The World Beyond BetterMost > Anything Goes
Victorian era men
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: ednbarby on November 15, 2006, 01:23:53 pm ---I guess I am being awfully simple-minded, but I look at it this way: If you have sex with members of your own sex exclusively, you're gay. If you're a you have sex with members of the opposite sex exclusively, you're straight. Where it gets complicated to me is in the notion of bisexuality. If you're a man and having sex with women and men, but you really prefer sex with men, are you really bisexual? Or just doing what society has branded into you is the thing you're "supposed" to do? Same with women who prefer sex with women but do have sex with men. We've talked many times about how there are probably very few to no true 3s on the Kinsey Scale. So I think it boils down to which sex you find yourself physically attracted to/wanting. So according to that theory, it seems to me both Shaw and Tennyson were gay. The thing is, I don't see why that has to be a revelation. Some men love other men. Yes, in our emotionally and spiritually retarded society, that's a big hairy deal. Really, the question shouldn't be were these guys gay but why does it matter?
--- End quote ---
It probably shouldn't matter, but the reason that it does matter is political, broadly speaking. The motive for wanting to claim that a Civil War military hero like Robert Gould Shaw and one of the most prominent poets of the nineteenth century like Alfred, Lord Tennyson were gay is that the more Great Men (or Women) from the past who can be claimed to have been gay, the more ammunition the gay rights movement has against the forces of homophobia.
ednbarby:
Good point there, Jeff. I'll just do my best Emily Litella "Never mind" and slink quietly away... ;)
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: ednbarby on November 15, 2006, 02:36:21 pm ---Good point there, Jeff. I'll just do my best Emily Litella "Never mind" and slink quietly away... ;)
--- End quote ---
I see no need for you to "slink quietly away," Little Darlin', because you're right, it shouldn't matter.
Moreover, I guess since I had my academic training in history before I came to my self-knowledge of my sexuality, it actually makes me uncomfortable to try to "claim" for support of a contemporary political agenda people who lived their lives in a time and place and culture very different from today.
Was Robert Gould Shaw erotically stimulated by sight of the men he thought were beautiful? We don't know and we can't know. We have only his words, and we don't know what those words meant to him when he wrote them.
delalluvia:
Thanks for all the replies, fellow brokies.
Kd's links gave me enough reading material for a week and then some.
Andrew really startled me with his comment on the better to have loved and lost factoid. Never crossed my mind that it was from one man to another. It'll be quite the ice-breaker at parties for me from now on. 8)
I actually have a book of poems by Tennyson and promptly went over to my bookshelf and yanked it down to re-read with a new eye.
It does bring up some thoughts. These men were writing personal things - letters to close family members, elegiatic poems. Did these private thoughts also extend to the public world? Did they say such things aloud to their men friends if they had the chance or shared these thoughts and opinions at social gatherings?
I'm a frustrated writer and I write mostly sci-fi and fantasy. When I'm writing about men, which is somewhat difficult for me being a woman, I find that in order that the male characters be seen as realistic whether they're a nobleman or a monk on a plague ship in some vastly distant future or part of the governing body of a pansexual colony on a much closer planet, the men have to be stereotypical of Western men today so as to be recognizable. What we might see on some modern show like CSI or some detective series. Men of action, men of little words, men of little emoting.
I write some historical stories as well - but I get hung up on the history part. Right now, I'm a 3rd of the way through my Jack/Ennis slash story of them being marooned on a Micronesian island after the volcanic catastrophe of Krakaota in 1883. They have a female passenger marooned with them - the story is one of healing - and she has just realized what the Jack character has done in the past.
The woman character is South African by way of New Dehli.
I'm stuck because I'm looking for the 19th century South African or Indian equivalient of 'rentboy'.
Anyway, the Jack and Ennis characters as I'm wriitng them are very similar to BBM's models. But now, having read R.G. Shaw's letters and all the info you guys have given me about Victorian era men, I wonder if they might not have been more emotive than I'm currently writing them.
Andrew:
--- Quote from: delalluvia on November 23, 2006, 01:03:02 am ---Andrew really startled me with his comment on the better to have loved and lost factoid. Never crossed my mind that it was from one man to another. It'll be quite the ice-breaker at parties for me from now on. 8)
--- End quote ---
Well, accuracy is not in much demand at parties. But of course the truth is more complicated. The section from which that quote comes, #27, is a general reflection on human experience. The whole quatrain goes,
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most,
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Yes, he is talking about his sorrow, and therefore presumably his own love. But he also says, in his Memoir, 'this is a poem, not an actual biography...I is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him.' The Victorians lived out their lives in a protected world of social expectation. You didn't have to worry about the unthinkable because the unthinkable and the unspeakable could not be. Men did not experience physical attraction to each other, certainly, who had heard of such a bizarre thing? But they might care about each other deeply, might be emotionally devoted for life, might write 'sentimental' things. Because physical sex was in a hermetically sealed compartment of impossibility, there was vast freedom in other areas to say and write exactly what you felt without fear of condemnation. Especially if you did a little careful clarification like Tennyson's in the Memoir to prevent the slightest chance of misunderstanding.
--- Quote from: delalluvia on November 23, 2006, 01:03:02 am --- Did they say such things aloud to their men friends if they had the chance or shared these thoughts and opinions at social gatherings?
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Somewhere in the Memoir or elsewhere I remember Tennyson saying, with much dignity, that he never called Hallam 'dear' during his life or to his face. Letters and poetry made it easier to let down the guard.
--- Quote from: delalluvia on November 23, 2006, 01:03:02 am ---I find that in order that the male characters be seen as realistic whether they're a nobleman or a monk on a plague ship in some vastly distant future or part of the governing body of a pansexual colony on a much closer planet, the men have to be stereotypical of Western men today so as to be recognizable. What we might see on some modern show like CSI or some detective series. Men of action, men of little words, men of little emoting.
--- End quote ---
If you have an idea for a male character who is not stereotypical, why not try to put him in? If it seems like a genre is forcing you to do things by rote...rebel! Think of the most interesting men you have encountered and try to imagine how some of their characteristics would show up in your story if they were in it. Or see what other authors have done who are simply writing novels of contemporary life. Anthony Trollope put a huge variety of male characters into his work because he wanted to draw a very broad portrait of his society. One thing I find interesting about a novelist like Jane Austen is that even though there is an element of formula in her basic story line - there is always a man who is right for the heroine and a man who is wrong for her - her heroines themselves are so unlike one another, and her novels are so character-driven, that the formula is completely overwhelmed by her originality. And then...the formula itself is largely of her own creation.
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--- Quote from: delalluvia on November 23, 2006, 01:03:02 am ---I'm stuck because I'm looking for the 19th century South African or Indian equivalient of 'rentboy'.
--- End quote ---
I did see the part of The Jewel and the Crown which had the nasty colonialist who physically and sexually abused his young male Indian servant. What would happen if that boy couldn't go back to his family and had to support himself? I didn't read the books, and you probably need a different character. But the more you read about the period you are writing about, the more ideas you get and the better the results always are.
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