Customer Reviews

Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-century England

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Louis Crompton's *Byron and Greek Love* sullied the reputations of many reviewers attempting
to dismiss it as impugning the reputation of a major poet. In 1985 it was still improprietous to
recognize the homophilic tradition - as if homosexuals would claim more biographical
pedestals and historical niches than they were entitled to. Crompton's *Byron* was held to be improprietous in the extreme.

Curiously, few objected to calling Adolf Hitler (...) even though he was blatantly heterosexual
and overtly homophobic - except, perhaps, those who objected to the use of "the perfectly nice
word (...)" for `sodomite', the same who never objected to losing "perfectly nice words" like
`faggot', `pansy', and `sissy'. There was always a value-added tax on homophilic words while
homophobic words spewed forth like vomit at a frat party. As Gertrude Stein suggested: by any other name,
the same.

If anyone doubted Crompton's overview of 4800 years of gay history, much of which he himself learned in the (...) oral tradition, his stupendous new *Homosexuality and Civilization* must allay all doubts about his *Byron and Greek Love*; it remains the definitive contextual setting of the complex homophilic man Byron and his work.

Today the public is getting used to the (...) reality that civilization is unnatural and that unnatural people have contributed to that reality out of all proportion to their expectable numbers.

As homosexuals came out, their oral tradition had to yield to the written. In that revelation, Crompton is a major expositor. He is amongst the (...)historians who decided, back in
the 1950s, that, while homosexuals had to lie to survive, they would not lie about their own history and the heritage that they sought to pass on.