A Reconsideration of the Homoerotic in Ming-Qing Texts

Giovanni Vitiello’s subject here is homosexual practices and attitudes toward these practices as reflected in a variety of texts from late imperial China. His central concern is to demonstrate the degree to which homoerotic practices and their representations in writing contributed to the development of elite culture and literature during the Ming and Qing periods, the mid-sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Beginning with writings reflecting what has been widely referred to as the “cult of qing 情” (emotion, passion, love, desire) and works of pornography from the late Ming period, this study considers a number of texts, most of them fiction from the Qing period, in roughly chronological order. At each historical stage, Vitiello bolsters his interpretations with contemporary legal and other documents, reminiscences, and the like to trace changes in fashion of both the practice of and writing about homosexual activity. His basic questions are: who penetrated whom, under what circumstances, and what both characters in fiction, their narrators, and their commentators thought about these events.

This is the first monograph to explore this material in detail; other studies of erotic writing have concentrated on heterosexual relations. Vitiello’s nuanced readings of these diverse texts significantly enrich our understanding of the development of the Chinese novel through the Qing period.¹ Vitiello begins with Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅詞話 (Plum in the golden vase, ca. 1580; published 1618) and its predecessor and partial source, Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳 (Outlaws of the marsh, 1550s–1620s), to demonstrate parallels in characterization between the libertine’s homoerotic activities and the misogynistic camaraderie of Shuihu’s chivalrous heroes.

Some years ago Chen Qinghao 陳慶浩 and C. K. Wang 王秋桂 edited an extensive collection of erotic fiction with the title Siwuxie huibao 思無邪匯寶, a reference to Lunyu (The Analects) 2.2: 子曰：詩三百，一言以蔽之，曰：思 無邪。² In D. C. Lau’s translation, the line reads, “The Master said, ‘The Odes are three hundred in number. They can be summed up in one phrase, “Swerving not from the right path.” ’ ”³ Confucius seems to be drawing a parallel with the proper way to drive a team of horses: along well-worn tracks. However, when read literally, the title might suggest “Having no wayward thoughts,” perhaps an injunction to the reader—or to the researcher. A large portion of Vitiello’s primary sources are found in this collection, which is particularly fortunate. By using this as his primary source, Vitiello conveniently avoids all the Bowdlerization that compromises understanding the original texts in so many twentieth-century editions.

Vitiello’s study of this material is comprehensive and generally exemplary. He describes his topic as “homosexuality in relation to ideologies of masculinity and romantic love,” but developments in aesthetics and fashion are similarly important to this study, especially as they reflect changes in ideas of masculinity. His quest is facilitated by the persistence of concepts concerning homoeroticism since antiquity. Among them is the equivalence drawn between the beauty of young women and of boys and the dangerous attractiveness of both for men in positions of authority. Older boys not only threaten distraction from duty; they may also have access to a ruler’s harem for illicit relations there (see chapter 3). Classic texts widely read by the elite provide lasting allusions—duanxiu 斷袖 (the “cut sleeve,” Han shu), fentao 分桃 (the “shared peach,” Han Feizi), and longyang 龍陽 (a male lover, Zhanguo ce)—as prime examples (pp. 2–3). Vitiello also discovers a range of later, more fashionable terms for such relationships and their participants (esp. pp. 27–30, 41–42), at a time when male beauty was more likely to be seen as “natural” in contrast to young women’s artificial appearances achieved through using makeup.

Especially during the late Ming and through much of the Qing period, normative homoerotic relations generally were a “cross-age and cross-class phenomenon” (p. 5). That is, mature men of the liangmin 良民 (decent folk) class took...