The Homoerotics of Orientalism

    While Homosexual History is a disjointed affair – the 1870's Victorian term “homosexual” being a relatively new concept comprising definition, pathology and vilification in equal parts – we the men who desire and have sex with other men can glean much from the past to know about our present day selves beyond modern Western ideas about identity.

We’re wise to take a “Well, yes and no…” approach when trusting academia to stay in its own lane: Queer integrity necessitates viewing LGBTIQ as a political collective whose successes rise and fall on being able to rally around overarching goals...goals which coincidentally intersect with race and broader gender issues only some of the time. Masculinity itself as an academic pursuit somewhat surprisingly however has been most poorly studied, and is consequently misunderstood. And male homosexuality as an offending sub-species of masculinity isn’t likely to fare well within that contextualization.

It’s then overwhelmingly impressive when an academic with impeccable credentials publishes something like “The Homoerotics of Orientalism”. Joseph A. Boone’s 520-page masterpiece (a fascinatingly informative and satisfying read) manages to take Orientalism from its old-tymey connotations and frame so much about how homosexualists are very real (and perhaps universal, if not timeless) participants in masculinity, although currently disenfranchised when it comes to effectively shaping masculinity.

No slouch himself when it comes to nutting out the finer points of Queerdom, race and transnational culture, (the following extract from) Eng-Beng Lim's excellent review highlights the degree of critical thought which pervades the book:

In Joseph A. Boone’s monumental tome, The Homoerotics of Orientalism , the conundrum of engaging in the evidentiary politics of homo-orientalism itself becomes a critical challenge. What the book helpfully provides is a surfeit of historical evidence for their comparative quotidian and sensationalist treatments. Such an exhaustive examination of the ‘cross-cultural interplay of homosexual desires and taboos throughout history’ is best read as a contribution to world sexuality studies rather than queer studies even as it steers astutely clear of identitarian-based readings of homosexuality.

Readers who marvel at the book’s interdisciplinary visual, literary, historical and ethnographic scope may be struck just the same by its particular strength as an encyclopedic endeavour. Its coverage of same- sex encounters or male-on-male love over a period of 400 years primarily in the Islamicate world and secondarily in Anglo-Europe and the United States is at times breathtaking and at times overwhelming. The sheer range of Western and Middle Eastern objects (miniaturist painting, salon art, diaries, travel writing, canonical texts, films, ethnography, pornography, advertising, cartoons) is itself a useful resource. Many visual artefacts are given relatively long treatments for those seeking close readings of representative images as texts. They are richly descriptive and often outweigh the theoretical framings ghosting them. This encyclopedia-plus approach serves as a kind of repository or locus for myriad meanings generated by the ‘echo’ chambers in the study. As Boone surmises, ‘reading these cultural manifestations contrapuntally, listening to their echo-effects they create, adds a density of texture that illuminates the staying power, connotative energies, and accretion of meanings that emanate from them’ (p. 53).

In this regard, the mounting evidence of what might count as orientalist homoerotica or homo-orientalist art reads like a ‘discovery’, toggling between colonial anthropology and the legal definition of the term to produce a kind of self-conscious, defensive or enlightened form of critical reading. It would seem that this archive of homo- evidence is so big that it can anticipate both homophobic pre-emptions and queer interrogatories around the question of same-sex desire and erotic practice from the precolonial to the transnational Islamic world. The book makes the case for a more textured, if also benign, form of humanistic understanding that is untethered from the overdeterminations or preformulations of power that some scholars are said to model (badly) after Edward Said and Michel Foucault. The result is a compendium of sex acts, courtship behaviours and eros between men that are sometimes observed in their own right as homoerotic evidence. Suffice to say, the book’s engagement with the critical ruminations of Said, Foucault or other theorists is secondary to the full descriptions of identifiable themes, encounters and tropes (such as the beautiful boy, the pasha and the eunuch) that appear in its many sympathetic readings of works by European writers and artists. Boone adopts a largely detached stance in his writing, which shines in the literary interpretations. Elsewhere, it seems almost campy as readers pore over rare images and graphic descriptions of men doing things to other men as he maintains his resolute tone of directed indifference.

    Boone's own preface reveals his clear understanding of the nuances of sexuality which must shape such a broad subject lest it be undone by dualistic assumptions, or an overemphasis on differences. He expertly rises to the challenge of addressing both homosexual acts as well as identity, as they've historically played out for, and by, men of what was once known as The Orient. The author hasn't assembled a linear history as such - more a highly successful attempt to empirically gather evidence which isn't assembled to suit any narrative or foregone conclusions.

von Gloeden's 1890s Orientalized Sicilians

An actual Oriental / Ottoman same-sex couple circa 1920s

 






In focusing on Orientalism, Boone is able to relieve homosexual history of being determined by, or rooted in, Occidental Classicism and its uncomfortable associations with pederasty. In fact, more modern bridging images (as photographed by the likes of von Gloeden) appear to be of rather old  'boys': he coated his subjects in emulsions and used filters to peddle real men as 'youths'. (Anti-pornographers and their missionary kind are usually smart enough to avoid scapegoating von Gloeden as an exploiter of the poor and/or non-consenting: his models received good royalties from their images, and did so with the blessings of their communities.)

Von Gloeden's images are important inasmuch as they are the earliest photographic evidence of homoerotic Orientalism as it straddled the art vs smut divide. They also effectively refute how European art had traditionally insisted on mitigating the penis size of sexually mature males from Classicism onwards. While some insist that the photograph itself is more of a vehicle of pornography  than any painting or sculpture (due to its infinite possibilities for reproduction), there's no doubting its superior ability to document. But what von Gloeden documented wasn't penises of exotic races - he documented forays into erotic Arcadianism and Orientalism by virtue of a then-revolutionary medium. In a way he made homoerotic Orientalism more real, and in doing so dignified it.

It would however be quite wrong to suggest that von Gloeden (or any image for that matter) defines or best represents homoerotic Orientalism, or that it had, or has, watershed moments. The Homoerotics of Orientalism successfully prevents the topic (and the men) from being dismissed as products and images of Western projection: Orientals themselves certainly bring enough meaningful homoeroticism to inform the topic.

 

Professor Joseph Boone address (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute 2016)

 
Of course "The Orient" nowadays refers to territories, races and peoples far removed from what and where Orientalism flourished - Boone's milieu encompasses cultures of North Africa, Asia Minor and a broad Arabia. Language, dress and religion have significantly gutted the Middle-Eastern man of his benign homoerotic appeal, and Boone is courageous enough to invoke Abu Ghraib images of men to demonstrate that demonically dark side of homoeroticism, as practiced by men (and women) who torture.

Orientalism as a viable homoerotic pursuit probably had its last days of innocence in our own times immediately before the demise of the busy cruising areas around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. They hosted Israeli and Palestinian men coupling in the name of Eros...oblivious to the reality of The Other being rapidly recast as The Enemy. Given what came before (The Crusades) and what has since transpired, it's not too simplistic to isolate these acts of homosexuality as possibly the only tangible evidence of men behaving with any degree of sanity toward each other in the entire region, for a very long time.