Queer exhibition at NGV looks beyond the gender question
Contemporary ideas of fluidity are not as original as they seem.
We used to think that we were sexually liberated, tolerant and uninhibited, while previous generations – before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and especially in the notoriously repressed Victorian era – lived in chronic states of moral anxiety and guilt, and even dread that they would be gruesomely punished in the next life for their misbehaviour in this one.
Of course sexual liberation was never quite as rosy as it might have seemed in the ’60s and ’70s. As I have observed before, it was always a better deal for men than for women, who ultimately need a reliable and trustworthy partner to support them when they have children. Casual sex with no strings attached is ultimately an adolescent way of life, not a mature or sustainable one.
But something fundamental has changed in the new century. We suddenly find ourselves as preoccupied with venereal sin as any hellfire preacher in the mid-19th century, the kind who inveighed against the horrors of adultery and sodomy and who believed that masturbation caused moral and physical degeneracy in individuals and even the decline of nations and empires.
Like so many cultural trends, this one arose in America, where the embers of a puritanical fear of sexuality had never died out.
How have sexual incidents come to loom as large as global catastrophes?
In part it is because we measure the normal or the acceptable against a bizarrely unrealistic and Disney-kitsch benchmark. Eros is a powerful and irrational instinct that makes both men and women behave badly at times, and sexual experiences can be wild, messy and even ugly, as well as joyful and ecstatic.
This has always been the case, whether in antiquity, the early modern period, or the ostensibly stuffy 19th century. It was in this period, perhaps precisely because of the enforcement of respectability with its inevitable concomitant of hypocrisy, that modern psychology and sexology arose.
Only in the latter part of the century, in fact, were modern concepts of homosexuality and therefore of heterosexuality formulated; and this new awareness culminated in the theories of Freud that placed sexual experience at the core of the very process of human psychological development.
But if we want to form some idea of what really went on a century or more ago, there is no better text than the case studies in Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (5 volumes, 1897-1908).
Previously collected case studies had been based on the declarations of criminals and the insane. Ellis, who had spent decisive years in Australia in his youth, instead asked his middle-class friends – authors, academics, professionals, officers – to narrate their own sexual histories.
These accounts, contributed by both men and women, reveal stories as unconventional as any in the century that followed; more varied, if anything, than the typical experiences of supposedly liberated Americans in the ’60s and ’70s.
There are first experiences with servants – housemaid or stablehand – or at boarding school; relationships at university or in the army – and above all a surprisingly common indifference to what later became the boundaries of “sexuality”.
One young Indian army officer concludes by tabulating his preferences; from an Englishwoman of his own class at the top through a variety of male and female partners of various ethnicities, down to satisfaction with a papaya as a last resort.
All of which is to say that contemporary ideas of fluidity are not as original as they seem – nor of course so fluid, since one of the paradoxes of the alphabet sexualities is a compulsion to create new boxes instead of accepting the idea that both sensibility and experience really are fluid, and subject to change over time.
At least the merit of the idea of “queer”, celebrated in this exhibition, is that it is inherently boundless and thus has some affinities with the less delimited reality of sexual experience before the very recent definition of “sexualities”. This is not to say that sexual experience has ever been ungoverned and unregulated by cultural norms. On the contrary, every culture imposes rules and conventions, encourages some practices and sanctions others. But they don’t think of what they classify as deviant behaviours as different orientations, so much as vices to which anyone could be subject, like fornication in general.
The exhibition is a mixture of things that will probably appeal in various ways to different people. There are theatre and dance costumes and notably the outfits designed by Leigh Bowery; there are posters and other materials from the gay liberation and AIDS periods. And then there are paintings and prints and sculptures, from antiquity to the recent past.
All of these things are more or less interesting, but a number of pieces are only tangentially relevant to the theme, like those that refer to Trajan and Aeschines, some are by individuals with interesting stories but do not actually speak of those stories, while others are so obvious as to be trite. The most interesting items in the exhibition are those which, as the show’s rationale suggests, help us to recall or even discover for the first time stories about the complexities of sexual experience in other times.
One set of stories concerns the family of Louis XIV. Although he was devoted exclusively to women and disapproved of relations with men, he was surrounded by such behaviour. His own father, Louis XIII, had very little interest in women and it is said that the Sun King’s very conception was due to the happy chance of a storm during a hunting party which forced his parents to share a bed for at least one night.
Louis XIV’s younger brother – the result of another fortunate nocturnal conjunction – was of the same disposition, but dutifully married not once but twice and fathered a number of healthy heirs, one of whom later became regent, while the king himself outlived most of his legitimate children, and his illegitimate ones were ineligible to inherit the throne.
Louis’ cousin the Duc de Vendôme was similarly inclined as was another and closer cousin, the Prince of Condé, known as Monsieur le Prince, one of his greatest generals.
It is even suggested that Louis’s nemesis William III, Prince of Orange and Stadhouder of Holland, who became co-monarch of England with his wife Mary after the latter’s father James II was deposed in 1688, was homosexual or bisexual.
Queen Christina of Sweden, another great figure of the 17th century, was never married, and in the following century Frederick the Great of Prussia took no interest in women.
Another set of material relates to sexual themes in antiquity, mainly through their representations in modern art. There is the story of Orpheus, one of the most fascinating examples of an ancient myth which evolved – as I showed recently in the story of Oedipus – in the course of centuries of retelling.
One of the last additions to the tale of Orpheus, in the Hellenistic age, was to explain his killing by the Thracian women: according to Phanocles, this was because after the loss of Eurydice he could never love another woman but introduced the love of boys instead.
The story of Achilles on Scyros is also noteworthy. According to a non-Homeric source, Achilles’ mother Thetis hid him, disguised as a girl, among the daughters of King Lycomedes to save him from being killed in the Trojan War. Odysseus, disguised as a merchant, brought a chest full of jewels and clothes for the girls to inspect; but hidden among them was a sword, and as soon as Achilles saw the weapon he seized it and drew it, betraying his instinctive virility. It is all the more interesting that the subject is here represented by a female artist, Angelica Kauffmann.
A third set of interesting material – mainly cartoons by the Cruikshank family and others – hint at aspects of homosexual life around two centuries ago. This was at a time when the only homosexual act considered a crime was buggery (other homosexual acts were not criminalised until 1885). The penalty was death, although it was sometimes commuted to transportation and the last executions were in 1835.
It was already clear to many, as the judge at that time observed, that this was a crime without a victim. But although homosexual behaviour was often tacitly tolerated, perhaps especially in upper-class circles, it always exposed participants to the danger of blackmail by disgruntled servants and criminal types, entailed infamy when it became public, and not infrequently provoked the suicide of those in danger of being disgraced.
The Cruikshank cartoons suggest cross-dressing, cruising in parks, and – a practice with a long history – going abroad for sexual adventures in a more tolerant or at least anonymous environment.
Other cartoons evoke the ambiguous fashion for dandyism which, while not necessarily associated with homosexual activity, certainly implied a degree of effeminacy or perhaps asexuality; dandyism is a posture of self-defence against the vulgarity and disorder of life, and nothing is more antithetical to order than sexual desire.
One puzzling omission is what would seem the most obviously “queer” picture in the whole of the NGV’s considerable collection: Jacopo Amigoni’s group portrait of the celebrated castrato Farinelli (1750-52). Here we have the sexually ambivalent singer in the middle, beside a beautiful Teresa Castellini, as though they were a couple; on the left is the poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio, holding a quill, and on the right the painter Amigoni with a handful of brushes.
On the far right, meanwhile, a boy enters in an extravagant costume and carrying a sword, so presumably not a page but a young nobleman, holding Amigoni’s palette. They all turn to look at us, posing self-consciously in an enigmatic tableau, hinting at their various adventures in the borderlands of love and eroticism, but not letting us into their secrets.
Queer: stories from the NGV collection,
NGV International, Melbourne, until August 21
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