Gay Royale

It's good to be the king. Or queen.

With political power comes extraordinary privileges, including the freedom to indulge your deepest sexual desires. So it makes sense then that as long as there were monarchs, there were monarchs who pursued flings, affairs and even life-long romances with lovers of the same gender.

Queen Anne (1665-1714)

This last of the Scottish Stuarts became notorious for the patronage she offered to her childhood friend and long-term lover, Sarah Jennings, later Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. The British public did not mind the Queen's preference much at the time, but Sarah's influence over the Royal Person was the object of much jealousy at court, which eventually led to a bitter break-up.

Anne in her 20s, by Michael Dahl (Curtis, The Life and Times of Queen Anne)

Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, playing cards with a Lady (by Godfrey Kneller, Life and Times of Queen Anne)

Popular illustration of Anne and Sarah's break-up. "Upon her Knees famed Somerset receives an Office which another Duchess [Sarah] leaves." Life and Times of Queen Anne

Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689)

Christina was thought to have been a boy at birth; this confusion, combined with her later preference for masculine dress and demeanor, have led some to hypothesize that she was Intersex. Never inclined towards marriage, Christina is thought to have had both male and female lovers, including Ebba Sparre, her lady-in-waiting and 'bed-fellow.' At age 26, Christina abdicated the throne, converted to Catholicism, and moved to Rome where she became a great patron of the arts.


Dashing Christina (by Sébastien Bourdon, from Buckley, Christina, Queen of Sweden)


Chistina laughing as Ebba and another woman read from a bawdy book


The beautiful Countess Ebba Sparre, whom Christina called "Belle."
Gustav V, King of Sweden (1858-1950)

Well-loved as the King who built modern Sweden, but with a legacy of sexual scandal that erupted after the King's death in the intensely anti-Communist and homophobic 1950s. A man named Kurt Haijby announced in the mainstream press that he was Gustav's lover from 1912 until 1932; Swedes were perhaps more upset that the Crown at first tried to buy Haijby's silence.


Gustav with tennis buddies: image here from Hadenius, Gustav V

James VI and I, Scotland and England (1566-1625)

A biography in the collection

James, icon of Scottish-style Protestantism

George Villiers, Earl of Buckingham, aka "Your faithful slave and dog, Steenie." Image from Rowse's Illustrated History of Britain.

James greatest legacy: The King James Bible (From an old (date?) edition held at UMN)


Christian VII, King of Norway and Denmark (1749-1808)

The so-called "homosexual half-wit" was never really in control of his court; powerful advisers like his doctor, Johann Friedrich Struensee, allowed him to pursue boys and stay out of the way while they took the reigns of power.

Image available at Wikimedia commons.

Edward II, England (1284-1327)

Edward I subdued Scotland in a series of masterful military campaigns; Edward II, more interested in boys and parties, is blamed for Scottish rebellions during his reign. Edward's love for the selfish, impudent, but by all accounts extremely cute Piers Gaveston helped anger the court against the both of them. Edward's final tragic end (he is thought to have had a red-hot poker inserted into his anus) is dramatized in the play Edward II by Christopher Marlowe. British director Derek Jarman made a film version in 1991.

Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886)

The reclusive builder of Neuschwanstein realized he was gay as a teenager when he discovered the music of Richard Wagner and the charms of young Bavarian men like Prince Paul von Thurn und Taxis and Richard Hornig. As his life became increasingly extravagant, government ministers moved to depose him, and Ludwig died in a mysterious drowning incident together with a close male friend.

Barazoku 薔薇族: the manga angle

There's a lot of male-themed manga in the collection; I just scanned something that was laying around. This is from The Barazoku, a venerable gay-male magazine:

Barazoku was Japan's oldest gay magazine, and was in print for 33 years. First published in 1971, Barazoku was known as a trailblazer for other gay publications and a leader in Japanese gay culture, boasting celebrity fans including Akihiro Miwa, a drag queen rumored to have been a lover of famed author Yukio Mishima. During its 33 years, the magazine survived mainstream disapproval, legal injunctions, and numerous arrests of its founder and editor, Bungaku Itō.

According to the wikipedia entry, the magazine ceased publication in 2004.

Wikipedia also provides a good summary of the magazine's contents:

A typical issue of Barazoku had approximately 300 pages, including several pages of glossy colour and some black and white photographs of younger, fit men in their late teens and twenties (these photographs were censored in accordance with Japan's rules, which require the obscuring of genitals and pubic hair). Despite the inclusion of pornographic pictures, however, Barazoku was not a pornographic magazine.

The bulk of a typical issue of Barazoku was made up of articles and short stories, advice, how-tos, interviews, news, arts, and community listings. In comparison with other gay magazines like Badi, Barazoku typically had fewer pictures and less manga stories and news, which may have contributed to its demise.

I'm not totally sure what's going on here, but it looks like the big queenie bear is some sort of super hero figure. Midwesterner's should be able to relate to that, right?

Two more things to look for when browsing this mag:

Barazoku was the first gay magazine in Asia to be sold at mainstream bookshops, such as Kinokuniya. It became such a cultural phenomenon that its title has entered the mainstream language as a synonym for "gay".

In its early years, the magazine published anonymous work by some of Japan’s most famous poets and authors, and artwork by Goto Mishima. Founder Ito's determination to fight discrimination led the magazine to publish an interview with Japan’s first known AIDS sufferer when the mainstream media refused to address the issue.

Comix 2: Manga

Examples of a "GL" (girls love) manga:


I bought these Chinese translations of Japanese manga at Gingin's Bookstore 晶晶書庫. Looks like author here is Mera Hakamada 袴田めら; she has a blog. These books are available in English as well as "The Last Uniform" 1 and 2. One Librarything user writes,

A wholesome set of short stories about high school girls, some of whom have crushes on other girls in their dorm. There isn't much plot driving this volume: it's just a series of vignettes that follow six girls through the school year.

Gay Comics

The Tretter Collection has a good representation of GLBT-themed comics, including a sizable local gift of American comics from Peter Wilson, transferred from the Quatrefoil Library. Recent acquisitions from Japan and Taiwan offer a glimpse into the world of the tremendously popular "boy's love" and "girl's love" manga.

Gay Comics

Gay Comics anthologizes the underground comics series Gay Comix, which have been appearing since 1980. Major themes are finding love and resisting homophobia; the comics features work by artists of all genders.

Leyland Publications in San Francisco (a 1984 offshoot of Winston Leyland's Gay Sunshine Press) has brought out many more comics with gay males, often with much more graphic sexual material, as in the series Meatmen. Other Leyland comics exhibit slightly different styles, often with wry, lewd humor.

Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse is one of the most sophisticated and highly celebrated GLBT-themed comic arts yet written. Main character Toland Polk must come to grips with both racism and homophobia as he comes of age and comes out in 1960s Mississippi.

Wilson's donation includes several titles that are not put out by GLBT presses, nor do they contain explicitly homoerotic themes. And yet, they just seem gay. Perhaps this is a reminder that comic artists generally understand what it means to be marginalized and how important
it is to fight back, which attracts queer readers and can naturally reproduce a queer sensibility.

culture of queer : a tribute to J.B. Harter

Rubin, David, and Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans, LA) and the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation. The Culture of Queer : a Tribute to J.B. Harter. New Orleans: Contemporary Arts Center, 2005.

This nice little volume I dragged up from the collection does not have the breadth of a serious survey, but does serve as a quick guide to the major issues involved in the term "queer" as it is approached by a small group of contemporary artists and curators. From a focus on "know thy self" and "faces," the book also makes comments the role of "queer" as applied to stereotypes, male bonding, sex, commitment and AIDS. The book does not attempt to make any systematic conclusions about the term "queer" at all, either as an important part of some social advocacy or as a trait in art; it merely attempts to leave the impression that "queerness" does both of those things. Despite this weakness, the close attention given to each of the works presented makes the book a valuable peak into the usage of "queer" in one subcommunity of the art world.

J.B. Harter. Self-Portrait as Curator, 1983

I love the humor in this one. Harter was actually museum curator at the time he painted this. Apparently, "he was not yet publicly out of the closet," but he certainly gives his audience plenty of clues to work out his sexual orientation, as well as the basic attitude towards culture that it entails. How many ways can you find to say that he's gay?

This portrait of a famous, older, and openly gay photographer by a young admirer makes clever references to the many bonds the two of them share: photography, identity, and the male form, among others.

How many Boomer-era Americans think of a certain friend from their past, someone associated with home, welcomed into the family, and, eventually, the ideal of goodness, beauty, and all that is sexually desirable? The. (Ted) Titulo's photo-collage commemorates this narrative with equal parts fantasy and nostalgia, turning boyhood love into something sublime.

Each painting Michael Meads' patron saints series brings an overt sense of the sacred to scenes of male community. In For St. George, Patron Saint of Boy Scouts (1996), we have a rich meditation on the theme of 'mentoring,' with all of the problematic erotic overtones that are contained therein.

After a strong start, The Culture of Queer begins to fray into too many subtopics with no clear sequence or relation, and many of the pieces are too allusive to stand on their own. At least one discussion is worth remembering however: the pattern of "ultra-masculine stereotyping of gay men that emerged in post-Stonewall America in the 1970s was also taking hold at that time in other parts of the world..." Two examples here are the more familiar Touko Laaksonen, "Tom of Finland" and a new face for me, Japan's Tsuyoshi Yoshida, "Goh Mishima" (1924-1988). Mishima seems to me to provide a link between his namesake the seppuku-loving aesthete and later graphic publications in magazines like Barozoku.

Shuaiguy.cn

Poking around, you know.

I discovered a gay Chinese website called Shuaiguy.cn. Random thoughts along the Way:
上有兩仙童， 好食亦好飲。 與我一丸藥， 光輝有物色。

There were two young fairies living up there.
They *loved* eating; drinking, more.
They gave me a pill of elixir,
it glowed with all five colors.
(Apologies to Cao Pi)
Skin like ivory under water, deliciously desirable
「鮮膚一何潤，秀色若可餐。」 -- Lu Ji 陸機

RIP Eve Sedgwick

Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick (May 2, 1950-April 12, 2009)



Professor Eve Sedgwick, an important founder of the academic sub-discipline 'Queer theory,' has died of cancer. She was 58. When she took to the academic stage in the 1970s at Yale University, English and other humanities departments were rarely welcoming to discussions of Feminism, of same-sex desire, of the fluidity of gender, or of homophobia. As an agressive and radical teacher, advocate and scholar, Professor Sedgwick worked tirelessly to change that situation. The fact that universities across America are more open than ever to the study of Feminism and Gay and Lesbian Studies is, in part, the result of the great conversations on identity, desire, and culture that Professor Sedgwick helped begin with essays like "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" and books like Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and Epistemology of the Closet.

Both "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire examine great works of Western literature and find many places where something "queer" is going on. In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, for example, Sedgwick finds coded expressions of repressed female sexuality. In a study of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, Sedgwick shows how homophobia, heterosexual desire, and homosexual desire can all become entangled among a set of multiple fictional characters. She believed firmly that life was like that -- to her, nobody was completely "straight," and the concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were far too simple to describe the way live, love, and hate. Building on Michel Foucault's theories of sexual behavior and the evolution of systems for controlling populations, Sedgwick developed "queer theory" as a set of reading strategies that could show how our sexual desires, our senses of gender, and even our very basic senses of identity are constructed by larger cultural forces.

"It's about trying to understand different kinds of sexual desire and how the culture defines them," she told The New York Times in 1998. In the obituary by Patricia Cohen for the New York Times, Ms. Cohen wisely asks us to

Consider the issue of gay marriage. Some contend that gays are like everyone else (what Ms. Sedgwick called the “universalizing view”) and should be treated that way; others portray them as an oppressed minority (the “minoritizing view”) who deserve protection. At the same time, those who would outlaw gay marriage can argue either that homosexuals are a deviant subgroup (minoritizing) or that the ubiquity of homosexual tendencies (universalizing) endangers the traditional institutions that underlie civilized society.

The persistence of the deadlock between the universalizing and minoritizing views, she wrote, is “the single most powerful feature of the important 20th-century understandings of sexuality, whether hetero or homo, and a determining feature too of all the social relations routed, in this sexualized century, through understandings of sexuality.” Ms. Butler said, “her brilliance was to show how both of these claims are often made at the same time, and that this is actually a productive tension.”

Much of Sedgwick's work, and many of her close readings of literary work, remain controversial. The constructivist view of sexual identity is problematic to many historians of gay and lesbian culture, including Jim Kepner, Louis Crompton, Warren Johansson, and the University's own Jean-Nickolas Tretter. To these scholars and archivists, gays and lesbians throughout history share a common, essential experience of same-sex desire that they are born with, and they also share a common experience of homophobia. Both scholarly perspectives have made great contributions to the study of sexual identity in American universities; surely this is another "productive tension."