Doug Ireland: Review of Louis-Georges Tin's Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay and Lesbian Experience
Louis-Georges Tin's"Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay and Lesbian Experience," just published in a translation from the French by Arsenal Pulp Press, aims to revive the Age of Enlightenment tradition of critical dictionaries, in which philosophers like Voltaire and Diderot employed the format to fight prejudice and other forms of intolerance.
With contributions by more than 70 people worldwide - writers, academics, sexologists, and gay activists - this well-illustrated, wide-ranging collection of nearly 200 mini-essays is a rich, rewarding, enlightening, and often entertaining read that belongs on the bookshelf of every sentient, self-respecting queer.
Tin - a brilliant 33-year-old French academic of African descent who is an expert on 17th century French poetry, on which he's published several erudite books - was born in the French department of Martinique, in the Caribbean Antilles chain. One of the most creative gay leaders internationally, Tin, in 2005, founded the annual International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) on May 17 - 15 years to the day after the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses.
Tin's brainchild has been endorsed by the European Parliament and by a host of countries, from Honduras to France. This year, IDAHO was even endorsed by the government of Cuba, and was the occasion for the first-ever public national assembly of queer activists in the history of the Castro regime. Indeed, IDAHO was observed in over 70 countries this year - but due to the isolationism of leading US gay organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, it goes sadly unnoticed in America.
IDAHO has proved especially useful as the focal point for gay activism in countries in which legal, institutional, or cultural homophobia has prevented the development of large-scale LGBT organizations, from Africa to China and Iran. This May, thanks to a year of skilled lobbying led by Tin, French President Nicolas Sarkozy's government pledged to use its turn in the rotating presidency of the European Union to advance universal decriminalization of homosexuality at the United Nations. (See this reporter's May 22-28 article "France Fights for Decriminalization.")
Tin is also a rising star of France's emerging black activist community, initiating the Representative Council of Black Associations in France (CRAN), French blacks' first national organizational voice. Launched during the November 2005 ghetto riots that shook 150 French cities and towns, CRAN, an alliance of some 150 associations, has already been recognized by the political establishment as a force to be reckoned with. Its annual national conventions of some 2,000 people see all major political parties on the left and right sending important emissaries as observers in an attempt to curry favor. Tin and CRAN have become privileged interlocutors in public policy discussions about the integration of ghettoized French blacks, who are all-too-frequent targets of discrimination.
Despite this fecund whirlwind of activism, Tin still found time to assemble the"Dictionary of Homophobia" and to write important sections of it. The"Dictionary," he writes,"displays both a scientific and political vocation," but is also"a work of knowledge and battle."
In his lengthy introductory essay tracing the historical development and changing social and political contours of homophobia, Tin observes that"heterosexism's latent and inherent homophobia can suddenly be reawakened by a serious crisis that justifies the search for a scapegoat. Accused of all evils, homosexuality can become sufficient reason for purges perceived as necessary," as in today's Iranian theocracy under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Zimbabwe under the dictatorial Robert Mugabe.
"Depending on the historical moment," Tin writes,"homophobia is adjusted to each particular situation and projected upon an adversary who is to be stigmatized or eliminated. Thus, likened to Bulgarian heresy during the Middle Ages, sodomy was regularly used as the main charge in the fight against religious 'deviancy,' such as the charge against the Knights Templar. Similarly, during the French Religious Wars, homosexuality became a Catholic vice according to the Huguenots, and a Huguenot vice according to the Catholics. During the same period, it was ascribed to Italian morals, in the sense that the French court seemed to be submerged by Italian culture; then to English morals, when the British Empire was at its pinnacle; to German morals, at a time when the Franco-German rivalry was at its pinnacle; to Jewish cosmopolitanism, whose alleged aims were so worrisome to the idea of nation; to American communitarianism, whose principles threatened, we were told, the French Republic."
Moreover, notes Tin,"while homosexuality was a bourgeois vice to the proletariat of the 19th century, it was considered by the bourgeoisie to be a phenomenon of the immoral working classes, or of the necessarily decadent aristocracy. In the Near East, India, China, or Japan, it is perceived as a Western practice; in Black Africa, it is, of course, a white phenomenon."
Each of these examples is illustrated by a corresponding entry in the"Dictionary," which examines homophobia and the evolution of the way same-sex relations were perceived and repressed over the centuries in separate mini-essays on Southern, Western, and Central and Eastern Africa; Japan; China; India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; the Middle East; the Maghreb (or North Africa); Southeast Asia; Ireland; England; Latin America; the Balkans; Eastern Europe; most of the other European countries; and the United States.
There are also portraits of some of history's leading homophobes, from"Buchanan (Pat)" to"Bryant (Anita)," and including the likes of the acerbically homo-hating novelist Marguerite Duras; Justinian the First, the 6th century Byzantine emperor who initiated a violent crusade against homosexuals; Patrick Devlin, the conservative British jurist who led the long-running opposition to the 1957 Wolfenden Report recommending the decriminalization of homosexuality (only partially achieved by the sexual law reform of 1967); Peter Damien, one of the most influential figures of the Catholic Church during the 11th century and author of the homophobic Liber Gomorrhianus (Book of Gomorrah); and Paul of Tarsus, who helped install homophobia in the tenets of Christianity at its birth.
The entry on Nazi Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler tells us how"the secret directive of Himmler dated October 10, 1936, prioritized 'the fight against homosexuality and abortion'... The reinforcement of Paragraph 175 [the provision of the 1871 German criminal code which criminalized male homosexual acts], combined with the creation of new official organizations such as the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion, had the joint advantage of creating files on known homosexuals, leading to increased arrests and... exile to concentration camps... Castration, notwithstanding the fact that it was disputed as a remedy for homosexuality, became the simplest means of sending 'cured' gays to the front. Dr. Carl Vaernet's criminal experimentations at the Buchenwald concentration camp, in which he tried to cure homosexuals by injecting synthetic hormones into their groins, were also encouraged by Himmler."
All of the major religions are explored in savant entries in the"Dictionary." Under"Buddhism," for example, we learn that,"from the late Middle Ages to early modern times, romantic relationships between monks and young male initiates seem to have been a common occurrence in monasteries. These initiates, usually adolescents, often wore facial powder and makeup, and were occasionally the subject of internal struggles among the monks.
"Some texts trace this tradition all the way back to Kukai (774-835 CE), one of the great Japanese Buddhist saints... Monks usually came from the nobility or the warrior class, where pederastic relationships, considered a cultural sophistication, were held in high regard while relations between men and women were held in lower esteem. This type of love was considered under the benediction of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, a mythical being who usually took the form of a young man, and whose Japanese title, Monjushiri, even evoked the buttocks (shiri) of the ephebes..."
In addition to these fascinating historical explorations, popular culture is not neglected. There's an amusingly illustrated section on"Caricature." And the"Dictionary" mini-essay on"Comic Books," for example, relates how their creators had accusations of queer proselytizing hurled at them"during McCarthyism in the U.S. during the 1950s, beginning with the first edition of the book 'Seduction of the Innocent,' in which psychiatrist Fredric Wertham denounced the corruption of American youths as promoted through the medium of the comic book." Critics pointed to"the promotion of homosexuality by Batman and Robin; of lesbianism by Wonder Woman, the 'Amazon princess'; of sadomasochism through the countless girls appearing bound and tied at the hands of a super-villain: the writing was on the wall. In an America preoccupied with chasing internal enemies, comic books were identified as a willing accomplice of the growing red menace" in increasingly homophobic terms.
Nor is the history of ideas and language neglected. There are thought-provoking entries on"Abnormal,""Perversion,""Essentialism/Constructionism,""Insult,""Sociology,""Psychiatry,""Vice,""Vocabulary," and a first-rate contribution on"Rhetoric" by Tin.
There's much to chew over in the contentious but incisive entry on"Shame" by Sébastien Chauvin, which concludes:"If it is shame that constitutes us, it is also shame that connects us: entering shame is at the same time acknowledging what we are, who we are, and to whom we are joined through the common experience of the homophobic social order. The just valorization of pride must not lead us to forget those who live their entire lives in shame or, in the absence of oppression, of the perverse eroticization of its instruments and agents (which could be a way to disarm opponents and initiate a process toward pride, as Genet said) for the social and political awakening that this shame and the marginalization that it imposes helps to produce and nourish. Just as pride is always a step away from its shameful ancestry ('One is always a little ashamed of being proud of being gay,' as the French gay queer theorist and novelist Guy Hocquenghem wrote), shame, when fully assumed, when one ceases to be ashamed of being ashamed, contains a form of paradoxical pride which, Didier Eribon explains, could constitute the starting point for self-reinvention toward something like our freedom."
Tin's"Dictionary of Homophobia" is so sweeping in its scope that one can dip into it again and again and learn something, or confront an idea in which even the most well-read queer will find fresh intellectual nourishment and historical illumination.
Tin, by the way, is currently at work on a three-volume history of heterosexuality, the first volume of which, "L'Invention de la culture hétérosexuelle," will appear later this year in Paris from Editions Autrement. In the meantime, if you're fortunate enough to read French, Tin is publishing a blog, sponsored by the French daily Libération, called L'Obsérvetoire de l'Hétérosxualité, at heterosexualite.blogspot.com/.