David Profumo
Coming Out
The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse
By Stephen Coote (Ed)
Penguin Books 410pp £8.95) order from our bookshop
Mae West is Dead: Recent Lesbian and Gay Fiction
By Adam Mars–Jones (Ed)
Faber 307pp £10 order from our bookshop
‘For me’, writes Dr Coote in his introduction to this Penguin anthology, ‘a gay poem is one that either deals with explicitly gay matters or describes an intense and loving relationship between two people of the same gender.’ ‘Homosexual’, the synonym he has chosen for the title, is a term coined by Karoly Maria Benkert in 1869 to describe behaviour which was beginning to be regarded as a disease after decades of being treated as a crime- in Britain, sodomy (as opposed to intercrurual sex) was a capital offence until 1861. Those who take homosexuality to be a natural variation of human feeling rather than an abnormality will expect to find some love-poems in this book, as well as poems of desire. Both are represented, and, like similar heterosexual verse, a fair proportion is explicit, erotic, sometimes leering.
Coote’s introduction offers a crash course in the history of attitudes to homosexuality that suggests, plausibly enough, the flux of tolerance, prejudice, hypocrisy, taboo and repression from Ancient Greece up until the present era of partial emancipation. He writes with authority, but at times he seems to forget that what
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german
You only have a week left to take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/