I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but I have been spending the last couple of weeks getting ready for Gay History Month, which we celebrate in October each year.
- I've taken out all my CDs and old records of music by Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber and (a personal favorite) the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski and put them next to the CD player for easy access. And I went through the program guide for the local classical music stations and marked the pieces by other gay composers.
- I dug out that dauntingly long, definitive biography of Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann that I have been meaning to read for years and put it beside my big leather easy chair.
- I pulled my copy of Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy from the bookshelf and put it on my nightstand so each evening before going to sleep I can re-read a few of Cavafy's surprisingly frank and level-headed descriptions of street cruising, man-watching, love and loss in early 20th century Alexandria, Egypt.
- I made a short list of the buildings designed by architect Louis Sullivan that I want to make a point of going to see. And I want to make a special effort to spend some time just sitting and looking around in Ralph Adams Cram's neo-Gothic Fourth Presbyterian Church on Michigan Avenue, trying to figure out what makes it so remarkable.
- I went to the post office and bought a bunch of the new stamps honoring composer Samuel Barber that the U.S. Postal Service issued Sept. 13, just in the nick of time for Gay History Month.
- Luckily for me Henry Gerber, founder of the first American gay advocacy organization in the United States (the Society for Human Rights founded in 1924), lived here in Chicago at 1710 N. Crilly Court, a street just one block long just west of Wells St. in the Old Town area. I've never actually gone to look at that site, so I shall put on a coat and tie and make a small pilgrimage to honor our venerable ancestor.
As one of the small band who were early proponents of the idea of a Gay History Month way back in 1994, I admit that my celebration may be a little more thoroughgoing than other people's, maybe even obsessive. But the point is, anyone could easily do one or two of these things, or something similar. I myself may punk out on a few of these (Ellmann's book does look pretty long), but the opportunities exist.
Though the idea of a Gay History Month is less than four years old, the idea of gay history itself has been around quite some time.
Perhaps the earliest form of gay history was the list of famous homosexuals.
"The list," as we could call it, appears even in classical times. It was used by gay writers or characters seeking to offer a justification or precedent for their sexuality. One notable example is in the 2nd century Greek writer Athenaeus: anecdotes about the gay sexuality of several gods, heroes and ancient figures are offered by guests at a dinner party (in Book XIII).
The list's first appearance in modern times may have been in Marlowe's play Edward II (written in 1596), and it became a staple of 19th and early 20th century apologetic writings and early gay fiction. The list eventually became so long and inclusive that it became an object of parody by Chicago playwright Rick Paul and by novelist Larry Kramer in his labored, unfunny satire Faggots.
As modern candor about sexuality increased through the 1960s, researchers began to ask more interesting questions about the lives of famous gays?about the social environments they lived in and the friendship networks they formed, and about how their sexuality, and the social response to it, influenced their lives and entered into and shaped their creative works.
An extreme case, for instance, would be Henry James' almost excruciating attention to the nuances of people's behavior and the details of cultural coding.
Another example would be Walt Whitman's backing away from his early celebration of male physical bonding and "adhesiveness" and degenerating into windy vagueness about "democracy" and invented stories about illegitimate children as he was at first attacked and then grew better-known as a poet.
A still more recent third phase of gay history now takes as its task the attempt to find out how ordinary gay men and women actually led their lives: how they discovered one another, the informal institutions they developed, the coding they used, how they coped with persecution and prejudice, how they thought of themselves, and how their self-understanding may have influenced their lives.
George Chauncey's Gay New York, though not a zippy read, is a prominent example of this sort of history. Allan Berube's 30-page history of gay bathhouses (contained in the anthology Policing Public Sex) is another.
And the fascinating thing is that even for the much earlier periods new material keeps coming to light: A European archive divulges a group of letters, an ancient library is discovered in a Near East archeological dig, a Greek vase depicting sodomy is found hidden in the basement of a museum, a mummy is found wrapped in papyrus that preserves a same-sex love-spell, etc.
If history, as Oscar Wilde?who should know?said, is "merely gossip," then of what use is gay history, besides being merely a charming antiquarian hobby?
I think the answer is that George Orwell was absolutely right when he said in his anti-Christian (as well as anti-Communist) novel 1984 that "Whoever controls the past, controls the future." The Catholic church knew this full well when it burned Sappho's poems and destroyed other ancient literature, when it sought to have records of gay court cases and interrogations burned with those found guilty, when it sought to make sodomy a literally unspeakable "thought crime."
History is a way of finding out that one has a past, that there have always been gays and lesbians who struggled and survived, who failed nobly or prospered, who provide models to emulate or transcend. History can increase our self-understanding by showing us the richness of our past.
At the same time history can be a way escaping the present, of getting a bit outside oneself and one's limited viewpoint, of seeing that the world was once different from the way it is now, and realizing that it could be?surely will be?different in the future.
And one almost inevitably wonders what gays and lesbians 100 years hence will think as they look back on us as a part of their own history. It is an odd feeling, really.