0:00

This episode will discuss childhood

0:03

sexual abuse, and if that is not

0:05

something that you would like to listen to, this

0:08

is not the episode for you, and see

0:10

you again next week.

0:13

🎵 Outro Music 🎵 Hello

0:22

and welcome to Bad Gays, a podcast all about

0:24

evil and complicated queer people from history. Last

0:28

week we had a special episode with Arthur Azaroff,

0:30

who was talking about Mustafa bin Ismail,

0:33

a Tunisian street sweeping twink

0:35

who rose to become Prime Minister and he ended up

0:37

taking down a whole nation. Who

0:39

are you talking about this week, Ben? Well,

0:42

I'm going to begin today's

0:44

episode by reading from the first pages

0:46

of our subject's autobiography.

0:51

I was born on November 22nd, 1869.

0:55

My parents at that time lived in the Rue de Médicis

0:57

in an apartment on the fourth floor, which they

0:59

left a few years later and of which I have kept

1:02

no recollection.

1:03

Still, I do recall the balcony, or what

1:05

could be seen from the balcony. The bird's

1:08

eye view of the Place with its ornamental piece of

1:10

water and fountain. Or rather, to be still

1:12

more exact, I remember the paper

1:14

dragons which my father used to cut out for me

1:16

and which we launched into the air from the balcony.

1:19

I remember their floating away in the wind over

1:21

the fountain in the Place below and being carried

1:23

away as far as the Luxembourg Gardens,

1:25

where they used sometimes to catch in the top branches

1:28

of the horse chestnut trees.

1:30

I remember too a biggish table, the dining

1:32

room table no doubt, with its tablecloth

1:35

that reached nearly to the ground.

1:37

I used to crawl underneath it with the concierge's

1:39

little boy who sometimes came to play with me.

1:42

What are you up to under there? my nurse would call

1:44

out. Nothing, we're playing. And

1:47

then we would make a great noise of our playthings which

1:49

we had taken with us for the sake of appearances. In

1:52

reality, we amused ourselves otherwise,

1:55

beside each other but not with each other. We

1:57

had what I afterwise learned are called called,

2:00

Bad Habits. Which

2:02

of us two taught them first to the other? I

2:05

have no idea. Surely a child

2:07

may sometimes invent them for himself.

2:10

Personally, I cannot say whether anyone instructed

2:12

me in the knowledge of pleasure or in what manner

2:15

I discovered it. I only know that as

2:17

far back as the recollection goes, I

2:19

cannot remember a time without it.

2:21

I perfectly realize, for that matter, that

2:23

I am doing myself harm by relating this

2:26

and other things that follow. I

2:28

foresee what use will be made of them against me.

2:30

But the whole purpose of my story

2:32

is to be truthful. Put the case

2:35

that I am writing fit for a penance. One

2:37

would like to believe that in the Age of Innocence the soul

2:39

is all sweetness, light, and purity, but

2:41

I can remember nothing in mind that was not ugly,

2:44

dark, and deceitful. Wow. That's

2:48

a bold opening paragraph. So that's

2:50

the opening of If It Die, which is

2:52

by Andre Jied, the French writer who

2:54

became the granddaddy of a generation

2:57

of European writers and intellectuals who figured

2:59

themselves against the romanticized

3:01

and exoticized other to be found in the

3:04

so-called Orient.

3:05

Jied's life expresses a series of paradoxes.

3:08

He became an icon of homoerotic literature,

3:10

but was married to a woman, sired a daughter,

3:13

and never identified as gay.

3:15

May I ask you an indiscreet question? an

3:17

interviewer asked in 1950.

3:19

He replied, there are no indiscreet questions,

3:22

only indiscreet answers.

3:24

The interviewer, is it true that you're a homosexual?

3:27

Jied, no monsieur, I am not a homosexual,

3:30

I am a pederast.

3:32

Wow.

3:33

So he was capable both of an

3:35

asceticism rooted in his Protestant upbringing,

3:38

and also a profound sensualism that was

3:40

emplimized in sexual experimentation, and

3:42

as we'll see, he racialized that sensualism

3:44

in some really troubling ways.

3:47

He was capable both of figuring North Africa

3:49

as a sensualist's paradise, a

3:51

delight of erotic experimentation in a classically

3:54

Orientalist mode, and

3:56

of traveling through French colonies and writing scathing

3:59

journalism in dicey.

3:59

fighting French capitalism's abuse of Africa

4:02

and Africans. He was a communist

4:04

who broke with communism after seeing Stalin's

4:06

attacks on cultural freedom. His

4:09

life lived between 1869 and 1951, so earlier than

4:12

most of the writers with whom he's

4:16

often associated, helps us understand

4:18

major shifts in forms of male homosexual

4:20

identification and the relationship between that

4:22

identification and colonized subjects.

4:26

Edmund White wrote in

4:28

the London Review of Books, quote,

4:31

gay men like me, who came of age in the

4:33

50s and 60s, knew more about Gide's

4:35

personal lives than they knew about many of their

4:37

own friends' lives.

4:39

His Protestant beginnings, his sexless

4:41

marriage to his cousin Madeleine, his espousal

4:43

of Catholicism and communism, and his subsequent

4:46

renunciations of each, his affair with

4:48

Mark Ella Grey, 31 years younger than

4:50

he, his year-long trip to Africa,

4:52

his fathering a child with Elizabeth Rand Risselberg

4:54

after what appears to have been his unique sexual

4:56

experience with a woman.

4:59

White goes on, quote, today

5:01

many, if not most, up-and-coming writers in

5:03

the English-speaking world are routinely confessional.

5:06

Focused on their childhoods, they invariably

5:09

discover the same pathetic blights,

5:11

alcoholism and abuse, family dysfunction,

5:13

even incest.

5:14

Gide, by contrast, never saw himself

5:17

as wounded, never complained about his fate,

5:19

nor sought to assign blame.

5:21

And he wasn't much interested in the past.

5:23

On the contrary, he was eager to attune

5:26

himself to each new generation, end

5:28

quote.

5:30

So there's a recent queer theory book

5:32

that I really like, which is about

5:34

another great French gay troublemaker

5:36

who liked sucking dick in North Africa, Jean Genet.

5:39

The book is called Disturbing Attachments by

5:41

Kaji Amin.

5:43

And Amin's thesis is that scholars

5:45

and activists too often shy away from

5:47

the heart of the naughty conflicts that lie

5:49

at the heart of our most influential

5:52

and problematic, to use the term to mean a criteria

5:54

of interest,

5:55

queer thinkers and activists.

5:57

So the example of Genet, Genet first meets

5:59

error.

5:59

of men as a French colonial soldier and then

6:02

develops what Amin calls the quote

6:04

holy grail

6:05

of a politics of radical solidarity across

6:08

difference

6:09

out of the experience of sex with much younger

6:11

Arab men and teens.

6:13

And so instead of understanding this as a movement

6:15

across a life, one in which the sex

6:18

sort of healed and deterritorialized

6:20

Janay,

6:21

moving him from the colonialist

6:23

position to the position of alliance, Amin

6:28

suggests that we think of this as being temporarily

6:30

simultaneous. So not first colonialist

6:32

then liberatory but yes and.

6:36

And so Amin is asking basically

6:38

what, this is a quote from the book, what

6:40

historical forms of relation must be forgotten,

6:43

overlooked, or suppressed so that

6:45

contemporary queer theory can sustain

6:48

its key critical and political commitments

6:50

and imaginaries.

6:51

And that question is not unrelated to the question

6:54

we always ask on this podcast, which is who

6:56

do we choose to remember and why do we choose to forget?

6:59

But it's also how we remember that's important.

7:02

And so by examining Zid in his role

7:04

as a major influence on gay male identity

7:06

formation, even though that's not how he identified,

7:10

we force ourselves to confront some very uncomfortable

7:12

truths about gay male sexualities relationships

7:15

to race, pederasty, and

7:17

systems of production and exchange.

7:21

So Zid was born in Paris in 1869,

7:24

the year that in Berlin the lawyer Carl Maria

7:26

Kurtbenny coined the term homosexuality.

7:29

He was the son of a professor of La de

7:31

Sorbonne and lived in a lovely flat overlooking

7:33

the Luxembourg Gardens as we've heard about.

7:36

The family was Protestant on both sides but

7:38

his father was from the south of France and his mother

7:40

from the north. His

7:43

mother was very strict, his father was

7:47

more gentle and loved reading to him from

7:49

the Arabian Nights.

7:53

He was sent at the age of five to what

7:55

his biographer George D Painter calls

7:57

quote a private school for infant

7:59

boys.

7:59

and big girls, a phrase

8:02

that I find irresistible.

8:05

What does that even mean? I don't know,

8:07

but is she

8:10

an infant boy or a big girl?

8:13

Or both. So

8:15

then he left the school for infant boys and big

8:17

girls and went to a Protestant school, which

8:21

he ended up doing pretty well at after measles

8:24

and misbehavior set him back a year.

8:27

Despite his family being well off, his mother

8:30

dressed him in cheap clothes so the difference between

8:32

him and poorer friends was invisible.

8:35

And so the baby Andrei was longing for soft

8:37

shirts and sailor suits and berets.

8:41

At the age of 11, Andrei's father died of tuberculosis.

8:44

The family moved to Montpellier where he for the first

8:46

time felt excluded from being a Protestant.

8:49

At one point he was

8:50

chased home by Catholic students throwing

8:52

mud.

8:53

Really as I think is a psychosomatic

8:55

reaction to this, he developed headaches and

8:58

was sent to a spa where he was given

9:00

potassium bromide and chloral hydrate

9:03

as a young teenager, which is crazy because

9:05

those are both extremely poisonous and habit forming,

9:08

but he ended up breaking the habit.

9:11

This seems to be a theme of the season so far

9:13

of these crazy

9:15

so-called cures for people.

9:19

The family moved back to Paris when Andrei

9:21

was 13 and he began attending school.

9:24

He got much more serious about the piano and

9:26

he became sort of a young

9:28

Protestant ascetic.

9:30

Again quoting George Painter's biography,

9:32

quote,

9:33

he rose at dawn, took a cold bath,

9:35

slept on boards and awoke at the dead of night to

9:37

kneel and pray. And these exercises

9:40

he saw as an act not of mortification

9:42

but of joy,

9:43

his love for his cousin Madeleine, end

9:46

quote, and this love had began when he

9:48

was transfixed by her magnificent

9:50

sadness, quote,

9:52

like his love for God depended on

9:54

the basis of the beloved.

9:56

Perhaps he said

9:57

during these ardent renunciations of the flesh,

9:59

He might have heard if he had only listened

10:02

the devil rubbing his hands and sniggering in

10:04

the corner end quote

10:08

Well, and that's yeah, that's so intense

10:11

I love my pretty cousin because she's so sad

10:13

yeah So I'm

10:15

gonna have a cold bath every morning and sleep on

10:18

a wooden board so

10:20

the young Andre became a writer and became

10:22

entranced by the poetics of symbolism

10:24

and so at 1891 at the age of 22

10:27

he published his first book the notebooks of Andre

10:30

Walter

10:32

Painter characterizes symbolism as the

10:34

first of several attempted escapes from

10:36

the Moralism in which she'd

10:38

was raised But

10:39

it wasn't until the mid to late

10:42

1890s that he would find the thing that would truly be

10:44

his escape from that world And that was young

10:46

Arab men and teenage boys And

10:48

so I'm now going to return

10:51

to the autobiography if I die for a bit

10:53

and let jeed

10:55

Narrate for you a bit what

10:57

happened here

11:00

In the name of what God or what ideal do you

11:02

forbid me to live according to my nature and Where

11:05

would my nature lead me if I simply followed

11:07

it

11:07

up to the present? I had accepted Christ's code

11:10

of morals or at any rate a kind of Puritanism

11:12

Which I had been taught to consider as Christ's

11:15

code of morals

11:16

By forcing myself to submit to it. I had

11:18

merely caused a profound disturbance

11:20

in my whole being

11:22

I would not content to live lawlessly and

11:24

I required my mind's assent to the demands

11:27

of my body

11:28

Even if those demands had been more usual I

11:30

doubt whether I should have been less troubled

11:32

For as long as I thought it my duty to deny my

11:35

desire everything what I desire did not

11:37

matter But I gradually came

11:39

to wonder whether God really exacted such

11:41

constraints

11:42

Whether it was not impious to be in continual rebellion

11:45

whether such rebellion was not against him

11:48

and whether in the struggle that divided me

11:50

it was reasonable to consider the opponent always

11:52

in the wrong

11:54

Continuing later. I

11:56

was resolved in some case to go on a journey,

11:58

but I had hesitated as to whether I should

11:59

accept my cousin Georges Poucher's invitation

12:02

to accompany him on a scientific cruise to Iceland.

12:05

And I was still hesitating when Paul Laurent

12:07

was given a traveling scholarship which obliged

12:09

him to go abroad for a year.

12:12

The choice he made of me as a companion decided my

12:14

fate, and so my friend and I started off on our

12:16

journey." End quote. And so

12:18

he decides to go to North Africa and not to

12:20

Iceland. Who knows what would have

12:23

happened to the course of world literature if he had gone

12:25

to Iceland instead.

12:26

Yeah, I'm just trying to unpick what he's saying

12:28

there as well about, I guess, this sort of theology

12:31

of sin that he

12:33

has. That he's basically saying,

12:35

as long as he

12:38

maintains that

12:42

intense sort of Protestant, Puritanical

12:46

expulsion of all desire from his life and it was fine,

12:48

but then once he started to let it in,

12:51

he thought,

12:53

why would God have given me these desires? Yeah.

12:59

We'll see. His, Gide's relationship to

13:01

morality is fascinating and

13:04

we will be talking a lot about it throughout.

13:07

So going back to the autobiography now, we've now

13:09

arrived in French North Africa. Quote, on

13:12

the very first day, as soon as we made our appearance

13:14

in the bazaar, a small guide of about 14

13:17

years old took possession of us and

13:19

escorted us into the shops.

13:21

I'm going to stop here and say that we

13:24

now have a major trigger warning for

13:26

basically the entire rest of the episode coming

13:28

up that has to do with

13:33

pederasty, with sex between men

13:35

and boys, with childhood

13:37

sexual abuse. So this

13:40

is going to be a major theme of the rest

13:42

of the episode to the extent that I think if you don't

13:44

want to hear a frank discussion

13:47

of that, you should probably

13:49

turn this episode off and wait until next

13:51

week's episode to

13:54

continue.

13:56

As he spoke French fairly well and moreover was

13:59

charming,

13:59

appointment with him for the next day at our hotel.

14:02

He was called Sessie and came from the island of Gerber,

14:05

said to be the Isle of the Lotus Eaters.

14:07

I remember our anxiety when we did

14:09

not turn up at the appointed hour.

14:11

And a few days later, when he came into my room,

14:14

we had left the hotel and taken a little apartment,

14:16

carrying the things we had just bought.

14:18

I remembered my mixed and troubled feelings

14:21

when he half undressed in order to show me

14:23

how to drape myself in a hike." Okay,

14:24

let's

14:29

see how this is going. Oh yes.

14:31

So now we go with

14:34

the guide Ali out into the desert.

14:38

Ali, this was my little guide's name, led me

14:40

up among the sand hills. In spite of the fatigue of

14:42

walking the sand, I followed him. We

14:45

soon reached a kind of funnel or crater, the

14:47

rim of which was just high enough to command the

14:49

surrounding country and give a view of anyone coming.

14:52

As soon as we got there, Ali flung the coat

14:54

and rug down on the sloping sand. He

14:56

flung himself down too and stretched on his back

14:59

with his arms spread out on each side of him.

15:01

He looked at me and laughed.

15:03

I was not such a simpleton as to misunderstand

15:05

his invitation, but I did not answer it at once.

15:07

I sat down myself, not very far from

15:10

him, but yet not very near either, and

15:12

in my turn looked at him steadily and waited,

15:14

feeling extremely curious as to what he would

15:16

do next. So there in this crater,

15:18

there is this sort of abortive encounter. One

15:20

thing that's really interesting about this book, and it's not in these

15:23

quotes

15:24

here, is that the

15:26

extent to which these quote unquote guides

15:29

are embedded in extremely

15:31

exploitative systems of colonial

15:33

sex work is completely known

15:36

to the narrator. It's known at the level

15:38

of the narration.

15:39

It's known to the narrator in the text.

15:42

It's not presented as something that the

15:44

narrator discovered after

15:47

what is being narrated. It's

15:48

entirely present,

15:51

and it's just worth keeping that in mind as we continue.

15:54

The narrator isn't oblivious

15:57

to it, which

15:59

doesn't make it better. in

16:02

many ways it makes it worse, but it's worth noting that.

16:06

So then we go into the,

16:08

then we have the sort of second encounter where

16:11

this is all consummated. So

16:13

here we go. Quote, Goodbye then, he said.

16:16

Seizing the hand he was holding out, I sent him spinning

16:18

to the ground. Once he began laughing again,

16:20

he made short shrift of the complicated knots and

16:22

the lacing that served him as a belt,

16:24

pulled a little dagger out of his pocket and slashed

16:26

through the tangle with a single cut.

16:28

Down fell his clothes, he threw his vest away

16:31

and stood up naked as a god. For

16:33

a moment he stretched his slender arms heavenward,

16:35

then still laughing he fell upon me. His

16:38

body may have been burning hot, but to me it

16:40

felt as refreshing as deep shade.

16:42

How lovely the sand was.

16:44

In the glorious splendor of evening, what radiance

16:46

bathed my joy.

16:49

Yeah. So that

16:51

feeds for his sexual encounter. In terms

16:54

of what he's saying about that, is there an implicit

16:56

thing there that he's sort of describing the, in

16:58

his reading of it, the willingness

17:01

of this child to engage

17:03

in like a sexual encounter,

17:05

because he understands

17:08

that as part of the sort of economy of sex

17:10

work that he's involved in, as sort

17:12

of almost

17:14

like the initiating partner.

17:16

And that's liberatory for

17:19

she does a Westerner who's been told he must

17:21

feel shameful and sinful, that his

17:23

boy doesn't. And he is extremely,

17:25

extremely insistent. And this

17:27

is, I mean, this is something

17:29

that we see often in sort

17:33

of pro-pedophilia or pro-abuse

17:36

literature, or argumentation,

17:39

that it's the kid that wants it. Describing

17:44

being seduced. Yeah.

17:47

Not just that, but you get that in all sorts, not just

17:49

with even necessarily with that sort of

17:53

racialized element, but in other

17:55

forms of pedorastic literature in general,

17:57

that the child is understood

17:59

as,

17:59

innocent and therefore their

18:02

desires are free from the

18:05

shame that this older

18:07

narrator

18:08

feels around their own sexuality so it's

18:10

therefore somehow yeah more

18:13

pure. Right. Which

18:16

is a super fucked up way of assuming

18:19

innocence. It's an unbelievably fucked up

18:21

way of assuming innocence. So

18:24

before we before we leave Algeria

18:27

we need to talk a little bit about

18:29

some other people that Jied runs

18:31

runs into

18:33

down there and some of the experiences

18:36

that he has with them

18:37

in this kind of economy of sex work and

18:39

the way that he differentiates himself from

18:41

certain other people. So we're

18:43

now going back to Jied narrating quote

18:46

I was on the point of leaving and the omnibus

18:48

had already gone to the station with my bag and trunk.

18:50

I can still see myself standing in the hall

18:53

of the hotel waiting for my bill. When

18:55

my eye fell by chance on a slate on which

18:57

the names of the visitors were written and I began to read

18:59

them mechanically.

19:00

My own first then the names of various

19:02

strangers and suddenly my heart gave a leap.

19:05

The last two names on the list were... wait

19:08

for it Hugh? Oscar

19:10

Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas. Oh

19:13

wow the whole thing's just

19:15

a big circle. Gay culture,

19:18

gay community.

19:21

So basically what happens

19:23

is that Bozi shows up and starts

19:26

dragging Jied around the

19:30

various places

19:34

and trying to teach him about

19:37

all of the fun sex he

19:39

can have with teenage

19:43

sex workers and

19:46

Jied is like I know and

19:49

Bozi's playing like big

19:51

man tourist who sort of knows like

19:53

you know what I mean this sort of superior so this

19:55

is now we're like now quoting Bozi as quoted

19:58

in Jied's text.

20:00

All these guides are idiotic, it's no good explaining.

20:02

They'll always take you to cafes which are full of women.

20:05

I hope you're like me. I have a horror of women.

20:07

I only like boys. As you're coming with us

20:09

this evening, I think it's better to say so at once."

20:12

Jeade then says, I could not think Bozy

20:14

as beautiful as Wilde did, but though he had the despotic

20:16

manners of a spoiled child, he combined

20:19

them with so much grace that I soon began to understand

20:21

why it was that Wilde always followed so submissively

20:24

in his wake.

20:25

To tell the truth, Bozy interested me extremely,

20:28

but terrible he certainly was. And

20:30

in my opinion, it is he who ought to be held responsible

20:33

for all that was disastrous in Wilde's career.

20:35

Wilde beside him seemed gentle, wavering,

20:38

and weak-willed.

20:39

Douglas was possessed by the perverse instinct

20:41

that drives a child to break his finest

20:44

toy.

20:44

Nothing ever satisfied him. He always wanted

20:46

to go one better." End quote.

20:50

There's also a strong sense here

20:52

of Sebastian Flight in Bride's

20:54

Head Revisitors, the evening war book, where he ends up

20:56

in a similar position of this queer

21:01

westerner living in North

21:03

Africa, I think, taking this

21:07

educated tourist position.

21:09

I also want to put this a little bit in

21:11

the context of the conversation that we had with

21:14

Arthur Aseroff last week about

21:17

the kind of existing systems of

21:20

intergenerational sex and sex

21:22

work in Tunisia,

21:25

in that case, before French

21:27

colonization, which is not

21:29

to say that French colonization was not

21:32

traumatic, violent, unjustified,

21:35

and

21:36

did not have a significant and disfiguring

21:38

effect on local sex-gender systems. But

21:40

it is to say that this sort of figure of

21:43

the

21:44

beautiful, receptive,

21:48

younger boy as the sort of beloved object

21:51

was also something that was indigenous

21:54

there.

21:54

There was something that

21:57

was being encountered. It's

21:59

the...

21:59

the power conditions around the encounter

22:02

are

22:03

profoundly unequal.

22:06

And then the thing that is being encountered

22:09

is itself an expression of

22:11

profoundly unequal power

22:14

relations, which are

22:16

probably definitionally abusive.

22:19

Yeah. I mean, presumably though,

22:21

it's the pre-existing

22:23

modes. It's what attracted those

22:25

men, those Western European men, to

22:28

go there in the first place as essentially

22:30

sex tourists. And

22:33

it's also the power

22:36

differential that they can exploit

22:38

that is also maybe part of the attraction. Absolutely.

22:44

So in 1895, he

22:47

marries his cousin Madeleine, the sad,

22:50

silent

22:51

cousin of his youth. And

22:54

this marriage is, you will be shocked to discover,

22:57

never consummated.

22:58

On his honeymoon,

23:00

rather than having sex with Madeleine,

23:03

he, to quote the painter biography, quote,

23:05

took boy models to his room in Rome on the

23:07

pretext of photographing them

23:09

and quote, on the train from Biscra

23:11

to Algiers, flirted through the window with

23:13

schoolboys in the next carriage. You

23:15

look like a criminal or a madman, Madeleine

23:18

admonished him afterwards, end quote.

23:22

They're romantic. So

23:25

Madeleine seems to serve as a kind of mother

23:27

figure for him, this sort of symbol of ultimate

23:31

spiritual restraint. At

23:34

this point, he's married to

23:36

Madeleine and he's sort of living as a respectable

23:39

French cultural bourgeois. At

23:42

this point, he's corresponding with painters like Edgar

23:44

Degas. At one point, he writes Degas, quote,

23:47

what I like about you is that like me, you

23:49

hate Jews and think Poussin, a great painter.

23:52

And

23:55

he's mayor of a town called

23:57

La Roque. He publishes

24:00

a series of books including The

24:02

Fruits in April 1897 and that begins to include some

24:06

of the sort of sensualist inspiration

24:08

from North Africa. Larry

24:10

Kramer's The Fruits. Larry Kramer's

24:13

The Fruits, exactly. Hedonism

24:15

evolves into asceticism, this idea of spiritual

24:17

joy beginning to include the body through the

24:20

figure of this sort of pure boy. It's

24:22

exactly this

24:23

sort of fantasy, petarast fantasy that

24:25

you were talking about before. In 1902

24:27

he publishes one of his

24:29

most famous books, The Immoralist,

24:32

which is a semi-autobiographical story of a

24:34

man named Michel who is raised

24:36

with strict Huguenot values, learns

24:38

a series of ancient languages and begins to

24:40

fantasize about

24:42

quote-unquote primitives, enters academia,

24:45

marries a woman to satisfy his dying father,

24:47

is diagnosed with tuberculosis on his

24:49

honeymoon in Tunisia, and

24:52

slowly recovers through a series of obsessive

24:54

interactions with Algerian boys through

24:56

which he loses his wife and career. And

24:58

so this book is

25:01

used as an example in Edward Said's

25:04

collection of essays, Cultural and Imperialism,

25:07

as an exemplar for Orientalist discourse.

25:09

And Said also points out how the relationship between

25:11

this and the sexuality works. So the

25:14

book Said says is quote, usually

25:16

read as the story of a man who comes to terms with

25:18

his eccentric sexuality by allowing it to

25:21

strip him not only of his wife and career

25:23

but paradoxically of his will, end

25:25

quote.

25:27

But the homosexuality hides what Said

25:29

calls quote, an unmistakably hierarchical

25:32

relationship. The African boy gives

25:34

a surreptitious thrill, which in turn

25:36

is a step along the way to the French narrator's

25:38

self-knowledge. What Muktir, the

25:40

main boy character, thinks or feels is

25:43

far less important than what Michel and Menalke,

25:45

French characters, make of the experience. The

25:48

people of Africa and especially those Arabs are

25:50

just there. They have no accumulating

25:52

art or history that is said to be entered into works.

25:55

Were it not for the European observer

25:57

who attests to its existence, it would not matter.

26:00

Though the instance of a highly individualistic

26:03

artist, Gide's relationship to Africa belongs

26:06

to a larger formation of European attitudes

26:08

and practices towards the continent."

26:13

So in 1908, Gide co-founds

26:15

and becomes the first editor of the Nouveille

26:18

Revue Française, which is a really influential

26:20

literary journal that becomes a founding

26:22

part of the iconic publishing house, Édisson

26:24

Galimard.

26:25

This is where Malraux and Sartre first published.

26:28

The magazine's publication is

26:30

interrupted by the First World War, during which

26:33

at first Gide works in Paris for the

26:35

Red Cross, but then in 1916 he takes the 15-year-old

26:37

son of

26:40

his best friend as his lover and flees

26:42

with him to London.

26:45

And he must be then in his 50s

26:47

at this point. He

26:50

is 1916 minus 1869. Yep,

26:52

he's mid-50s.

26:57

And so this is

26:59

one of the first times when his

27:01

wife really

27:03

gets mad and does something. And so

27:06

she burned his letters, all of his

27:08

letters that were written to her, which he had been collecting.

27:11

He's someone who has an extremely high sense

27:13

of his own literary importance, and so

27:15

he publishes all of his letters,

27:17

he publishes all of his journals, and

27:19

he oversees the publications of these things. Those

27:22

are things that are collected and published after he dies.

27:27

So this is an exchange from that

27:29

Edmund White essay.

27:31

So at first I thought my heart had stopped beating,

27:33

that I was dying, Madeline told Gide.

27:36

I had suffered so much, I burned your letters

27:38

in order to have something to do. Before

27:40

I destroyed them, I read them all over one by

27:42

one.

27:43

And Gide's response was, quote,

27:46

an incomplete, exact, caricatured,

27:48

grimacing image is now the all that will endure of

27:50

me. My authentic reflection has been

27:52

wiped out forever. All that was purest

27:54

and noblest in my life, all that could best

27:56

have survived and shone and spread warmth and

27:59

beauty, all is destroyed.

27:59

and no effort of mine will ever be able to

28:02

replace it. fucking

28:04

do one.

28:07

So in 1924, Gide

28:09

has this reputation as a great

28:12

man of French letters. He's been an inspiration

28:14

to a couple of generations now of young

28:17

French writers. He's just published

28:19

a respected book on Dostoyevsky.

28:21

His personal life is always a bit

28:23

messier. In 1923, he fathered an illegitimate daughter by another offspring of

28:25

his close friends. This

28:33

was Elizabeth van Rysselberg, who was the daughter

28:35

of the Belgian painter Theo van Rysselberg

28:38

and his wife Maria Monom.

28:40

We think that this was probably the

28:42

single time he had sex with a woman.

28:47

All of this is happening behind

28:49

the scenes, but then Gide

28:52

does something that really affects his public reputation. That

28:54

is that he publishes the autobiography

28:57

that I've been reading from, and also

29:00

a book called Corridon.

29:02

These are two places where what

29:04

has until this point been received as

29:07

literary and symbolist depictions

29:09

of homosexuality suddenly cross

29:11

over into his own life. Suddenly,

29:14

people think, wait a minute, this man who has

29:16

been writing all these books about how great it is to have sex

29:18

with Algerian teenagers actually likes having sex

29:20

with Algerian teenagers.

29:24

Which apparently is surprising to

29:26

a lot of people. This

29:30

other book, Corridon, Gide

29:34

refers to this as his most important

29:37

book. To quote Edmund

29:39

White about this book, quote,

29:59

intellectual defamation and were

30:02

guilty of some of the accusations leveled

30:04

at all homosexuals. Zheed can

30:06

be tedious with his definitions. Much

30:08

sprightlier is Proust who once wrote with perfect

30:10

accuracy, a

30:11

homosexual is not a man who loves homosexuals,

30:14

but a man who, seeing a soldier, immediately

30:16

wants to have him for a friend."

30:21

There's

30:26

a lot to unpack there including Edmund

30:28

White's genius. One of the

30:31

things that I think is really interesting here

30:33

is this distinction between,

30:41

because we're familiar with this kind of sodomite

30:43

invert

30:45

dichotomy during this period

30:47

of the construction of the identity, and

30:49

here's Zheed, who's someone who is extremely

30:52

influential on the construction of that identity,

30:55

offering this third thing,

30:57

pederasty, which is the thing that we

30:59

don't like to talk about. Yes, as

31:02

a sexual identity in its own right distinct from a

31:04

gender binary. Yes, but it is something that

31:07

he includes in the

31:10

definition of homosexuality and in the justification

31:12

of homosexuality in this book, Corridon.

31:15

Corridon is a series of Socratic dialogues

31:17

in homosexuality. It makes arguments

31:19

that our listeners will be familiar with,

31:22

examples from classical studies anthropology

31:24

and natural sciences, talking about how

31:26

natural homosexual behavior is.

31:30

He puts

31:31

pederasty under homosexuality, but

31:33

then insists that pederasty is different and

31:35

on a higher, he says it's

31:37

a categorically different spiritual act

31:40

than sodomy.

31:43

I mean, I disagree that

31:45

sodomy and pederasty are ethically

31:48

profoundly different, but I think Zheed and I

31:50

disagree about the order in which we put them.

31:53

I think it's wrong to abuse and rape children,

31:55

and I think what two adult men do together is what

31:58

it is.

31:59

wild say, a noble act, there's

32:01

nothing finer, etc, etc. And,

32:05

and for jeed, it's the other way around.

32:09

Yeah, it's sodomy is base, and

32:11

pederasty is spiritual and elevated.

32:14

I mean, we can talk about this later. But what's interesting is

32:16

that is that although, yeah, I

32:18

told the same opinion as you, there have been

32:21

maybe at least one generation of men

32:23

who wouldn't

32:26

work of homosexual men who

32:28

nonetheless fit, petter fitted

32:30

that cultural representation of pederasty into

32:32

their understanding of

32:34

the homosexual identity. No.

32:36

Yeah, well, so let's talk about that. I

32:39

want to now go back

32:41

to Edmund White,

32:42

who wrote

32:45

this really lovely essay, and I don't want to pick

32:47

on him. But there is one paragraph

32:50

in this white essay, which is from 1998 from

32:52

the LRB, which I found

32:54

rather extraordinary.

32:56

So quote,

32:58

jeed obviously regarded his life as exemplary

33:00

and as an open pedophile, he frequently invoked

33:02

the didactic Greek model of manboy love.

33:05

Today, adult sex with adolescents is universally

33:08

condemned. I suppose if people are

33:10

going to find the defining moment of their lives to have

33:12

been the abuse they suffered while young, the act must

33:14

necessarily and invariably be branded as

33:16

criminal. But as Alan Sheridan

33:19

writes of jeed in his comprehensive book, quote,

33:21

surprisingly, no complaint was ever made against

33:23

him either by a boy or his parents. He

33:26

was of course protected by the innocence of the times,

33:28

but he never forced his attentions on anyone. End

33:31

quote. And

33:34

so I find this to be a really troubling passage

33:37

by white, because

33:39

a few things are going on.

33:42

One thing that I think is really interesting that's going

33:44

on is that despite white earlier

33:46

in the essay,

33:48

articulating how different his

33:50

homosexuality is from jeed's,

33:53

he's still obviously been so shaped

33:55

by it.

33:57

Like despite white saying, I agree

33:59

that it's not. nuts that Jeet is saying

34:01

that pederasty is more noble

34:03

than

34:04

consensual adult sodomy. He's

34:06

still so shaped by it that he feels the need

34:08

to somehow come to its defense. And

34:11

he uses what I find to be this very weak

34:13

defense that, well, no one ever complained. Well,

34:15

who was going to complain? Like

34:18

the parents of, in

34:20

what context? And

34:23

to use the phrase, the innocence of the times,

34:27

you know, really does, I think,

34:29

kind of missed the point, especially when we're talking

34:31

about these Algerian and Tunisian boys

34:33

who no

34:35

one in

34:37

their lives was in any position to complain. Yeah,

34:40

no, that's like a rhetorical trick that

34:42

is below Edmund White.

34:48

What does, what would, yeah, like

34:50

as you said, what would a complaint look like? Because

34:52

he's already acknowledged that the

34:55

formulation of this sort of

34:58

sex was this like

35:01

abusive power relationship.

35:03

Like it's intrinsic to it. And he acknowledges

35:05

that. So therefore, like the

35:10

victim of this is in no position to complain. They

35:12

have no one to complain to. Like that's

35:14

why he goes to North Africa to commit

35:18

these crimes. In

35:20

the case of the boys in North Africa, there's no means

35:22

of complaint meaningfully. And

35:25

in the case of the of the children of his friends,

35:28

like Marc Alagrey with whom he's still traveling in

35:30

the 20s when Alagrey is in his 20s,

35:32

even there, it's,

35:35

you know, to frame all

35:37

of the systems of silencing and shame

35:40

and

35:41

all of that as an

35:43

age of innocence seems to me

35:45

to be a bit perverse and beneath, beneath

35:49

White's intelligence and, and, and

35:53

really collaborating with some, with some nasty stuff.

35:59

In 1925, Gide embarks with

36:02

Allegrae on a journey to sub-Saharan

36:04

Africa, and he visits Dakar, Konakri,

36:07

Kinshasa, Brazzaville, and then travels up

36:09

the river to a more inland destination.

36:12

So the book, Travels in the Congo,

36:14

is dedicated to Joseph Conrad, and it opens

36:16

along standard Conradian lines

36:19

with a narrator in,

36:21

quote, inexpressible Langer talking

36:23

about how he doesn't know why he's traveling, and he'll see when

36:25

he gets there.

36:26

The text then goes on to decry

36:29

French colonialism,

36:30

to compare the treatment of African people colonized

36:32

by the French to chattel slavery,

36:34

to denounce French capitalism for its exploitation

36:37

of colonized subjects. And

36:39

so once again, I want to think of Kaji

36:41

Amin's work on Genet.

36:43

Rather than thinking about Gide moving through

36:46

sex

36:47

with Arab and African boys towards the politics

36:49

of everybody, instead I want to think about

36:51

the various kinds of outmoded and disturbing

36:54

attachments to borrow Amin's terminology

36:56

that construct Gide's life on the brink

36:58

of various extremely different versions

37:01

of deviant male sexuality, inversion,

37:04

pederasty, and the emerging gay dominant

37:06

ideal of sex between adult men.

37:09

And it's important, I think, to remember that not everyone,

37:12

even people as influential as Gide,

37:15

were in favor of or expressed the kinds

37:17

of ideas that ended up dominating, right?

37:19

The

37:20

sex between adult men ideal.

37:23

So this growing concern for the oppressed then

37:25

extends to a period where Gide

37:27

never joins but becomes very close to the Communist

37:30

Party. This is in the early 1930s,

37:33

as fascism is rising in Europe, and Gide

37:35

is a committed anti-fascist.

37:37

Paris at this time is a haven for refugee intellectuals

37:40

from Hitler's Germany, and Gide says

37:42

that communism is starting to, quote, distract

37:44

me frightfully from literature, end

37:47

quote.

37:48

The party was very much aware of how important

37:50

a major figure like this could be to their own

37:53

lives.

37:53

But his communism didn't

37:55

survive a trip to the USSR in 1936.

37:59

in which he was dismayed and made furious

38:02

by Stalinism and by Stalinist controls

38:04

on cultural expression. As he traveled

38:06

around the country, his speeches would be taken from

38:08

him and he'd then be handed back

38:10

to him with more praise for Stalin

38:13

added in.

38:13

And so, Gide publishes a travelogue revealing

38:16

all of this, which then makes the Communists furious

38:18

at him and call him a fascist and turn

38:21

on him.

38:23

Stan Dutta.

38:26

In 1938, Gide's wife Madeleine died

38:28

and in 1942, he moved

38:30

to North Africa and that's where he lived at the

38:32

Second World War.

38:33

In 1947, he won the Nobel

38:36

Prize for Literature and in 1950, published

38:38

the final volume of his journal and with

38:40

that, stopped writing for the final year of his life.

38:43

I want to close this narration with

38:45

a big extended quote from Gide's book, The Counterfeiters,

38:48

which is about various school friends and their gay affairs

38:50

with one another. And I think this gets

38:53

us close to his literary

38:55

project, which has not been really the center of

38:57

this narration

38:59

and to his sort of remarkable prose.

39:01

Quote, there

39:04

is a kind of tragedy, it seems to me, which has

39:06

hitherto almost entirely eluded literature.

39:09

The novel has dealt with the contrariness of fate,

39:12

good or evil fortune, social relationships,

39:14

the conflicts of passions and of characters, but

39:17

not with the very essence of man's being.

39:19

And yet the whole effect of Christianity was

39:22

to transfer the drama onto the moral plane.

39:24

But properly speaking, there are no Christian

39:26

novels. There are novels whose purpose

39:28

is edification, but that has nothing to do with what

39:30

I mean. Moral tragedy, the

39:33

tragedy, for instance, which gives such terrific

39:35

meaning to the gospel text, if the salt

39:37

have lost his flavor, wherewith shall it be salted,

39:40

that is the tragedy with which I am concerned.

39:43

End quote.

39:47

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39:49

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39:51

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And it covers a whole series of evil

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40:59

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And now on with the show.

41:26

Thanks, Ben. That's a fascinating

41:29

and really troubling

41:31

story. I

41:33

guess it's a very complicated

41:36

conversation to begin to have about the

41:41

role of pedirasty and

41:44

how pedirasty was understood in the

41:46

formulation of homosexual

41:50

and perhaps queer identities in

41:53

the late 19th and 20th century, partly

41:56

because I think a lot of people

41:59

are very interested in the role of are reticent

42:01

about having a conversation about it existing

42:03

at all because it's such

42:05

a slur that's

42:07

pulled out at any opportunity against

42:09

LGBTQ people in

42:12

general and perhaps gay men especially,

42:15

that homosexuality

42:18

and pedirasty are the

42:20

same thing or how

42:23

the homosexuals are implicitly pedirasts,

42:26

pedophiles.

42:28

That's been something that's been used so

42:30

frequently to oppress

42:35

LGBTQ people.

42:38

How do we

42:40

go about having that conversation without

42:45

giving fuel to those people who

42:47

today will still try and suggest

42:51

that being LGBTQ

42:57

is part of some sort of pedophilic

43:01

culture which you'll

43:03

see in mainstream

43:05

newspapers around trans issues today and on

43:08

Fox News and what have you as a very

43:10

common sort of libel against us?

43:13

I think

43:17

the right is going to

43:21

say this no matter what we say. And

43:24

so I think if we don't talk about it,

43:27

then we have given them the complete

43:31

discursive playing field to talk about it. And

43:34

I think that we have to be able to talk about

43:36

it and we have to talk be able to talk

43:38

about how wrong it was

43:41

and is when

43:44

it happened and how wrong it was that so

43:46

much of this stuff got branched

43:50

together and somewhere between

43:53

actively celebrated and mistakenly

43:55

defended by large

43:56

portions

43:59

of some

44:03

gay liberation movements without

44:09

pretending that

44:12

sex with people of this age group was

44:15

a uniquely

44:16

homosexual occurrence.

44:19

This is a time when then

44:23

as now high powered

44:25

upperclassmen are regularly

44:30

abusing young teenagers

44:33

or having sex with older teenagers

44:35

or people in their early 20s, right? And like having

44:38

sex with someone who's 19 or 20 is not the same

44:40

as abusing someone who's 13 or 14. I don't mean

44:42

to make that equivalence at all, ethically.

44:47

But there is something of the kind of youth

44:49

cult of the sexual beloved

44:51

for the high powered man,

44:53

right? Which

44:54

provides a cover for and a romanticization

44:57

of child abuse. And this happens between

45:00

men and boys the same as it happens between men and girls,

45:02

right?

45:03

Yeah. We know from statistics

45:06

that most childhood sexual abuse happens

45:08

in the family, that most childhood

45:10

sexual abuse is committed

45:12

by straight identifying

45:14

men, right? So we know that this is not

45:16

a uniquely gay phenomenon. At

45:19

the same time, to the extent that sexual liberation

45:21

movements, because on the one

45:23

hand they desired to oppose all

45:26

restrictions on

45:28

sex. And on the other hand,

45:31

because they were still

45:34

fundamentally often constructed around

45:36

the poor

45:38

and privileged and attendant sexual

45:41

desires of the upper class man,

45:43

too often

45:45

ended up

45:48

defending and encouraging this

45:51

kind of really awful behavior and even adopting

45:54

it as something

45:57

that was related to or a part

45:59

of their own. movement. Yeah,

46:03

I think that's one of the most noticeable things,

46:05

both in Sheed's writing and other

46:07

writings of the time around

46:12

this constant, the advocate,

46:14

I guess, this form of homosexual

46:16

pedarasty as a sexual subjectivity,

46:20

is this

46:21

absolute steamrolling

46:23

of the subjectivity of the older man

46:27

who almost

46:30

ventriloquizes for the child

46:32

a form of purity and a form of innocence,

46:35

or a form of unspoiltness by

46:39

the sexual mores of the time. Ventriloquizes

46:41

those experiences that

46:44

that man hasn't had, that that

46:47

child probably isn't having.

46:50

Ventriloquizes that as some sort of justification

46:54

or advocacy for a more liberated

46:57

form of sexuality, which in reality is just

46:59

obviously a justification of

47:03

their own desire

47:06

to abuse that child.

47:08

And

47:10

yet at the same time, it

47:12

exists as a form

47:17

of writing that is creating

47:21

a sexual subject, the homosexual,

47:25

because it is

47:31

outside the mainstream bourgeois sexuality,

47:34

so

47:36

that it becomes advocacy in its very existence,

47:38

whereas the heterosexual

47:41

men who are engaged in

47:43

childhood sexual abuse writing about

47:45

it

47:46

don't see themselves necessarily as performing a form of

47:48

advocacy for that because it's something that already

47:51

exists and is too huge an

47:53

extent at the time tolerated

47:55

within that society. Right,

48:01

and we're also talking about societies that have a completely

48:04

different understanding of the meaning of childhood

48:06

and adulthood, of

48:08

when those things occur and

48:11

in which, I mean, we're talking about societies in which people

48:13

are regularly being married at 14 or 15. Yeah.

48:17

And then

48:19

we're also talking about societies

48:22

in which oftentimes

48:24

it's the same law

48:26

that bands both consensual adult

48:29

sodomy and

48:31

childhood sexual abuse. And so

48:33

the movements against

48:36

one and the other

48:38

end up combining and

48:41

understanding one another as a lie in

48:43

this kind of, at least to me, really horrible

48:46

and

48:48

yeah, horrible way.

48:52

I think also with

48:54

regards to it being seen as part of

48:57

an advocacy of it within a homosexual

49:00

subjectivity that's emerging

49:02

at the time, that doesn't need to be articulated

49:05

by heterosexual men who are

49:07

engaging in childhood sexual abuse. Because

49:09

that is something that is to a degree

49:12

or was to a degree already normalized

49:14

as part of that it wasn't something

49:17

that required advocacy for those men. If you

49:19

remember from a few episodes

49:21

ago when we were talking, I was mentioning

49:24

Perron in

49:26

Argentina and how Perron was grooming

49:28

this 13 year old child. And

49:30

that was sort of reported on as a sort of,

49:35

not

49:36

even a sex scandal, like a bit of tabloid

49:38

gossip. And his response to it was,

49:41

when someone said, is it true

49:43

she's 13

49:45

was, don't it doesn't bother

49:47

me. I'm not superstitious. That

49:51

was something that was already normalized, so that doesn't

49:53

fit into the creation of the

49:56

heterosexual subject because it

49:58

was already there. Right. Or,

50:00

you know, when Jerry Seinfeld was a 39 year

50:04

old

50:04

major TV star, he was dating a 17 year

50:07

old in high school. Yeah.

50:10

This is public knowledge, right? And

50:13

yeah, I mean, there's it's

50:17

what I don't want to do is end the

50:19

conversation here and downplay the extent

50:22

to which and I think the responsibility that gay

50:24

liberation movements and people who feel

50:26

like they've inherited them have to do

50:28

the historical

50:31

and ethical work of processing

50:34

and and thinking through historical

50:37

complicity.

50:38

No, my point

50:40

wasn't that yeah, of course, I agree. My point isn't that

50:42

my point is that the

50:45

that that

50:46

complicity and that the

50:49

existence of pedirasty within

50:51

the creation of a sexual subject

50:53

is used as a libel against LGBTQ

50:56

people, where actually it's a condition

50:59

of human societies where

51:01

with power differentials where men

51:04

want to abuse children.

51:06

Yeah, and what these people never want to say is

51:08

that, you know, the the queer institutions and

51:10

the movements are throwing open our

51:13

archives and are

51:15

critically reassessing all these years of our

51:17

complicity. And what the Catholic Church is doing is trying

51:19

to, you know, cover things

51:21

up as long as possible and deny and deny and deflect

51:24

and deflect. And so I

51:26

think it's important that we have these conversations

51:28

openly, that we open our archives and

51:31

our our

51:34

sort of physical archives, but also the kinds of

51:36

archives of our cultural memory and of our cultural

51:39

admiration

51:40

to this kind of critical reexamination

51:43

and that we are willing to be

51:46

ruthless in this way and that we are willing to

51:49

lose or

51:51

demote or accept

51:53

complicated facts about beloved

51:57

figures

51:59

in order to do this important

52:01

ethical work. Right.

52:04

The conversation is important. It's important to have the

52:06

conversation because it's important to repudiate

52:09

the arguments that those people were making

52:11

for abuse.

52:13

Yeah, and it's also important to have it in

52:15

our head. Like I'm not, I wouldn't tell anyone to throw away

52:17

their jeed books. I'm

52:19

not really a believer in

52:22

that as a functional approach, especially people who are dead.

52:24

I mean, it's, you know, in the case of someone

52:26

like R. Kelly, right, the case

52:28

is very clear. You buy this person's music,

52:31

you are keeping them alive, and you are funding

52:33

the

52:35

system of abuse and

52:37

torture. Right. Jeed is dead. I

52:40

think we can read jeed. I think we

52:42

should read jeed. I think we can get something from

52:44

reading jeed, but I think that having,

52:48

dealing with this critically while we engage

52:50

with jeed is important. Yeah.

52:52

What I think is also really interesting, again, to this point

52:54

that you made about who has to justify it. When

52:58

I was reading about this, there were a

53:00

lot of times when in

53:02

some of the kind of straight appreciations

53:04

of jeed, the more pure literary appreciations

53:07

of jeed, the way that I thought this was

53:09

talked about, found this being talked about was often

53:11

even a lot more minimizing

53:14

than in Edmund White, right? Edmund White at

53:16

least admits that there's something weird about this

53:19

and then has this kind of

53:21

backside of justification, whereas in

53:23

a lot of the other texts it's just written about is this

53:25

like, oh yeah, and then he discovered the

53:27

secret essentialism in these beautiful Tunisian boys

53:29

and then he went and had a pizza. I

53:31

mean,

53:32

there's no grappling with it and no acknowledgement

53:35

of it at all. I think for a certain kind

53:37

of straight literary critic, it's almost like,

53:40

it's almost like

53:43

fine to imagine. I don't know. It's

53:45

hard to explain what I'm saying here. Yeah,

53:47

maybe there's also a fear for those people of having

53:50

those conversations which

53:52

we should be having because they don't want to be perceived

53:55

as engaging in that same homophobic

53:57

libel.

53:59

Exactly. Or they

54:01

think that this is just what all

54:03

gay men are and so I don't know it's

54:06

hard to say.

54:07

Yeah on that note actually I

54:09

think my second question I was

54:11

really shocked because

54:13

you'd said earlier in his biography

54:16

that he'd the real

54:18

sort of one of the real changes in his

54:20

life was after he released his autobiography

54:23

and then that then people realized

54:26

all this stuff was not just like a sort of this

54:28

sort of literary symbolism but was his

54:31

actual sexual preferences which

54:33

first of all sounds completely crazy

54:35

to me in the first place that you would not

54:39

make that connection but secondly that then later

54:41

and later in his life he'd received the Nobel

54:43

Prize for literature. Why

54:47

I guess

54:49

my question is something

54:51

that would be very hard for I guess for most readers

54:54

most listeners today to understand is why

54:56

was where these admissions in his autobiography

55:00

not

55:01

career-ending

55:04

things to boast about

55:11

because that's that's not gay people keeping him in that position

55:14

that's a that's a heterosexual culture

55:17

literary culture it

55:19

is and I think it speaks to the extent to which all

55:22

of this stuff is so minimized

55:26

that it almost becomes part of the romantic

55:29

myth of the artist right as

55:31

opposed to

55:32

being taken seriously

55:36

if that makes sense

55:38

yeah like

55:40

it's just it's oh yes of course it's the it's

55:43

it's he becomes such a sort of he's

55:46

such a large literary figure that it just

55:48

kind of gets it gets excused

55:50

the way that you know they all sort of excused

55:53

or ignored but Proust or Wilde himself right

55:56

yeah

55:56

and again for this audience it's all the same

56:00

Even though it obviously isn't.

56:03

Yeah, without wanting to get into some sort of literary

56:05

xenophobia here, do you think there's something

56:09

unique about French, sort

56:12

of high literary culture that tolerates

56:15

all these sorts of crimes under

56:18

the heading of, you know, the

56:20

untouchable artists should be allowed to deal with anything?

56:22

Because she does not the first

56:25

or the last to to sort of engage

56:27

in these crimes and write about them in a literary

56:29

way and it, you know, to go on and to win a Nobel

56:31

Prize or to continue to be

56:34

part of French literary culture. There's figures like Roger

56:37

Péfreet in the middle part of the 20th

56:39

century. You know,

56:42

not hugely respected, but still part of that culture.

56:44

Also, like Gabriel Matzneff, who, you

56:47

know, was regularly, I think, appearing on TV

56:50

shows and in newspapers until

56:52

maybe five or ten years ago, despite the fact

56:54

that he'd written extensively about

56:58

him abusing

57:00

children, young boys and very young boys

57:03

in, as

57:06

a sex tourist in Asia, so-called

57:08

sex tourists in Asia. Is

57:12

that something that

57:14

is to do with this French concept of the

57:17

public intellectual? Or do you think that's something that's

57:19

actually a result of someone like she'd managed

57:23

to maintain his career and receive

57:25

these accolades?

57:27

I think that there

57:29

is something about the

57:33

French figure of the kind of intellectual or writer

57:36

in which that person is seen as being above

57:38

morality.

57:40

And I don't want to say that on

57:42

this particular theme, especially, because actually

57:44

the, I mean, I know the history of German gay

57:47

liberation a lot better and the history of

57:49

German gay liberation's relationship specifically

57:51

with pederasty is

57:53

quite long and troubling

57:55

and I'd be surprised if the French

57:58

one could be longer or more troubling.

58:01

What I think is more

58:04

the case here is that this is the sort of writer

58:06

that is understood because of the talent

58:08

and because of art as being on this

58:10

kind of plane of art in which

58:13

that's what really matters.

58:17

Well, thanks a lot, Ben. Yeah, a really interesting

58:20

and troubling story about

58:22

power. I think we

58:24

can probably both agree that he was a

58:27

bad gay. Yeah,

58:29

definitely a bad gay and someone who

58:32

has to be reckoned with both as a writer and as someone who

58:35

helps to construct some of these really

58:38

abusive and dysfunctional approaches

58:42

to power into

58:45

certain elements of gay culture.

58:49

And if people are interested in reading

58:52

more about Jeet, what were some of the sources

58:54

used for this episode? So

58:56

there is the aforementioned biography of Jeet

58:59

by George D Painter. There

59:02

is that wonderful essay about Jeet by

59:05

Edmund White in the London Review

59:07

of Books. There's Jeet's autobiography.

59:11

And also

59:14

a book by Paris

59:17

on the Brink, which is about a variety

59:21

of French intellectuals in the early

59:23

years of the 1930s. And that book is by Mary

59:25

McAuliffe.

59:26

And those were the main sources I used

59:29

for this. And that's where I would recommend people go to

59:31

learn more. Great.

59:34

Well, you've been listening to Bad Gays. You can find us online

59:37

at badgayspod.com on social

59:39

media at Bad Gays Pod. You

59:42

can find me at Hugh Lemy.

59:44

And me at Ben Wright's Things. Until

59:46

next week. Goodbye. Bye.