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3 Literary Intimacies This chapter explores how intimate relations between men were represented in a number of literary works by major and minor writers—Yu Dafu, Huang Shenzhi, Ye Dingluo, Guo Moruo, and Ye Lingfeng—from the 1920s to the early 1930s. In both China and the United States, writings on male same-sex relations in modern Chinese literature have been ignored by both literary critics and historians, and this piece of China’s literary repertoire has been largely forgotten by history. It is very important to restore these writings because they represent a moment in modern Chinese history when male same-sex love inspired various social imaginings and the meaning of homosexuality (tongxing lian’ai) was far from xed. At the time when the iconoclastic New Culture/May Fourth intellectuals opposed arranged marriage by advocating free choice in heterosexual love, same-sex love between male friends was also presented as a challenge to the constraints of social and sexual morality. Male same-sex relations were understood as having a positive and a negative side. The positive form of same-sex love was imagined as a foundation for a utopian vision of human society. The negative form was deemed an evil practice and relegated to the past. With the encroachment of imperialist powers, writers also creatively conveyed the feeling of sadness for the decline of Chinese empire through the fragile and ephemeral quality of male same-sex love. One shared feature of these literary representations is that they portrayed the intimacy between male friends as an unmistakably erotic experience. But unlike sexological writings that pathologized male same-sex relations and tabloid newspaper reports that socially stigmatized such relations, literary production seemed to provide a relief from these social anxieties manifested in these other writings, by sentimentally depicting the sexual intimacy between men as an intensely beautiful human experience that was “transient,” “eeting” and “contingent.”256 Yu Dafu (ࠃ༠ʩ, 1896–1945) described a strong emotional attachment between two young men in his short story Mangmang ye (ঃঃէ, Boundless Obsession 62 night, 1922). Huang Shenzhi (ඡ෶ɾ) wrote a rst-person narrative of an adolescent’s longing for intimacy with one of his classmates in a short story called Ta (ˢ, Him, 1923). In his short story Nan you (Әʤ, Boyfriend, 1927), Ye Dingluo (່ཡໃ, 1897–1958) depicted an intimate relationship between a young teacher and one of his students in a provincial college. Guo Moruo (஬ؑߗ, 1892– 1978) characterized two episodes of his childhood experience as homosexual love in his autobiography Wo de tongnian (҈‫ؿ‬೧α, My childhood, 1928). Ye Lingfeng (່᜙უ, 1905–1975) depicted a beautiful young man with homosexual tendencies in his novella Jindi (ຑΔ, Forbidden zone, or Taboo, 1931), but failed to nish it. Most of the writers who wrote on the topic of love between men were involved with the Creation Society, a literary organization established by a group of young writers educated in Japan in 1922.257 Guo Moruo and Yu Dafu founded the society. Huang Shenzhi’s Him was published in the society’s journal Creation Quarterly. Ye Dingluo’s collection of writings entitled Boyfriend was published as a volume of the Creation Society series. Ye Lingfeng was known as a second generation Creation writer. The three writers Huang Shenzhi, Ye Dingluo and Ye Lingfeng were inuenced by Yu Dafu. One of the most important intellectual sources for Creation writers was Europeandecadentwritings.258 IntheWesterncontext,decadencehadtwodistinct but entangled associations. The rst one was derived from Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which decadence was gured as a symptom of the fall of the Roman Empire to the barbarian invaders. In this conguration, sexual perversity as a form of decadence was blamed for the decline of the civilization. In modern Western literature, as Eve Sedgwick points out, homosexuality was frequently singled out as the cause of human disaster, with suggestions that the homosexual minority should be eliminated from the earth.259 The second meaning of decadence was used to describe the n-de-siècle writings exemplied by the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine and the ctional works of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust. Decadence in this context was a critique of modernity, posing questions about the so-called development of civilization. Decadent writings represented sexual non-conformity as inspiration for alternative thinking. Homosexuality was highly aestheticized as a gesture and a protest against unquestioned conventional social norms.260 In The Lure of the Modern, Shu-Mei Shih points out that “decadence...

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