Return of the warrior gays
Petronella Wyatt reports on American homosexuals, who are determined to reject effeminacy and revive an ancient machismo There is a famous exchange between the trouser-suited American author Edna Ferber and Noël Coward. Coward: ‘You almost look like a man.’ Ferber: ‘So do you.’ But the days of the aesthetic, effeminate gay are over, at least in the United States. The languid poof is out and the warrior gay is in. Bin the carnation and caustic wit for a uniform and parallel bars. Homosexuals are being encouraged by gay rights groups across the nation to seek inspiration not from the arts world but the military and sports worlds. Indeed, there seems to be a growing backlash against the old-fashioned idea of the homosexual as someone in touch with his feminine side.
It all began with the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Iraq war. The spokesman for American gays, Andrew Sullivan, says, ‘This was the first major war in which the open visible presence of gay Americans cannot be denied. On the homefront we already had heroes. They are not gay heroes. They are American heroes. Remember Mark Bingham, a burly 6ft 5in football player, one of the men who in all likelihood wrestled a plane to the ground in Pennsylvania. Then there is Father Mychal Judge, an openly gay Catholic priest who served the men and women of New York’s Fire Department. Revered by a macho subculture, fearless and strong, he died in the flames of the World Trade Center tending to his flock in need.’ Gays such as these preferred sport and a wholesome lifestyle to homosexual bars and designer leather. Lines such as that from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, ‘I am aesthetic and poetic. I am a very Narcissus,’ have become outdated. It’s the army, Mr Jones, to paraphrase the heterosexual songwriter Irving Berlin. There are now tens of thousand of gays in the US military. Indeed, Peter Tatchell, the unreconstructed organiser of OutRage!, complains that ‘the mainstream US gay rights groups have embraced the “right to serve” agenda, emphasising the loyalty of homosexuals to “the American way”. Devoid of vision, much of the modern gay rights agenda is about queers adapting to hetero society.’ Gay heroes are no longer Oscar Wilde, Coward, Piers Gaveston, Harold Nicolson or Cole Porter. They have been replaced by military men through history. The National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce in Washington says, ‘New role models are more likely to be soldiers, like your Kitchener and Montgomery. Gays are tired of being seen as different and therefore weird.’ Jude Bennett of the magazine Gay Agenda tells homosexuals to ‘normalise’. He suggests they dress like ‘straights’, reclaim Jesus and join the military.
There are an increasing number of books being published in the US on warrior gays. Zak Webber, author of The Gay History of Planet Earth, focuses on gay military heroes. Gay Warriors: a Documentary History from the Ancient World to the Present by B.R. Burg was a recent bestseller. Likewise, Homosexuality and Civilisation by Louis Crompton and Homosexuality in Greece and Rome by Thomas K. Hubbard. The New Gay is particularly attracted to Greece and Rome, where homosexuality was not considered an effeminate or deviant activity. Consider Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephaestion. Hardly examples of weediness. Even Julius Caesar, Octavian and Mark Antony were not averse to an encounter with a member of the same sex.
Paul Halsall, the author of Homosexual Eros in Early Greece, explains that ‘eros’, the Greek word for sexual desire and romantic love, was something directed primarily at members of one’s own sex. The word ‘homosexual’ is a 19th-century term to medicalise what had previously been known as sodomy. Perceptions moved from sinful acts to sick persons. The Greeks lived before sin or medical models. The ideal male body is sympathetically caricatured by Aristophanes as consisting of a ‘powerful chest, a healthy skin, broad shoulders and a big arse’. Not so dissimilar to Michelangelo’s ‘David’. Great men who prided themselves on their masculinity, such as Socrates, sought the athletic male body. Socrates, who fell for the handsome Alcibiades, described himself as ‘experienced in the pursuit of men’. Plato spoke of his utter consternation on the exercise ground when the well-muscled youth Charmides appears. ‘It will take me a year to recover.’ Sex between a man and another man was considered loftier than sex with a woman; hence Plato’s love between equals. In Athens’s phallocratic society there was no sexuality as such. People were typecast not according to the sex of the people to whom they were attracted, but by the role they assumed in the act of intercourse — either penetration or domination. In his study of classical sexuality, Courtesans and Fishcakes, James Davidson describes Plato’s Phaedo as one of his most moving works, an account of Socrates’ death told by a close friend, who gives his name to the dialogue. While the hemlock is being prepared, Socrates plays with Phaedo’s long hair, soon to be cut short in mourning. Men who loved youths were called philopais. On the other hand, the woman-lover and adulterer was considered to be himself somehow womanised by his womanising and was pictured as effeminate.
The US Human Rights Campaign, which has gay rights groups spread across America, says, ‘If homosexuality was considered manly and normal by the greatest civilisations this planet has seen, then there is no reason to contradict that. That is why it should not be surprising that we encourage gays not to be scared of the military and the warrior gay concept.’ It was the Bible and Christianity, despite David’s love for Jonathan in the Old Testament, that overturned the old consensus and portrayed homosexuals as unmanly and wicked. As sex was considered a sin unless it was for the purposes of procreation, homosexual intercourse must therefore be a sin. It was also important for the Church that ‘sodomites’ were seen as ‘weak and lustful’ like women. Thus the idea of the self-indulgent, fancy-clothes-loving, effete homosexual was born, and has remained with us. In Tudor England homosexuals were often referred to as ‘women’. Some historians now argue that Henry VIII was able to build more of a case against Anne Boleyn because of the group of bisexuals surrounding her, including Thomas Wyatt, William Brereton, Sir Francis Weston and the musician Mark Smeaton, whom Thomas Cromwell sneeringly referred to as a ‘womanly catamite’.
‘Gays have kind of played up to that, making a virtue of their feminine creative side,’ agrees a spokesman for Stonewall, the British lobby group. ‘But things are certainly changing in the US. We may be seeing the dawning of a new era.’ Will Oscar be turning in his grave, I wonder?
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