Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II, and : Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day (review)

As the nineteenth century faded into the twentieth, Oscar Wilde stood in the dock of the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey and, when questioned, described "the Love that dare not speak its name." Drawing himself to his full height, he declaimed, "'The Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare." As the twentieth century stumbled into the twenty-first, this Gay Name Game grew into a frenzy of books and web sites, list begetting list, vague innuendo morphing into granite fact in a cringe-inducing effort that all too often seemed to be pleading that gay people really aren't so silly, evil, and inconsequential as everyone seemed to think. Alexander the Great. Sappho. Leonardo da Vinci. George Michael. See? See?

The editors of the new Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History volumes are aware of the pitfalls inherent in any work attempting to list Famous Homosexuals, and they have attacked the problem head on. Distancing themselves from early works such as A. L. Rowse's Homosexuals in History (1977), they acknowledge that in the past an eagerness for validation led to some twisting of historical facts. "It presupposed that it was critical to prove that a range of famous people were homosexual and to find the 'stains on the sheets,' and it supposed that almost anyone who strayed from the straight and narrow was probably 'one of us.'" Shunning the stained sheet test, the editors were determined that their work should display none of the "hagiographical" excesses of similar compilations. To an admirable extent they have succeeded—with only a few exceptions.

The entry for Virginia Woolf is a good example of the exception to the rule. Her marriage to Leonard Woolf is dismissed with a cursory, "All biographers agree that it was essentially a sexless marriage, but many also agree that on some levels it was a satisfying partnership for both." Well, yes, but many biographers also agree that the relationship was the most important of her adult life—warm, nurturing, and sustaining. Essentially sexless it might have been, but if frequency of genital contact is to be the gold standard by which intimacy is weighed, many historic (and not so historic) love affairs are in very deep trouble. Hogarth Press was not merely a satisfying business partnership—a substitute for a real marriage—it was a manifestation of Leonard's love for Virginia, founded with the express purpose of giving her a quiet occupation to coax her back from the edge of madness. Their love was deep, mutual, and long-lasting. Her tender, apologetic suicide note was, after all, addressed to her husband. Virginia's relationship with Vita Sackville-West, described in the entry as "her most famous affair of the heart and the one to have been most physical[sic]," is discussed only briefly, but one can almost see the stained sheet being waved defiantly from the window. The entry ignores nephew Quentin Bell's contention that the affair was never really consummated, that it was never fully "physical." Virginia Woolf's sexuality was buried deep beneath the wreckage of a disastrous Victorian childhood. Leonard tried gently to coax it to the surface but failed. Vita went...