Homosexual Affair Research Articles

The Use and Abuse of Queer History

The Use and Abuse of Queer History

A.E. Housman’s Bio-Drama(tic) Journey in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention Of Love

This study highlights the compulsive sexuality of Housman for his love towards his classmate, Jackson. The moral codes of the era enforced Housman to keep his feelings secret since Victorian society prohibited homosexual affairs. Therefore, Housman was compelled to hide his desires stemming from his desperate love. The Invention of Love turns around the ambition of Housman for his homosexual identity. At the same time, Stoppard’s play is one of the best examples of bio-drama which consists of the words “biography” and “drama”. In this respect, the aim of this study is to reveal how the playwright uncovers Housman’s homosexual tendencies from Foucauldian perspective through bio-drama.

Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage by O. Alan Weltzien

Reviewed by: Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage by O. Alan Weltzien Paul Lindholdt O. Alan Weltzien, Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2020. 257 pp. Hardcover, $40. Professor emeritus Alan Weltzien has hit upon a captivating story that begins in Dillon, Montana, where he taught for twenty-nine years at the University of Montana Western. Author Thomas Savage was raised there, moved East for college, wed his sweetheart, fathered three children, wrote thirteen novels— and conducted an adulterous homosexual affair that threatened to disintegrate his household. A batch of family facts buoys the psychological insights in this first Savage biography. The book ventures into territory many straight angels fear to tread— into gender politics. Annie Proulx, in her afterword to the reissue of Savage’s novel The Power of the Dog (1967, 2001), characterizes the male protagonist as “a vicious bitch,” which Weltzien considers “a violent, homophobic phrase” (101). In novel after novel Thomas Savage returned to the landscapes of his childhood and young adulthood. Those landscapes include southwestern Montana and Central Idaho. “In his fiction,” Weltzien writes, “ranches wreck people and small towns often do as well” (223). In an approach-avoidance pattern combining inspiration and disdain, Savage recalls Thomas Wolfe and his Asheville, North Carolina; Sherwood Anderson and his Clyde, Ohio. Savage wrote a more autobiographical fiction than most of his predecessors, though, and Weltzien does a fine job of cross-referencing Savage relatives with their fictional avatars. The philistines that people his novels become mouthpieces for Savage to satirize the dearth of elegance he discovered in the Intermountain West. There is much to admire in the way this book places Savage within American intellectual history. Eschewing the genre Westerns of Zane Gray and Owen Wister, Savage instead practiced “a steady excoriation of his hometown” (178). He criticized the settler-colonial tradition made popular by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and other “professional Montanans” whom he discredited (188). Invited back to Dillon in 1983, Savage was a featured writer and keynote speaker at an arts festival— only after Guthrie turned the sponsors down. A fan of Savage and his “queer-inflected” West (215), Weltzien presents [End Page 87] an extended lament that the author remains a mere “footnote in American literary history” (208). The gender studies elements in this good biography recommend it. “Savage flaunted his gay desires through his luxury sports cars,” Weltzien writes, “the bright luster of their finish and the purr of their engines” serving as stand-ins for himself (73). Costly cars as identity markers, including a Rolls Royce, belied his economic condition: his books never sold well. The thirteen superb photos in the book modestly exclude a revealing nude photo of him that features “a festooned braid of seaweed serving as his G-string” (79). Commendable, too, is Weltzien’s sleuthing through Savage’s life to discover his male lover, one Tomie dePaola, who told a chilling story. The two were caught by surprise in Boston, and dePaola was battered by Savage’s upset son. Afterward, “Tom insisted on sex, which dePaola characterized as ‘very rough’” (93). Following that sad interlude together, Savage “cut ties and reverted to his older loyalty,” his wife and children (94). Alan Weltzien is a good friend whose work I admire. Having edited volumes on Rick Bass, Norman Maclean, and John McPhee, he has built a solid standing as a biographer. He has also published multiple articles on Savage, spoken on him at conferences, and led tours within what he dubs Savage West. Contrary to that other West, which is “a repository of national wish fulfillment perpetuated by popular cultural production” (215), Savage West is a literary site where women are accorded great respect and male ranchers get bared as the brutes and bullies that would turn Montana politically red. Parts of this biography seem to have been rushed into print. In 2019 Palme d’Or winner and director Jane Campion began filming The Power of the Dog, Savage’s most celebrated novel (110). In the interim, COVID hit, film production was delayed, and this biography bears a couple dozen blotches in documentation, grammar, spelling, and punctuation...

Portraiture in Oscar Wilde’s Fiction

Wilde se rendit compte dès le début de sa carrière que le genre du portrait reposait sur une dichotomie entre la représentation des aspects intimes de la vie d’un individu d’une part et celle du personnage public, d’autre part. Mais peu après la criminalisation des « outrages aux bonnes mœurs » en 1885 et le début de sa liaison avec Robert Ross en 1886, il prit conscience du fait que le portrait constituait également une structure imaginaire propice à la représentation de vies caractérisées par des désirs illicites, désirs que l’on ne pouvait satisfaire que secrètement, loin du regard de la société. Cet article explore la dynamique entre portrait, artiste, sujet (ou « modèle ») et spectateur dans quatre textes de fiction que Wilde a publiés à intervalles réguliers à la fin des années 1880. Il montre qu’au fil de ces quatre textes, Wilde développa une théorie nuancée de l’art du portrait comme incarnation visuelle du désir pour les hommes et entre hommes. Il suggère en conclusion que la nouvelle compréhension de l’art du portrait acquise par Wilde a pu à son tour influencer l’œuvre de son ami Toulouse-Lautrec, dont le célèbre portrait à l’aquarelle de l’écrivain, réalisé en 1895, constitue une rupture radicale par rapport aux normes de l’époque.

Youth Cinema: Young Taiwanese Lesbian on Screen

This study offers an analysis of lesbian affairs depicted in Hsiao-tse Cheng’s Miao Miao (2008). Reading this production alongside the representations of lesbian, the authors argue that homosexual affair represented in this film involves nothing more than interpersonal issues with lively audience interaction as this film skimms the surface of its subject matter, especially regarding ‘genital stage’ in personality development, and also, the survey conducted in Taiwan shows that there is a considerable number of young Taiwanese cinema-goers are more concern on psychosexual issues, compare with other themes. This film is an example of Taiwan-Hong Kong co-production and a feature debut by a Taiwanese young film director. Colours, natures, gestures and other means of expression therefore have exhibited a unique look for Taiwanese youth cinema. Keywords: LGBTQ, youth cinema, representations of homosexuality, Taiwanese films, Taiwan

An Anthropology of Ethics (review)

James D. Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 306 pp. How are we to do cultural anthropology when distinct communities with long-established customs and moralities are giving way to free market individualism and ever-changing commercialized lifestyles? James D. Faubion addresses this critical question with a framework for studying ethics or subjectivation, that is, how individuals fashion themselves through work on the self. His approach, however, is decidedly not psychological. To the contrary, he begins by rejecting psychological reductionism in favor of a Foucauldian perspective on how reflexive social actors govern their selves (3). He is concerned not with psychic interiority but rather with positions, that is, with subjects passing through positions in environments, whether as part-selves, individuals, dyads, human or non-human collectivities, corporations, or even cyborgs (119). Faubion draws particularly on Foucault's history of sexuality where ethics and morality are separate aspects of morals. In contrast to morality or moral code, ethics is said to concern the subject's care of the self (not the usual way of defining ethics in Anglo-American circles). For Foucault, it includes substance (e.g., carnal appetite), mode of subjection or how the subject relates to morality, self-forming activity, and aim or purpose. Faubion elaborates on these four components throughout his monograph, although he refers to morality as the and subsumes it within a broader ethical domain. He also draws on Niklas Luhmann and Max Weber. In agreement with Foucault, Luhmann contends that individual psychology is irrelevant to social-systemic communication. In a manner reminiscent of Foucault's treatment of capillary power and discursive practices, he views social systems as loose connections of semi-autonomous subsystems each with its own autopoiesis of codes and understandings. And like Foucault, he privileges ethics over morality; indeed, for Luhmann, shared moral orders in modern societies are dysfunctional. Drawing on Weber, Faubion finds ethics originating with charismatic leaders in social crises. In such primal scenes of social life, the themitical and rationalization are in abeyance as sovereign charismatic leaders fashion and purvey new ethical values. After introducing this approach, Faubion reviews Foucault's survey of ethics and subjectivation in ancient Athens. He then presents several case studies: 1) Fernando Jose Mascarenhas, a Portuguese aristocrat; 2) Amo Paul Bishop Roden, a leader in the Branch Davidian group in Waco, Texas; and, briefly, 3) Constantine Cavafy, a expatriate Greek poet of the 19th and early 20th century. The discussion of Fernando relies on a monograph by George E. Marcus as well as Faubion's own interviews with Fernando, while the chapter on Ms. Roden builds on Faubion's earlier The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millenarianism Today (2001). Faubion portrays Fernando as a composite figure and Ms. Roden and himself as forming a dyad-subject. Fernando was twice in psychoanalysis. He found men more attractive sexually, but ultimately regarded women as more interesting. He was twice married. He was a communist. Faubion nicely describes how Fernando conscientiously tried to fulfill his aristocratic obligations to society, but he ignores how psychoanalysis influenced Fernando and is more interested in his one serious homosexual affair than his two marriages. Fernando's communism also receives scant attention, unfortunately since it was no doubt part of his ethical perspective. Faubion pities Fernando's lack of enthusiasm for homosexuality, and admits that he did not connect well with him (209). Ms. Roden was a divorced, single parent; leader among the Branch Davidians; and proponent of polygyny. Fernando was not only an aristocrat, but also unusual in his sexuality and politics. Ms. Roden was, if anything, even more eccentric. …

“Old Father, Old Artificer”: Queering Suspicion in Alison Bechdel’s <i>Fun Home</i>

“Old Father, Old Artificer”: Queering Suspicion in Alison Bechdel’s <i>Fun Home</i>

Sex differences in response to imagining a partner’s heterosexual or homosexual affair

Based on sexual strategies theory, we predicted that men would be less likely to continue an imagined long-term relationship following a partner’s heterosexual affair compared to homosexual affair. For women, it was expected that both affair types would result in a low willingness to continue the relationship, but especially so for homosexual affairs. We further predicted that the interaction would remain independent of the following moderator variables: number of affair partners, number of instances of infidelity, and real infidelity experience. Participants ( N = 718) were randomly assigned to read one of eight infidelity scenarios and estimate the likelihood that they would continue the relationship. Results confirmed all three predictions. A separate analysis of relationship outcomes following real infidelity experiences provided additional corroboration. These results support the conclusion that threats to paternity and threats of abandonment differentially motivate men and women to terminate relationships in response to a partner’s infidelity.

Review: Canada's Voice The Public Life of John Wendell Holmes

CANADA'S VOICE The Public Life of John Wendell Holmes Adam Chapnick Vancouver UBC Press, 2009. 384pp, $32.95 paper ISBN 978-0774816724Adam Chapnick has written a fascinating and extremely well-researched book about John Wendell Holmes, whose work for the Canadian Institute of International Affairs covered three different periods of his life and is celebrated annually in an issue of the International Journal dedicated to his memory. Sandwiched in between his CIIA stints were 16 years in External Affairs, into which he parachuted during World War II in 1943 and from which he was secretively forced to resign in late 1959 as part of an ongoing purge of homosexuals in sensitive positions. In the fourth stage of his life, Holmes remained involved with the CIIA at a less intense level while teaching and mentoring postgraduates at the University of Toronto and Glendon College and commenting on Canadian foreign policy. Chapnick had access to Holmes's papers and carried out extensive interviews with former colleagues and friends. The resulting narrative weaves together a myriad of fascinating strands concerning Holmes, warts and all.Chapnick describes Holmes as embodying the ideals of postwar Canadian foreign policy. was an integral part of the cadre of civil servants who dominated the Canadian public arena during the nation's formative years as a world player. He played an equally crucial role in shaping the way that diplomats, scholars, and statespeople abroad understood Ottawa and its citizens, Chapnick writes. For students and practitioners of international affairs at home and around the world, he was Canada's voice (x).That someone whom Chapnick reveals as having a natural tendency towards indecision could end up playing such a role is just one of the many contradictions that come to light in the book. Holmes's trademark was to stress the importance of paradox in the formulation of Canadian foreign policy, and his own career and personal life were full of paradoxes in their own right. Some of Holmes's concerns and preoccupations (e.g., the importance of the Commonwealth and staying out of the Organization of American States) may have been somewhat overtaken by events, but many of his views, particularly the importance of managing relations with the United States and the value of the United Nations, still ring true today.Holmes's diplomatic career took him to London, Paris, Moscow, New York, the National Defence College in Kingston, and finally, killer's row in the east block of Parliament Hill, where he served as assistant undersecretary. reached this level in half the time that it took most other diplomats. En route to London, Holmes carried a letter from George Ignatieff to Alison Grant proposing marriage. However, she was unable to decipher Ignatieff's handwriting and it was up to Holmes to propose marriage on his friend's behalf.A 10-month posting to Moscow as charge d'affaires in 1947-48 ultimately led to Holmes's dismissal from External in 1959 because of the homosexual affair he had while in the Soviet Union. (Chapnick points out that the affair was not with a Soviet agent assigned to discredit Holmes (113).) But during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, he was a close confidant of the senior establishment in Ottawa at both the political and bureaucratic levels, and he served as mentor to many young foreign service officers. While at the National Defence College, Holmes enunciated six principles of Canadian foreign policy. His analysis drew on Louis St. Laurent's Gray lecture of 1947, but emphasized the centrality of foreign trade, the need for a counterweight to the United States, and the importance of being realistic about the extent of Canada's international influence. …

Verlaine's La bonne chanson and Romances sans paroles

In Verlaine's La bonne chanson, the path to the lady involves centripetal circling, proceeding by degrees, toward an ever closer encounter, in hopes of achieving synthesis with her at the stillpoint of a vortex. Two episodes, located like elliptical dual centers, result in two outcomes: the first, a sudden, centrifugal reversal flinging him violently away, signifying the lady's rejection; the second, an apparently successful but short‐lived fusion, as the poet's measured centrifugal withdrawing, this time of his own accord, portrays. By the time Romances sans paroles opens, estrangement from the lady has increased, but a harmonious intimacy has developed between the poet and a male companion, and the poet's bisexuality is reflected by various gender relations and shifts. His open avowal of a homosexual affair is a shock that upsets the delicate balance between conflicting desires that had been, until now, precariously maintained, resulting in the violent, vertiginous vortex that tears things apart. Although the vortex is, as phenomenon and symbol, reversible, whirling centripetally toward a calm union at the center or centrifugally away toward the furious chaos at the periphery, it is the destructive centrifuge that prevails in these works, ending all tensions and conflicts by annihilating them.

Siegfried Sassoon: the journey from the trenches: a biography (1918-1967)

The eagerly awaited volume II of Jean Moorcroft Wilson's masterful biography of Siegfried Sassoon now launched in paperback; Where most veterans of the Great War returned home traumatised by the carnage in the trenches, Siegfried Sassoon had received recognition for his superbly vivid poetry and the bravery both on the battlefield and back home. In rapid succession, he had numerous homosexual affairs: none of them ultimately satisfying. Yet he also started on his great trilogy of anti-hero novels, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress. Jean Moocroft Wilson continues to impress with the eagerly awaited second volume of her definitive biography of Sassoon. Showing how a homosexual poet came to define heroism not only during the war, but even more so after the war until now, she has unearthed many new facts about Sassoon.

Gay fathers in straight marriages.

The author bases his conclusions about gay parenthood on anecdotal evidence gathered from about 100 gay German fathers. First he notes how the religious ethic that surrounds the nuclear family stands in the way of a father's awareness and expression of his homosexual desires. Like van der Geest, he reports that many women are attracted to gay men and proceed to marry them. After coming to realize that husbands' homosexual affairs are transitory and do not constitute a serious challenge to marital and family bonds, a few couples have been able to preserve their marriages. In most cases the marriages collapse under the combined pressures of wife and gay lover both claiming exclusive proprietorship: "the 'love triangle' can rarely be closed." The author laments the existence of all-male gay communities that ignore the existence of females and force gay husbands and fathers to choose against marriage and parenthood.

Mother-daughter incest

Reports of mother-daughter incest are conspicuously absent from the extensive literature on the sexual abuse of children. When homosexual incest has been reported, the relationship usually involves father and son. In some reported cases of father-daughter incest, the mother had an active role in the sexual act. There is one reported case of grandmother-grand-daughter incest. In the present case, the victim, L., entered psychotherapy because of migraine headaches. She was a university student, struggling, ambivalently, to separate from a jealous and possessive mother. She had been involved in several homosexual affairs which had ended with L. rejecting her partner. Early in therapy, she made a self-mutilating suicide attempt. L. was the only child of an older, lower middle class couple. Father was a passive, ineffectual man, overshadowed by L. 's mother. Soon after L. was born, mother and father began sleeping in separate bedrooms. When L. was six years old, mother invited her to share her bed. L. had a room of her own, but was allowed to sleep there only when mother entertained her homosexual lover. L. recalls being extremely jealous of her mother's lover. Starting at age 8, L. recalls awakening to find mother kissing L. on the lips or fondling her breasts. L. thinks that genital fondling also took place while L. was asleep. At age 14 L. insisted that she sleep alone because she felt there was “something wrong” with her relationship with mother. After two years of psychotherapy, L. was able to separate successfully from mother. Soon after this, she rekindled a relationship with a male friend and later married. It can be difficult to distinguish a sexually exploitative mother-daughter relationship from a normal physical closeness that occurs between mothers and female children. This closeness is critical in the development of mothering behaviors in the daughter. Seductive behavior in mothers is more socially tolerated than similar behavior in male caretakers. In some cultures, mothers actively masturbate their nursing infants. In the case of L., the sexual relationship between mother and daughter parallels the patterns seen in father-daughter incest. The incest behavior occurred in the context of a deteriorated husband-wife relationship. L. was confused about whether to relate to mother as a parent or as a sex partner. Sexual contact began when the patient was pre-pubertal and consisted mainly of fondling. L's memories of this contact are vague and dreamlike, and were revealed after a substantial therapeutic relationship had been established. L's subsequent homosexual encounters were a repetition of her seduction by her mother. Less explicit maternal seductions have been implicated in the pathogenesis of female homosexuality. As more women with homosexual life-styles take on the single parenting of daughters, reports of mother-daughter incest may become more common.

Comment: Beyond Attica

Comment: Beyond Attica