Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

by Huw Lemmey

English antiquarians at this time were often thought to be morbidly, queerly obsessed with old objects and the past, much as some decadent orientalists used fantasies of mysterious and magical other lands to escape bourgeois life.5 Back in England, Lawrence was shunned for having been born out of wedlock, and homosexual sex was still an illegal offence; for him, the Middle East seems to have opened up a new world of exotic, and erotic, experiences. These experiences were and continued to be, however, predicated on a view of the native population as ‘noble savages’ – representatives of romanticized primitive man, free to express themselves without the corrupting influences of civilisation. A 2014 monograph by Joseph Boone focusing on homosexuality and orientalism in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century anglophone literary cultures argues that ‘Western fantasies of the “Orient” ‘ contained ‘the potential for unexpected eruptions of sex between men that … disrupt European norms of masculinity and heterosexual priority’.