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G&S Typesetters PDF proof Chapter 6 Pioneers: The United States Well before the middle of the nineteenth century each of the major nations of northwestern Europe had established its own peculiar variations on the general theme of how best to regulate deviant sexuality in a modern, increasingly secular society and render it relatively harmless. By drawing a clear line between the acceptable and the unacceptable, and by enforcing that border as much through disapproval as by laws of varying severity, they had succeeded in pushing what had once seemed threatening sufficiently far out on the fringe that it could largely be ignored. But at that point, inevitably, the law of unintended consequences came into play. The more clearly the line was drawn, the more emphatically the homosexual or any other subculture was labeled as different and distinct, the more likely it was that such a subculture would develop a group consciousness, a sense of its own separateness and identity. To the extent that members of such a subculture internalized the stigmas applied to them by society, regarding themselves as in some measure criminal or sick or sinful, they represented no great threat. But group consciousness could lead as well to a sense of solidarity within the subculture, of grievance against the society that stigmatized it, and finally to the desire to redefine and assert itself on its own terms. Moreover , once a clear line had been drawn between acceptable and deviant behavior , then ever-increasing vigilance was required to ensure that the line was not crossed. Indeed, the clearer the boundary, the greater the danger, since a single transgression was more and more likely to be viewed, not as a temporary lapse, but as indicative of a deviant nature. It was as a result of these two unintended consequences of the labeling of sexual deviance that the Victorian compromise and Victorian silence on the subject of homosexuality broke down. Members of homosexual subcultures did indeed begin to question their labeling by society and to attempt the long| 69 06-V2660 6/19/03 6:50 AM Page 69 G&S Typesetters PDF proof and difficult task of redefining themselves on their own terms. Partly in response to that effort, and partly due to the emergence of other social problems in late-nineteenth-century Europe, problems with which homosexuality could be linked as symptom or even as cause, social critics and medical scientists broke their silence and turned their attention to homosexuality with an intensity not seen for nearly a hundred years. Surprisingly, the first process, that of redefining the subculture from within, was pioneered most influentially by a poet, and an American poet at that— Walt Whitman. Though it is more confusing than helpful to dub him, as some have, the first modern homosexual, there is no question that he is the first iconic figure in the pantheon of the modern movement for gay self-definition and gay rights. John Addington Symonds, the English critic and cultural historian , who wrote the first scholarly account of Greek pederasty, as well as one of the earliest defenses of what he called “sexual inversion” in modern times, was deeply influenced by Whitman. Writing to him in 1872, Symonds declared the nature and extent of his indebtedness to the poet: I have traced passionate friendship through Greece, Rome, the medieval and the modern world. . . . It was while engaged upon this work . . . that I first read Leaves of Grass. The man who spoke to me from that Book impressed me in every way most profoundly and unalterably; but especially did I then learn con- fidently to believe that the Comradeship which I conceived as on a par with the Sexual feeling for depth and strength and purity and capability of all good, was real—not a delusion of distorted passions, a dream of the Past, a scholar’s fancy—but a strong and vital bond of man to man. Ten years later Oscar Wilde, while on his highly publicized (and selfpromoting ) visit to the United States, called on Whitman at his home in Camden , New Jersey. “There is no one in the great wide world of America whom I love and honor so much,” Wilde said of Whitman. A quarter-century later, when the French novelist André Gide wrote a defense of pederasty in the form of a dialogue, his fictional protagonist had on his desk a single picture— of Walt Whitman. And one hundred years after Symonds told Whitman...

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