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| homosexuality in french history and culture: Homosexuality in French History and Culture Jeffrey Merrick, Michael Sibalis, 2013-09-13 Deconstruct changing representations of homosexuality with this important new work of cultural criticism! Homosexuality in French History and Culture explores episodes, patterns, and images of same-sex attraction in France from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, from the essays of Michel de Montaigne to pride parades in contemporary Paris. This groundbreaking book documents the ways homosexuality has been named, experienced, regulated, understood, and imagined. During these centuries, homosexuality has been stigmatized as a sin, crime, or disease, and denounced as a threat to social order and national identity. Yet the rhetoric of condemnation has always co-existed with the reality of toleration. This groundbreaking collection analyzes the ways in which persecutions, as well as differences within minority sexual subcultures, have highlighted stereotypes and anxieties about class and age differences, gendered roles, and separatism. Homosexuality in French History and Culture offers historical and literary studies based on a wide variety of sources, including: novels, plays, and poetry gossip and satires police reports medical texts travel literature newspapers and periodicals memoirsHomosexuality in French History and Culture combines fresh, creative re-interpretation of familiar texts with exciting new explorations of neglected historical episodes and cultures. It is a landmark of meticulous scholarship and rigorous theoretical analysis, and a vital resource for scholars of queer theory, French history and culture, and literary criticism. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Homosexuality in French History and Culture Jeffrey Merrick, Michael Sibalis, 2013-09-13 Deconstruct changing representations of homosexuality with this important new work of cultural criticism! Homosexuality in French History and Culture explores episodes, patterns, and images of same-sex attraction in France from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, from the essays of Michel de Montaigne to pride parades in contemporary Paris. This groundbreaking book documents the ways homosexuality has been named, experienced, regulated, understood, and imagined. During these centuries, homosexuality has been stigmatized as a sin, crime, or disease, and denounced as a threat to social order and national identity. Yet the rhetoric of condemnation has always co-existed with the reality of toleration. This groundbreaking collection analyzes the ways in which persecutions, as well as differences within minority sexual subcultures, have highlighted stereotypes and anxieties about class and age differences, gendered roles, and separatism. Homosexuality in French History and Culture offers historical and literary studies based on a wide variety of sources, including: novels, plays, and poetry gossip and satires police reports medical texts travel literature newspapers and periodicals memoirs Homosexuality in French History and Culture combines fresh, creative re-interpretation of familiar texts with exciting new explorations of neglected historical episodes and cultures. It is a landmark of meticulous scholarship and rigorous theoretical analysis, and a vital resource for scholars of queer theory, French history and culture, and literary criticism. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Homosexuality in French History and Culture , 2001 |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Living in Arcadia Julian Jackson, 2009-12-15 In Paris in 1954, a young man named André Baudry founded Arcadie, an organization for “homophiles” that would become the largest of its kind that has ever existed in France, lasting nearly thirty years. In addition to acting as the only public voice for French gays prior to the explosion of radicalism of 1968, Arcadie—with its club and review—was a social and intellectual hub, attracting support from individuals as diverse as Jean Cocteau and Michel Foucault and offering support and solidarity to thousands of isolated individuals. Yet despite its huge importance, Arcadie has largely disappeared from the historical record. The main cause of this neglect, Julian Jackson explains in Living in Arcadia, is that during the post-Stonewall era of queer activism, Baudry’s organization fell into disfavor, dismissed as conservative, conformist, and closeted. Through extensive archival research and numerous interviews with the reclusive Baudry, Jackson challenges this reductive view, uncovering Arcadie’s pioneering efforts to educate the European public about homosexuality in an era of renewed repression. In the course of relating this absorbing history, Jackson offers a startlingly original account of the history of homosexuality in modern France. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Pederasts and Others William Peniston, 2012-11-12 Examine how a community of support in Nineteenth-Century Paris became a blueprint for modern sexual identity! A unique social history, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris is a valuable addition to the growing field of gay and lesbian studies. The book examines the interaction between the city's male homosexual subculture and Parisian authority figures who attempted to maintain political and social order during the early years of the French Third Republic by using laws against public indecency and sexual assault to treat same-sex sexuality as a crime. Faced with a constant cycle of surveillance, harassment, and arrest, the city's gay men survived the hostile urban environment by forming a community of support that had a widespread and lasting influence on the development of modern sexual identities. Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris is based on a statistical analysis of more than 800 working-class and middle-class men who were arrested or investigated by Parisian police between 1873 and 1879. Their stories, presented through long and short case studies, represent nearly 2,000 names recorded by police in Pederasts and Others, a ledger detailing the arrests of male homosexuals for public offenses against decency and other minor offenses. (The term pederast identified those suspected of same-sex sexual activity, not the modern definition that indicates homosexual relations with a minor.) The ledger entries reveal specific habits, attitudes, values, and characteristics about these men that set them apartthe same traits that identified them as part of a community based on their behavior and relationships. Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines: the forces of authority the laws regarding same-sex sexual behavior the role of the police the role of the magistrates the role of the doctors the common characteristics of the city's male homosexual subculture the sexual behaviors of the Paris underground the geography of the subculture and takes an expanded look at three case studies: A Decadent Aristocrat and A Delinquent Boy Pederasts, Prostitutes, and Pickpockets Love and Death in Gay Paris Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris also includes tables, appendices, and maps linked to statistical data. The book is an essential resource for historians, sociologists, sexologists, criminologists, and other scholars working in the fields of gay and lesbian studies, urban studies, social and cultural history, and French history. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Homosexuality and Civilization Louis Crompton, 2006-10-31 How have major civilizations of the last two millennia treated people who were attracted to their own sex? Crompton chronicles the lives and achievements of homosexual people alongside a darker history of persecution, as he compares the Christian West with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, Arab Spain, imperial China, and pre-Meiji Japan. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Homosexuality in Modern France Jeffrey Merrick, Bryant T. Ragan Jr., 1996-08-15 This volume explores the realities and representations of same-sex sexuality in France in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the period that witnessed the emergence of homosexuality in the modern sense of the word. Based on archival research and textual analysis, the articles examine the development of homosexual subcultures and illustrate the ways in which philosophes, pamphleteers, police, novelists, scientists, and politicians conceptualized same-sex relations and connected them with more general concerns about order and disorder. The contributors--Elizabeth Colwill, Michael David Sibalis, Victoria Thompson, William Peniston, Vernon Rosario II, Francesca Canade-Sautman, Martha Hanna, Robert A. Nye, and the editors Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. and Jeffrey Merrick--use the methods of intellectual and cultural history, the history of science, literary studies, legal and social history, and microhistory. This collection shows how the subject of homosexuality is related to important topics in French history: the Enlightenment, the revolutionary tradition, social discipline, positivism, elite and popular culture, nationalism, feminism, and the construction of identity. Given the role of gays and lesbians in modern French culture and the work of French scholars on the history of sexuality, this collection fills an important gap in the literature and represents the first attempt in any language to explore this subject over three centuries from a variety of perspectives. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: A History of Homosexuality in Europe, Vol. I & II Florence Tamagne, 2006 Just crawling out from under the Victorian blanket, Europe was devastated by a gruesome war that consumed the flower of its youth. Tamagne examines the currents of nostalgia and yearning, euphoria, rebellion, and exploration in the post-war era, and the b |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Global Gay Frederic Martel, 2018-04-27 A panoramic view of gay rights, gay life, and the gay experience around the world. In Global Gay, Frédéric Martel visits more than fifty countries and documents a revolution underway around the world: the globalization of LGBT rights. From Saudi Arabia to South Africa, from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv, from Singapore to the United States, activists, culture warriors, and ordinary people are part of a movement. Martel interviews the proprietor of a “gay-friendly” café in Amman, Jordan; a Cuban-American television journalist in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; a South African jurist who worked with Nelson Mandela to enshrine gay rights in the country's constitution; an American lawyer who worked on the campaign for marriage equality; an Egyptian man who fled his country after escaping a raid on a gay club; and many others. He tells us that in China, homosexuality is neither prohibited nor permitted, and that much Chinese gay life takes place on social media; that in Iran, because of the strict separation of the sexes, it seems almost easier to be gay than heterosexual; and that Raul Castro's daughter, a gay rights icon in Cuba, expressed her lingering anti-American sentiments by calling for Pride celebrations in May rather than June. Ten countries maintain the death penalty for homosexuals. “Homophobia is what Arab governments give to Islamists to keep them calm,” one activist tells Martel. Martel finds that although the “gay American way of life” has created a global template for gay activism and culture, each country offers distinctly local variations. And around the world, the status of gay rights has become a measure of a country's democracy and modernity. This English edition, which has been thoroughly revised and updated, has received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation, supported by a grant from the French-American Book Fund. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: La Répression des homosexuels au Québec et en France Patrice Corriveau, 2011-03-07 In 2004, the first same-sex couple legally married in Quebec. How did homosexuality – an act that had for centuries been defined as abominable and criminal – come to be sanctioned by law? Judging Homosexuals finds answers in a comparative analysis of gay persecution in France and Quebec, places that share a common culture but have diverging legal traditions. In both settings, Patrice Corriveau explores how various groups – family and clergy, doctors and jurists – tried to manage people who were defined in turn as sinners, as criminals, as inverts, and as citizens to be protected by law. By bringing to light the various discourses that have over time supported the control and persecution of individual homoerotic behaviour in France and Quebec, this book makes the case that when it came to managing sexuality, the law helped construct the crime. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: The Dictionary of Homophobia Louis-Georges Tin, 2009-05-01 A comprehensive, global history of homophobia, available in English for the first time. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Didier Eribon, 2004-07-07 DIVPublished in English for the first time, Didier Eribon’ s well-received and celebrated work on a philosophy of and examination of gay life./div |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault, 1990-04-14 Why we are so fascinated with sex and sexuality—from the preeminent philosopher of the 20th century. Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: One Hundred Years of Homosexuality David M Halperin, 2012-07-26 Halperin's subject is the erotics of male culture in ancient Greece. Arguing that the modern concept of homosexuality is an inadequate tool for the interpretation of these features of sexual life in antiquity, Halperin offers an alternative account that accords greater prominence to the indigenous terms in which sexual experiences were constituted in the ancient Mediterranean world. Wittily and provocatively written, Halperin's meticulously drawn windows onto ancient sexuality give us a new meaning to the concept of Greek love. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Napoleonic Friendship Brian Joseph Martin, 2011 The first book-length study of the origin of queer soldiers in modern France |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Colonialism and Homosexuality Robert Aldrich, 2008-01-28 Colonialism and Homosexuality is a thorough investigation of the connections of homosexuality and imperialism from the late 1800s - the era of 'new imperialism' - until the era of decolonization. Robert Aldrich reconstructs the context of a number of liaisons, including those of famous men such as Cecil Rhodes, E.M. Forster or André Gide, and the historical situations which produced both the Europeans and their non-Western lovers. Colonial lands, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century included most of Africa, South and Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Caribbean, provided a haven for many Europeans whose sexual inclinations did not fit neatly into the constraints of European society. Each of the case-studies is a micro-history of a particular colonial situation, a sexual encounter, and its wider implications for cultural and political life. Students both of colonial history, and of gender and queer studies, will find this an informative read. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: The Apparitional Lesbian Terry Castle, 1993 In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: André Gide Patrick Pollard, 1991-01-01 Andre Gide, renowned French essayist, novelist, and playwright, was also a homosexual apologist whose sexuality was central to the whole of his literary and political discourse. This book by Patrick Pollard--the first serious study of homosexuality in Gide's theater and fiction--analyzes his ideas and traces the philosophical, anthropological, scientific, and literary movements that influenced his thought. Pollard begins by discussing Corydon, a defense of pederasty that Gide felt was his most important book. He then provided a historical and analytical survey of books that contributed to Gide's perception of homosexuality, including works on philosophy, social theory, natural history, and medicolegal questions. Pollard goes on to investigate works of fiction--ancient and modern, European and Oriental--in which Gide saw homosexual elements. He concludes by considering the homosexual themes in Gide's own works, analyzing the ways that Gide constantly tried to resolve conflicts between nature and culture, hypocrisy and honesty, corruption and sound moral judgment, anomaly and conformity, and sexual freedom and religious constraint. The book provides a new perspective on Gide's work, a reconstruction of the moral and intellectual climate in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a substantial contribution to the cultural history of homosexuality. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: The Politics of Adoption Bruno Perreau, 2014-04-25 An argument that French adoption policies reflect and enforce the state's notions of gender, parenthood, and citizenship. In May 2013, after months of controversy, France legalized same-sex marriage and adoption by homosexual couples. Obstacles to adoption and parenting equality remain, however—many of them in the form of cultural and political norms reflected and expressed in French adoption policies. In The Politics of Adoption, Bruno Perreau describes the evolution of these policies. In the past thirty years, Perreau explains, political and intellectual life in France have been dominated by debates over how to preserve “Frenchness,” and these debates have driven policy making. Adoption policies, he argues, link adoption to citizenship, reflecting and enforcing the postcolonial state's notions of parenthood, gender, and Frenchness. After reviewing the complex history of adoption, Perreau examines French political debates over adoption, noting, among other things, that intercountry adoptions stirred far less controversy than the difference between the sexes in an adopting couple. He also discusses judicial action on adoption; child welfare agencies as gatekeepers to parenthood (as defined by experts); the approval process from the viewpoints of social workers and applicants; and adoption's link to citizenship, and its use as a metaphor for belonging. Adopting a Foucaultian perspective, Perreau calls the biopolitics of adoption “pastoral”: it manages the individual for the good of the collective “flock”; it considers itself outside politics; and it considers not so much the real behavior of individuals as an allegorical representation of them. His argument sheds new light on American debates on bioethics, identity, and citizenship. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Queer City Peter Ackroyd, 2018-05-08 A history of the development of London as a European epicenter of queer life. In Queer City, the acclaimed Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way–through the complete history and experiences of its gay and lesbian population. In Roman Londinium, the city was dotted with lupanaria (“wolf dens” or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels), and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks, and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure. Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music, and the horror of AIDS. Ackroyd reveals the hidden story of London, with its diversity, thrills, and energy, as well as its terrors, dangers, and risks, and in doing so, explains the origins of all English-speaking gay culture. Praise for Queer City “Spanning centuries, the book is a fantastically researched project that is obviously close to the author’s heart.... An exciting look at London’s queer history and a tribute to the “various human worlds maintained in [the city’s] diversity despite persecution, condemnation, and affliction.””—Kirkus Reviews “[Ackroyd’s] work is highly anecdotal and near encyclopedic . . . the book is fascinating in its careful exposition of the singularities—and commonalities—of gay life, both male and female. Ultimately it is, as he concludes, a celebration as well as a history,” —Booklist “A witty history-cum-tribute to gay London, from the Roman “wolf dens” through Oscar Wilde and Gay Pride marches to the present day,” —ShelfAwareness |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature E. L. McCallum, Mikko Tuhkanen, 2014-11-17 The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is grounded in current scholarship. It presents new critical approaches to gay and lesbian literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for gay and lesbian literature for years to come. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Queering the Color Line Siobhan B. Somerville, 2000 The interconnected constructions of race and sexuality at the turn of the century. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Strangers Graham Robb, 2004 A fresh examination of this forbidden history shows the profound effects of gay culture on modern life. Robb, brilliant biographer of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud, examines how homosexuals were treated by society and finds a tale of surprising tolerance. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Queer Budapest, 1873–1961 Anita Kurimay, 2020-09-04 By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the “Pearl of the Danube,” it boasted some of Europe’s most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city’s liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest is the riveting story of nonnormative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961. Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to regulate but also tolerate and protect queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence between the illiberal state and queer community ended abruptly at the close of World War II. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality’s political implications, Queer Budapest recuperates queer communities as an integral part of Hungary’s—and Europe’s—modern incarnation. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: How To Be Gay David M. Halperin, 2012-08-21 A pioneer of LGBTQ studies dares to suggest that gayness is a way of being that gay men must learn from one another to become who they are. The genius of gay culture resides in some of its most despised stereotypes—aestheticism, snobbery, melodrama, glamour, caricatures of women, and obsession with mothers—and in the social meaning of style. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation Craig Griffiths, 2021 This book explores the different ways West Germans thought about and discussed being queer in the 1970s; a decade in the midst of the Cold War, sandwiched between the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1969 and the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: French Masculinities Christopher E. Forth, Bertrand Taithe, 2007-07-11 French Masculinities makes a valuable contribution to gender studies by presenting, for the first time, a comprehensive and critical overview of ideas of how virilité has been imagined in France from the Eighteenth century to the present. Incorporating insights of cultural and social historians as well as specialists in film and literature, this collection approaches masculinities in a complex and interdisciplinary manner that will appeal to a wide range of readers. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: A Little Gay History R. B. Parkinson, Kate Smith, Max Carocci, 2013 How old is the oldest chat-up line between men? Who was the first lesbian? Were ancient Greek men who had sex together necessarily gay? And what did Shakespeare think about cross-dressing? 'A Little Gay History' takes objects ranging from ancient Egyptian papyri and the erotic scenes on the Roman Warren Cup to images by modern artists including David Hockney and Bhupen Khakhar to consider questions such as these. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Proceedings of the ... Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History Western Society for French History. Meeting, 2000 |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Queer 1950s H. Bauer, M. Cook, 2012-10-15 Leading sexuality scholars explore queer lives and cultures in the first full post-war decade through an array of sources and a range of perspectives. Drawing out the particularities of queer cultures from the Finland and New Zealand to the UK and the USA, this collection rethinks preconceptions of the 1950s and pinpoints some of its legacies. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Sapphic Fathers Gretchen Schultz, 2015-01-15 Literature that explored female homosexuality flourished in late nineteenth-century France. Poets, novelists, and pornographers, whether Symbolists, Realists, or Decadents, were all part of this literary moment. In Sapphic Fathers, Gretchen Schultz explores how these male writers and their readers took lesbianism as a cipher for apprehensions about sex and gender during a time of social and political upheaval. Tracing this phenomenon through poetry (Baudelaire, Verlaine), erotica and the popular novel (Belot), and literary fiction (Zola, Maupassant, Péladan, Mendès), and into scientific treatises, Schultz demonstrates that the literary discourse on lesbianism became the basis for the scientific and medical understanding of female same-sex desire in France. She also shows that the cumulative impact of this discourse left tangible traces that lasted well beyond nineteenth-century France, persisting into twentieth-century America to become the basis of lesbian pulp fiction after the Second World War. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Homosexuality in Cold War America Robert J. Corber, 1997-05-22 Challenging widely held assumptions about postwar gay male culture and politics, this book examines how gay men in the 1950s resisted pressures to remain in the closet. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: In the Closet of the Vatican Frederic Martel, 2019-02-21 The New York Times Bestseller '[An] earth-shaking exposé of clerical corruption' - National Catholic Reporter In the Closet of the Vatican exposes the rot at the heart of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church today. This brilliant piece of investigative writing is based on four years' authoritative research, including extensive interviews with those in power. The celibacy of priests, the condemnation of the use of contraceptives, the cover up of countless cases of sexual abuse, the resignation of Benedict XVI, misogyny among the clergy, the dramatic fall in Europe of the number of vocations to the priesthood, the plotting against Pope Francis – all these issues are clouded in mystery and secrecy. In the Closet of the Vatican is a book that reveals these secrets and penetrates this enigma. It derives from a system founded on a clerical culture of secrecy which starts in junior seminaries and continues right up to the Vatican itself. It is based on the double lives of priests and on extreme homophobia. The resulting schizophrenia in the Church is hard to fathom. But the more a prelate is homophobic, the more likely it is that he is himself gay. 'Behind rigidity there is always something hidden, in many cases a double life'. These are the words of Pope Francis himself and with them the Pope has unlocked the Closet. No one can claim to really understand the Catholic Church today until they have read this book. It reveals a truth that is extraordinary and disturbing. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Homosexual Desire Guy Hocquenghem, 1993 This essay focuses on the possibility of social and personal transformation which was opened up by the gay liberation movement in France, which the author terms a revolution of desire. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Queer Theory Bruno Perreau, 2016 Who's afraid of gender theory? -- The many meanings of queer -- Transatlantic homecomings -- The specter of queer politics |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Gay Life and Culture Robert Aldrich, 2010 Originally published: London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2006. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Homoeroticism Pandey Bechan Sharma, 2009-02-27 This volume makes available for the first time in English the work of a significant Indian nationalist author, Pandey Bechan Sharma, better known in India as “Ugra,” meaning “extreme.” His book Chocolate, a 1927 collection of eight stories, was the first work of Hindi fiction to focus on male same-sex relations, and its publication sparked India’s first public debates about homosexuality. Many prominent figures, including Gandhi, weighed in on the debates, which lasted into the 1950s. This edition, translated and with an introduction by Ruth Vanita, includes the full text of Chocolate along with an excerpt from Ugra’s novel Letters of Some Beautiful Ones (also published in 1927). In her introduction, Vanita situates Ugra and his writings in relation to Indian nationalist struggles and Hindi literary movements and feuds, and she analyzes the controversies that surrounded Chocolate. Those outraged by its titillating portrayal of homosexuality labeled the collection obscene. On the other side, although no one explicitly defended homosexuality in public, some justified Ugra’s work by arguing that it was the artist’s job to educate through provocation. The stories depict male homoeroticism in quotidian situations: a man brings a lover to his disapproving friend’s house; a good-looking young man becomes the object of desire at his school. The love never ends well, but the depictions are not always unsympathetic. Although Ugra claimed that the stories were aimed at suppressing homosexuality by exposing it, Vanita highlights the ambivalence of his characterizations. Cosmopolitan, educated, and hedonistic, the Hindu and Muslim men he portrayed quote Hindi and Urdu poetry to express their love, and they justify same-sex desire by drawing on literature, philosophy, and world history. Vanita’s introduction includes anecdotal evidence that Chocolate was enthusiastically received by India’s homosexual communities. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: The Elastic Closet S. Gunther, 2009 A social, legal and political history of gays and lesbians in France since World War Two. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: The Permissive Society and Its Enemies Marcus Collins, 2007 Deconstructing the myth of Britain's “swinging sixties,” this collection of essays examines the revolution of cultural permissiveness in postwar Britain and how societal debates over drug use, pornography, and women's rights of this period have influenced current thinking. Britain's period of nebulous social change is analyzed by defining permissiveness, locating the movement's origins, identifying its proponents and opponents, and assessing long-term consequences. Discussions of ludic liberalism, lesbian politics, beatnik ideology, and the rise of the moral crusader highlight the developing subcultures of Britain's society. |
| homosexuality in french history and culture: The Sotadic Zone Richard F. Burton, 2011-07-01 |
Understanding sexual orientation and homosexuality
Oct 29, 2008 · Although many lesbians and gay men learn to cope with the social stigma against homosexuality, this pattern of prejudice can have serious negative effects on health and well …
A brief history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social …
Mar 16, 2023 · Most historians agree that there is evidence of homosexual activity and same-sex love, whether such relationships were accepted or persecuted, in every documented culture. …
How Can I Explain the Bible’s View of Homosexuality? - JW.ORG
“What does the Bible say about homosexuality?” “The Bible makes it clear that God designed sex to be engaged in only between a male and a female and only within the arrangement of …
Sexual orientation and gender diversity
Sexual orientation is a component of identity that includes sexual and emotional attraction to another person and the behavior and/or social affiliation that may result from this attraction. …
LGBT Rights | Human Rights Watch
Jun 3, 2025 · Anti-Homosexuality Law Makes Supporting LGBT Loved Ones Dangerous . May 6, 2025 Letter Letter to FIFA Re. Human Rights Responsibilities in 2026 World Cup. April 10, …
Explaining Your Beliefs About Homosexuality - JW.ORG
Explaining your beliefs on controversial topics like homosexuality can be challenging. This worksheet helps you develop tactful replies to common perceptions.
Being Gay Is Just as Healthy as Being Straight
May 28, 2003 · In 1975, the American Psychological Association publicly supported this move, stating that "homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, reliability or general …
How Can I Explain the Bible’s View of Homosexuality? - JW.ORG
Attitudes about homosexuality may differ from one generation to another or from one land to another. But Christians aren’t “carried hither and thither by every wind of teaching.” (Ephesians …
Discrimination Against Homosexuals - American Psychological …
Homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social and vocational capabilities; Further, the American Psychological Association urges all mental …
Uganda: Court Upholds Anti-Homosexuality Act - Human Rights …
Apr 4, 2024 · Uganda’s Constitutional Court on April 3, 2024 upheld the abusive and radical provisions of the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, Human Rights Watch said today. The ruling …
Understanding sexual orientation and homosexuality
Oct 29, 2008 · Although many lesbians and gay men learn to cope with the social stigma against homosexuality, this pattern of prejudice can have serious negative effects on health and well …
A brief history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social …
Mar 16, 2023 · Most historians agree that there is evidence of homosexual activity and same-sex love, whether such relationships were accepted or persecuted, in every documented culture. …
How Can I Explain the Bible’s View of Homosexuality? - JW.ORG
“What does the Bible say about homosexuality?” “The Bible makes it clear that God designed sex to be engaged in only between a male and a female and only within the arrangement of …
Sexual orientation and gender diversity
Sexual orientation is a component of identity that includes sexual and emotional attraction to another person and the behavior and/or social affiliation that may result from this attraction. …
LGBT Rights | Human Rights Watch
Jun 3, 2025 · Anti-Homosexuality Law Makes Supporting LGBT Loved Ones Dangerous . May 6, 2025 Letter Letter to FIFA Re. Human Rights Responsibilities in 2026 World Cup. April 10, …
Explaining Your Beliefs About Homosexuality - JW.ORG
Explaining your beliefs on controversial topics like homosexuality can be challenging. This worksheet helps you develop tactful replies to common perceptions.
Being Gay Is Just as Healthy as Being Straight
May 28, 2003 · In 1975, the American Psychological Association publicly supported this move, stating that "homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, reliability or general …
How Can I Explain the Bible’s View of Homosexuality? - JW.ORG
Attitudes about homosexuality may differ from one generation to another or from one land to another. But Christians aren’t “carried hither and thither by every wind of teaching.” (Ephesians …
Discrimination Against Homosexuals - American Psychological …
Homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social and vocational capabilities; Further, the American Psychological Association urges all mental …
Uganda: Court Upholds Anti-Homosexuality Act - Human Rights …
Apr 4, 2024 · Uganda’s Constitutional Court on April 3, 2024 upheld the abusive and radical provisions of the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, Human Rights Watch said today. The ruling …
