4. Historical Context
• By the end of the 19th century, medicine and psychiatry were
effectively competing with religion and the law for jurisdiction
over sexuality. Discussions about homosexuality moved beyond
the spheres of crime and sin to include that of pathology. This
change was generally considered progressive because a sick
person was less to blame for deviance than a sinner or criminal
(Duberman, Vicinus, & Chauncey 1989).
• Even within medicine and psychiatry, however, homosexuality
was not exclusively considered a pathology. Krafft-Ebbing, as we
know, termed it a degenerative sickness in his Psychopathia
Sexualis, but Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis both took more
accommodating positions. In 1901, Ellis argued that
homosexuality was not a disease but innate; he pointed out
that many homosexuals made outstanding contributions to
society (Robinson 1976).
5. Presentation: 1911-1927
• 1914: Gay author William
Burroughs is born in St. Louis.
Known for his book the
Naked Lunch and for being
part of the "Beat
Generation."
1919: Liberace (Wladziu Valentino) is born.
The American pianist, entertainer, and camp
showman, exuded charm, and popularized
piano classics on his TV show. His live
appearances broke all box office records.
6. 1920: Harvard University student, Cyril
Wilcox committed suicide after he
returned home with a case of nervous
hives. His family thought the death
accidental until his brother intercepted
letters addressed to Wilcox that detailed
homosexual behavior. George Wilcox
tracked down the parties involved and
beat them for causing his brother’s
suicide.
He then went to the acting dean of the college to present to him the names of those
he held responsible for causing Cyril’s death.
A secret five-man court was created to investigate homosexual behavior on the
Harvard campus even though Cyril was dead, one of the three men accused had
graduated, and the other two were not connected to Harvard. They methodically
collected suspects, eventually interviewing 30 witnesses and expelling or severing
ties with eight students, a graduate, and an assistant professor. The whole
investigation was a secret until 2002.
Read the full story here: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/11/21/the-secret-court-of-
1920-at/?page=1
7. • 1920: The word Gay is used for the first time
in reference to homosexual in the
Underground.
• 1921: In England an attempt to make
lesbianism illegal for the first time in Britain’s
history fails.
• 1923: The word “fag” is first used in print in
reference to gays in Nels Anderson’s The
Hobo: “Fairies or Fags are men or boys who
exploit sex for profit.”
• 1924: The Society for Human Rights was established in Chicago,
Illinois in 1924 by Henry Gerber and a group of friends. It was
the first recognized gay rights organization in America and
produced the first American publication for homosexuals,
“Friendship and Freedom.” A few months after being chartered,
the police shut it down and arrested all its members.
9. Typical questions:
1. What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay,
lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed
in...the work's thematic content or portrayals of its
characters?
2. What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a
specific lesbian, gay, or queer works?
3. What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer,
gay, or lesbian experience and history, including literary
history?
4. How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that
are by writers who are apparently homosexual?
5. How might the works of heterosexual writers be reread to
reveal an unspoken or unconscious lesbian, gay or queer
presence? That is, does the work have an unconscious
lesbian, gay or queer desire or conflict that it submerges?
10. More Questions
6. What does the work reveal about the operations (socially,
politically, psychologically) homophobic?
7. How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of
sexuality and sexual "identity," that is the ways in which
human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate
categories defined by the words homosexual and
heterosexual?
8. What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the
perceived masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what
elements exhibit traits of both (bisexual)?
9. What elements of the text can be perceived as being
masculine (active, powerful) and feminine (passive,
marginalized) and how do the characters support these
traditional roles?
10. What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or
characters who question the masculine/feminine binary? What
happens to those elements/characters?
12. QHQ: Havelock Ellis
• Contrast “From Studies in the Psychology of Sex” and”
From the Psychopathia Sexualis”: Nurture versus
Nature in queer theory.
• 1. Compare or contrast case history from Havelock Ellis
to another reading we have done thus far.
• I am going to compare the first case study, Case 129,
from Krafft-Ebbing to the third case history, History III,
from Havelock Ellis. In both cases, there are men that
act more feminine than masculine and they both prefer
men as partners over women.
13. • Compare Ellis to “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather
• In the story Paul’s case we have this young
homosexual boy who has been around boys and a
male role models for the majority of his life. We
found out how he lost his mother very early and
this is one fact that stood out to me. He didn’t
have his mother throughout his life to spend time
with her and be close at all as compared to Ellis’s
case study from history III on page two to three. It
says how F.R was always alone with his mother
and therefore started picking up on things and
drifting towards the feminist attitude and feelings
as if he lost his masculinity hanging out with his
mother.
14. Compare to the “Psychology of Sex” and the
“Paul’s case.”
• According to the history 2 of Psychology of
Sex, B.O. admitted that he never feel tempted
by any girls here, although he sees so many
with their bodies freely exposed, and plenty of
them have really pretty faces. Likewise, Paul
also has even worse emotion about women
than the B.O. Specially, Paul shows his
antipathy when any woman try to touch him.
15. QHQ: “Miss Ogilvy Finds
Herself”
• Q: What did joining the army give to Miss
Ogilvy’s life?
• Q: Why does Miss Ogilvy still yell when she
talks?
• Q: Why does Miss Ogilvy place her hands in
pockets repeatedly?
16. • Q: What happens to her on the island?
• Q: Did the uncovered bones found on the
island mean anything?
• Q: Why did Miss Ogilvy become so irate at the
way the prehistoric skull was treated?
• Q: Subsequent to her memory loss, how has
Miss Ogilvy’s actions show who she really is?
• Q: Did Ms. Ogilvy perhaps catch a glimpse of
her past life?
17. • Q: What were the predictive clues of how
severe Miss Ogilvy’s “shell-shock” was?
• Q: Is her short temper caused from shell
shock, or because she’s always wanted to be
the opposite sex therefore feels she must act
in an aggressive manner when upset?
• Q: Can Miss Ogilvy be classified as
transgender?
• Q: Did other aspects of the island symbolize
Ms. Ogilvy’s sexuality or inner struggles being
a trans man?
18. • Q: How did Miss Ogilvy lose control of her
emotions throughout the story? Does this loss
of a sense of self drive her to commit suicide?
• Q: Did all of her boyish tendencies lead her to
commit suicide because it conflicted with what
she had dreamed prior to being found dead?
19. Author Introduction: Freud
• Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg,
Austria in 1856. He developed
psychoanalysis, a method through
which an analyst unpacks
unconscious conflicts based on the
free associations, dreams and
fantasies of the patient. His theories
on child sexuality, libido and the
ego, among other topics, were some
of the most influential academic
concepts of the 20th century.
• Freud's theory of human sexuality was different from that of Ellis. He
believed all human beings were innately bisexual, and that they become
heterosexual or homosexual as a result of their experiences with
parents and others (Freud, 1905). Nevertheless, Freud agreed with Ellis
that a homosexual orientation should not be considered a form of
pathology. Later psychoanalysts did not follow this view.
20. Author Introduction: Woolf
Virginia Woolf, born 1882, was an English writer
and a pioneer of modernism with her “stream of
consciousness” style. Among her most famous
novels are To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway and
Orlando. She is regarded as one of the greatest
modernist literary personalities of the twentieth
century. Woolf suffered a lifetime of severe
depression, which led to her suicide in 1941.
While many critics once insisted that the intense erotically charged and
sometimes sexual relationships that Woolf developed with women
throughout her life as the result of psychological wounds—her mother’s
death when Virginia was 13 or her sexual abuse by a half-brother—critical and
biographical perspectives have shifted to make space for the discussion of
Woolf as a writer with a lesbian consciousness. Her most famous love affair
was with Vita Sackville-West, for whom she wrote the novel Orlando (1928),
which her nephew, Quentin Bell calls “the longest and most charming love
letter in literature.”
21. Author Introduction: E. M. Forester
• E.M. Forster, in full Edward Morgan
Forster , was born 1879 and died
1970. He was a British novelist,
essayist, and social and literary critic.
His fame rests largely on his novels
Howards End (1910) and A Passage
to India (1924) and on a large body of
criticism.
• His novel ‘Maurice’ was written in
1913; Its homosexual theme kept the
book from being published until
after his death, nearly sixty years
after he wrote it.
22. Author Introduction:
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway, 1899—1961, was an American
novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for
the intense masculinity of his writing and for his
adventurous and widely publicized life. His
succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful
influence on American and British fiction in the
20th century.
Gertrude Stein, who had many conversations with
him about homosexuality, seemed to think he was
hiding something about himself.
This belief has developed into a critical cliché that avers that Hemingway must have
been repressing his own homosexuality because of the amount of time he spent
abusing other people's. There are several homosexual characters in Hemingway's
fiction; there are also frank homophobes. For example, Jake Barnes, the castrated
heterosexual narrator of The Sun Also Rises (1926), is severely affronted when a
group of homosexual men clusters around the woman he desires but cannot have.
23. Homework
• Read
• “The Psychogenesis of a Case
of Homosexuality in a
Woman” by Sigmund Freud
• “Slater’s Pins have no Points”
by Virginia Woolf 1928
• “Arthur Snatchfold” by EM
Forster 1928/1972
• “The Sea Change” by Ernest
Hemingway 1931
• Post #4: QHQ on Freud,
Woolf, Forster, or
Hemingway
