redheadreading's review against another edition
4.0
Very torn between a 3 or 4 star rating for this! This was a very well-researched look at groups of influential queer people from history. I enjoyed how much this encompassed, we travel from London to Paris to Berlin to Russia to Tangier and more. At times, this was rather dense and some parts seemed like they could be edited down a bit. A lot of potted biographies of people and descriptions of their books etc. On the whole though, a really interesting read which has expanded my knowledge.
sarapetizzi13's review against another edition
4.0
On my version of the book, there's a review saying " It's one of those books that make other books possible" and I couldn't agree more. This book is like the ABC of LGBT+ history and it's so thorough I couldn't help but wonder how much time it took to place all the facts, names and quotes together. The reader is confronted with hard, solid truths and it's clear how some things changed throughout the decade, but unfortunately, it's also clear that so many other things haven't.
I was disappointed only by the author's failed mentions of trans people and of Stonewall, I mean, trans people played a big role in the gay rights movement, so why not add their stories?
I was disappointed only by the author's failed mentions of trans people and of Stonewall, I mean, trans people played a big role in the gay rights movement, so why not add their stories?
morgandhu's review against another edition
3.0
Gregory Woods’ Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World is an interesting look at some of the queer people and communities who have undeniably influenced modern cultural development, from Oscar Wilde to Yukio Mishima, and how these artists and communities have been viewed.
Woods begins by defining his idea of the Homintern (a play on the international Communist organisation, Comintern, which advocated world communism): “The Homintern is the international presence of lesbians and gay men in modern life. Imagined as a single network, it is either one of the major creative forces in the cultural development of the past century, or a sinister conspiracy against the moral and material interests of nation states. You decide.”
However, Woods makes it clear that he is not speaking of some actual secret organisation or conspiracy to make the world more queer, but rather a loose conceptualisation of the international community of queer cultural workers, the artists, writers, musicians, critics, aesthetes, sponsors and patrons who held salons and operated clubs and galleries and publishing houses and other businesses and establishments where culture makers could gather, disseminate their works and perspectives, pass on their world views to future generations, straight and queer. But at the same time, he reminds us that the “homosexual” has frequently been seen as a fifth columnist, as a security risk, as a traitor more inclined to identify with “his” own kind across international birders than with his country if birth.
“There was no such thing as the ‘Homintern’. It was a joke, a nightmare, or a dream, depending on one’s point of view; but, despite its lack of substance, it still occupied a solid and prominent site near the centre of modern life. ... The coining of the expression ‘Homintern’ is often attributed to Cyril Connolly, less often to Maurice Bowra, and sometimes to W.H. Auden; but Anthony Powell thought its source was Jocelyn Brooke, and Harold Norse claimed it for himself. Most plausibly, it was the felicitous invention of many minds, unknown to each other, at more or less the same time. Anyone who pronounced the relatively new word ‘homosexual’ with a short first ‘o’ – and that is likely to have included anyone with a classical education – could have made the camp pun. ‘Homintern’ was the name Connolly, Auden and others jokingly gave the sprawling, informal network of friendships that Cold War conspiracy theorists would later come to think of as ‘the international homosexual conspiracy’. In fact, the Homosexual International was sometimes only superficially international and sometimes only half-heartedly homosexual: it was also a matter of surfaces, fashions and styles. The term tended to be applied to networks only of men, in part because those who thought of such a potential conspiracy as a threat tended not to think of women, let alone lesbian women, as having sufficient influence to be worth worrying about.”
Woods also reminds us of the at-times commonly held belief that “homosexual cliques” controlled access to the cultural world, offering preferential access to artists who were gay themselves, or incorporated gay aesthetics into their work. The Homintern may not exist, but it has been, and still is, believed to exist (think of the religious right’s harping on a mythical ‘gay agenda’), and thus affects the ways in which queer people, communities and culture are seen and treated.
Woods begins his meditation on the interactions of gay aesthetics with the larger scope of modern culture with an examination of the influences of Oscar Wilde - his art, his role in the aesthetic movement, and his homosexuality, imprisonment and exile. Wilde’s work influenced a generation of continental writers, many of them also homosexual, but the tragic circumstances of his later life reinforced an association between aestheticism, decadence, and sexual deviance, and motivated a generation of straight writers to “butch up” as much as possible to avoid any suspicion that they might be “like Oscar Wilde.”
He also notes the effects of psychological and psychoanalytical exploration of sexuality, including deviant sexuality, centred around such German and Austrian thinkers as Freud and Kraft-Ebbing. Woods suggests that these effects were particularly pronounced in England: “The fact that the new sciences of sexology and psychoanalysis were of predominantly German and Austrian origins inspired in some British nationalists and jingoists the suspicion that sodomy itself was being promoted by a conspiracy of German-speaking perverts against the moral purity of the British Empire.”
From these beginnings - which in combination mark the end of an era where gay sexuality was kept hidden and as unremarked as possible, by all but the most daring of wilful outcasts, and the start of the modern era of sexual ferment and freedom when the love that once dared not speak its name became able to shout it proudly in the streets - Woods takes us on a tour of queer engagement with culture and public discourse, from the literary salons of Natalie Barney to the ballet company of Sergei Diaghilev, from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and the Weimar Republic’s Berlin club scene to the idyllic pleasures of sultry Capri, and on to the post-war “Sodom-on-Hudson,” Greenwich Village.
The book reads like a massive combination cultural tour guide and gossip sheet to all things queer, following a somewhat idiosyncratic itinerary through the 20th century, stopping frequently to exclaim “something interesting was said here” or “here is where these people were” - and then proceeding to tell you absolutely everything about it. As an organising conceit, the idea of the Homintern allows Woods to trace connections, networks, of acquaintance, of influence, of correspondence, of personal relationship, between people, places and even times, giving a sense of organicity to the idea of queer culture(s). It is a “who’s who” of queer artists and thinkers, and a celebration of their lives, scandals and achievements.
What is lacking, unfortunately, is an actual argument in support of the grand claim made in the book’s subtitle. There is much exploration of the minutiae of gay culture, but not much critical exploration of its themes and subjects, or indeed of its influence on mainstream culture. What critical analysis there is, is mostly about theories of homosexuality, and the ways in which changes in society influenced attitudes towards being gay.
What this book offers, essentially, is a vicarious journey through the lives of a number of well-known creative gay people, rarely rising above the level of reportage about their notable achievements, social habits and domestic arrangements. The depth of detail, and the research involved to produce such a tome, is impressive. However, the Homintern ultimately dissolves into a simple narrative of who worked with whom, who vacationed with whom, where they partied and with whom they slept while they did all that. I don’t know what I was expecting from a book so expansively titled, but what I got was little more than a crowded landscape of biographical notes about people linked by a common sexual orientation and shared occupation.
Woods begins by defining his idea of the Homintern (a play on the international Communist organisation, Comintern, which advocated world communism): “The Homintern is the international presence of lesbians and gay men in modern life. Imagined as a single network, it is either one of the major creative forces in the cultural development of the past century, or a sinister conspiracy against the moral and material interests of nation states. You decide.”
However, Woods makes it clear that he is not speaking of some actual secret organisation or conspiracy to make the world more queer, but rather a loose conceptualisation of the international community of queer cultural workers, the artists, writers, musicians, critics, aesthetes, sponsors and patrons who held salons and operated clubs and galleries and publishing houses and other businesses and establishments where culture makers could gather, disseminate their works and perspectives, pass on their world views to future generations, straight and queer. But at the same time, he reminds us that the “homosexual” has frequently been seen as a fifth columnist, as a security risk, as a traitor more inclined to identify with “his” own kind across international birders than with his country if birth.
“There was no such thing as the ‘Homintern’. It was a joke, a nightmare, or a dream, depending on one’s point of view; but, despite its lack of substance, it still occupied a solid and prominent site near the centre of modern life. ... The coining of the expression ‘Homintern’ is often attributed to Cyril Connolly, less often to Maurice Bowra, and sometimes to W.H. Auden; but Anthony Powell thought its source was Jocelyn Brooke, and Harold Norse claimed it for himself. Most plausibly, it was the felicitous invention of many minds, unknown to each other, at more or less the same time. Anyone who pronounced the relatively new word ‘homosexual’ with a short first ‘o’ – and that is likely to have included anyone with a classical education – could have made the camp pun. ‘Homintern’ was the name Connolly, Auden and others jokingly gave the sprawling, informal network of friendships that Cold War conspiracy theorists would later come to think of as ‘the international homosexual conspiracy’. In fact, the Homosexual International was sometimes only superficially international and sometimes only half-heartedly homosexual: it was also a matter of surfaces, fashions and styles. The term tended to be applied to networks only of men, in part because those who thought of such a potential conspiracy as a threat tended not to think of women, let alone lesbian women, as having sufficient influence to be worth worrying about.”
Woods also reminds us of the at-times commonly held belief that “homosexual cliques” controlled access to the cultural world, offering preferential access to artists who were gay themselves, or incorporated gay aesthetics into their work. The Homintern may not exist, but it has been, and still is, believed to exist (think of the religious right’s harping on a mythical ‘gay agenda’), and thus affects the ways in which queer people, communities and culture are seen and treated.
Woods begins his meditation on the interactions of gay aesthetics with the larger scope of modern culture with an examination of the influences of Oscar Wilde - his art, his role in the aesthetic movement, and his homosexuality, imprisonment and exile. Wilde’s work influenced a generation of continental writers, many of them also homosexual, but the tragic circumstances of his later life reinforced an association between aestheticism, decadence, and sexual deviance, and motivated a generation of straight writers to “butch up” as much as possible to avoid any suspicion that they might be “like Oscar Wilde.”
He also notes the effects of psychological and psychoanalytical exploration of sexuality, including deviant sexuality, centred around such German and Austrian thinkers as Freud and Kraft-Ebbing. Woods suggests that these effects were particularly pronounced in England: “The fact that the new sciences of sexology and psychoanalysis were of predominantly German and Austrian origins inspired in some British nationalists and jingoists the suspicion that sodomy itself was being promoted by a conspiracy of German-speaking perverts against the moral purity of the British Empire.”
From these beginnings - which in combination mark the end of an era where gay sexuality was kept hidden and as unremarked as possible, by all but the most daring of wilful outcasts, and the start of the modern era of sexual ferment and freedom when the love that once dared not speak its name became able to shout it proudly in the streets - Woods takes us on a tour of queer engagement with culture and public discourse, from the literary salons of Natalie Barney to the ballet company of Sergei Diaghilev, from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and the Weimar Republic’s Berlin club scene to the idyllic pleasures of sultry Capri, and on to the post-war “Sodom-on-Hudson,” Greenwich Village.
The book reads like a massive combination cultural tour guide and gossip sheet to all things queer, following a somewhat idiosyncratic itinerary through the 20th century, stopping frequently to exclaim “something interesting was said here” or “here is where these people were” - and then proceeding to tell you absolutely everything about it. As an organising conceit, the idea of the Homintern allows Woods to trace connections, networks, of acquaintance, of influence, of correspondence, of personal relationship, between people, places and even times, giving a sense of organicity to the idea of queer culture(s). It is a “who’s who” of queer artists and thinkers, and a celebration of their lives, scandals and achievements.
What is lacking, unfortunately, is an actual argument in support of the grand claim made in the book’s subtitle. There is much exploration of the minutiae of gay culture, but not much critical exploration of its themes and subjects, or indeed of its influence on mainstream culture. What critical analysis there is, is mostly about theories of homosexuality, and the ways in which changes in society influenced attitudes towards being gay.
What this book offers, essentially, is a vicarious journey through the lives of a number of well-known creative gay people, rarely rising above the level of reportage about their notable achievements, social habits and domestic arrangements. The depth of detail, and the research involved to produce such a tome, is impressive. However, the Homintern ultimately dissolves into a simple narrative of who worked with whom, who vacationed with whom, where they partied and with whom they slept while they did all that. I don’t know what I was expecting from a book so expansively titled, but what I got was little more than a crowded landscape of biographical notes about people linked by a common sexual orientation and shared occupation.
eddie's review
3.0
Terrific amount of research - hence the three stars. Quite difficult to read straight through, due mainly to the sheer density of facts & names on the page at any one time - but this is definitely a book to keep and use as a work of reference. The subtitle feels like a marketing hook tacked on by the publisher - the book doesn't concern itself with the 'how' so much as the very copious 'what'. Explication, not analysis.
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