Strangers Book

I teach middle school English, and often I'll work with the social studies teacher to tie together strands of history, literature and myth. To get the kids into a new historical text I tell stories. It's short, sweet, and dramatic. I'm guilty of telling history as a series of discreet events that crash into each other with a kind of inevitability. I recap history with broad brushes and stereotyped characters.

In my defense, I think we all need a basic historical skeleton to hang our experiences on-- a timeline with a simplified sense of how things were: rugged 49ers, rigid pilgrims, stuffy Victorians.

That skeleton view of history is fine for seventh graders. But this book reminded me how much we oversimplify the past. We imagine there is some kind of linear progress from past simplicity to contemporary complexity. We imagine we enjoy modern uniqueness.

So all this to introduce this book: it's a revelation. Graham Robb cracks open the past. I imagined I knew what the Gay past was like: furtive, dangerous, disparate. Instead Robb presents a world with startlingly modern seeming heroes and anti heroes, proving our modern tolerance is not as newly minted as we think, and that our progress has just been change, not linear evolution. Gay people have identified themselves, have organized themselves, published accounts of their lives, disguised or performed their sexualities, advocated for their rights in myriad ways long before I'd ever imagined.

One of the first ideas Robb surgically dismantles is the Foucaultian idea that homosexuality as a social construct didn't exist until it was named (42). Actually, self-identifying groups of same-sex loving and gender no conforming people have been self-consciously visible for much longer than the modern words existed for them.

We imagine that modern homophobia and the visibility of contemporary gay culture makes us view the past with an artificially rainbowed lens. But in fact people even in the 1700s were aware of homosexual innuendo and subtext as much as we are. Although same-sex physicality was more prevalent than in today's American no-homo climate, people were aware that there was a line that crossed into homosexual behavior.

Gay men and women of the past had to carefully code their presence or risk legal prosecution (although less often in the 19th than the 20th century, contrary to what we'd assume) or medical intervention. But their secret symbols were codified well enough to be internationally recognizable. Robb lists delightful personal ads, detective stories and scientific questionnaires with allusions to whistling, beardless bohemians, Greek heroes, and sidelong glances.

It is stubbornly superior of us to imagine the literary past as unsophisticated and sexually innocent. In fact stories that explicitly or implicitly featured homosexual storylines were roaringly popular in the 19th century. The progress we have made is that modern gay characters are allowed happy endings slightly more often.

It is also arrogant to imagine that this tumblr generation has invented the art of queer hair-splitting. Early homosexual organizations spent their time and attention on critically categorizing and labeling themselves as well.

The take-home of this book is about more than the history of same sex love. The real message, to me anyway, is that we need to challenge the commonplaces. Once we have that historical stereotype, we need to flesh it out-- understand that while history may seem, from a distance, like a few plain bones, really there are legion nerves, tissues, vessels, cells, and molecules making up the body of the past.