The Libertine's Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China

310 Pages·2011·2.703 MB·English

by  Giovanni Vitiello

the libertine’s friend

the libertine’s friend
Homosexuality and Masculinity
in Late Imperial China
giovanni vitiello
the university of chicago press
chicago and london
giovanni vitiello is associate professor of Chinese in the Department of East
Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2011 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2011.
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-85792-3 (cloth)
isbn-10: 0-226-85792-1 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vitiello, Giovanni.
The libertine’s friend : homosexuality and masculinity in late imperial China /
Giovanni Vitiello.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-85792-3
isbn-10: 0-226-85792-1
1. Homosexuality—China. 2. Gays—China. 3. Sex customs—China. I. Title.
hq76.3 .c6v58 2011
306.76'609510903—dc22
2010042775
a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
to ines giallombardo (1938–67),
my young mother,
and to my father andrea vitiello,
for his eightieth birthday

contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Male Beauty 15
2. Friendship and Love 53
3. Libertine Masculinity 93
4. Hybrid Heroes 132
5. The Male Romance 166
Epilogue 200
Notes 211
Glossary 255
Bibliography 265
Index 285
vii

acknowledgments
Perhaps the earliest inspiration for this book came when our Chinese lan-
guage teacher at the University of Rome made us act in a play and chose
for the purpose the tragic romance of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, the
legendary “butterfly lovers.” Over a thousand years old, the legend has been
a continuous performance hit for at least the last four hundred, and has kept
enjoying an enormous popularity in the twentieth century, while traveling
through various new media and audiences. The story tells of a love born in
a school between two classmates—a boy and a girl in a boy’s disguise. Then
she has to go home, where her father, according to the agreement that had
allowed her to fulfill her extravagant desire to go to school like a boy, has
made preparations for her wedding. She leaves her beloved without reveal-
ing her secret, yet gives him her address and offers to serve as a matchmaker
so that he can marry “his sister.” Liang Shanbo comes to look for him and
discovers he is a girl—what splendid news, so now they could get married!
But her supplications to her father to break her engagement are to no avail.
Liang Shanbo, as a result, dies of chagrin. Zhu Yingtai asks that her wedding
procession stop at his grave for a last farewell; once there, her painful tears
make the grave open up, and she quickly plunges into it. Two butterflies
rise from the grave and flutter away together, finally free.
The story of the poor lovers, we were told, was a symbol of the cruelty
of “feudal” China, of a backward society that suppressed both women’s self-
determination and spontaneous romantic feelings. It was the ultimate fated
heterosexual romance, the Chinese Romeo and Juliet. Yet this romance
puzzled me—it seemed incomplete, or at least uneven, as if something had
been skipped or left unaccounted for. The heterosexual romance, after all,
emerged as a shared option only toward the story’s end, when the girl’s gen-
der was revealed, and not much before that option was crushed. What about
ix