The politics of Spartan pederasty

Abstract

Homosexuality, it would appear, now claims the space in the public prints that was not long ago lavished on the ‘woman question’. Its prominence in contemporary life is reflected in art. Nearly sixty current journals dealing with the subject in all its multifarious manifestations are listed in the eighteenth edition of Ulrich's International Periodical Directory (1979). The experience of homosexuals in the concentration camps and the role of the homosexual as hero in contemporary fiction have lately provided matter for books. Recent biographies of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter and W. H. Auden discuss their subjects' practice of or writings on homosexual behaviour. Masters and Johnson have now applied their quantitative approach to homoerotic physical response. Christian attitudes to homosexuality, notably in mediaeval Europe, have been extensively canvassed. In a less scholarly vein Edmund White has written of his travels in gay America; he, like Jeffrey Weeks and other members of the British Gay Left Collective, is much concerned with the politics and political vocabulary of homosexuality. Many other illustrations could be given. In short, ‘the love that dared not speak its name has become … insistently communicative’.