I was trying to fall asleep while listening to the NPR Books podcast, which this past week featured an item on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Morning Edition interviews Clinton Heylin, the author of a new book about the publication of the sonnets who posits that Shakespeare never meant for the sonnets to be published, which I was willing to believe, since I know very little about Shakespeare, and most academic Shakespeare-speculation goes over my head. But then Heylin went on to suggest that the reason Shakespeare didn’t want the sonnets to be published is because the poet expresses love for a “fair youth” in many of the sonnets, and that would have been, he said, a “criminal offense” in Elizabethan England.

Well. I don’t know about that, and I was so skeptical I actually got out of bed at 3am to write this. I say this with the heavy disclaimer that I’ve read only some of the sonnets, that I don’t know a whole lot about Shakespeare and his time, and that, well, I’m a college student with not a whole lot of knowledge about anything. I’m not equipped to take on the Shakespeare speculators. But this suggestion struck me as dubious because homosexuality didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time. The idea of sexual acts called “sodomy” or something similar that may have been criminalized at the time (I don’t know for sure what laws were on the books under the Tudors or the first half of the Stuarts, but I’m betting there were laws against non-procreative sex) would likely have existed in a completely separate dimension from the idea of a close male friendship in terms of the Shakespeare-era social world. Mind you, I’m talking out of my ass, but I think that even if same-sex sexual relationships were going on covertly, I’m not sure that it would have occurred to the Elizabethans as a culture to make the leap to “criminal offenses” from the expressions of love/affection/desire/etc. in the sonnets and therefore to condemn Shakespeare for having written them—and thus, it isn’t entirely accurate for Heylin to say that Shakespeare’s love for the youth in question would have been a criminal offense, if it did exist.

I say this because I’m thinking about much later writers, like Whitman, whose expressions of same-sex desire went over the heads of many people, such as the contemporary censors who criticized expressions of heterosexual lust but were much less critical of the Calamus poems. Indeed, if I recall correctly, it wasn’t until some time after their publication that the Calamus poems got buried—and I’m fuzzy on my dates, but that might have been after the trial of Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s trial equated “the love that dare not speak its name” with the term “sodomite,” and neatly coincided with the turn-of-the-century beginnings of the psychological understanding of homosexuality that the German sexologists were getting up to. After Wilde’s trial (or so the folklore has it), young men stopped walking arm and arm on the street, as was previously the fashion. Wilde’s trial, to the best of my knowledge, was what made same-sex affection actually seem “homosexual,” and therefore, according to the standards of the day, immoral.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how far it’s possible to go in labeling Writer X “homosexual” or “gay” or saying that Writer Y’s work addresses queer themes or things like that. I’m sure that quite a lot of very important people have written on this issue, and maybe one day I’ll read what they’ve written and figure it out. But I do know that I have an inclination to place writers like Whitman in a historical narrative tracing literary expressions of same-sex desire, and maybe it’s legitimate to do that when his poetry was embraced as a cultural rallying point of some early queer movements, and when legitimately gay literary figures such as Ginsberg cited it as inspiration. But then cases like Shakespeare, which made me sit bolt upright in bed at 3 in the morning to go, “Hey, you can’t make the leap from same-sex affection to implying homosexuality; that didn’t exist in the 16th century!” remind me that I need to resist the tendency to assume that as many figures as possible were gay or bisexual or queer or what have you.

They also remind me of a key tenet of “doing history,” which will probably be very important to remember as I go on to do a degree in said discipline: you can’t impose the cultural frameworks of the present upon the past. Maybe Heylin was just trying to render the context of Shakespeare’s poetry more understandable to the modern NPR listener, and actually maybe I’ve just got all my facts wrong and Heylin’s explanation really does make sense. He’s certainly far more qualified to pronounce upon the subject than I am. But hey: to me, in this case “doing history” means recognizing that putting sexual acts and affection/desire together into a modern sexual-object-choice model of homosexuality or bisexuality or queerness is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and one that doesn’t work retroactively.

And I also have to wonder why we can’t just appreciate what Shakespeare had to say without wondering what his personal stake in things was. His words wouldn’t have captured Western civilization for the last 400-some years if they didn’t have a certain universality outside of his personal experience.

I saw a quite over-the-top, not terribly fantastic, production of Twelfth Night tonight, but I’m not going to waste time reviewing it–primarily because I’m typing this on my iPod, which is kind of a pain.

What I wanted to say is that Twelfth Night is my favorite Shakespeare, and not just because of the gender issues. What I like is the nuance in the plot, and the acceptance that even in a comedy, not everyone’s fortunes will turn out well. Of course, all is roses for Viola, Orsino, Olivia, and Sebastian (which this production made eminently clear by showering the stage–and audience–with stupid rose petals), but this isn’t the case for a lot of characters. Most famous for being “most notoriously wronged” is Malvolio, of course, who by the end of the play is a highly sympathetic character. But Antonio is often overlooked, and there’s an undeniable “love that dare not speak its name” quality to his unrequited adoration for Sebastian, 300 years before the phrase. And there’s Feste, left standing alone onstage at the end. Where do all these odd folks fit in the happily-ever-after scheme of normalcy that the traditional twin marriages enforce?

Were I a better literary scholar, I’d posit why Shakespeare made that choice–but as it is I think we’ve now successfully learned why exactly this is my favorite Shakespeare.

We read excerpts from Sexual Behavior of the Human Male and Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, Alfred Kinsey‘s meisterwerks (sp?), in my sex and gender class, and I was trying to remember where I’d read the Ginsberg reference that led me to believe once and for all that Kinsey’s methodology was flawed. Well, seeing that I own about as many books by or about Allen Ginsberg as the Princeton University Library (okay, that was slightly hyperbolic, but only slightly), it didn’t take that long. This is from p. 66 of Bill Morgan’s biography of Ginsberg, I Celebrate Myself:

[Herbert] Huncke seemed to know everyone worth knowing on the street, from criminals to policemen. In fact, in 1945 Professor Alfred Kinsey was canvassing people in the Angler Bar as research for his pioneering study of American sexual practices. He recognized Huncke as someone who could secure interesting subjects for his study, and he offered Huncke a few dollars to bring him people willing to talk anonymously about their sex lives. Huncke was more than willing to oblige. He brought Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac to Kinsey for study and their interviews were integrated into his monumental study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948. Allen’s responses undoubtedly were the most uninteresting of the group, since he was still a virgin.

Yeah, that last sentence is a bit funny—but I think the prevailing attitude is “come on!” Huncke was a transient drug addict who knew his way around the underworld and counterculture of ’40s New York. He slept with both men and women, and he brought Kinsey the trio—Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg. Kerouac, though he regarded himself as straight, had slept with men before; Burroughs, despite his common-law marriage, enjoyed his North African boys; Ginsberg hadn’t quite decided what he was in 1945, but his long relationship with Peter Orlovsky kind of turned him into a gay icon. And now let’s think: if you want to do a scientific study on the “sexual behavior of the human male,” and you want to extrapolate statistics such as what percent of the male population has had sex with a man, does it really make a lot of sense to seek out like the four men in New York who would actually admit to it?

Yeah, Kinsey was still ground-breaking, I think. But it was more in what he was willing to study than in his actual findings.

On a semi-unrelated note, I wonder if I, college freshman that I am, am really entitled to pontificate on quasi-intellectual matters when I haven’t the education or broad base of general knowledge to draw any informed conclusions. Your thoughts on the validity of my pontifications are always welcome. There’s a comments box below.

I was writing a ramble on my life’s trajectory in the past four or five years, and in the context (don’t ask. It’s complicated), a phrase from “Howl” came to mind. That phrase is “the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising,” and it’s rather odd that I thought of it, because the context had nothing to do with nitroglycerin, shrieks, fairies, or advertising. So quite odd.

But, see, the problem is that I was thinking of “fairies” with a totally different connotation than the one that I’m pretty sure Ginsberg intended. In my sex and gender class this week, we learned what “fairy” meant to urban folks in the early 20th century: it connoted a certain homosexual prototype. Before we (as American culture) got used to conceiving of homosexuality as being defined by whom you’re attracted to and have sex with, it was defined according to gender characteristics. Therefore, a man who dressed and behaved in what was considered an effeminate manner was classified as a “fairy,” and was considered to be “other” or “deviant,” though were often tolerated as an amusing novelty in places like New York. On the other hand, the men who picked up and had sex with fairies, because they were assumed to be penetrators as opposed to penetratees, were considered “normal” men—they weren’t stigmatized or considered “other.”

So now that we know what fairies were in the popular culture of Ginsberg’s period (basically think of the most offensive effeminate gay male stereotype you can, then import it to the early 20th century), we’re stuck. What can they possibly have to do with my high-school experience in suburban California, far removed as it is from the Bowery and the Village?

Well see, this is the thing. Because before my history class taught me what it meant to be a “fairy” in 1940s New York, and perhaps before my latest close-reading craze, it would never have occurred to me to get so stuck on the meaning of this word that I couldn’t finish the ramble that brought it to mind. I’m glad that I’m learning to think this way, and accumulating the knowledge that enables me to do so. This is, in part, what college is about—and I love every bit of it.