6

RUTH VANITA

The homoerotics of travel: people,

ideas, genres

If there is some truth to the adage that there are two basic plots – person leaves
home, and stranger comes to town – it is even truer that stories about same-
sex desire involve selves changed through travel. Protagonists move from the
rural to the urban, occasionally from the urban back to the rural, and often
from one country to another, in search of more congenial climes and of the
hidden self.
When people travel so do ideas. Ideas about same-sex desire have
circulated between cultures throughout recorded history and cross-fertilized
one another.1 Opposition to homosexuality often takes the form of blaming
other cultures for importing it into one’s own supposedly pristine society.
As John Boswell points out, this tendency is evident in classical antiquity as
well as in medieval Europe; it is much more pernicious and widespread
today.2
The current wave of globalization, which has had many precursors
throughout history, brings a new twist to the debate. LGBT movements in
developing countries are frequently seen as manifestations of neo-
imperialism, with ‘third world’ queer people mindlessly imitating ‘first
world’ identities, like ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘homosexual’.3 This is the left-
wing counterpart of the right-wing claim that homosexuality is an import
from the ‘West’.
In response, some third-world AIDS organizations have picked up
American health workers’ terms, such as MSM (men who have sex with
men), as more politically correct, and have also reinvented local terms,
which they claim are more accurate than terms like ‘homosexual’.
Interestingly, they often apply a word in a local language or a regional identity
from one region to the entire country.4 These efforts to separate national from
international identities arise from the unstated assumption that identities can
be fixed.
Attempts to pin down cultural difference are doomed from the start. More
fruitful, in my view, are attempts to explore interconnections and circulations.

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 ruth vanita

Most scholars would agree that great literature has always depicted identities
as multiple, fluid and hybrid. Despite this agreement, the anxious desire to reify
identities repeatedly resurfaces. Nationalism, arguably the dominant religion
of the twentieth century, provides fertile soil for this anxiety.
But fear cannot stop border crossings, physical, virtual or imaginative.
When people cross borders, their identities change. The borders may be
between nations, religious communities or linguistic groups. Today, even
the most brutal dictatorships find it hard to prevent their citizens from
crossing borders over the internet.
Perhaps the most invigorating border crossing is that between past and
present. Despite continuities, any culture’s past is radically different from its
present. Lesbian and gay writers often travel into the past in search of ancestors.
Indeed, it is impossible to truly explore a culture without considering its past.

North to south: in search of passion and beauty

Tourism and travel in Europe and America became more widespread in the
nineteenth century than ever before. Walter Pater was a pioneer of the
narrative that intertwines explorations of cultural difference and of homo-
eroticism. ‘Winckelmann’, the last essay in Pater’s enormously influential
little book The Renaissance (1873), outlines what would become a familiar
pattern – a man journeying from northern to southern Europe, in search of
freedom, male beauty and the intensities of love.
Pater conceives of the European Renaissance as steeped in the homoerotic
traditions of the medieval and classical pasts. He celebrates the northern
transmission of those traditions by Hellenist scholar Winckelmann, who,
Pater argues, influenced Goethe’s transformation of modern literature
through Romanticism. Pater depicts Winckelmann as travelling physically
to Rome but imaginatively to Greece in search of pagan beauty, which he
characterized as archetypally male. Pater judiciously quotes Winckelmann’s
letters in a way that links his intense, often anguished, love for men with his
quest for ‘some unexpressed pulsation of sensuous life’ in ‘the buried fire of
ancient art’.5
Many writers, including Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf,
would pick up and play with this pattern of a journey from north to south.
Today, ‘North’ and ‘South’ often refer to Western Europe and North America
versus Asia, Africa and South America. But up to the early twentieth century,
these terms more commonly referred to the supposedly sharp divide between
northern and southern Europe.
Northerners went south in search of the sun. The brilliant skies of southern
Europe, closer to Africa and Asia, beckoned them from the chilly industrialism

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 The homoerotics of travel: people, ideas, genres

of Puritan England and Germany to literally and metaphorically hot and fertile
vineyards. Southern France, Spain, Italy and Greece all participated in this
mystique. Greece, indeed, was part of both Europe and ‘Asia Minor’, serving
as a bridge between past and present as well as between continents.
For northern Europeans, Venice, where Shakespeare’s Antonio longs to die
for his Bassanio, Byron’s ‘isles of Greece / Where burning Sappho loved and
sung’, Rome, where Wilde passionately commemorated the tomb of Keats,
‘fair as Sebastian’, patron saint of Victorian homosexuals, and Florence,
where Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett fled from her father’s chilly
Victorian house, all comprised Keats’s ‘warm south / Full of the true, the
blushful Hippocrene’. Here had flourished the glories of pagan poetry and
art, and here were to be found the pleasures of free and passionate love.
Often, this love was between members of the same sex.
Wilde’s works are saturated in this imaginative continuum – almost every
poem, short story and essay dwells on forays into other cultures. His come-
dies, though set in England, are galvanized by ‘Bunburying’ people who
journey between town and countryside, or return home from long sojourns
abroad. Dorian Gray’s life is changed by a book about a young Parisian, and
it seems fitting that Wilde ended his life in Paris and was buried there.
Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote under the joint pen-name
‘Michael Field’ and belonged to Wilde’s circle, recomposed the north to south
journey in a Sapphic key. They travelled extensively through Europe, and
their poems display an eclectic pursuit of female beauty and love, transposed
from southern Europe to England’s green and pleasant land. The seduction
poem ‘An Invitation’ places the lover’s room in an imagined ‘south’:

Come and sing, my room is south,

Come with thy sun-governed mouth,
Thou wilt never suffer drouth,
Long as dwelling
In my chamber of the south.
...
There’s a lavender settee,
Cushioned for my love and me,
Ah, what secrets there will be
For love-telling,
When her head leans on my knee.6

Later in the century, Henry James, who emigrated from America to England,
shared a passion for Italy with writer and art critic J. A. Symonds. In 1895,
sending Symonds a copy of his essay on Venice, James wrote, ‘it seemed to me
that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look’.7

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 ruth vanita

Both men were homosexually inclined, although Symonds was relatively

more open about this than James.

Self-realization abroad
At the start of the twentieth century, two consummate literary tellings of this
story of self-realization through discovery of one’s homosexuality in a foreign
land were André Gide’s The Immoralist (1902) and Thomas Mann’s Death in
Venice (1912).8 While Gide’s novel explores the consequences of abandoning
morality in favour of unbridled hedonism, Mann’s is more narrowly focused
on same-sex desire. Throughout his tale of a celebrated middle-aged German
author’s passion for a beautiful Polish boy, Mann emphasizes the foreignness
of the setting in that ‘most improbable of cities’, Venice.9 The difference
between modern Venice and Munich is emblematized in both natural and
cultural forces – the naked sun god who draws attention away from the
intellect to the senses, the oppressive sirocco blowing across from Africa
and the maze of bridges and alleys where the protagonist, Gustav von
Aschenbach, loses himself. Equally important is Italy’s cultural ancestor,
Greece, where Socrates taught his beloved Phaedrus, and where the reigning
deities included Eros; Eos, ‘ravisher of youth’ (55); Apollo who loved
Hyacinthus; and Dionysus, whose revels haunt Aschenbach’s dreams.
Far from resisting a passion he knows is ‘absurd’ (59), Aschenbach embraces
his emerging identity. Formerly a rigid moralist, he now delights in anything
that seems to undermine ‘the bourgeois structure’ (61). He wears make-up and
hair dye, thus becoming like the grotesque old dandy he had despised on his
voyage to Venice. All this is possible only because ‘He was alone, he was a
foreigner, he was sunk deep in this belated bliss of his – all which enabled him
to pass unblushing through experiences well-nigh unbelievable’ (63).
The locals deliberately hide from foreign tourists the cholera epidemic
raging in the city. When an Englishman reveals the secret to Aschenbach, he
neither enlightens Tadzio’s family nor leaves Venice. Recalling the foreigner
in Munich who had aroused in him ‘a lust for strange countries and fresh
sights’ (74), he rejects the option of returning home to a life of reason.
His death just before Tadzio leaves Venice can be read as punishment for
his love, but can also be read as the crowning glory of his life – he has nothing
to live for, since he knows that the loving contemplation of beauty is the
supreme felicity of existence. In Pater’s words:

And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom . . .
Who, if he saw through all, would fret against the chain of circumstance which
endows one at the end with those great experiences? (‘Winckelmann’, 148–9)

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 The homoerotics of travel: people, ideas, genres

International community
Since Aschenbach cannot confide in anyone, his identity remains unchanged
in the eyes of the world. In contrast, The Well of Loneliness (1928) traces its
protagonist Stephen Gordon’s progress from isolation on her family estate in
the English countryside to joining an international gay community in Paris.
Paying tribute to the expatriate homosexual community on the Left Bank, the
novel maps another pattern that grows increasingly important in the con-
struction of lesbian and gay identities through the twentieth century – leaving
one’s own country in order to find community abroad.10
The need for gay communion impels Stephen to leave England. Her friend,
the gay playwright, Jonathan Brockett, insists that she go to Paris because she is
atrophying in London.11 Compelled to concur with his diagnosis, Stephen
terms it a ‘queer revelation’.12 This term is echoed later when she finds happi-
ness with Mary Llewellyn in Paris, and life becomes ‘a new revelation’ (327).
Hall uses the categories ‘invert’ and ‘abnormal’ (242), regardless of peo-
ple’s nationality or race. Stephen’s sense of identity as a homosexual gradu-
ally emerges once she leaves her much-loved country. Unsure at first whether
she feels ‘outraged or relieved’ that Brockett and his friends in Paris recognize
her as one of themselves, she withdraws and immerses herself in work.
After the war, she gains not only a partner but also increased confidence in
her new identity. She and Mary attract little attention on the streets, where
female couples stroll among male-female couples, while in the air is ‘the
inconsequent feeling that belongs to the night life of most great cities, above
all to the careless night life of Paris’ (328). Later, Stephen seeks out gay night
life. She and Mary frequent bars where women can dance together; they also
host and attend gay parties and musical soirées.
Hall paints an invaluable portrait, from the perspective of an insider, of this
international gay community’s cultural diversity. Stephen’s sympathies are
broadened as she learns about other cultures. She and Mary befriend a lesbian
couple from the Scottish Highlands, and socialize with American lesbian
expatriates. With Wanda, a Polish Catholic, Stephen visits the church of the
Sacré Coeur. Adolphe Blanc, a ‘gentle and learned Jew’ (356), tells her of her
duty to write about the injustice gay people suffer; she will act on his words at
the book’s conclusion. She also hears two African-American heterosexual
men sing spirituals, and feels a kinship with them.
Although Hall refers to the gay community, especially the drug addicts and
alcoholics in it, as a ‘miserable army’ (393), she depicts its members as
mutually supportive and generous. At home in the English countryside,
Stephen thinks she is the only one of her kind, but in Paris, she turns to ‘her
own kind’ (360), and realizes that she is one of millions throughout the world.

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 ruth vanita

Hall depicts this, in the book’s last pages, as a turning point in the incipient
gay movement for justice. Such a movement can grow only when borders are
crossed.

Primeval places
As even more Europeans and Americans began to travel in the early twentieth
century, they went further afield. More exotic locales appear in gay fiction.
Stephen and Mary become lovers not in France but in Orotava on Tenerife, a
Canary Island situated off the African coast. They stay in the oldest villa there,
which has walls adorned with old erotic frescoes, as well as ‘a veritable Eden
of a garden’ (309). In this brief idyll, they return to a more ‘natural’ (317)
condition: ‘They no longer felt desolate, hungry outcasts’ (320).
The lush vegetation is described as an objective correlative for their love,
which is termed ‘primitive’ (317) in the sense of ‘primeval’; it is part of
‘Creation’s terrific urge to create’. Although the local culture is Spanish, they
are described as coming together in ‘the African night’ (311). The memory of
‘those African nights’ (327) sustains them after they return to Paris.
Here, Hall adumbrates a cluster of ideas that is found at this time in many
European and American fictional representations of travel in Africa, Asia and
South America. Such travel is represented as pleasurable, liberatory and
conducive to discovery of one’s self and one’s sexuality. From the late nine-
teenth century onwards, many homosexual and bisexual writers undertook
and wrote about such travels – Edward Carpenter in Sri Lanka and India,
J. R. Ackerley, Christopher Isherwood and Allen Ginsberg in India,
E. M. Forster in Egypt and India, Paul and Jane Bowles in Morocco, Hart
Crane and Tennessee Williams in Mexico, Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil – the list
could go on for several pages. For some, like Isherwood, these travels were part
of a spiritual quest. These travels were part of a larger, still continuing, histor-
ical pattern of gay people leaving home for sojourns in places where they feel
freer precisely because they are foreigners there. Radclyffe Hall’s Barbara puts it
succinctly when she pleads with her lover to leave their village in Scotland:
‘Jamie, let’s go away . . . they hate us. Let’s go where nobody knows us’ (359).
It is important to remember that travellers to Asia and Africa also travelled
widely in Europe and America. For instance, Isherwood travelled to
Germany, and then moved to the US with Auden (he depicts the isolation of
a Britisher in America in A Single Man); Forster travelled in Italy and Greece;
Bishop lived in Brazil for many years; many Americans, including Natalie
Clifford Barney, Romaine Brooks, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, H. D.,
and later Paul Cadmus, James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith sojourned or
settled in Europe. Rimbaud and Verlaine conducted their tempestuous affair,

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 The homoerotics of travel: people, ideas, genres

memorialized in both poetry and prose (‘A Season in Hell’), partly in England,
and this preceded Rimbaud’s later travels in Asia and Africa.
The reverse movement, from Asia and Africa to Europe and America,
began later, concurrently with the ironic reversal of levels of tolerance
between ‘East’ and ‘West’ in the late twentieth century. This movement is in
full spate today. With the recent and honourable exceptions of South Africa,
Nepal and India, most formerly colonized countries in South and South-East
Asia and Africa have retained the anti-sodomy laws introduced by the
European colonizing powers. But most European countries and now the
USA too have abolished the anti-sodomy laws, and many have also intro-
duced a range of civil rights for gay people. Consequently, a substantial
number of Asian and African gay people seek amnesty in the USA, Canada
and European countries, on the grounds that they face persecution in their
home countries.

Hunted and exiled

The twentieth century was the century of exiled refugees pouring from one
country or continent into another. The Holocaust is the enduring image of
such exile, but it was preceded and succeeded by many waves of such unwill-
ing boundary crossers. This century also saw an increasing number of writers
hounded for their works, and as gay writers became more visible, they
suffered greatly in this respect. Wilde, who died as the century began, was
the archetype of such suffering.
Ironically, the trial of The Well of Loneliness enacted the persecution the
novel documented, thus confirming its central thesis. Throughout the book,
Hall uses images of hunted animals to symbolize the victimization of defence-
less homosexuals. English literature has a long and honourable history of
critiquing the hunt, by juxtaposing it with the oppression of women, children,
prisoners and other wretched of the earth. William Wordsworth’s ‘Hartleap
Well’ and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles are among the more
famous examples. Hall was among the first to explicitly connect the image to
the persecution of gay people.
Stephen is an avid hunter, but one day, after her father’s death, she
suddenly identifies with the fox as a ‘solitary creature’ hunted by ‘ruthless,
implacable, untiring people’ (123), and then experiences an almost mystical
epiphany: ‘she perceived that all life is only one life, that all joy and all sorrow
are indeed only one, that all death is only one dying’ (125). Much later, the
misery of a drug-addicted young gay man reminds her of the fox and her own
thoughts about it: ‘It’s looking for God who made it’ (394). This perception
illuminates the dark underside of Paris’s international community, or of gay

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 ruth vanita

exiles and refugees anywhere. Their border crossings and assumption of

international identities are not chosen but forced, and they suffer irreparable
losses, as Stephen suffers the loss of her ancestral home.

‘I have no country’?
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of artists and writers
across the world, who were supporters of colonized countries’ struggles for
national independence, developed an aspiration towards internationalism. In
India, Tagore critiqued narrow nationalisms, and Suryakanta Tripathi
‘Nirala’, arguably the greatest twentieth-century Hindi-language poet,
described ‘ekdeshiya’ (uni-national) writing as ‘inherently narrow’.13 He
claimed that interaction between literary traditions caused them to shine
‘like the many beautiful colors of the rainbow in the rays of one sun’.14
In England, members of the Bloomsbury group, most of whom were
homosexual or bisexual, forcefully enunciated an internationalist position.
Virginia Woolf, for example, claimed, ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a
woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’15
Such utopian yearnings, though, were haunted by the spectres of colonial-
ism and imperialism.16 Forster was famously to remark in 1939, ‘if I had to
choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I
should have the guts to betray my country’.17 But his last novel, A Passage
to India (1924), which emblematizes this aspiration in the homoerotic friend-
ship of the Englishman Fielding and the Indian Aziz, concludes with the two
men’s separation. They want to be friends, but larger forces obtrude.
Although both Fielding and Aziz marry women, their relationship is the
thread running through the book, and evolves as the thematic centre. Their
separation indicates how hard it is for what Forster termed ‘Love, the Beloved
Republic’ to survive the tensions created by imperialism. Forster dedicated
Passage to Ross Masood, the Indian he loved unrequitedly for years. This was
a time when ideas about homosexual identity were being exported from one
country to another. While this created connections, it also spawned fears,
many of which are still alive today.

Imports and exports

In north India, male homoerotic subcultures had flourished in pre-colonial
cities and been celebrated by major poets.18 But in the late nineteenth century,
British-educated nationalists, both on the right and on the left, who had
internalized Victorian homophobia, claimed that homosexuality was imported
into India by ‘Westerners’ – either Europeans or West Asian Muslims. This
myth still thrives in India today. Ironically, it was in fact not homosexuality but

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 The homoerotics of travel: people, ideas, genres

homophobia in its modern form that was imported into India via British
education and law.19
The first public debate in north India around homosexuality and its
representation in literature was also a debate about ‘West’ versus ‘East’. It
was sparked off in 1927 by the publication of a collection of short stories on
male homosexuality, entitled Chocolate.20 The author, a firebrand national-
ist, Pandey Bechan Sharma, with the pen-name ‘Ugra’ (Extreme), claimed that
despite the anti-sodomy law introduced by the British in 1860, homosexuality
was widespread in all strata of Indian society, and that his stories were written
to expose and denounce it. However, his opponents claimed that the stories
titillated readers with depictions of beautiful boys and lovers’ encounters, and
were therefore obscene. Ugra, who never married, was suspected of homo-
sexuality, and there is evidence that male homosexuals were delighted by the
book’s publication. The first edition sold out in a week.
Ugra depicts groups of sophisticated young men, both Hindu and Muslim,
who enjoy the pleasures of the city, and most of whom acknowledge the
attractions of other males. ‘Chocolate’, the title of the collection and of one of
the stories, is a term they use both for their desires and for the objects of those
desires. While suggesting that male–male desire is a Western import, this term
also normalizes that desire by indicating that Western tastes are an ineradic-
able part of modern Indian identity. One of the most widely available con-
sumer items in India, chocolate is so indigenized as to have become a Hindi
word, but is nevertheless non-Indian in origin. Hence the term works against
Ugra’s narratorial denunciations of homosexuality.
Ugra’s homosexual characters are proud of their hybridity. They defend their
desires by expounding a hedonist philosophy, derived from both ancient Greek
and medieval Indian thought: ‘Truth must be respected wherever it is. Beauty
alone is truth. So whether the beauty is a woman’s or a man’s, “I am a slave of
love”’ (49). They also claim an illustrious ancestry, with hybrid sources, Eastern
and Western, Hindu and Muslim. In the title story, a homosexually inclined
character quotes the renowned Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir’s homoerotic love
poetry but also looks to the West for inspiration. The censorious narrator
reports, ‘[H]e told me, on the basis of an English book, that even Socrates was
guilty of this offence. He said that Shakespeare too was a slave of some beautiful
friend of his. He spoke of Mr Oscar Wilde as well’ (39).
Ugra uses a range of terms for homosexuality, and these too are drawn
from different cultures. Among them are older indigenous words like sarvab-
hogi (taking pleasure in or consuming everything) and ranginmijaz (of colour-
ful temperament),21 popular pejorative terms like laundebaaz (boy fancier)
and poetic words in local dialect like paatalpanthi (followers of the path of
paatal, a rose or trumpet flower). Ugra’s writings were widely attacked by

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 ruth vanita

Hindi litterateurs. One reason was that he dared depict homosexuality as a

heady mix of different cultural traditions from West and East.

Anxiety and transformation

Suniti Namjoshi, the first openly lesbian Indian writer, moved from India to
Canada and then to England. From its inception, her work draws on Indian as
well as European literary traditions to engage with post-colonial and diaspo-
ric anxieties about Western identities. A number of her animal figures, from
the blue donkey and the one-eyed monkey to the tiger and the dragon, suggest
the fear and hostility that prevail between heterosexual and homosexual, East
and West, men and women.22 While acknowledging these conflicts as real,
she also deconstructs identities to reveal convergences across national and
other boundaries.23
The Conversations of Cow, a fantasy novel, is her most sophisticated
exegesis of the question of identity.24 The protagonist, Suniti, and the object
of her pursuit, the eponymous Cow, constantly metamorphose yet remain
recognizable. Cow is Goddess, woman and animal; this is normal in an Indian
context where one may be reborn as an animal, many Gods have an animal
vehicle, some Gods take an animal form and most animals are worshipped,
but it appears outrageous in a Western context. While Suniti, with her
Western education, is agitated by identities that fluctuate, Cow is equally
comfortable as an Indian lesbian and a white heterosexual man.
Namjoshi draws on Hindu philosophy to undo everyday categories. In
Hindu thought, Kama is one of the four aims of human life, and represents
the third stage before the final one of Moksha or liberation. One interpreta-
tion of this is that when all desires are fulfilled and one has nothing left to
desire, one reaches liberation. Namjoshi’s Cow resonates with a number of
Hindu narratives, recalling both the mythological cornucopian cow Surabhi,
who produces an endless stream of milk, and Kamadhenu, the cow who fulfils
all desires. Kama means desire, and dhenu means cow. Bhadravati, the
lesbian cow, both fulfills Suniti’s desires and also liberates her from prejudices
and unreal categories. Evoking the Hindu idea that all living beings are
manifestations of the divine, Cow becomes a symbol for dissolving cultural
differences, like those of gender, race, nationality and sexuality.
When Suniti is perplexed by Cow’s rapid transformations, Cow reassures
her – ‘It’s all right . . . identity is fluid. Haven’t you heard of transmigra-
tion?’25 – thus pointing to ancient Indian versions of apparently new Western
ideas. When Suniti is not persuaded, Cow expresses a desire that many people
who are categorized as deviant may have experienced, ‘All I ever wanted . . .
was to be an ordinary animal’ (32).

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 The homoerotics of travel: people, ideas, genres

In the closing peroration, Namjoshi draws on another Indian devotional

practice, that of invoking a God by hundreds of names. She uses this linguistic
strategy to displace gender and cultural difference, much as Monique Wittig
and Jeannette Winterson use the first-person pronoun. The protagonist
invokes Cow as all who have appeared in the narrative, including Westerners
and Indians, living and imagined beings, humans and nonhumans, men and
women, straight and gay, concluding, ‘O Cow who manifests herself in a
thousand shapes and a thousand wishes’ (121–2).
Namjoshi thus returns us by many routes to a modern version of the
Bhagavad Gita’s claim that a wise person sees the one in the many, and the
many in the one. The novel concludes with the return of Cow, which makes
Suniti ‘feel so very, so extraordinarily happy’ (124). She decides that she likes
Cow in all her incarnations, and finds even her heterosexual white male
persona ‘wholly engaging’ (125).

Sweet dualities26
Crossing boundaries involves meetings, encounters and sometimes dualities. A
love relationship is one kind of duality, and as international relationships
become increasingly common, identities are transformed at the most visceral
levels. As Edmund White remarks, ‘a love affair between foreigners is always as
much the mutual seduction of two cultures as a meeting between two people’.27
In The Married Man, White’s most extended examination of such a mutual
seduction, the American protagonist Austin falls in love with a Frenchman,
Julien, and part of the attraction is that the relationship represents ‘a total
immersion into France’ (67). As in Henry James’s novels, this has mixed
results for Austin’s identity. Julien has a French disdain for sexual identities,
which shakes Austin’s sense of himself as a gay man; he becomes distanced
from his gay friends and from America, which appears more and more like a
foreign country to him.
The limitations of identity politics become evident when Austin is accused
of political incorrectness at the American university where he teaches.
American liberal tolerance of homosexuality is scathingly revealed as shallow
and xenophobic; Austin’s colleagues do not warm to Julien and him, because
they are not ‘the sort of dotty, aging gay couple an academic community
likes’. As Julien’s health declines, they travel to Venice and Morocco; here,
White pays tribute to Gide, Mann and Bowles, and perhaps to James
Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, one of the earliest novels about a transatlantic
gay relationship.
A kind of relationship less often examined is that between expatriates from
two different countries who settle down together in a third. Such was the

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 ruth vanita

relationship between American Natalie Barney and Englishwoman Renée

Vivien, both of whom settled in France, and later between short story writer
Katherine Mansfield and Ida Baker. Mansfield came from New Zealand and
Baker from Burma to a finishing school in London, where both later relo-
cated. Though Mansfield had earlier had an intense affair with Maata, a
Maori classmate, her unfinished manuscript ‘Maata’ records her lifelong
partnership with Baker, whom she termed her ‘wife’, and who coexisted,
not always happily, with Mansfield’s husband, the literary critic Middleton
Murry.28 More recently, Namjoshi and her partner, Gillian Hanscombe,
explore their relationship in a poetic dialogue, Flesh and Paper, which
touches on their life as expatriates from two former colonies (India and
Australia) who lived in Canada and England.

Travelling genres
Another way cultural identities mingle is when genres are translated and
rewritten in cultures other than their native ones. Marilyn Hacker’s villanelles
and Adrienne Rich’s ghazals come to mind. The ghazal is a particularly
interesting case, because of its conventions in its native languages, Persian
and Urdu, where lover and beloved always take the masculine grammatical
gender. This is so even when a woman is the addressee. The convention lends
itself especially well to male–male relationships, and renders unnecessary the
kind of subterfuge that poets in English resorted to for centuries, using the
‘I-you’ format to avoid revealing the beloved’s gender.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, Indian nationalist critics
launched campaigns to purify literature in several Indian languages. The
ghazal came in the line of fire; Urdu critics denounced it as decadent.
Fortunately, it proved resilient and still flourishes, but the homoeroticism
endemic to the genre was purged or disguised, and the male–male convention
was gradually replaced by a male–female convention. Twentieth-century
Urdu poets, like Josh Malihabadi and Firaq Gorakhpuri, widely known to
be homosexual, wrote in the male–female mode.29 From the late nineteenth
century onwards, Rekhti, a sub-genre of early nineteenth-century Urdu
poetry, which contained explicit descriptions of female–female relationships,
was suppressed in India as obscene.30
The recuperation of same-sex conventions in the English-language ghazal
is, therefore, an example of how cross-cultural travellings shift the identities
not only of individuals but even of genres. If the encounter with British
colonialism heterosexualized the ghazal, the encounter with Western gay
identities enables a recuperation of same-sex desire. Where Agha Shahid Ali
draws on his own identity as an Indian Muslim to write in the ghazal form

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 The homoerotics of travel: people, ideas, genres

(interestingly, English allows him to disguise the homoerotic content of his

work by avoiding third-person pronouns), Adrienne Rich, an American half-
Jewish lesbian, writes ghazals that are explicit about female–female amours.

Citizens of the world

Today, many writers, especially from the developed world, emigrate, move
freely across borders, live in more than one country and obtain dual or triple
citizenships. Their quest may be for foreignness itself, for the special creative
urge triggered by exposure to different cultures and histories. Many others,
from Asian and African countries, are still forced into exile, fleeing either
outright persecution or more subtle forms of discrimination.
France has retained its status as a site favoured by gay writers, despite or
perhaps because of its literary climate where many openly homosexual wri-
ters refuse to identify as ‘gay’ or attend gay literary conferences.31 Marilyn
Hacker’s sonnet sequence Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons
records a relationship lived out in Manhattan and Paris.32 Edmund White’s
The Married Man is based on his own life. American David Sedaris light-
heartedly recounts his experiences with his partner in France.33
Greece, too, whose past contributed so centrally to shaping modern gay
identity, retains its allure. For two decades James Merrill and his partner
David Jackson spent part of each year in Greece, and Merrill’s poetry, which,
like Forster’s fiction, develops a poetics of place, often evokes Greek life and
Greek men. Merrill and Forster also had in common an admiration of Greek
homosexual poet C. P. Cavafy, whom Forster brought to the English-
speaking world’s attention and three of whose poems Merrill later
translated.34
A forerunner of today’s globe-trotting gay writers was the peripatetic
Ronald Firbank, who often wrote a novel set in a real or imaginary foreign
land while himself living in another foreign land; he travelled around Spain,
Italy, the Middle East and North Africa; Venice was one of his favourite
cities.35 European and American gay writers today, because of their privi-
leged position, are increasingly able to identify with more than one nation-
ality. However, writers of Asian, African or Latin American origin, whether
straight or gay, who live in the ‘West’, tend to write only or largely about their
countries of origin or about ethnic diasporas.
Vikram Seth is an exception; he writes not only with the ease but with the
loving knowledge of an insider about China, England and America as well as
India. As A Suitable Boy demonstrates, not least by its wide popularity among
readers in India, he is one of the foremost imaginative chroniclers of modern
Indian life. But his masterpiece, The Golden Gate, which Gore Vidal called

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 ruth vanita

‘the great California novel’, nowhere suggests his Indianness, and predictably
came in for some criticism on this score.36 Its portrait of a gay relationship
between a bisexual older man and a tormented young gay Catholic reveals
how certain feelings cross times, places and sexual orientations, for example
when one man must stretch out his hand in the darkness to his roommate,
making the first move and thus risking rejection.
Seth’s lyric poems excel in working out variations on the theme of unrequited
or semi-requited love, the age-old, even central, preoccupation of European as
well as Indian lyric poetry. In his first collection, Mappings (1981), Seth play-
fully wonders how his bisexuality fits into identity categories: ‘In the strict ranks
/ of Gay and Straight / what is my status? / Stray? or Great?’.37 Mappings
features explicit love poems about men (‘Guest’, ‘Even Such’) and women
(‘Time-Zones’), rendering somewhat futile the years of media speculation
about his sexuality that followed. The media imagined that he first came out
on a radio talk-show in the late 1990s, or even later, when his mother mentioned
his bisexuality in her autobiography, or still later, when he was the lead
signatory to an open letter calling on the Indian government to repeal the
anti-sodomy law instituted by the British.38 His ‘coming out’ has had to be
repeated again and again.
From the start, Seth favoured the time-honoured ‘I-you’ form in his lyric love
poems, most of which avoid gendering the beloved. One reason this form has,
throughout history, been so popular is that it allows anyone, regardless of gender,
to identify with both lover and beloved, and it also allows the poet to get to the
heart of the matter by exploring universal rather than gendered emotion.
In his introduction to his Collected Poems, first published by Penguin India
in 1995, Seth suggests that an author’s national identity is ultimately irrele-
vant to writing: ‘I see myself as Indian . . . But . . . [T]he wish to write about
anything is such a rare and mysterious feeling that it is pointless to preempt or
constrain it by notions of subject or geography or genre’.39
The next generation of writers, born and bred in the internet patch, often
bypasses the question altogether. The protagonist of Kari, a graphic novel
published in India in 2008 by Amruta Patil, lives in Bombay, and is in love
with a vanished non-Indian called Ruth.40 Going by her appearance and
preoccupations, Kari could as well live in New York or London, as many
readers of the book do. Elements of Indian life (the house cleaner, for
instance) appear without being marked as exotic in any way, as do the
many signs of international identity. No sexual identity terms are used, but
Kari’s butch baby dyke ways are quite evident, visually and in words.
As the world shrinks, gay people are indeed everywhere, both in life and
literature, popping up in the most remote places and unlikely settings. This
frenzied travelling, however, should not obscure that journeying for which it

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 The homoerotics of travel: people, ideas, genres

is a metaphor, and which, fittingly, travel-shy poets like Emily Dickinson and
Mary Oliver have best evoked:
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
...
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save. (Mary Oliver, ‘The Journey’)41

NOTES

1. For example, by erecting statues of his dead lover Antinous throughout the empire,
Roman Emperor Hadrian publicly idealized male–male love in regions unused to
such idealization. Another example is the translation of the fourth-century Kama
Sutra, including its chapter on male–male sex, by nineteenth-century Europeans
like Richard Burton.
2. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 52.
3. For detailed analyses of this debate, see my essay, ‘A Rose by Any Other Name: The
Sexuality Terminology Debates’, in Ruth Vanita, Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile:
Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005), 60–9.
4. For example, in India, the word koti. See Lawrence Cohen, ‘The Kothi Wars: AIDS
Cosmopolitanism and the Morality of Classification’, in Vincanne Adams and
Stacy Leigh Pigg, eds., Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality and Morality in
Global Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 269–303.
5. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 118.
6. Michael Field, Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses (London: George Bell,
1893), 80–2.
7. Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘The Passion of Henry James’, New York Times (9 May
2008). In 1884, James had written a story, ‘The Author of Beltraffio’, based on
Symonds’s problems with his wife over his homosexuality.

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 ruth vanita

8. In Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press, 1997), Anthony Heilbut analyses Mann’s diaries, which were unsealed in
1975, and which establish his homosexual inclinations.
9. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, Tristan, Tonio Kröger, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter
(translation 1928; Harmondsworth: Penguin Modern Classics, 1955), 24.
10. There were several precursors of this expatriate gay–lesbian community, for
example, the circle around Harriet Hosmer and Charlotte Cushman in
mid-nineteenth-century Rome. See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women
who Loved Women 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
11. Terry Castle, in her Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1996), suggests that Brockett may be modelled on
Coward.
12. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago Press, 1982), 234.
13. ‘Sahitya ki Samtal Bhumi’ (1926) in Nirala Rachanavali, ed. Nandkishor Naval
(New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1983), vol. v: 156–61, 156.
14. ‘Navin Sahitya aur Prachin Vichar’ (1929) in Nirala Rachanavali, vol. v: 441–3,
441.
15. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938; London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1966),
109.
16. See Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle
Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006).
17. E. M. Forster, ‘What I Believe’, Two Cheers for Democracy (1938; New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1951), 68.
18. See Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from
Literature and History (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), especially 119–25,
161–8, 175–83.
19. Ibid., 194–205.
20. For a more detailed account and analysis of the controversy and a translation of
the text, see Ruth Vanita’s translation of and introduction to Pandey Bechan
Sharma Ugra, Chocolate and Other Writings on Male-Male Desire (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
21. See Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra, About Me, translated and with an introduction
by Ruth Vanita (New Delhi: Penguin, 2007), 64. For ranginmijaz as a term for
homoerotic inclination, see Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, 192.
22. For an analysis of the homoerotic implications of these animals, see Ruth Vanita,
Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary
Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), chapter 9, ‘Dogs,
Phoenixes and Other Beasts: Nonhuman Creatures in Homoerotic Texts’.
23. See Anannya Dastupta, ‘“Do I Remove My Skin?”: Interrogating Identity in
Suniti Namjoshi’s Fables’, in Ruth Vanita, ed., Queering India (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 100–10.
24. For a more extended analysis of this text, see Ruth Vanita, ‘“I’m an Excellent
Animal”: Cows at Play in the Writings of Bahinabai, Rukun Advani, Suniti
Namjoshi and Others’, in her Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile, 290–310.
25. Suniti Namjoshi, The Conversations of Cow (London: The Women’s Press,
1985), 32.

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 The homoerotics of travel: people, ideas, genres

26. Borrowed from Gillian Hanscombe and Suniti Namjoshi, ‘And There’s You
and Me, My Sweet Duality’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 24:3
(2001), 401–8.
27. Edmund White, The Married Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 66.
28. See George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney
(New York: Popular Library, 1978); Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield:
A Secret Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988).
29. See Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, 201.
30. See Ruth Vanita, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West
(New Delhi: Penguin, and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005), Chapter 8,
‘Married Among Their Companions: Female-Female Unions in Pre-Modern
Erotica’, 246–80.
31. See Edmund White, ‘Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf’, New York Times
Book Review (16 June 1991).
32. Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons (1986; London:
Onlywomen Press, 1987).
33. David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2001).
34. C. P. Cavafy, Three Poems, trans. James Merrill (Westchester, PA: Aralia Press,
1987).
35. See Miriam Benkovitz, Ronald Firbank: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1969);
James Merritt, Ronald Firbank (New York: Twayne, 1969).
36. Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate (New York: Random House, 1986); A Suitable
Boy (New Delhi: Penguin, 1993).
37. Vikram Seth, The Collected Poems (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995), 46.
38. Sheela Reddy, interview with Vikram Seth, ‘It Took Me Long To Come To Terms
With Myself. Those Were Painful Years’, Outlook India (2 October 2006); ‘Sex,
Lives, and no Videotape, and Transformative Grief’, Up Front Radio, 30
December 2005; Leila Seth, On Balance (New Delhi: Viking, 2003).
39. Vikram Seth, Collected Poems, xv.
40. Amruta Patil, Kari (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2008).
41. Mary Oliver, Dream Work (1986; New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000),
38–9.

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