Style derives from Greek stylos: The tool of the writer, but also the chisel of those sculptors whose marble-youths made me realize my own gay desires when I was a boy. Style, according to Buffon l’homme meme, is the distinctive set of voluntary manners and involuntary traces that allows us to ascribe an artifact to an individual artist, ethnic group, region, or epoch. Gay style, thus, would be what both connects and gives away their maker’s secret in the works of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Kant and Nietzsche, Michelangelo and Dürer, Händel and Beethoven. Seen from summits so far apart the question can be but turned around (read: perverted): Is there such a thing as non-gay style?
Even if the one telling gay-style is a phantasm, gays, after all, loom large in the sphere of style where it is not individual, but collective. Such is their dominance in the field of fashion that it may give straight men a sense of inferiority. How else to interpret Erich Kästners jibe Just because you do it from behind you are not fully geniuses! What irks him are hardly the geniuses on Mount Olympus, who public memory usually sanitizes from all sexuality, but rather the scores of gay stylists and dandies who tend to set fashion trends ever since, say, the Knights Templar. Mocking them as rear-gunners nowadays seems somewhat démodé.
Yet, every high-school-kid to this day fends off as gay whatever strikes him as softer or more refined than what he himself expects to be allowed as an adult; lest girls will do so for him. So, is there not still some stylistic similarity between, say, Giorgio Bassani, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde? Does the stylist Hubert Fichte not have a point when he identifies an indirect, improper, ironic manner of speech as homosexual style?
Not quite. The similarities between these authors are more immediately explicable with the epoch they lived in than with their shared penchant towards the same sex. In the bourgeois 19th century such desires could indeed only be expressed by way of allusion. Those sensitive to the issue understood; yet there was no smoking gun to be found for the prosecutors. The belle-epoque, after all, oppressed homosexuality and homosexuals more thoroughly than any era before. The flip side of this persecution was an esthetically fruitful sublimation. The love that dares not speak its name is how Alfred Douglas put it: The foppish youth whom to love landed Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol. A short century earlier, though, Lord Douglas’s French peer, the Marquis de Sade, did not mince words in painting his gay obsessions in the most colorful and obscene detail. What landed him the Bastille was not that, but having forced female prostitutes to anal intercourse. His contemporary Goethe, who desired Girls but admired everything about the Ancients, including their pederasty, had no qualms to put this to classic measure: Boys I loved too, but I do prefer girls; if I’m fed up with her as a girl she may still serve me as a boy. Such frankness reveals what the carefully crafted allusion and sous-entendus of authors of a less open-minded era really are: not gay-style but slave-style. Free men, from the Greek Solon to the American Walt Whitman speak about their love to free youths in free words.
Yet, even the expressive freedom of de Sade at some point hit a wall. I am not referring to the walls of the dungeon, into which the chaste revolutionaries quickly threw him back into after his brief liberation when the Bastille was stormed. De Sade, free in virtue of his fearlessness, was no freedom fighter, but an author. As is true for all stylists, what concerned him was not style, but truth. To call a prick a prick is an act of self-assertion as a free man. Literature begins with the realization that the prick one takes into ones mouth in speech will never be the prick one takes into ones mouth – or anus - in sex. Sex can be both pure and vile; so can be speech. To bashfully shroud it does nothing to make the vile pure, but may make the pure appear vile. De Sade is the ancestor of a more modern gay style of provocative divestiture. Jean Genet, Hubert Fichte and others (including myself) work from the assumption that even – or especially! – the most indecent exposure of man’s physical existence can but reveal his metaphysical truth: the untouchable dignity of each and every human being. It is this pure belief that permeates contemporary popular gay culture, from Tom of Finland and Ralf König to the anonymous participants in any Gay Pride Parade.
Even if the one telling gay-style is a phantasm, gays, after all, loom large in the sphere of style where it is not individual, but collective. Such is their dominance in the field of fashion that it may give straight men a sense of inferiority. How else to interpret Erich Kästners jibe Just because you do it from behind you are not fully geniuses! What irks him are hardly the geniuses on Mount Olympus, who public memory usually sanitizes from all sexuality, but rather the scores of gay stylists and dandies who tend to set fashion trends ever since, say, the Knights Templar. Mocking them as rear-gunners nowadays seems somewhat démodé.
Yet, every high-school-kid to this day fends off as gay whatever strikes him as softer or more refined than what he himself expects to be allowed as an adult; lest girls will do so for him. So, is there not still some stylistic similarity between, say, Giorgio Bassani, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde? Does the stylist Hubert Fichte not have a point when he identifies an indirect, improper, ironic manner of speech as homosexual style?
Not quite. The similarities between these authors are more immediately explicable with the epoch they lived in than with their shared penchant towards the same sex. In the bourgeois 19th century such desires could indeed only be expressed by way of allusion. Those sensitive to the issue understood; yet there was no smoking gun to be found for the prosecutors. The belle-epoque, after all, oppressed homosexuality and homosexuals more thoroughly than any era before. The flip side of this persecution was an esthetically fruitful sublimation. The love that dares not speak its name is how Alfred Douglas put it: The foppish youth whom to love landed Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol. A short century earlier, though, Lord Douglas’s French peer, the Marquis de Sade, did not mince words in painting his gay obsessions in the most colorful and obscene detail. What landed him the Bastille was not that, but having forced female prostitutes to anal intercourse. His contemporary Goethe, who desired Girls but admired everything about the Ancients, including their pederasty, had no qualms to put this to classic measure: Boys I loved too, but I do prefer girls; if I’m fed up with her as a girl she may still serve me as a boy. Such frankness reveals what the carefully crafted allusion and sous-entendus of authors of a less open-minded era really are: not gay-style but slave-style. Free men, from the Greek Solon to the American Walt Whitman speak about their love to free youths in free words.
Yet, even the expressive freedom of de Sade at some point hit a wall. I am not referring to the walls of the dungeon, into which the chaste revolutionaries quickly threw him back into after his brief liberation when the Bastille was stormed. De Sade, free in virtue of his fearlessness, was no freedom fighter, but an author. As is true for all stylists, what concerned him was not style, but truth. To call a prick a prick is an act of self-assertion as a free man. Literature begins with the realization that the prick one takes into ones mouth in speech will never be the prick one takes into ones mouth – or anus - in sex. Sex can be both pure and vile; so can be speech. To bashfully shroud it does nothing to make the vile pure, but may make the pure appear vile. De Sade is the ancestor of a more modern gay style of provocative divestiture. Jean Genet, Hubert Fichte and others (including myself) work from the assumption that even – or especially! – the most indecent exposure of man’s physical existence can but reveal his metaphysical truth: the untouchable dignity of each and every human being. It is this pure belief that permeates contemporary popular gay culture, from Tom of Finland and Ralf König to the anonymous participants in any Gay Pride Parade.
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