cover image A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition

A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition

Gregory Woods. Yale University Press, $60 (464pp) ISBN 978-0-300-07201-3

Woods's (Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-Eroticism and Modern Poetry) dense but rewarding history has a lofty aim: ""queering the canon."" Starting with the man-boy love of Greek classics, this academic text focuses on homoeroticism in the literary imagination. But Woods does more. By analyzing attitudes about homosexual men, he looks at the homophobic ideologies that poetry and prose have encouraged throughout history. While there is not enough information on the role of religion in classifying sodomy as sin, Woods demonstrates that as early as the 12th century, hostility against man-to-man love was evident. But despite the linking of homosexual love with shame and repentance, it formed a culture--described by writers as diverse as Aristophanes, Rumi, William Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Langston Hughes and Jane Austen--that held on. Woods's commentary about the Nazis and about the popular postwar belief that fascism developed because of Germany's tolerance of ""sexual perversion"" is eye-opening, as is his deconstruction of 1950s crime fiction, which routinely depicted gay men as deviants. Woods moves his readers into the decades since Stonewall and scrutinizes writing that deals with gay pride as well as AIDS. Throughout, his point that homoerotic traditions are a literary constant is well-taken and persuasively argued. Woods makes inroads in defining queer culture and illuminates the essential role gay men have played in the Western canon. (Mar.)