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STONEHENGE TO STONEWALL

A la recherché du temps perdu

France began to develop a
gay reputation back in the
ninth century with Alcuin and
his group of scholars at the
court of Charlemagne. They
even had pet nicknames for
each other, such as “Dodo” and
“Daphnis.” John Boswell ana-
lyzes their poems and letters as
“part of a tradition of erotic
address between men.”

A couple of centuries later,
in the era of troubadours and
songs of courtly love, France
became the Motown of
Europe, and Provencal became
the language of love. Other
countries envied the legendary
level of romance in Provence,
and this included same-sex
love. Chartres was the major
academic center of Europe in
the 11th century, where gay
clerics, including Marbod,
Bishop of Rennes, wrote and
taught gay poetry. In fact, there
were even male brothels in
Chartres, Orleans, and Paris
that employed only men with
large genitals. I

When the French monk,
Bernard of Morlaix looked
around him in the late Middle
Ages, he commented that gay
people “are as numerous as
grains of barley, as many as the
shells of the sea or the sands of
the shore.”

Honi soit qui mal y pense

In previous columns, we
have met gay Frenchmen such
as Bishop Ralph of Tours and
his boyfriend John, the bishop
of Orleans (nicknamed “Flora”
after a famous French prosti-
tutel). We also met King Henry
111, who “...combin(ed) the
qualities of both sexes,” and
his infamous yet lovely
“mignons.” A later French
king, Louis XIII, with his
lovers provided by Richelieu,
even created a kind of gay her-
itage by fathering Phillip of
Orleans. Phillip was deliber-
ately brought up as a girl so as
not to be a threat to his brother,
the future “Sun King,” Louis
XIV. He became the most
stately homo at his brother’s
court in 17th century
Versailles.

Cherchez la femme

Look at your lists of gay
folk and notice that the les-
bians on it seem to be writers
and poets, and that many of
them are also French. In the
flow of poetry and prose from
Sappho to Audre Lorde, the

lesbian writer has been the
torchbearer for the lesbian
cause. France seems to have
produced more than its share of
Sapphic muses.

Collette (1873-1954) comes
out on every lesbian list... and
every French list too for that
matter! Her first marriage was
to a guy who made her write
the Claudine novels and then
published them under his
name! She left him (no won-
der), and though she married
twice more, she found time for
romance with several women.

Her study of lesbian mores,
The Pure and the Impure, has
been called brilliant. The
androgynous drawings of
Aubry Beardsly were her inspi-
ration. That blend of masculine
and feminine qualities became
the stuff of her characters, and
something she admired in the
lesbians she knew.

Although in time she
became a national treasure, the
church, no surprise, refused to
let her be buried in a Christian
graveyard due to her
“immoral” life and her “cele-
bration of human sensuality.”
Here in the US, her best known
work is Gigi, which was both a
play and a hit movie starring
Audrey Hepburn. To be honest,
I don’t remember sensuality of
any kind, unless you count the
homophobic Maurice
Chevalier drooling over little
girls.

Chacun a son gout

Another movie on a French
theme is Total Eclipse. This is
the biography of that prince of
poets, Paul Verlaine (1844-
I896), who claimed that all his
troubles came from being fem-
ininel (Not that his incredible
devotion to religion and alco-
hol had anything to do with it!)
He actually got married, and
you can only feel very sorry for
his wife and child. (In one fit of
madness, he deliberately set
his wife’s hair on fire!) Their
lives together were a torment
for everyone.

His torrid love affair with
Artur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
was also a mess.—This “mar-
velous boy”—brilliant, origi-
nal and an outrageous
Bohemian in every way-—stabs
Verlaine through the hand dur-
ing one argument. (Watching
them in action, you really end
up intensely disliking both of
them.)

Rimbaud wrote all his stuff

by charlie emond

 

before he was 19 and then went
on to become a merchant and
die at 37. Though they inspired
each other to write their best
stuff, they were both too prick-
ly to get along together well
and things ended up with a
scandalous duel.

In this movie, Rimbaud is
played by a sometimes naked
Leonardo DiCaprio, and it is
worth the rental fee tolsee him
play gay with such abandon.

Plus ca change, plus c’est
la meme chose

Along with the French kiss,
French letters, French ticklers,
and French fries,- the French
may also have also given us
our current use of the word
“gay. In the language of
Provencal, “gai” meant courtly
love, “gai saber” meant lover,
and “gaiol” meant an openly
homosexual person. “Gay
Paree” always conjures‘ up in
my mind same-sex couples
strolling down the Champs
Elysees. How about a remake
of Gigi with Leonardo in the
title role?

99

For more info: I have writ-
ten this column using informa-
tion from two books in particu-
lar: John Boswell’s
Christianity, Social Tolerance
and Homosexuality, which I
have already recommended,
and Thomas Cowan’s Gay
Men and Women Who
Enriched the World.

Charlie Emorzd has a bache-
lor ’s degree from Queens
College and master ‘S degrees

from both Dartmouth and

Keene State. He teaches col-
lege history courses in
Springfield and White River
Junction. V

   

January‘ 2001 | Out in the Mountains‘ |13

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