History Of Homosexuality Research Articles

“Not a Personal Matter”: Soviet Conservative Discourse on Homosexuality in the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract While historians of homosexuality in the post-Stalin era have mainly focused on developments such as discussions about the decriminalization of homosexuality and the establishment of sexology, our understanding of conservative perspectives on homosexuality remains limited. This article introduces and analyses a previously classified medical doctoral thesis (habilitation) on homosexuality prepared and defended in the 1970s. This is currently the only accessible in-depth scholarly investigation of male homosexuality in this period. The article seeks to contribute to the thriving field of the history of homosexuality under late socialism by shedding some light on the rationale for continuing to criminalize consensual homosexual activity, from the perspective of a contemporary forensic expert. Secondly, the thesis, which was based on the criminal files of those convicted of consensual homosexuality in Leningrad (1961–1968) – a total of 107 men were convicted – provides additional data on the previously rather obscure realm of interaction between homosexuals and law enforcement agencies.

Keberagaman Gender di Indonesia (Analisis Wacana Pemberitaan Gender pada Suku Bugis)

Indonesia has had a diverse history of homosexuality and transgenderism for a long time. This contradicts general public knowledge, which assumes that this influence originates from the Western world. This research aims to find out more about news about gender diversity in the Bugis tribe in Indonesia. News is taken from online media Kompasiana.com and Goodnewsfromindonesia. Id, and Bbc.com. These three media were chosen because they have the same reporting theme. The method used in this research is a descriptive qualitative study using Teun A. Van Dijk's discourse analysis. This research shows that the three news items fulfill the elements of discourse as text, except for the rhetorical elements in the Kompasiana.com and Bbc.com news. The three news stories both use inductive pattern explanations. The results of the analysis found that the context of gender diversity in the Bugis tribe includes roles, behavior, thought patterns, and emotional characteristics inherent in humans. Apart from that, the news also reminded the government to pay more attention to the traditions of the Bugis tribe because the culture of Indonesian society is decadent and must continue to be preserved. Keywords: Gender; Homosexual; Diversity; Bugis Tribe

Investigating the History of Homosexuality in Soviet Lithuania: Deconstructing Court Verdicts

This article examines the Soviet court verdicts under Article 122 of the Criminal Code of the Soviet Lithuania, which tried men for homosexual relations, as historical sources. The author argues that the documents stored in the contemporary archives remain programmed according to Soviet logic. The 20 verdicts examined reveal that in practice, men in Vilnius Lenin District were mainly tried for having relations with minors or for sexual coercion rather than consensual sexual relations. The testimonies in which the convicted men’s traces of subjectivity can be detected are proposed to be defined as ‘post-voice’. In some cases, these ‘post-voices’ reveal how the ‘weak’ resorted to their own tactics when they found themselves in the judicial and political power field.

Sounding out the history of homosexuality

Sounding out the history of homosexuality

"Glued together, gushing": Sticking with John Addington Symonds

Abstract: This review article considers recent work on the queer Victorian writer John Addington Symonds, a central figure in the history of homosexuality. It examines monographs by Shane Butler and Simon Joyce and a novel by Tom Crewe. It focusses, in particular, on the significance of embodiment and the senses in these works.

Characteristics of condyloma acuminata patients with HIV/AIDS at Prof. Dr. Sulianti Saroso infectious diseases hospital during 2019-2023

Introduction: Condyloma acuminata (CA) or genital warts is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Individuals with CA are more susceptible to HIV compared to those without the condition. CA increases the risk of HIV occurrence and vice versa. This study examines characteristics of CA patients with HIV/AIDS visiting the Dermatology and Venereology Clinic of Prof. Dr. Sulianti Saroso Infectious Diseases Hospital during 2019-2023. Method: The research methodology employed in this study is a retrospective descriptive approach with a cross-sectional design. The sampling technique utilized was the total sampling method. Result: Among 22 recorded cases, 11 fulfilled the study criteria. Most patients were aged 19-44 years (86.7%), male (81.8%), with a history of homosexual relations (54.5%), and exhibited lesions primarily in the perianal region (54.5%). All patients received antiretroviral therapy (ART) (100%), and CD4 count results predominantly ranged from 101-200/mm3 (63.6%). Trichloroacetic acid (TCA) therapy was the most prevalent treatment modality (81.8%). Conclusion: The highest prevalence was noted within the age range of 19-44 years, with a majority of male patients. Unmarried status was most common among the patients. Homosexual history emerged as the predominant pattern of sexual intercourse. The perianal region was the most frequent location. The average CD4 count ranges from 101 to 200/mm3. The predominant treatment method utilized was the application of trichloroacetic acid (TCA).

Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture

In Love's Next Meeting, Aaron S. Lecklider presents an impressive range of examples of how sexual dissidents participated in, contributed to, and often thrived within the U.S. Left from the 1930s through the beginnings of the Cold War. His goal is to challenge how “much of the prevailing scholarship on queer history discounts the Old Left due to its perceived homophobia, suggesting that emerging gay subcultures were more historically significant than movements that did not centralize Lgbt identities” (p. 6). Going beyond noting the individual lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (Lgbt) Communists and fellow travelers, Lecklider considers their plays, poetry, novels, and autobiographies, as well as other art forms that depicted queer life alongside proletarian themes. The author sets the stage in the first chapters, using various life stories and documents to illustrate the range of representations, views, and analyses of homosexuality among socialists, Communists, and other radicals. The next three chapters focus on workers, women, and the urban poor, examining the visibility of gay men in labor unions such as the Marine Cooks and Stewards union and analyzing sex work as labor.

Recovering the Entangled History of Political and Sexual Radicalism

Recovering the Entangled History of Political and Sexual Radicalism Zifeng Liu (bio) Aaron S. Lecklider's Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture, Oakland: University of California Press, 2021 Many historical accounts of the U.S. gay and lesbian liberation struggle date the beginning of radical sexual politics to the late 1960s, when activist groups such as the Gay Liberation Front linked the attainment of sexual freedom to the eradication of racial capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. According to such studies, the possibility of an alliance between leftists and sexual dissidents before that decade of worldwide revolutionary fervor was precluded by the former's inability to incorporate sexuality into their analyses and visions of liberatory social transformation, if not their outright homophobia. While not downplaying the Old Left's contradictions and ambivalence in its attitude toward nonnormative sexualities, Aaron S. Lecklider's Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture recounts a pre-1960 history of queer advocacy that reveals the intimate imbrication of anti-capitalist politics and gay visibility, recognition, and liberation. These little-known queer-Left intersections helped shape the contours of later sexual activism. As with other scholars exploring political and sexual formations that fall out of the boundaries of the permissible, Lecklider mitigates the archival lack around the intimacy between leftist politics and queer life—due to long-standing anti-communism and sexual conservatism—through examining the representational, the aesthetic, and the pleasurable as sites where the engagement between political and sexual dissidents was most visible. He focuses particularly on leftist literary and cultural circles that offered space for radical, alternative representations and discussions of nonnormative sexualities. In tracing this underexamined relationship, Lecklider assembles an impressive multiracial cast of writers, artists, and thinkers, some better known than others, who intentionally [End Page 215] and at times unknowingly drew gay men and women into the fold of radical politics and united the movement for sexual diversity with the struggle against the ravages of capitalism and white supremacy. Lecklider convincingly explains the intertwining of political and sexual radicalism. Leftists and gay women and men were united by their shared geographical spaces, similar experiences of marginalization and exclusion from mainstream U.S. society, and comparable commitments to transgressing the confines of the acceptable and the normative. In particular, the entanglement of anti-Blackness, heterosexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-radicalism and the resistance to it blurred the lines between political radicalism and sexual deviance. Organized both chronologically and topically, Love's Next Meeting's exploration of the intersection between the Left and homosexuality unfolds in three sections. The first part, consisting of the first three chapters, shows that political radicals, and in particular those who were sexually dissident, supported sexual liberation as an inseparable part of the fundamental political and economic transformation of the United States. They articulated that position in the pages of leftist literature and the leftist press. In agitating for radical social change, queer leftists in many instances were able to link their desire for same-sex intimacy to their commitment to anti-capitalist activism. These sexual radicals, at times, also struggled to balance the fulfillment of their affective and sexual needs with the waging of struggles against racial capitalism and imperialism. Within leftist networks, whose advocacy work around the issue of sexuality was often constrained by political and cultural rigidity as well as by heterosexism, gay women and men repurposed the language and conventions of leftist and anti-racist politics to explore sexual nonnormativities. For them, the repression of obscenity served the interests of the ruling class, and the embrace of sexual diversity was a hallmark of a classless society. Radical print culture thus abounded with discussions of nonnormative sexualities. Radicals also drew on narratives of Black solidarity with sexual dissidents against state repression, as well as leftist analyses of sexual deviants as members of the proletariat, in order to link the Left's anti-racist campaigns with the struggle for sexual freedom. The second part argues that leftist theorizations of labor, "the woman question," and proletarian fiction laid the groundwork for a radical sexual politics that emphasized the mutual constitution of...

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Societal perceptions and homosexuality in India: The impact of colonialism on Hindu religious and cultural history of homosexuality

This paper explores the colonial underpinnings of societal perceptions of homosexuality. Using India as the point of contextualization, it delves into how the social order of the country, including its colonial past, religious values, and societal perceptions, impact the treatment of the LGBTQIA+ community. In particular, this paper explores how the British imparted their restrained Victorian value system of heteronormativity and how this destabilised the traditional and religious systems in India. This paper also discusses cogent ways in which India can decolonize its approach to homosexuality.

Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture

I am thrilled to be reviewing a work of queer history in this journal. Too often the queer and labor movements seem separate, and this division is blamed on their historical emergence. Aaron Lecklider asserts otherwise. Love's Next Meeting turns to the archive and to literature to explore how sex, class, perversion, labor organizing, and antiracism interpenetrate.I'll focus here on the first half of the book, which has the most to say about workers. While acknowledging “the failures of the left to build a cultural movement centralizing sexual dissidence as a political concern,” Lecklider also locates and analyzes how queer people, queer desires, and queer concerns shaped leftist thought and activism (6). He implies that the failure to center sexual dissidence had the effect not of prohibiting queer engagement but, rather, of nurturing it, since queerness operates better as a campy style of critique than as a “political concern.”Chapter 4 focuses specifically on labor in part via the example, made famous by Alan Bérubé, of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. As more gay men were drawn to this work, they felt increasingly comfortable being identifiable and using the union to fight for their rights as gay workers. Lecklider points out that the union also challenged the homo/hetero binary by virtue of its class and labor alliances (122). Because the union embraced dissidence and militancy, it resisted the pull of middle-class assimilation. At least for a while.When workers seek to advance class ranks (to enter the middle class, usually) either by joining or by resisting a union, they do so by adopting middle-class sexual styles. Ultimately, these middle-class sexual styles—restraint, monogamy, separation between domestic and work spheres—come to define what gets read as gay, lesbian, queer.Lecklider devotes an entire chapter to the workplace. Often sexuality is understood as separate from work, and even from class, and this book brings them back together by examining archival and literary contexts in which “sex and labor were intertwined” (143). He finds numerous instances in which the radical nature of labor activism both feeds and draws from sexual deviance.As people without class privilege who occupied stigmatized (often racialized or feminized) jobs and risked association with the despised Communist Party, workers could forge queer and interracial alliances, since they essentially had nothing left to lose. During the 1940s, the Marine Cooks and Stewards went beyond enabling this radicalism to embracing it. “The tendency of members to associate with the dispossessed, rather than aspiring to respectability, suggests how tightly deviant politics was stitched into the fabric of the union culture” (121).This embrace of deviance as an organizing strategy has the potential to radicalize union efforts today, and this book's valuable lesson is that it's not new—it has a very long history. Labor historians Michael Goldfield and Toni Gilpin have documented this past practice, and Lecklider adds the crucial perspective of queer history. If “labor is a highly sexed enterprise” and if “leftists imagined labor as a site of queer possibility,” then Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse pickers, and the adjunct faculty and janitors in my own local are adding a new chapter to an existing practice (143, 145). Solidarity appeals to workers whose conditions of labor isolate and stigmatize them, and the workplace brings all kinds of people together and provides them with a common experience, which can mute bigotry and foster community.So, history doesn't corroborate a division between queer and worker politics and activism, yet Lecklider acknowledges that recently they have swum in separate streams. Anti-fascism and the Cold War elevated consumerism and domesticity. When the left erased its earlier overlap with homosexuality, it “was not an unintended consequence of building a gay rights movement. It was a strategy born out of a commitment to rejecting a broader revolutionary struggle” (295). Separately, each could embrace capitalism, linked to middle-class sexual and social norms and to the myth of American exceptionalism. Love's Next Meeting offers an alternative history—labor's historic embrace of deviance—which serves as warning, as model, and as pure campy fun.

Situating J. C. Leyendecker within the Conflicting Narratives of the Gay and Lesbian Past

Situating J. C. Leyendecker within the Conflicting Narratives of the Gay and Lesbian Past Michael J. Murphy (bio) Coded: The Hidden Love of J. C. Leyendecker, directed by Ryan White (New York: Imagine Documentaries, 2021), 28 min. One of the challenges of writing about the American illustrator J. C. Leyendecker (1874–1951) is the imbalance between what can be documented about his life and the large body of work he produced over a fifty-year career. Apart from a handful of photographs, interviews, and letters, few primary documents connected to Leyendecker survive and little in the artist's own words. By contrast, Leyendecker left behind hundreds of drawings, oil sketches, and finished paintings intended for mass reproduction as product advertising, book illustrations, posters, and magazine covers and story illustrations. Though Leyendecker's work appeared on the covers of most popular magazines published between 1896 and 1952, his longest association was with the Saturday Evening Post, on whose cover he either created or expanded the popular iconography of US national holidays: pilgrims at Thanksgiving, flowers on Mother's Day, a baby at New Year's, and so forth. He provided advertising imagery for major national soap, cereal, cigarette, and automobile brands but was best known for his illustrations for men's products such as Gillette razors, Williams' shaving cream, Interwoven socks, S. T. Cooper's and B.V.D. underwear, Chesterfield and Fatima cigarettes, and several men's clothiers, including A. B. Kirschbaum; B. Kuppenheimer; Hawes. von Gal; Ederheimer, Stein & Co.; and Hart, Schaffner & Marx. From 1907 to 1932, Leyendecker's paintings of preternaturally handsome young men for Arrow brand shirts and collars helped create the "Arrow Collar Man," an advertising trade character frequently cited in popular songs, musicals, poems, and literature. At the peak of his career in the 1920s, Leyendecker's identifiable style and the ubiquity of his work in popular print media made him something of a household name and one of the most successful (and wealthy) illustrators in America. [End Page 1079] The disjunction between the large quantity of known Leyendecker images and the scarcity of information about their creator is both frustrating and freeing. On the one hand, scholars have little evidence of Leyendecker's goals, motivations, or intentions for his work. On the other, they are freed from considering such issues to focus on what are arguably more interesting and important questions such as the role of his work in advertising at the dawn of consumer capitalism, expansion of audiences for mass print media, creation of national markets for branded consumer products, and reimagining of American national identity in the early twentieth century. However, much of the scholarly and popular writing on Leyendecker attempts to draw connections between the content of his work and the poorly documented aspects of his personal life. Most often, this takes the form of attributing its "homoeroticism" to Leyendecker's likely homosexuality, often characterized as tragic, troubled, or closeted.1 Even when unintentional, in this near obsession with pictorial evidence of his sexuality Leyendecker comes to resemble the stereotype of the shadowy, devious homosexual covertly insinuating an "unnatural" desire where it would not otherwise exist. Ultimately, this approach is a minimizing, minoritizing, and homophobic form of cultural interpretation. Thus, it is somewhat disappointing that the short documentary film Coded: The Hidden Love of J. C. Leyendecker, from the director Ryan White (The Case Against 8 [2014]), focuses on Leyendecker's sexuality and its potential influence on his work, even as it offers the fullest cinematic exploration of the artist and his work to date. Coded compensates for the lack of biographical documentation on Leyendecker through a creative mix of expert interviews, historical film, vintage photographs, innovative animation, and the inclusion of many original Leyendecker paintings and their mass media reproductions. The film will doubtless be welcomed for its contribution to documentary films on LGBTQIA+ people, especially artists and those who lived prior to the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. However, the film struggles when it attempts to map the trajectory of Leyendecker's life and career onto the larger history of homosexuality and its representation in popular visual culture, largely due to its unwillingness to commit to a consistent narrative of the...

“Gay Is Good”: History of Homosexuality in the DSM and Modern Psychiatry

“Gay Is Good”: History of Homosexuality in the <i>DSM</i> and Modern Psychiatry

Medium Specific Sexuality

New names for sexual selves drop daily online. How do we make sense of this apparently novel proliferation of terms? Most of our models for thinking about sexual self-nomination derive from the history of homosexuality and its imbrication with print cultural networks of circulation and conversation. But unlike earlier terms—butch or femme, fairy or molly, sissy or stud, uranist or invert, or any number of other vocabularies of sexual selfhood that sexuality studies has seized upon as historiographic waystations in the tale of emergent sexual modernity—our lexicon today appears to issue from a different substrate of culture. It circulates on different media and implicates us in different systems of self-disclosure, social exchange, and scientific capture. It is not just novelty nomenclature—the narratives, discourses, and names that organize the social sense of sexual selves—with which we must contend but also the media environments from which they issue and in which they circulate. How do we make sense of the convergence of liberatory vocabularies of gender self-determination and the mechanics of mass personalized data capture? How does this moment fit into the history of sexuality at large, punctuated as it is by many moments of taxonomic irruption?

Decriminalisation of Homosexuality - Corrupting Indian Culture through Westernisation?

Homosexuals have been cast out as sinners and anomalies worldwide, while even being criminalised in some countries, like India, which uphold religious sentiments to advocate its criminalisation. Heterosexuality has been accepted as Nature’s default, the “normal”, banishing any other sexual orientation. It is little known how a variety of sexual orientations were accepted and celebrated in various cultures, prior to the colonisation of those countries. The physiognomy and dress of “natives” often confounded Europeans’ notions of gender propriety and sexuality, whether it was due to the long grown hair of Ceylon men, or the dangerously oversexed Black African men or the perceived sexual voracity of Arabs - casual perceptions that often reflected Europeans’ insecurities turned into obsessions about “native” sexual misconduct, provoking new sorts of sexual regulation and repression. A closer look at the history of homosexuality in India brings its colonial legacy in the limelight. A read of the Indian scriptures and ancient texts provides evidence that unlike popular belief, homosexuality and cross dressing has been widely represented and accepted in the Pre-colonial India. The criminalisation of same sex relations is both culturally and legally, a British construct. My crucial question then, is what allows politicians and courts to carelessly wield “culture and tradition” to prove decriminalisation of homosexuality as a sin? How is decriminalisation not westernisation or not simply a result of the fascination with western concepts? The aim of my research is to take a closer look at the history of the LGBTQIA++ community in India, especially referring to the Indian scriptures and sacred texts to bring out an argument that the criminalisation of homosexuality in India has been entirely a British construct. It is to look at the instruments that allow politicians and courts to advocate Section 377 by citing Indian tradition and culture to prove homosexuality as unnatural, abhorrent and a sin. The objective of this paper is to argue against the commonly believed idea that “Gay rights” is a ‘western’ concept and decriminalisation of homosexuality is a brutal ‘westernisation’ of India’s ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ thus coorrupting it. This paper is aimed to prove the existence, celebration and acceptance of homosexuality in pre-colonial Indian culture through numerous readings of sacred texts, scriptures as well as taking a look at Temple sculptures and art.

“Homosexual People Do Not Stand Outside of Socialist Society”

This article centers on four petitions (Eingaben) presented to the East German Central Committee in the 1970s and 1980s by men attracted to other men. The East German legal apparatus required that the state address all petitions. An analysis of these Eingaben written by non-activists demonstrates a growing boldness to use the available legal structures to claim one’s rights. The petitioners used the Eingaben system to assert their legitimacy as GDR citizens, forcing officials to deal with them as any other citizen. This article moreover calls for the still young field of East German homosexual history to more fully incorporate the untold number of Eingaben written by homosexuals in the former GDR. This would help to develop a more comprehensive historical narrative as such documents provide an invaluable and unique window into everyday life under socialism.

'Um grito de alarme contra a degenerescência da espécie': Homosexuality and Decadence in the Anarchosyndicalist A Batalha in the Early 1920s

'Um grito de alarme contra a degenerescência da espécie':Homosexuality and Decadence in the Anarchosyndicalist A Batalha in the Early 1920s Richard Cleminson and Diogo Duarte Abstract This article sets discourse on homosexuality in the early 1920s anarchosyndicalist daily A Batalha within the context of the history of the anarchist labour movement, literary and cultural representations of same-sex desire, and contemporary scientific understandings. It highlights the 'campaign' by A Batalha against homosexuality, which was perceived as an expression of biological and cultural degeneration and sets the 'alarm' sounded by the daily within the context of leftist ideas on sexuality in general. The understanding of homosexuality as evidence of such degeneracy led authors in the newspaper to condemn such desire and, while at the same time refusing to advocate its punishment, to argue that a purified society would lead to the reassertion of heterosexual values. Resumo Este artigo situa o discurso sobre a homossexualidade no periódico anarco-sindicalista A Batalha ao início dos anos 1920 no contexto da história do movimento operário anarquista, das representações literárias e culturais desta expressão de sexualidade e das teorias científicas contemporâneas. Destaca a 'campanha' de A Batalha contra a homossexualidade, percebida como expressão de degeneração biológica e cultural e coloca o 'alarme' da publicação no contexto das ideias esquerdistas sobre a sexualidade em geral. A compreensão da homossexualidade como evidência de tal degeneração levou os autores do periódico a condenar tal prática e, se bem que se recusassem a defender a sua punição, argumentavam que uma sociedade purificada levaria à reafirmação dos valores heterossexuais. Keywords Homosexuality, A Batalha, anarchism, degeneration Palavras-chave Homossexualidade, A Batalha, anarquismo, degeneração Introduction: Homosexuality and Labour History The overlap between the history of homosexuality and social attitudes towards it may seem to be somewhat removed from the dynamics of labour movements. The reception of understandings and perceptions about homosexuality in trades unions and political parties, however, are but a microcosm of broader attitudes in society generally and even though they may take on a particular hue in these milieus, they provide evidence of the lines of tension existing within the rejection/tolerance dyad that informs such practices. Although we may perhaps anticipate greater tolerance of alternative or non-mainstream sexualities and expressions of gender within 'progressive' labour movements across the globe, this may have more to do with the historian's subjective expectations than reality. Such positive attitudes were often absent in the past and, in some instances, opposition to homosexuality within labour movements was marked. The acceptance or otherwise of homosexuality as an expression of greater sexual freedom relied principally on contextual factors such as movements' relationships with modernity, the power of science to explain social phenomena and the reception of secularist ideas. While much has now been written on gender questions within labour movements beyond the mere 'incorporation' of women into movement history to embrace the relations between men and women within them,1 the question of non-reproductive sexuality, whether 'heterosexual' or 'homosexual',2 and the [End Page 45] ways in which this was perceived in labour movements, continues to constitute an undeveloped field. This is certainly the case for Portugal and this article seeks to open up this question for analysis. In the past, despite the advocacy of long-term relationships outside the tutelage of the church and state expressed in the form of 'free love' by anarchists from the late nineteenth century onwards and a commitment to women's rights and a more open attitude to contraception, for example, the expression of 'promiscuous' heterosexual relations outside marriage and the home was often viewed with suspicion by labour activists as a bourgeois manifestation of libidinous behaviour not fit for anarchists and to be avoided in the 'new society' that they attempted to create. The question of same-sex relations, if it was touched on at all, was received less openly still and often formed part of a moralistic discourse on 'normal' or 'natural' sexual behaviour for both men and women. In the powerful Spanish anarchist movement, a habitus defined...

COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown Resulting in an Unusual Rectal Foreign Body in a Young Male

Foreign body rectum may cause serious consequences, especially in psychologically vulnerable patients, In critical conditions like pandemic COPVID-19, when depression, fear boredom, loneliness such incidence may occur. An 18 years old young male presented in emergency with a foreign body rectum. He was a laborer on daily wages. During the COVID-19 pandemic, loneliness, anxiety, and unemployment have exposed him to bizarre behavior, resulting in inserting potato into his rectum. He denied any history of homosexuality. The diagnosis was made by examination. Per rectal examination found FB just above the anal verge. The foreign body was removed rectally under G/A. He was then referred to a psychiatrist for evaluation.

Queer Bandits and Partisans: Reimagining Male Homosexuality in Early Post-War Italy

ABSTRACT Despite state-sanctioned antipathy towards homosexuality, queer content began to proliferate in Italian art during the mid-to-late 1940s. It is now a commonplace that representations of homosexual characters in this period fell into a paradigm of fascists-criminals-paedophiles, but this essay challenges that notion. Tracing cultural representations of male homosexuality in Italy demonstrates that vilification was only one strategy employed by Italian artists of the early post-war years. Indeed, writers and filmmakers alike utilised increasingly realistic depictions based on actual cultural practices of homosexual men. In particular, Alberto Lattuada’s film Il bandito (1946) and Angelo Del Boca’s short story collection Dentro mi è nato l’uomo (1948) exemplify this trend. Analysing and contextualising these efforts, this essay contributes to a cultural history of homosexuality in Italy by elaborating on two tropes – cruising and egalitarian relationship structures – which make it possible to reconceive both how homosexual men were represented and how they may have lived.

Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.