Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature Book

More of a series of profiles and reviews of gay male and female authors than a cohesive study of gay literature, this collection of essays is still a nice work of queer canon formation. Sure, Wilde, Mann, and Baldwin are already at the forefront of this canon, but Tóibín (is it fun typing out that name precisely with those finicky diacriticals? it is not) also includes such figures as Elizabeth Bishop, Francis Bacon, Thom Gunn, and Pedro Almodóvar in his study. His point is to call attention to certain writers and artists because they were homosexual, but not necessarily to dwell on their homosexuality. In other words, it's about finding and naming gay heroes, an interesting project for a writer who never wrote about homosexuality in general or his own in specific until he had ten books under his belt.

As I said it's not a very rich critical or theoretical work. Definitely the most enlightening thing I came across was his defense of the love between Wilde and Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, who everyone understands as having ruined the great Irish writer with his selfishness and cruelty. Why did Wilde put up with it? Tóibín writes:

"In most societies, most gay people go through adolescence believing that the fulfillment of physical desire would not be matched by emotional attachment. For straight people, the eventual matching of the two is part of the deal, a happy aspect of normality. But if this occurs for gay people, it is capable of taking on an extraordinarily powerful emotional force, and the resulting attachment, even if the physical part fizzles out, or even if the relationship makes no sense to the outside world, is likely to be fierce and enduring. [. . .] This, more likely, was the stamp and seal of the love between Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas."

It almost made me not loathe the boy. Almost.