Filosofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity

Strongly opposing the idea of homosexuality as a treatable illness, Alfred Kinsey and Evelyn Hooker, American experts on sexology, came up with studies that stood up for the rights of homosexuals and significantly challenged the idea of the connection of homosexual desire with pathology. “Kinsey’s monumental 1948 study of the sexual behavior of American males” (Eisenbach 228) ascertains that the view that homosexuality concerns only an infinitesimal amount of people was fallacious. He suggests that about 37 percent of American men have had a certain kind of physical proximity with other men, which led to orgasmic culmination. Hooker’s paper of 1957 deals with testing a sample of men of both sexual orientations and their predispositions to mental illnesses. It implies no specific correlation between homosexuality and a higher rate of mental issues and disorders. Her work posed another challenge to the sickness model (228). In 1951, Cory’s revolutionary book written from the point of view of a homosexual entitled The Homosexual in America was published (12). For the very first time, the heterosexual majority had a possibility of identifying with a gay person. Homosexuality was eventually removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973.

The process of the decriminalization of sodomy in the United States was gradual and it experienced many reversals. The first state which abolished the laws regarding homosexual acts as crimes against nature was Illinois in 1961. The last 14 states, whose legal system still included sodomy law in 2003, made male love legal because of the decision of the Supreme Court in Lawrence vs. Texas (“Lawrence v. Texas”). There is no wonder that the process took such a long time. In fact, sodomy was closely associated with other crimes because of daily mass media brainwashing of the American public. Speaking of the 1950s, Eisenbach admits that “nearly every reference to lesbians and gays in New York City’s newspapers was connected to crime” (2) or that “media commonly depicted homosexuals as insane deviants and sexual predators” (foreword 7). Before the gay rights movement, a huge amount of gay men were forced to lead a “double life”, which was “a strange world of freedom and oppression” (1). And later, in the 1970s, Anita Bryant, a singer and ex-Miss Oklahoma, utilized her popularity when promoting anti-tolerance ideas in her campaign, whose aim was supposed to have been the protection of the traditional notion of an American family. Her argument that “a ban on discrimination would signify the social acceptance of homosexuality, which would encourage young people to eschew family life in favor of the ’homosexuality lifestyle’” was ridiculous and misguided (208).

In England, decriminalization took place in 1967. Ten years earlier, Lord Wolfenden proposed “the decriminalization of homosexual sex between men over twenty-one if conducted in complete privacy” in his report (Higgins 192). Higgins points out that it elicited a heated debate in the Parliament, whose members undoubtedly demonstrated their narrow-mindedness because “the level of ignorance and prejudice in the Mother of Parliaments was positively medieval” (192). One really refuses to believe that the following words were uttered in the late 1950s: “William Shepard, MP for Cheadle, House of Commons, 26 November 1958: “Incest is a much more natural act than homosexuality”” (205).

American gays were for the first time positively depicted in the media after the Stonewall riots. It was the year of 1970 when The Times labeled the marchers of an annual commemoration of Stonewall “not as sick deviants but as members of minority group who gathered to protest onerous discriminatory policies” (113). According to Eisenbach, the violent Stonewall events “challenged the stereotypical notion that homosexuals were fragile, passive” and not able defending their rights (9). In 1971, a sitcom “All in the family” presenting a gay man as tough and masculine appeared on American television. Unlike newspapers that endorsed negative connotations, television, a powerful medium of manipulation, contributed to gradually more and more positive display of an American homosexual. As a corollary of this, typical gays of the 1970s were commonly depicted as macho men whose characteristic features were “moustaches, muscles, biceps, hairy chests, Levis, lumberjack shirts, work boots, bomber jackets” (258-9).

The calamity of AIDS in Monette’s 1980s could not have happened at a worse time, as “the gay plague” appeared “when gay people were gradually getting rid of the label of “sinful, criminal, sick”” (Eisenbach 291). Woods even thinks that for ‘gayness’ it was “the Golden Age between Stonewall and AIDS” (360). Then a rapid fall came and “the tolerance of homosexuality dropped” (Eisenbach 299). The uninformed public began to believe again that homosexual orientation was not fully compatible with a state of perfect mental and physical health. Eisner argues that Monette’s memoir significantly helped in terms of humanization of the calamity. Borrowed Time “has translated personal tragedy into a socially accepted representation by transforming the historicity and specificity of a particular illness into a generic public display” (213) and also witnessed the transformation of two people “from the stable, secure gay bourgeois couple to the romantic heroes battling death” (216).

The generally accepted policy by the American press and political authorities was one of constant underestimating of the whole situation, misinforming the public and the intentional withholding of information, which caused panic and hysteria among ordinary people – some of them even started avoiding handshakes with people they suspected might have been gay. “Now we know that stride could have been made in ’82 or ’83 if the government hadn’t been playing ostrich” (Monette 119). “And if the government was stone-deaf, the press was mute” (110). Eisenbach argues that only 30 articles dealing with AIDS crisis appeared in American print media in 1982. Moreover, liberally oriented newspapers often “downplayed the threat”, “held back details of how the disease was spread” and “avoided the true story to protect gays from a political and social backlash” (294). Similarly to other newspapers and magazines “the Wall Street Journal began giving substantial coverage to AIDS only after it struck people who were not gay” (293). Just for the sake of constructed AIDS paranoia, “gays had been told to leave restaurants, refused ambulance service, and evicted from their apartments” (299). Religious Americans also came up with the idea that AIDS was a “divine punishment” sent from above “on deviants” (Higgins 285) and their sexual practices inconsistent with nature. “‘God’s punishment‘ was the major level of public debate in 1985: hate, it appeared, was the only public health tool available” (Monette 166).

Surprisingly enough, the AIDS calamity in the United States forced gay people to impose two changes in their lives that were of capital importance and, in retrospect, perceived as positive ones. The first change was reassessment of their promiscuous lifestyles, which gradually led to laying more emphasis on the priority of partnership loyalty and physical fidelity. This fact, along with numerous incomprehensible cases of life-partners of gays who were dying of AIDS being “excluded from visiting” their lovers’ deathbeds because of having no legal relationship started the campaign for the legalization of same-sex marriage (Eisenbach 307). “By the time Chris died – at twenty-eight, his family of strangers circled about him, his lover banished from the room […]” (Monette 40). However, the change was a fairly slow process. Speaking of 1982, “even when gay newspapers did print articles and opinion pieces suggesting a change in sexual practices, many gays were resistant” (296). However, the first consequences of this newly accepted policy were visible during the following year when “attendance dropped in the baths, bars and sex clubs in gays communities throughout the nation” (297). According to Sontag, Monette comes from a generation that regarded “sex as an adventure without consequences” (qtd. in Clum 651). The second considerable change that took place in the 1980s was a huge wave of coming-outs, which was a sign of solidarity with other people belonging to the same tribe in times of sorrow; and of the efforts to challenge stereotypical notions of homosexual relationships; and gave a good airing to a stuffy air of intolerance and myths in unventilated social rooms where the windows had been closed for too long time. “The fact is that it has not generally been possible to make useful cultural interventions from the closet” (Woods 369).

Monette’s memoir is a profound account of the loss. The loss of secure ground under his feet represented by the loved one, Roger, friends, faith in a better fate for homosexuals and a safe personal background. His life turns upside down in a second. “You fight tough, you fight dirty, but you cannot fight dirtier than it” (Monette 2). The arduously acquired identity of a self-confident man of homosexual inclination liberated from the shadows of the past suddenly vanishes and a life-long effort to establish certain values is in vain. He recollects “the day of Roger’s diagnosis in 1985, the day we began to live on the moon” (2). The symbol of the moon indicates here the insurmountable distance of him and Roger from healthy people, a mutual inability to understand too dissimilar life priorities. “[…] I don’t want to talk to people without AIDS anymore” (312). Fragments creating the whole of his living shrink to the ones of constant fear – ““What if I get it?” I’d ask him; that is, how would I bear it?”” (44), phobia of bacteria and viruses – “[…] I had my first experience of protective helplessness, lest someone should sneeze in our direction” (96), the search for the restoration of mental stability – “My life was a sort of amnesia till then, longing for something that couldn’t be true until I’d found the rest of me. Is this feeling so different in straight people?” (11), and the insidiousness of AIDS – “The most horrible death in modern medicine, people said” (86). The only aim that Monette seems to cling to is his determination to convey a message, to illustrate the situation to unaware people. “Gottlieb turned to me. “You’re a writer?” he asked with a skeptical air. “Why don’t you write about this? Nobody else does”” (80).

Sinfield sees gay people as a subculture and argues that “all subcultures produce myths” (83) and the myths of the homosexual minority are HIV and AIDS that have "become inseparable from the story of gayness” (81). Woods supplements him with the suggestion that “gay men have started referring back to those homophobic myths of their own tragic status” (361) during the crisis. Similarly, Hanson labels homosexuals as the minority of the “’living dead’ status” (qtd. in Eisner 218). Monette himself “refers to his state as ‘Half Life’", as he has lost half of what made life meaningful (qtd. in Clum 650). New York and San Francisco were supposedly the most affected American cities, as well as being the cities where the first reactions to the crisis were the most inadequate and the slowest. Unofficial statements of American doctors whose clientele were mostly people of homosexual disposition “suggested that at least half of the gay men in New York and SF born between 1945 and 1960 were probably infected with HIV between the end of the seventies and the end of eighties” (Eisenbach 308). San Francisco, according to Higgins, was “the gay capital of the world” because of the fact that “self-identified homosexuals were once estimated as a quarter of the total population” (240).

Waxman and Byington , college teachers of literature, complain about the intolerant shell that many American students build up around themselves to be protected from the confrontation with the Other, which is particularly visible in the areas of the United States with a strong religious tradition. According to them, Monette’s books encourage the readers “to confront societal pressures to conform to heterosexual norms” and to “analyze their own stories for rebelliousness versus conformity to society’s sexual norms” (164). Not only Monette’s but all three memoirs provide us a certain amount of personal reflection on our membership in society. Monette does it in the roughest form, though. At this point, the link between Symonds and Monette, directed via Isherwood is re-transformed into a circle. In the 19^th century homosexuals lived and died in solitude because of legal regulations imposed on their sexuality and the notion of sinful conduct; in the 20^th century, despite the Stonewall events, homosexuals lived and died in solitude because of the disease that produced superstitions and restored continuity between homosexuality and mental and physical backwardness. “People with AIDS were becoming alienated from family and friends, losing their jobs, being discriminated against, and, too often, dying alone” (Bailey, DeVinny, Gordon, Schadewald 1732). Moreover, both Symonds and Monette contemplated suicide. Symonds’ reason was the unbearableness of the constant inner clash between society’s standards and his own nature. Monette could not stand seeing his beloved friend’s health and mind deteriorating. Loyalty to Roger turned his thoughts away. “No, wait: I had to be here for Rog. It became unthinkable the moment I thought it” (93).

3.2 Platonic Concept of Love (Eros)

The developed society of classical Greece and its democratic way of thinking are, in many respects, celebrated in gay community as the absolute ideal of an open, liberal and tolerant social coexistence. Up to now, thousands of gay people from all over the world have headed for Greece to connect spiritually with the ancient place, where not only did “no law [forbid] consensual homoerotic intercourse between two free Athenian males” (Hindley 133) but also where homosexuality was extolled as one of the means of pursuing knowledge, if not wisdom, and adopting profound insights into the spiritual essence of living. Isherwood’s visit to Greece described in Borrowed Time is also in complete conformity with the idea of spirituality as he writes: “The closest I came to believing something higher – after the loss of the old Episcopal thing – happened in Greece, and centred on the Greek ideal: scholar, philosopher, athlete, warrior, citizen… it gave me a context” (105).

Ancient Athens gave birth to one of the wisest personalities who ever walked the Earth – Plato. Plato’s mastery of words and superiority of mind are indisputable as he laid the foundations of philosophical thoughts and debates over such topics that had been hardly discussed before in similar way. His consciousness-expanding ideas, especially about love and intellect, are, in one way or another, mentioned, described, indicated, followed, reflected, or elaborated in the memoirs. Noticing something different and yet the same in Plato’s texts, Symonds, Isherwood and Monette filter his ideas through personal experience and hardships; and derive from them comfort and inner serenity during hard times. The greatness of Plato chiefly consists in the universal veracity of what he conveys. Owing to Plato, everyone can quench their innate thirst for fundamental metaphysical answers, no matter what stage of life they are just going through.

Despite mentioning the ideas of mortality and beauty, this subchapter predominantly focuses on Plato’s theory of love, which is one of “the most influential traditions of love in the Western world” (Amir 6). This concept, whose applicability has been considered and analyzed from various angles of myriads of views throughout centuries, is certainly one of the ideas that is the most pregnant with interpretations, i.e., since its inception. If we take this fact into account, it is highly probable that the comprehension of its chief message might have been considerably distorted and diverted from its originally meant purpose. However, Plato’s dialogues are not chiefly dedicated to discovering or establishing the real and only truth; they rather incite the readers to embrace their own processes of utmost elimination of falsehood, and teaches them that to reliably tell the difference between the truth and falsehood is an arduous never-ending task. Symonds, Isherwood and Monette are searching for the truth whether their different sexual appetite is socially acceptable or not.

The Platonic concept of love is, to some extent, ambiguous and complex. Understanding of Platonic affection as being based on the idea of nearly secret admiration of the beloved and no physical consummation of the relationship prevailed among scholars up to the 1950s, when a completely new paradigm came into being. Specifically, it was the year 1954 and a British academic Kenneth Dover who then “realized that almost everything ever written about Greek homosexuality was confused and misleading” (Davidson 7). Dover’s theory centres on the examination of circumstances of physical love acts themselves rather than whether or not there were any. The most significant circumstance of sex was/is the factor of penetration - activity or passivity. The passive role during making love was/is considered humiliating and effeminate (8). The following words of Symonds describe general situation among boys at Harrow – and I would like to lay emphasis on the fact that it was during the 1850s: “Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognized as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow’s bitch” (94). Uncertainty about the presence or absence of sexual intercourse seems to be, in Dover’s view, completely out of question. So, supposedly, the original meaning of Plato’s approach to love, which is elaborated on in “Symposium”, and partly in “Phaedrus”, distinguishes between the spiritual and the corporeal. The relationship of the lover and the beloved, whose statutes are unequal, do not have to be completely deprived of sexual intercourse, but the major form of satisfaction of the lover is directed to his mind, not body – to the immortal or the divine. Mere obsession with satisfying bodily needs together with neglecting the needs of the mind is what Plato condemns. “Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, inasmuch as he is not even stable, because he loves a thing which is in itself unstable, […]” (“Symposium” 1183). According to Naugle, Plato’s “Symposium” manages to construct “a bridge between love and philosophy” (4). The bridge leads a human being from inconstant perception of what is beautiful to one’s sight (such as beautiful bodies) to the eternal perception of the beauty itself, which is impossible to be seen by the eyes but is visible to the mind and heart. Through her reading of “Phaedrus”, Amir comes to a similar conclusion as she considers Plato successful “in creating a very special synthesis of rationality and emotion” (10). Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; and is immeasurable. However, the essence of beauty is not to define what is beautiful and what is not, the essence is one’s ability to feel the beauty. Only those who are lucky enough to detect a note of beauty in the smallest things have a potential to merge with higher principles of life, which lie beyond everything else. Diotima’s explanation of what the nature of beauty is, is more than sufficient: It is not “existing in any other being, as for example, in a an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things […]” (“Symposium” 1211). When people are oblivious to the highest forms of beauty, they are not able to love unconditionally and therefore to become a part of the divine. However, when the lover’s major interest in the beloved is his soul, he himself becomes beautiful. “Once this beatific vision is experienced, all other forms of beauty vanish and are insignificant, even that of beautiful boys” (Naugle 37).

In the memoirs, “Symposium”, “Phaedrus” and “Apology of Socrates” are explicitly depicted. The reason why Symonds studied “Symposium” and “Phaedrus” in such a detail is clear. He was fascinated by a society where homosexual inclinations were not considered perverse and abnormal. The link between Plato and Symonds is provided by Woods who suggests that “the Platonic dialogues contained almost the only intelligent discussion of the subject to be found anywhere, and when inverts first lighted upon them, the sense of liberation was overwhelming” (5). Moreover, one of Symonds’s prominent acquaintances was Benjamin Jowett, a translator of Plato.

Isherwood did not seem to read any of Plato’s texts in the 1930s; and he visited Greece only once during this period without any deeper experience. However, he unconsciously partially lived in accord with the Platonic notion of love, which is truly remarkable if he had not read it before. Monette apparently loved Greece and its spiritual heritage. The reason why he and Rog chose to read Plato’s “Apology of Socrates” during the calamity was also very simple – “to see how a man of honor faces death without any lies” (303). In the words of Plato, the couple did not seek justification of their nature or assurance that what they had done and who they had become is correct anymore. They rather sought the assurance that death, despite being surrounded with a web of terrifying myths and stigmas, is not evil.

If a wise man, like Socrates, claims that there is no need to be afraid of the death because it might be “the greatest of all goods for the human being,” one wants to believe (12). And sometimes, when on the brink of the death, one simply needs to believe. Monette also compares Socrates’s “instinct that he wasn’t better or wiser than anyone else” to one of the personality traits of Roger (303). This fairly misleading correlation between the two might have helped Monette’s mind to reconcile with the inevitable. Platonic ideas were an integral part of Roger's treatment as Monette endeavored to keep his mind active and to resurrect his hopes of eternality. He was responsible for giving him “IV twice a day, not to mention keeping up food and fluids and twenty-two pills and Plato” (301).

Grosskurth suggest that Symonds’ memoir is not only an account of but also “a justification of his life” (15). In the words of Symonds himself, the memoir is referred to as “the record of a soul” (30). His psyche was torn apart between two voices of his consciousness – one rational commanding him to be a responsible member of society and to do what the masses expect, the second instinctive, encouraging him to live in accord with his nature. Along with other factors, his perplexity compelled him to make numerous mistakes in his life and in perspective, also many wrong choices. The memoir is his apology to them, and, to certain extent, a clarification for his descendants. In fact, he was not guilty of anything, except for being born into a conservative place and time of narrow-minded people. Plato, through “Symposium” and “Phaedrus”, was a valuable helper and guide during his struggle to convey that he is neither mentally ill nor any deviant monster. The texts expressed in a higher form what Symonds did not dare to. He was fascinated by Plato chiefly because of the fact that due to his writings, he finally “saw the possibility of resolving in a practical harmony the discords of [his] instincts” (99). The tradition of Platonic love brought him an immense relief, and perhaps also planted a little seed of pride in his soul. He was even courageous enough to indicate his sexuality in the letter to his daughter Madge:

I love beauty above virtue, and think that nowhere is beauty more eminent than in young men. This love is what people call aesthetic with me. It has to do with my perception through the senses, and does not affect my regard for duty, principle, right conduct. I know well enough that there are more important things in the Universe than beauty. But there is nothing I was born to love more. (qtd. in Higgins 108)