesbian on Marie Antoinette), or of reclaiming personal histories that had been heterosexualized, such as Elaine Miller on the relationship between Ellen Nussey and Charlotte Brontë (Lesbian History Group 1989: 29-55). Here, silence turns into speaking, but at the same time, the question can be asked, if this is all projection?

Precursors towards homosexuality?

In the early years of lesbian and gay historical research the question was often debated whether these ‘forgotten’ same-sex relationships should be regarded as precursors to 19th century homosexuality or not. This was especially the case in studies inspired by lesbian-feminist or cultural-feminist paradigms. An important role was reserved for (a-sexual) romantic friendships

among women which were regarded as the idealistic mode of lesbianism-before-the-fall in which sisterhood was more important than genital sex which was at that time viewed as a dirty masculine habit (e.g. Faderman 1981; Jeffreys 1989). Under this paradigm some early and important studies have been written, such as Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s inquiry into intense forms of friendship among american women in the early 19th century (Smith-Rosenberg 1975) and Adrienne Rich’s concept of the lesbian continuum (Rich 1980).

However, it has now become evident that the debate about the precursors is in fact a non-discussion, because it disguises the fact that there has been a genuine shift in important concepts concerning the organization of social and sexual life. We will return to this later after the consideration of some epistemological problems.

Epistemological problems

Historians have to face the problem that the subject of homosexuality does not fit as regards content and source analysis in the basically 19th century academization of their discipline. Traditionally the aim of history was to describe ‘how it really was’. There was no explicit ’theory of history’, but a rather rigid methodology of source criticism was developed together with an epistemology based along more or less positivist lines. In the early 20th century this led to a parcellation of the subject in different spheres of interest, but on the whole history was mostly viewed as political history. The French Annales school of (social) historians changed this in the early fifties by focusing on the integration of different styles/subjects of history (socio-economic, different time trends) with non-traditional subjects of inquiry, such as social groups that among other things had in common that they either could not or only with difficulty be found within classical source material and needed other methods of analysis. The Annales concentrated on the study of ‘lived experience’, the study of daily life. This opened the way to research into various kinds of subject outside the dominant discourse, such as the history of mentalities, family history, sexuality. Traditional source criticism was clearly not sufficient for the examination of mentalities and identities. Other sources and methods of analysis were needed. These were partly be found in sociology, although this in itself created another problem, as historians in general are usually not very interested in ‘grand theories’ as they think these will contaminate the view on their sources. By a curious twist of fortune the rise of social constructivism (not in itself an historical theory) which regarded homosexuality as the result of a social and historical process lead not only to extensive new research from this new angle but also contributed greatly to theory building on the conceptualization of homosexuality and sexuality in general.

Essentialism and social constructionism

Social constructionism in the study of sexuality arose at the end of the sixties out of two theoretical streams: American symbolic interactionism and French structuralism. Both concern themselves with the relation between the individual and society, social forces and ‘lived experience’. There are also differences between British constructionism, as embodied by McIntosh (1968), Plummer (1981; 1994) and Weeks (1981) and French constructionism, where in the field of sexuality Foucault is the most important writer. Both focus on the late 19th century as the period in which modern homosexuality was first conceptualized.

Foucault wrote what he called an ‘archaeology of the present’. For Foucault, sexuality is a construct of human imagination, a cultural artefact that changes with time. ‘Knowledge’ involves

talking about sexuality to other people and the subsequent effect of this talking Foucault designates as ‘Power’. By using the method of deconstructing different discourses he hoped to uncover those power structures that had served to regulate human behaviour and led at the end of the 19th century to the search for the desire to know the ’truth about sexuality’ (Scientia Sexualis). One of the methods individuals could use to gain this truth was by self-examination into what they saw as their personal identity and subsequent confession.

Weeks uses an historical approach that pays attention to the description of the social conditions under which homosexuality as a category came into existence and its construction as the unification of disparate experiences. The relation of this categorisation to other socio-sexual categorizations, and the relationship to certain historical circumstances that have been created by this are important roads of enquiry (Weeks 1981: 81). Weeks also sees the late 19th century as the formation period for the ‘personal identity’ conception of homosexuality.

The introduction of social constructionism led to fierce debates between the social constructionists and those who had maintained that there had ‘always’ been homosexuals in history. These were suddenly labelled ‘essentialists’ although several writers remarked on the fact that self-confessed essentialists were hard to find. Part of this fierce debate was of a personal nature and reflected old enmities that had little to do with academic debate. Philosophically, the essentialist/constructionist debate can be seen as a renewed version of the medieval ‘question of universals’, that is, whether groups of individual beings are intrinsically similar because they can be named by an abstract term common to all, or whether we attribute each individual to a group because they share any particular amount of characteristics which we have defined ourselves. In other words: is a table a table because of some inherent ’tableness’ or do we call it a table because it has four legs and a tabletop?

Although essentialists were often defamed by constructionists for being uneducated country hicks, within the essentialist grouping there was at least one very respected historian – John Boswell, whose study of sexuality in antiquity led him to believe there was something like a gay consciousness in the Roman period (Boswell 1980). According to Boswell constructionists only attack essentialists to further their own stance, disregarding the fact that there are some real problems, summarized in the question whether society is itself responding to sexual phenomena that are generic to humans and are not created by social structures. He then names four arguments against constructionism: philosophical (does an abstract ever relate to reality?); semantic (does the fact that the Romans had no word for ‘religion’ mean that they did not have any?); political (everybody uses generalisations for political reasons); empirical (in the facts of history itself).

After well over 15 years of debate on the essentialist/constructionist debate we can see that the constructionist paradigm has largely carried the day, at least within intellectual circles, though not as part of ‘popular knowledge’ among the public, and only reluctantly by parts of the political gay movement. For both public and movement, it apparently is safer to stress your status as an essential group to which members have no choice in belonging. If sexual identity is fixed, it poses no threat to seduction by older people. Vance (1991) comments on what she calls ’the failure to make a distinction between politically expedient ways of framing an argument and more complex descriptions of social relations.’ Interestingly enough in the US, used to ethnic minority models, essentialist notions are still used as argument against sexual voluntarism – here the old Hirschfeld argument to grant homosexual rights because homosexuals cannot help being this way still holds true (cf Schulman 1994, 16 who mentions a then recent New York Times Poll that showed that more people would be willing to support gay rights if they believed that gay people genetically

could not help their orientation; and goes on to comment that intrinsic to this approach is the insistence that heterosexuality is obviously superior and preferable and homosexuality is only acceptable if biologically determined and therefore beyond the free will of the practitioner).

The evidence of experience

According to Foucault, every culture has its own distinctive ways of putting sex into discourse – in his view sexuality cannot exist apart from being talked about. As we saw, the trouble with the gay icons was that they were silent – but we find also methodological problems with those who are speaking. An argument that is often used against constructionism is that people when talking about their (sexual) identities often are convinced that they were ‘born that way’, and therefore refute the idea that there could be such a thing as constructionism. Joan Scott calls this ’the evidence of experience’. She questions this evidence of experience especially when documenting life-stories of non-dominant groups. Breaking the silence meant that ever more life stories of gays and lesbians were documented, but all of those stories tell their own kind of truth and none of them is itself ’the truth’. The only way to deal with these stories is by comparing them to other narratives. Scott argues against accepting these stories simply at face value: the evidence of experience is not enough. By staying within the epistemological framework of orthodox history questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place are left aside. It is not individuals that have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience (Scott 1991).

The question of knowledge

The discussion about experience can also be regarded as a discussion concerning ‘knowledge’. Whereas the English only has the word ‘knowledge’ the French has two – ‘connaissance’ and ‘savoir’ (Smith 1991: 13). Whereas ‘connaissance’ refers to knowledge through experience, ‘savoir’ – the word used by Foucault – refers to learning, erudition, ideas. It is in this sense that ‘knowledge’ plays a role in discussions on the nature of the development of the lesbian sexual role in particular. Exactly because lesbianism (and female sexuality in general) has been so much more invisible than male sexuality, the existence of specific literary sources has been used as evidence that women had knowledge of same-sex sexuality. Among these sources we find literature written by men about explicit lesbian activities among distinct groups of women (mostly of a pornographic or adventurous nature, cf. Donoghue 1993) and coded poems written by women (Van Gemert 1995). This ‘knowledge’ has been constructed as ’transgressive’, as it pictured women in an active role in sexual play, and authors such as Donoghue and Van Gemert stressed this transgressiveness as a sure sign of the existence of other sexual heterodoxies such as lesbianism.

It remains to be seen whether this view is correct. It could be an a-historic argument, the result of Victorian projection: ever since Victorian times women were supposed to ’think about England’ rather than about sex and that therefore the simple fact that women could acquire some form of knowledge about sexuality was supposed to be in itself highly transgressive. This is the critique taken by Andreadis (1996). Yet, she suggests a connection between the development of sexual knowledge as a printed verbal construct with the increasing availability of vernacular print cultures, which is in itself associated with class and literacy.’

Class certainly seems to have played an important role. Most of the written histories of sex between women are situated within the lower classes, as well as (perhaps not incidentally) most of the cases involving females that went to court (Van der Meer 1984). This has less to do with transgressiveness as with the manner in which the sexuality of the lower classes was constructed in the 17th and 18th century.

Kraakman warns against the tendency to regard 18th century erotic fiction as subversive and transgressive by nature. ‘Transgression of political, social and discursive norms can go very well together with the reendorsement of existing sex-roles – how else can we explain the sharp odour of misogyny and sodomophobia that rises from this literature?’ At the same time, she recognises female curiosity in the 18th century as the source of sexual curiosity which in itself leads to both learning and knowledge through experience (Kraakman 1997:140 ff.). This again takes us to definitions of sexuality that are part of a changing discours in which elements of class and situation of knowledge play important roles.

II The development of sexuality

Homosexuality as we see it today pre-supposes not only the concept of personal sexual identity but also the notion that gender plays an important role in the development of sexual identity. Gender and sexual identities seem to have developed relatively recent.
The question we now have to turn to is about sexual object choice in the past and the ways in which this is structured socio-sexually. At which particular point in time was the concept of sexual identity formed and which elements played a role in that? (e.g. age, class, gender). How was same-sex behaviour regarded? Can or should people who engaged in same-sex behaviour be seen as precursors towards modern homosexuality? At which point in time became gender impor- tant and why?

Halperin, making a distinction between biological sex and cultural sexuality, states ‘Sex has no history’. ‘Sex refers to the erogenous capacities and genital functions of the human body. Sex, so defined is a natural fact (…and) lies outside history and culture’ (Halperin 1990, intro). Sexuality on the contrary, is a cultural production: it represents the appropriation of the human body and of its physiological capacities by an ideological discourse’. This statement was in fact already made by Padgug in the late seventies: ‘In the pre-bourgeois world sexuality was a group of acts and institutions not necessarily linked to one another. Each group of sexual acts was connected directly or indirectly – that is, formed part of – institutions and thought patterns which we tend to view as political, economic, or social in nature, and the connections cut across our idea of sexuali- ty as a thing, detachable from other things, and as a separate sphere of existence’ (Padgug 1989: 62).

Sexuality does have a history, but according to Halperin not a very long one (Halperin 1989). In classical antiquity there was as yet no sense a) of the autonomy of sexuality as autonomous sphere of existence and b) the function of sexuality as a principle of individuation in human natures. Foucault had already remarked on the fact that sexuality in antiquity had been largely an ethical concern. Recent studies of sexual behaviour in classical antiquity conform that although there was same sex behaviour, the main distinction in sex was between sexual behaviour of the free adult male versus the rest of the population. Penetration was the main sexual act, but as long as the free male was the perpetrator the passive partner was not really relevant: the sort of partner he had sex with did not constitute part of his identity, and could equally be a woman, a slave or a young boy (Halperin 1989; Winkler 1990).

The study on (homo)sexuality in the middle ages lags behind these new perspectives. This is partly because there have been very few recent studies on the subject, partly because the most influential author on the middle ages, John Boswell, advocated a more essentialist view of

homosexuality, supposing a gay subculture as early as the twelfth century (Boswell 1980). His study addressed the controversial influence of the christian church in the persecution of gay people. The source material on the medieval period is of a legal nature, focusing on sodomy and other forms of same sex behaviour (Pavan 1980; Trexler 1981), and it is probably this kind of material that leads some (like Goodich 1979) to the conclusion that effeminacy and the exclusive preference of men for other men so prevalent in Italian renaissance sources were indeed signs of a gay consciousness. The relationship between two forms of discourse is the source of this confusion: on the one hand the legal discourse, based on the church view of homosexuality as a sin against the world order; on the other hand apparently rather profuse ‘lived experience’ coupled to moral panic on the decadence of the higher classes and fear of extinction. The importance of moral precepts embedded in the late medieval and early renaissance worldviews based on the balance of the god-given universe cannot be emphasized too much. Within this moral universe, practising homosexual behaviour became another form of heterodoxy, such as sorcery, religious heresy, treason; a part of the general depravity to which all mankind is subject – dangerous to the continuing existence of the universe as such and therefore to be condemned, but not as a distinct social role as such (Bredbeck 1991). This ties in with studies that describe the main social division people recognized in sexual behaviour as that between those who were ‘honest’ (i.e. modest, chaste) and those who were ‘dishonest’ (lecherous and lustful in all matters of life) (Van der Pol 1996).

The Renaissance as period of transition

In her groundbreaking article on social constructionism, Mary McIntosh pointed out that the transition to what she called the homosexual role had taken place around 1700. As a sociologist she had no means to prove this at that time, but her conjecture led to a great number of impressive studies focusing around the transitional period 1600-1700 in England. Discourses around sexuality and same-sex relationships at the start of this century are totally dissimilar to those at the end of the century. The first of those studies was by Alan Bray, who studied the development of the homosexual role in the context of the great social changes in this period (Bray 1982). He started by positioning homosexuality in the mental universe and in the structure of society, deciding that at the very least homosexuality was the solution to a fit the social needs caused by the universal practice of late marriage. There was a contradiction in the fact that it existed on a large scale despite medieval social attitudes against it. He could not solve this contradiction – this challenge was taken on by literary historians, such as Smith. Smith, following a Foucauldian perspective, set out to investigate not just which was prohibited, but what was actively homo-eroticized, in order to trace ‘savoir’ in the 17th century – and found ‘a startling ambiguity’. There is a disparity between the extreme punishments prescribed by law and the almost positive valuation of homo-erotic desire in the visual arts, in literature and in the political power structure. So, in order to understand renaissance ‘scripts of sexual desire’ we must discriminate among various discourses about homosexuality: legal, moral, medical and poetic. Of these the poetic is the most important, as it tells us about homosexual desire. Smith then describes six (classical) poetic stories (which he calls ‘myths’) of desire. Each of those represents a different intersection of structures of ideology with structures of power, and a different site of socio-sexual experience. This ends with an eroticized form of male bonding specific to the culture of early modern England, as demonstrated within Shakespeare’s sonnets (Smith 1991).

The development of gendered sexuality

Smith’s study has shown a possible way in which specific forms of male desire could turn into a specific preference for same-sex sexualities rather than a possible form of behaviour. We still need to analyze the historical process by which this was taken further during the following century, the 18th. This started with an important shift in the organization of sexuality, from hierarchical to gender based relations.

This shift entailed several steps: first of all an essential difference between men and women had to be created which had to become enscribed in the soul as well as in the body. The result of this process was the recognition that the soul and the emotions were gendered. Men and women were supposed to be and feel differently. The existing division of humanity into those who were ‘honest’ and those who were ‘dishonest’ was ever more often explained in terms of gender than in terms of class. ‘Honest’ people could control themselves, did therefore not care much about sexuality, whereas ‘dishonest’ people were perceived to be pre-occupied with all sorts of dishonest behaviour, including sexual behaviour. ‘Dishonesty’ became connected to lasciviousness, which was regarded as a female characteristic. Women were supposed not to be able to control themselves, whereas for men sobriety and moderation were ideal traits.

In this way the gendered soul became embodied in a gendered body. The new male and female identities were realized within different kinds of discourse which are often contradictory. Masculinity is moulded within philosophical and religious discourses about identity in which ’the soul’, ’the Self’ are described as ‘human’, that is, ‘male’; femininity is described in medical, pedagogical and literary discourse, that only serve to demonstrate derived identities within the private sphere.

Finally the development of the theory of the Self at the end of the 18th century liberalized the individuality of emotions. Releasing the reproductive role of the family left room for the introduction of passion and friendship (cf for a more general background to this Armstrong 1987; Nussbaum 1989).

A pre-requisite to perceive gender differences is to recognize differences between the sexes in general. This remark might look facetious, but as Thomas Laqueur (1990) has shown, it was only during the 18th century that physical differences between men and women were gaining recognition as of crucial importance. Prior to that period the difference between the sexes was recognized as one of degree rather than of kind: there was only one sex with two genders, the ideal male and the lesser female. During the 18th century Laqueur describes a radical shift from this ‘one sex’ system to a ’two sex’ system, in which the anatomical differences between men and women were recognized as significators of important physical and emotional differences as well. Under the ‘one-sex’ system only one sex and two genders are recognized, whereas under the two-sex system there are two distinct sexes and as much as four genders (Trumbach 1994). In the end the body itself becomes the bearer of different messages through which the constructed differences between men and women are understood to be the result of natural differences. For women the formation of the two-sex system had the most consequences, as under the ‘one sex system’ males formed the universal human standard.

The new ideas about the differences between the sexes led to an increasing interest in the dynamics of sexual relationships between the sexes, to the detriment of the antique systems of attraction through hierarchical differences. There is a long period of transition, which takes place all through the 18th century and through a large part of the 19th. In the sexual vacuum created by this transition, gay and lesbian identities based on inversion were being formed, although there was probably a time gap of close to a century between the formation of gay and of lesbian

identities.

Male homosexual identities were formed first. When there was as yet no fixed homosexual role, men who had sex with other men also had sex with women, albeit often with women years older than they themselves were. Van der Meer (1995) found in his Dutch court-material of the 18th and 19th century evidence of the process by which these sexual acts with other males became tied in to gendered emotions. According to him, the rise of modernism and especially of the individual at the end of the 17e century was the main agent through which desires became gender-related. Within the old hierarchical system desires were in the first place of a purely physical nature. There was room for homosexual behaviour that might not have been exclusive, but was regarded as ‘habitual’. As homosexual behaviour was equated with excessive sexuality these desires were designated as ‘female’. Van der Meer sees discourse and lived experience (which he calls social reality) drift further apart after the persecutions of sodomites in the Dutch republic in the years after 1730. The persecutions forced people to face their own feelings and must have played an important part in fixing these feelings. Regarding these feelings as ‘feminine’ became connected to pre-scientific notions about influences on the unborn child, that led them to start seeing their ‘female’ behaviour as a sign of innateness. According to Van der Meer these early sodomite subcultures are definite precursors of modern homosexuality.

This connection between unlicensed sexuality and femininity seems to have played a crucial role in the development of homosexuality, that became obvious once these ascribed gender roles became written on the body.

The change in thought that led to homosexual men being regarded as ‘effeminate’ cannot by definition have been the same for women. Trumbach (1994) had already surmised that there had been a gap of at least 75 years between the formation of male and female homosexual identities, although he placed this gap earlier in the 18th century, instead of (as now seems more likely) at the end of the 18th century and the early part of the 19th century. For most of this period, women appear to stay out of the medical and psychiatrical discourses abound sexual identities that dominate most of the 19th century (Mak 1996).

In the development of ideas about the sexuality of women class played an important role. As we have seen the old ideas about honesty and dishonesty showed many undertones of classism and sexism. Those women in which both elements were united – working class girls and prostitutes in particular – were among the first to be described as having sexual relations with other women. On the other end of the scale we find the same suppositions about upper class women, based in the development of sexual knowledge through the Enlightenment and a general ‘don’t give a damn’ attitude (Trumbach 1984, Donoghue 1993, Kraakman 1997). At the same time we witness the apogee of the development of the middle-class woman, with her soft female soul and gentle habits. In the person of the middle class woman old notions of honesty developed seamless into the bourgeois ideal of sexlessness (with noted unfortunate Victorian consequences). Under the aegis of honest bourgeois enlightenment we can place such former lesbian icons as the Dutch writer-couple Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken, as well as countless other studious and literary couples and women who engaged in what later came to be known as ‘Boston marriages’ (Smith-Rosenberg 1975, Faderman 1981, Everard 1994).

In this system of gentility women who dress up as men (Dekker & Van de Pol 1989) can only create confusion by undermining limits that are becoming ever more fixed. At first all they are charged with is fraud, not homosexuality (Mak 1996). Within a one-sex system this is easily

explained: sex is not yet an identity, only a status. According to Mak, this status is proclaimed through actions and not yet through words. But this changes through the 19th century. As the result of the introduction of the two-sex system, doctors are now increasingly of the opinion that everybody should have ‘a true sex’. Gender can be explained through embodied sexed characteristics and thus sexual identity is formed. The intervention of the sexologists at the end of the 19th century has the result that women are now supposed to declare their ’true histories’ within the narrow definitions of the medical discourse. Masculine behaviour is seen as the result of the lack of femineity, rather than as a possible mode of behaviour. In this manner inversion – the reversal of the sex-role – in women is linked to (homo)sexuality. From this time on there is a lesbian role, linked to masculinity. The process ends with the internalization by some women of this role, as is witnessed by the publication in 1901 in one of the Jahrbücher für sexuelle zwischenstufen of the autobiography of a lesbian, E.Krause, under the title ‘Die Wahrheit über Mich’ (The Truth about Me).

The homosexual and lesbian role has gained a narrative.

III The 20th century

Consolidation

I have given attention to the developments in the 17th and 18th centuries out of proportion to the actual number of studies on this subject, because it seems to me that this period is at present on the cutting edge of the development of the study of homosexuality in history. This has not always been the case however, and some historians still maintain that the end of the 19th century is the period to look for the conceptualization of homosexuality. These studies emphasize the importance of the intervention of the sexologists, the ‘medicalisation of homosexuality’, following Foucault’s observation that modern homo- and heterosexual identities were only formed through the development by the medical profession of a ‘scientia sexualis’ in which ’the wish to know’ led to confess the ’truth about one’s sexuality’ (Foucault 1976; Hekma 1987, Weeks 1981). Weeks, interested in the intricacies of late-Victorian society also concentrated his argument on the final part of the 19th century (Weeks 1977). He focuses around 1890 as ’the moment of the solidification of that binary opposition between ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality’. Weeks, working ‘on historical questions through the reading of literature, reading literary texts with the grain of contemporary historical knowledge’ saw a sense of the historicity and power of our sexual definitions. He found no order, but conflict and disorder, at least suggesting that the process did not run along a clearly defined one-way track.

One example to illustrate this is the law-suit against Oscar Wilde, which probably did more to educate people about the interconnections between dandies, inverts and homosexuals in England around the turn of the century than the whole abstract discussion on the introduction of the Labouchère act in 1885 (Bristow 1995). After all, Queensberry did accuse Wilde of posing as a sodomite rather than being one!

The separate steps towards the process of medicalisation have been documented closely (a.o. Hacker 1987, Kennedy 1990, Lautmann 1993, Steakley 1975). The process of legal punishment and liberation that went hand in hand with this has also been described (eg Hütter 1992). Not yet fully documented are the interrelationships between the development of homosexuality and the process of nationalism, imperialism and its concomitant attempts at purity. Nationalist and imperialist nations such as Germany and Britain attached great value to the maintenance of what they defined as ‘healthy (hetero)sexuality’ as a moral precept that would validate their claims to

dominate countries in Africa and Asia. The ‘othering’ that was the result of this led to the equalization of being non-white with being non-heterosexual and therefore perverse ((eg Lautmann 1984, Mosse 1985; see also Gert Hekma’s contribution to this book). Some of this history is very confusing, as it demonstrates that there were uneasy alliances both between feminism and right-wing anti-sexual movements (putting to use their particular versions of ‘femininity’ in trying to curb a more free expression of sexuality by prohibitions through the law) and between early male bonding societies and early fascism (in celebrating masculine values).

Between 1890-1914 the final phase of the conceptualization of the modern homosexual was completed. Foucault pointed to the vicious circle that was the consequence of this process of conceptualization: as even more people started to recognize themselves under the label homosexuality, more people became aware of the existence of homosexuality. This in itself provoked a repressive reaction from the authorities. An emancipation movement started, which made homosexuality more visible and public and attracted more and more people. It is from this point of view of oppression and liberation that the remarkable history of the start of the emancipation movement in the 20th century has been described.

The company of others like oneself

To the notion that there now was an ‘official’ homosexual identity some dissident voices have to be noted. One of them is Lillian Faderman’s who claims that the potentially sexual and therefore dangerously transgressive nature of female relationships was only recognized after the writing of the sexologists which she found stigmatizing. In the United States the turn towards more pathologizing discourses only happened after 1928 (Faderman 1986). Attention has been paid to the conceptualization of other forms of relationships that were not sexual (among women: Rupp 1989) or not overtly homosexual among men (Chauncey 1994). In his study of New York, Chauncey found at the beginning of the century differences between the gay person and his partner based on the perceived female behaviour of the gay person and the masculine image/ behaviour of the partner, who did not lose his heterosexual status. According to Chauncey adaptation was the important ability to move between different personas and different lives. It was not so much Coming out as such, as Coming out into the gay world. In this world men were not divided into ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’. This is a recent distinction, that was not made in working-class culture. Men were labelled ‘queer’ if they took over the gender role of women; the man who responded to this was not considered abnormal so long he abided by masculine gender conventions. This changed by an uneven process between the thirties and the fifties, marked by class and ethnic differences (Chauncey 1994). This is masculine behaviour reminiscent of the old hierarchical system. It also reminds us of the well-documented behaviour of upper-middle class British writers such as Isherwood, Auden, Forster and Ackerley who only felt sexually attracted to young working-class boys. This attraction was based on availability, erotized class and therefore power. The difference between the ‘invert’ or core-homosexual and the masculine (rent) boy was maintained by the existing social relationships as well as by psychological discourse on inverted behaviour and only disappeared under the influence of sexual liberation in the 60s and 70s, that led to people regarding (sexual) relationships as being primarily models of equality.

At the end of the 19th century homosexual men and women developed their own forms of organization. This process was helped along by increasing urbanization within western Europe and the United States which created both the space and the people for this. City air again meant freedom. In cities such as New York, Berlin, Paris and to a lesser extent London men and women

met under various disguises and formed subcultures (eg Katz 1983, Chauncey 1994, Berlin-Museum 1984), first in Berlin in the 1880s.
There have been numerous studies on the development and habits within subcultures, in particular in relation to the development of subcultural identities. These subcultures are characterized by specific locales, norms and values. Usually but not always these have been sex-segregated (Benstock 1987, Kennedy & Davis 1993, Newton 1994, Casselaer 1986, Hamer 1996, Schuyf 1994, to name but a few).

Local knowledge was needed to be able to make same-sexual contacts. This was in particular true for smaller towns where we do not find an extensive subculture until the late 1970s. In many towns the local sexual infrastructure was limited to cruising areas only available for men (cf Koenders 1996 for provincial towns in the Netherlands and Nielssen 1995 for the town of Götenburg in Sweden).

The history of persecution of homosexuality during the Second World War can in part be seen as a disruption of the development of lesbian and gay subcultures in the western world. It attracted an early form of oral history and eye-witness accounts (Heger 1972, Plant 1986), then original source material got located and could be published (Jellonek 1990, Grau 1993). These studies led to the conclusion that mainly male homosexuality within the original German Reich was persecuted, especially in the years between the Nazi power take-over and the beginning of the War. According to Nazi ideology, gay men could be re-educated through hard labour, and so they were put into labour-camps. Although the many thousands that were arrested were not put into proper extermination camps, a disproportionate number of them died as they were the lowest in the pecking order of the camp and had no protectors (see Martin Sherman’s play Bent for a moving literary representation of this). Schoppmann (1991) wrote about the ‘invisible’ history of lesbians who did not wear a pink triangle because lesbian sexuality was not persecuted. Careful consideration of the sources also led Koenders (1996) to the conclusion that there had not been an extensive persecution of homosexuals outside Germany proper unless German soldiers were actively involved. A number of Dutch homosexuals were active in the resistance and this even might have led to the kernels of a post-war political movement.

Interestingly enough in the United States bringing together large numbers of young people in the army led to a heightened gay and lesbian consciousness (Berubé 1990) that despite a fierce backlash in the fifties, eventually led to the formation of the modern lesbian and gay movement after the war (Altman 1983, d’Emilio 1983).

Countering the taboo: Political and Emancipation History in the 20th century

With the conceptualization of the modern homosexual complete by the end of the First World War the discourse on homosexuality takes on a new dimension, that of the emancipation movement. The early emancipation movements made use of a particular kind of legitimizing discourse, that was based on a mixture of arguments taken from the natural sciences, the law and (literary) history. This can be seen almost from the beginning of the movements at the end of the 19th century. In reaction to legal pressures on the emerging homosexual identities emancipation movements were founded in Germany as early as 1897 (Wissenschaftlich Humanitares Komitee in Germany). Its Dutch counterpart NWHK was founded in 1911 (Tielman 1982). There is a remarkable unity in goals and organizational forms among these early movements. Hirschfeld’s adagium per scientia at justitia seems to have been adopted as their device: by producing ‘scientific evidence’ on the nature and manifestations of homosexuality they hoped to change the

public opinion and contravene the increasingly hostile measures of the authorities. This is also true for the reform movements that were founded after the Second World War (Adam 1987; Adam, Duyvendak and Krouwel 1998). These movements had to create a delicate balance between internal mobilization of the – mainly male – members and keeping up serious appearances externally, in order to be accepted by the heterosexual majority. With this, we have strayed into the realm of political history. (See for further discussion on this subject the article by Duyvendak and Krouwel in this volume).

Coda

Undoubtedly the development and ideas of lesbian and gay history has made a great contribution towards thinking about sexuality in the past. Yet at the same time it is striking that it took a long time before the influence of these ideas was felt within mainstream history – let alone the general public. One does not have to look far in order to find a reason for this – gay and lesbian studies are methodologically and ideologically suspect in many academic circles (see the Introduction to this Volume) and the message they carry can be threatening to the male heterosexual world order, which is based on the tenet that heterosexuality is ‘natural’. Also, many Foucauldian and post-modern studies are written in the kind of dense argot, that make them difficult to follow to those who are not experts. The personal, and especially the sexual, is still not regarded as a subject fit for research, well, perhaps fit for women’s history, something that has no status.

But things are slowly changing. There have been some efforts by gay and lesbian historians to write more general overviews of sexual history – such as Weeks 1981, d’Emilio & Freedman 1988.
Well over fifteen years after his death Foucault is finally making some imprint on mainstream history, although this is mostly on studies that deal with the history of culture of literary history. Within the postmodern paradigm recognition has been gained that identity is diverse and that it is constituted not in a uniform process, but is subject to class, gender and ethnic difference.

The Dutch culture historian Frijhoff recently summed up the change in perspective initiated in the study of ‘love’ (as this was called) as a language of culture and forms rather than something fit for anecdote. Sex has now become a fully fledged object of cultural history. The historization of gender and the body and the introduction in history of concepts such as honour and friendship can fully be put on the account of new studies starting out from gay and lesbian studies, although Frijhoff forgot to mention this last attribution (Frijhoff 1998).

We can add to that new methodological inroads such as the introduction of the historization of mentalities – in particular the historicity of the psyche – and the creative use of new types of sources in history, such as oral history, which although in itself not a lesbian and gay studies ‘invention’ has been widely used (Vacha 1985, Marcus 1995, Cant & Hemmings 1988, Kokula 1986, Newton 1994). No longer are these regarded as simple statements of facts but rather as narratives that can help deconstruct becoming (homo) sexual. ‘Telling sexual stories’ (Plummer 1994) is a sign of modernity, of gaining sexual citizenship. New narrative interpretations help along the way to solving the contradiction between theory, discourse and lived experience. It shows the space people created for themselves in countering dominant discourse and helps to get a way out of the dichotomy between dominance and submission (Marcus 1995).

So are there new directions to be found? The outline which I have sketched of the development of the homosexual role has to be fleshed out – in particular for the earlier part of the 19th century and in conjunction with the development of concepts as ‘passion’ ‘friendship’, ‘soul’ and ‘self’. This in itself could lead the way to make new inquiries into the middle ages. It might look as if this takes us away from homosexuality per se, but it leads us into new and exiting worlds.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my co-editors (Jan-Willem Duyvendak, Theo Sandfort and Jeffrey Weeks) and Geertje Mak for their careful comments on this article.

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Judith Schuyf

HIDDEN FROM HISTORY? HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES

I From homosexuals in history to the history of homosexuality

Epistemological problems

The evidence of experience

The question of knowledge

II The development of sexuality

III The 20th century

LITERATURE