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Many stops on the tour will be familiar to those with a long-standing interest in the subject, and the narrative moves too swiftly to permit close scrutiny or any other kind of lingering.
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He takes the reader on a tour of gay people in the arts during the 20th century, focusing mainly on literature in western Europe and the US, with some attention to dance, painting and music as well. Instead of trying to resolve the paradox, Woods ambivalently embraces it. Perhaps the solidarity that grew out of shared oppression did prove of use to ambitious non-straight writers and artists trying to find a foothold. So was there something like a Homintern after all? Perhaps gay people, as members of a stigmatised minority, were in fact more ready than their straight counterparts to jettison tradition and transcend national borders, as the spirit of modernism required. Woods then proceeds, however, to devote the bulk of his book to recounting, and even celebrating, links between gay men in the arts that were half-hidden and often sexual in nature – the same links that he thinks it would be unjust, if not paranoid, to make too much of. It’s also unfair to suspect them of conspiracy on account of habits of secrecy that they were forced into by legal persecution and social stigma for most of the 20th century. At the outset, he rightly debunks the idea of a Homintern, pointing out that it’s unfair to single out gay men for mixing romance and art – “as if,” he writes, “heterosexual people never dedicate their books to their lovers or spouses”. In choosing to write a book about this subject, Woods – whose 1987 study Articulate Flesh made him a pathbreaker for gay studies in academia – flirts with logical incoherence. In 1966, for example, Time magazine complained: “In the theater, dance and music world, deviates are so widespread that they sometimes seem to be running a kind of closed shop.” Homintern was “a joke, a nightmare, or a dream, depending on one’s point of view,” Woods writes, and the anxieties and aspirations that gave rise to it were still in play as recently as the 1990s, when a circle of gay celebrities around the LA entertainment moguls David Geffen and Barry Diller figured in gossip columns as a “Velvet Mafia”. It’s unlikely that they conceived of it as a serious idea, but it was taken that way by many who were hostile to gay people. It’s not clear who coined it Cyril Connolly, WH Auden, and Jocelyn Brooke have been credited, among others.
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It referred, originally in jest, to the notion that a clique of gay men and (in smaller numbers) lesbian women controlled the arts world from behind the scenes, giving undue preference to the work of their lovers, ex-lovers and would-be lovers, and skewing taste away from the “natural” and “wholesome”. “Homintern” was a portmanteau word, a mash-up of “Comintern”, the name of the international communist organisation that flourished between the two world wars, and “homosexual”.