BUGGER ALL:

A Dance to the (Disco) Music of Time: A review of Homosexuality and Civilization, by Louis Crompton (John Derbyshire, March 16, 2004, Claremont Review of Books)

We are, as everyone knows, living in the, or a, "gay moment." One of the consequences is that we have to put up with a great deal of homosexualist propaganda. (I favor the usage "homosexualist" for people who are activist about their sexual orientation, versus "homosexual" for people who are merely, and privately, homosexual. I admit, though, that my attempts to promote this—it seems to me, useful and non-insulting—usage have fallen mostly on stony ground.) Among homosexualists there are many whose devotion to what Christopher Isherwood famously called "my kind" is as intense as anything that can be shown by the followers of any religion or political ideology.

One aspect of this devotion is the urge to recruit long-dead historical names to the Cause—to comb through history seeking out gayness. Since history is, much more often than not, a very ambiguous affair, an explorer of this inclination can return with many trophies, which he will then display triumphantly to us dull-witted, unimaginative breeders, revealing to us that the human race is, contrary to our narrow brutish prejudices, a very ocean of gayness. Julius Caesar? Gay! Jesus of Nazareth? Gay! Leonardo? Gay! Frederick the Great? Gay! All of them-gay, gay, gay! I do not recall having seen it argued that George Washington was gay, but I have not the slightest doubt that the argument has been made by somebody, somewhere.

Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization belongs to this genre of homo-prop. It has, I should say here up front, many virtues. Crompton has done prodigies of literary and historical research across a wide range. His sources are for the most part secondary, but they could hardly be otherwise in a book of this scope. Nobody has real expertise on both ancient Greece and feudal Japan. He writes well for an academic (Crompton is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Nebraska), and the book is beautifully produced, with a high standard of copy editing and many fine plates to please the eye.

Certainly Crompton has a bill of goods to sell, but there we come to matters of personal taste in reading. You either like didactic history, or you don't. I myself like it very much, to the degree that I even like it when an author writes contrary to my own prejudices. We—the readers of this fine periodical, I mean—are not gaping rubes, to be lured from the straight and narrow by a silver-tongued swindler. We have powers of judgment, which we can apply to an author's reasoning, and we have knowledge, which we can compare with the facts he presents. Crompton left me unconvinced on his main point, but he proved thoughtful, and entertained me along the way. As propaganda goes, this is a superior specimen.

Don't know about General Washington, but ole Abe was outed a few years back.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 24, 2004 10:09 AM