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Who’s Who IN GAY AND LESBIAN HISTORY THE ROUTLEDGE WHO’S WHO SERIES Accessible, authoritative and enlightening, these are the definitive biographical guides to a diverse range of subjects drawn from literature and the arts, history and politics, religion and mythology. Who’s Who in Ancient Egypt Michael Rice Who’s Who in the Ancient Near East Gwendolyn Leick Who’s Who in Christianity Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok Who’s Who in Classical Mythology Michael Grant and John Hazel Who’s Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History Edited by Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon Who’s Who in Contemporary Women’s Writing Edited by Jane Eldridge Miller Who’s Who in Contemporary World Theatre Edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkegrafe Who’s Who in Dickens Donald Hawes Who’s Who in Europe 1450–1750 Henry Kamen Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History Edited by Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon Who’s Who in the Greek World John Hazel Who’s Who in Jewish History Joan Comay, new edition revised by Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok Who’s Who in Lesbian and Gay Writing Gabriele Griffin Who’s Who in Military History John Keegan and Andrew Wheatcroft Who’s Who in Modern History Alan Palmer Who’s Who in Nazi Germany Robert S.Wistrich Who’s Who in the New Testament Ronald Brownrigg Who’s Who in Non-Classical Mythology Egerton Sykes, new edition revised by Alan Kendall Who’s Who in the Old Testament Joan Comay Who’s Who in the Roman World John Hazel Who’s Who in Russia since 1900 Martin McCauley Who’s Who in Shakespeare Peter Quennell and Hamish Johnson Who’s Who of Twentieth-Century Novelists Tim Woods Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century World Poetry Edited by Mark Willhardt and Alan Michael Parker Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century Warfare Spencer Tucker Who’s Who in World War One John Bourne Who’s Who in World War Two Edited by John Keegan Who’s Who IN GAY AND LESBIAN HISTORY From Antiquity to World War II Edited by Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon London and New York First published 2001 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Second edition first published 2002 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2001, 2002 Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors for their contributions All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-98675-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-15983-0 (Print Edition) Contents Introduction vii Contributors xiv Acknowledgements xix 1 WHO’S WHO IN GAY AND LESBIAN HISTORY: FROM ANTIQUITY TO WORLD WAR II Introduction What do Sappho, Michelangelo, Queen Kristina of Sweden, Oscar Wilde, Magnus Hirschfeld, Colette, Henry James and Sigmund Freud have in common? Nothing at first glance, but there is one commonality: they are all significant in the history of homosexuality, and as such they feature in this Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History. A Who’s Who in some ways can seem a rather quaint sort of book—potted biographies of the rich and famous, the worthy and the nefarious, or those with some exalted position in society which gets them included. The assumption is that someone must be relatively important or well known as well as meritorious to appear in a Who’s Who; yet even being written about in such a volume itself provides at least a few lines of fame. It is thus by very definition élitist—unknown people do not make it into a Who’s Who. Indeed, it would be rather pointless if they did, because those who consult the book need to know the name of a specific figure in order to read about her or him. Except for those admirable eccentrics who derive great pleasure simply from browsing through encyclopedias and dictionaries, readers of a Who’s Who are interested in biographical information on identifiable figures. Professional historians may well have certain reservations about the approach to the past implied by a Who’s Who: it smacks of the ‘great men in history’ attitude of the nineteenth century (needless to say, our professional forebears were less concerned about ‘great women’ in history). Furthermore, those of us reared in the ‘new social histories’ of the Annales sort, or even the old or new Marxist history, may raise our eyebrows about a project that is necessarily based solely on individuals, with only limited scope for discussion of social context, general trends and the activities of groups or classes, or the impact of impersonal forces in history. As well, the overwhelming amount of discussion in recent years about ‘identity’ and the related arguments by postmodernists and queer theorists have raised questions about any categorisation of individuals by a single trait, in this case that of sexual orientation. Especially with ‘deviant’ sexuality, given its long- held taboo status in many Western societies, there seems also the danger of degenerating into high-class gossip: was one or another figure really lesbian or gay? Nevertheless, reference books such as Who’s Who directories are essential—they are often the first port of call for students embarking on research, for scholars needing to check basic facts, and for general readers looking for brief introductions. Undoubtedly more people consult, and certainly learn more from, a range of such reference books than they do from many ponderous monographs. Given the limits but recognising the imperatives, putting together a Who’s Who is therefore a useful undertaking. The idea of reference works on homosexuality, including biographical ones, is not new. After all, early writers on homosexuality, including most of those in the late 1800s and early 1900s, listed as precursors of our tribe the great ‘gays’—or homosexuals, sodomites, inverts, Urnings, Uranians or whatever other colloquial terms were used—of Antiquity and afterwards. Having such illustrious predecessors could ‘justify’ what society saw as reprobate emotions and behaviours. This approach continued well into the twentieth century. One of the most widely circulated of the books on homosexuality written in the ‘second wave’ of scholarly works, in the 1970s and 1980s—the time that such pioneering scholars as Kenneth Dover, John Boswell, Lillian Faderman and Jeffrey Weeks were giving gay and lesbian historical studies real legitimacy—was A.L.Rowse’s Homosexuals in History. Rowse was an eminent Elizabethan scholar, and the subtitle of his work—‘A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts’—appeared to indicate an imaginative perspective. 1 However, as many critics have noted, the work seemed largely a project of ‘recuperation’ (as postmodernists might say): a wide range of famous persons might be read as gay, and Rowse certainly had ample anecdotes (some of rather doubtful provenance) to prove his point. Chapter after chapter moved through century after century in a great gay genealogy. Enjoyable and important as it was, Rowse’s book suffered from flaws that a number of other writers would repeat. It presupposed that it was critical to prove that a range of famous people were homosexual and to find the ‘stains on the sheets’, and it supposed that almost anyone who strayed from the straight and narrow was probably ‘one of us’. Even today, there continues to be much work that assumes that paintings of two men gazing at each other are automatically a gay mise en scène, or that lines expressing even the most comradely or amical bonding are proof of at least a covert or latent homosexual relationship. This sort of approach quickly turns into chauvinism. Some works, in fact— as in several recent American publications—do not even try to hide their inspirational intentions and verge on the hagiographical. Not all succumb to these faults; the two- volume Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, published in 1990, remains a valuable resource, despite criticisms of certain aspects of its scholarship. 2 Available biographical compendia display various limitations. Curiously, many such books, explicitly or implicitly, try to provide rankings, as do the lists that come out in Gay Times, The Advocate and other publications which list the ‘Top 100’ of gays and lesbians of the past or present. One 1995 American publication was indeed called The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present, while in the following year appeared the revised Gay Men and Women Who Enriched the World. 3 Another problem is that many of these books are heavily weighted to the history of homosexuality in the English-speaking world. Several are remarkably Americanocentric. While they each generally include the usual suspects, like Sappho and Leonardo da Vinci, they are overbalanced towards the moderns and towards the Americans; figures from regions such as the Nordic countries and eastern Europe, for instance, almost never appear. This is notably true of the recent Completely Queer. 4 Furthermore, the scholarly apparatus of footnotes and bibliographies is usually rudimentary. 5 Directories in languages other than English, of which few have been published, have been little better. Two gay encyclopedic dictionaries in French published in recent years have a most eclectic choice of figures and only the briefest of references. 6 We have tried to learn from these earlier examples, and to avoid their weaknesses. We have set certain clear criteria. First, we have taken as our parameters only the Western world, where concepts such as lesbian and gay (but also homosexual) have a specific cultural meaning. Also, it has been argued that—with notable exceptions—it is primarily in the West that human worth has come to be valorized largely in individual terms; in many non-Western cultures, individuality is downplayed, being subsumed under wider