Thesislog

Wright, p. 204:

For his part, John Addington Symonds was appalled by the prevailing medical definition of homosexuality. He eschewed the scientific approach in favour of a historical and sociological exploration of the subject, believing that this would offer greater intellectual scope and provide him with far more powerful ammunition in his struggle against intolerance. Symonds waged that war in his landmark 1883 pamphlet A Problem in Greek Ethics, which argues that, far from being a ‘disease’, homosexuality was the norm in Greek society. In contradiction of the German sexologist Karl Ulrich, who had characterised homosexuals as an effeminate ‘third’ sex, Symonds maintained that homosexuals were typically ‘manly’ and ‘martial’ in character…. Symonds continued his attempt to free homosexuals from the prison of scientific classification in the pages of A Problem in Modern Ethics, which was published in 1891.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but in my reading one interpretive point that it seems as if nearly every critic gets wrong is this tendency to construe homosexuality and the scientific community as diametrically opposed. Symonds wasn’t nearly as opposed to the sexologists as Wright makes out; indeed, he collaborated with one of them, Havelock Ellis, on a book called Sexual Inversion, which interestingly uses the gender-inversion language which Wright portrays Symonds as being so opposed to, and which even more interestingly Wright doesn’t mention at all in this section. The thing is that psychology and medicine weren’t a perfectly unproblematic route to finding a language with which to talk about love between men, but they were a route, and one of the few available. Men like Symonds no doubt saw some of these scientists—whom we might consider “allies” in today’s language, in that they wanted to study and write about, and not to persecute, homosexuals—as doing a lot to further the cause of public dialogue about theories of identity.

To be sure, Wright does make one great point here, which is that Symonds used his work in “Greek ethics” to advance a view of homosexuality that was much more centered on sexual object choice than those of some people who were theorizing in terms of gender inversion. The fact that Symonds used his knowledge of the classics to advance very aggressively a viewpoint much closer to our own modern understanding of homosexuality is very significant to my topic.

I feel guilty and inappropriate making comments critical of the work of real scholars, but sometimes I honestly do think based on my knowledge that the spin they put on texts and people and events isn’t quite right. Negotiating this line, I think, and making sure I don’t cross it into being presumptuous and disrespectful, is what it means to be a more advanced student: not only assimilating information, but starting to create my own.