The Third Sex (review)

Willy's The Third Sex (1927) was actually the work of Colette's husband, Henri Gauthier Villars (1859–1931). He did not write the book himself but rather oversaw its publication, just as "Willy" oversaw publication of much of the ephemera of his day. The Third Sex is a "complete tour of contemporary Sodom"—an interdisciplinary account of Parisian homosexuality in its cultural, theoretical, and historical contexts (9). But it is more properly an exercise in a certain rhetorical hypocrisy. Lawrence Schehr, this edition's translator, sums it up: "scabrous, awful puns and double entendres, a penchant for neologisms and argot, a moral superiority combined with rakish libertinism" (x). This last combination is indeed what gives the book a notable range. The Third Sex is interesting less for what it tells us about homosexuality circa 1927 (not enough!) than for what it tells us about the moral-but-rakish hypocrisies of this genre.

Willy has a way with words and fairly nice distinctions. There may be a large number of "nieces" at American universities—young men "willing to make sacrifices to ephebic Eros"—but "quite rarely does one of them penetrate with full force the intimate and private realm of his special friend." They are more given to "digital flirting" (28). In this they differ from their Asian cousins, but then "[a]ll of Asia is tainted with pederasty," so it should be unsurprising that Asia even has "schools for Fairies":

. . . the classroom benches are fitted with rounded pegs, of graduated sizes. The young students, who do not wear underpants under their tunics, sit, straight as arrows, on these courtly stakes. When the range of their knowledge has been sufficiently widened on bench A, they go to bench B, and so forth, up to the seventeenth bench that represents the end of their training.

(30)

Shocking—yes. But then "if this way of seating reached our schools, wouldn't it at least have the advantage of keeping our schoolboys a bit quieter?" (31).

The first chapter of The Third Sex is thus dedicated to "Looking Across the Borders." A translator's introduction precedes it, along with two contemporary pieces of front matter: an introduction by Louis Estève and a preface, which surveys the buzz on homosexuality. "Across the Borders" also includes the situation in Germany (Herman Magnus as "apostle," special casinos, personal ads, the notorious Article 175) and in Italy (mainly, that "Mecca of Inversion" that was Capri). Then comes psychology, or "a bit of it," focused on the fundamental distinction between uranism (inborn) and pederasty (acquired) and differences by setting (prisons; "among our inferior brothers" [37]). "Some Leaders" includes Alcibiades, Rousseau, Proust, de Max, Rostand, Verlaine and Rimbaud, and Wilde (with regard to whom Willy takes a rare sporting attitude: "He paid heavily for his errors. Let us not be too hard on him" [45]). The "Tour for the Curious" takes us all across Paris to the Society of the Cavemen, to balls and bars and galleries, to cocaine dens and Turkish baths and La Petite Cabane. "Varied Opinions" come from history, doctors, and the ladies, and finally there is the "literature"—the short stories, novels, and theater in which homosexuality is dangerously promoted. Which sets up the most perplexing part of the book—the epilogue, which gets to the crux of the matter by drawing an essential link between "the brazen impudence of inversion and the abuse of a certain publicity" (95).

Because there is something brazenly inverted about publicity, Willy disclaims it. Which means that his account of "contemporary Sodom" could have been far more sensational than it is: "I have hardly given precise details, for one could possibly accuse me of getting rich through smutty publicity" (68). This is too bad, because The Third Sex might have had more historical value and more appeal had it gone into greater detail. The "Tour for the Curious" leaves the reader still curious, as Willy pursues other goals—punning, above all else, and also (though less...