Indestructible Closet

I don't want to sound like one of those Loony-Left academics who do Queer Theory readings of 100-percent straight shooters like Andre Gide, Willa Cather, and Truman Capote, but there is some pretty fascinating material, touching on contemporary gay-marriage and assimilation controversies, in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. (Easy! I'm not using the French title to be fancypants; just avoiding the pointless controversy over what the series should be called in English.) If you've got a few spare decades, the books are replete with both intentional and unintentional insights.

First, as one of the first works of the twentieth century to deal directly with homosexuality, it navigates a course through openness, secretiveness, and self-loathing in ways that are hilarious, bewildering, and fascinating, sometimes all at once: any number of hokey scenes wherein the narrator accidentally observes gays or lesbians making the love connection while they think nobody's looking; "M. de Charlus," a stratospheric aristocrat who is widely respected for being in lifelong mourning for his dead wife and behaves with supermasculine disdain for anybody who seems slightly pansyish, but then turns cartoonishly femme when he's trying to pick up some soldier or stableboy; numerous scenes wherein a tootyfruity gets beaten to a pulp after coming on to the wrong fella; constant negotiations between being in and out of the closet (it's never clear how aware or accepting of these matters belle epoque society is, either in general or in the specific cases of the novels' gay characters). Framing all of this is a narrator who is depicted as strictly heterosexual and in love with various girls (who have masculine-derived names like Albertine and Gilberte); but who also just happens to know all the customs of the gay demi-monde at a microscopic level of detail, and gets an offer to become a protégé of M. de Charlus (who wants to give him the skinny on a "freemasonry" that includes various leaders of Europe). I forget who said repressed homosexuality is the real theme of all novels, but if that's true this is the ultimate novel.

However, the most interesting question for a contemporary reader concerns gay rights as a movement, and comes about two-thirds of the way through, in the 30+-page essay on homosexuality that opens the book Sodom and Gomorrah. The essay ends on a literary conceit about Genesis 19: Since it's clear that God failed to eliminate sodomites from the world when he destroyed Sodom, that means some of Sodom's residents must have tricked the two angels who were sent to investigate the city's practices before destroying it. (Calm down, biblical literalists; I know this isn't exactly the way it is in the Good Book.) If instead, God had sent two gays to test the city, they wouldn't have been fooled by excuses like "I have a wife and six children," and nobody would have escaped to produce new generations of sodomites:

These descendants of Sodom, so numerous that you could apply another verse from Genesis to them: "If a man can number the dust of the earth, so your seed may also be numbered," have settled in every part of the earth, have gained access to every profession, and can get admitted to such exclusive clubs that, when a Sodomist fails to get admittance, the black ball is usually given by other Sodomists, who, having inherited the habit of lying which made it possible for their ancestors to flee the doomed city, always make a point of condemning sodomy. It is possible that they may go back to that city one day. Certainly in every country they form an Oriental colony, cultivated, musical, and spiteful, which has charming qualities and intolerable defects. We will study them more deeply in the coming pages, but for now I'd like to give a warning against the grave error of encouraging, just as some have encouraged the creation of a Zionist movement, the creation of a Sodomist movement that would try to rebuild Sodom. For as soon as they arrived, the Sodomists would want to leave the city in order not to seem to have been part of it; they would marry women and keep mistresses in other cities, where they would still find the same diversions that have always appealed to them. They would go to Sodom only in times of absolute necessity, when their own cities were empty, at times when hunger brings the wolf to the door. That is to say, everything would continue just as it happens today in London, in Berlin, in Rome, in Saint Petersburg or in Paris.

Obviously, this is somebody writing in the teens, but is that bit about the Sodomist movement just a prophecy on the author's part? Was anybody anywhere proposing anything like a gay rights movement in 1913?

More important, is any of this still relevant? The penalties and stigmas attached to open homosexuality have been reduced in ways that were unimaginable even thirty years ago, let alone ninety years ago. But I'm guessing we've still got plenty of gays in the closet (cough cough, Ken Mehlman, cough cough!), and that they've got their reasons for being there. Gay marriage would seem like a kind of final battle, after which the playing field is truly level, but I'm sure there will be other controversies once that one gets sorted out. Will there ever be a time when there are no advantages attached to heterosexuality, and thus no reason for anybody to stay in the closet? I live in rebuilt Sodom, and from here it seems like that's already the way things are, but it's a big world out there…