http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/ap...rated-arts
EXCERPT: For years gay people were tolerated in the arts – and were then accused of taking over. Gregory Woods traces the networks of writers, artists, intellectuals and film stars who transformed 20th-century culture...
. . . Today, lesbians and gay men maintain a cultural visibility that is not new: it has been built up over a century and more. But the question of gay influence is not entirely gratuitous. That it was a hot issue in the 1920s and 1930s accounts for the invention of the idea of the Homintern. Lenin had established the Comintern (Communist International) in 1919. Homintern was the name various people jokingly coined to describe a sprawling, informal network of contacts that occupied a prominent site near the centre of modern life. It may have started as a joke, but it was taken all too seriously by those whom it infuriated.
What exactly was the Homintern? Was it any more than a loose web of similar vested interests? Were parts of it ever distinct communities or subcultures? To what extent was influence used by homosexual powerbrokers (Diaghilev in the Ballets Russes, Hugh Beaumont in London’s West End theatres, David Geffen in Hollywood) to further the careers of other homosexuals? Were they defensive formations, created by the attacks of influential heterosexuals? In short, how far is the existence of the Homintern true, how far a myth?
[...] During a discussion in 1949, when the architect Frank Lloyd Wright said that “this movement which we call modern art and painting has been greatly, or is greatly, in debt to homosexualism”, he was trying to present modernism as unacceptable; but on the same occasion Marcel Duchamp identified lesbians and gay men as being largely responsible for the healthy state of the arts: “I believe the homosexual public has shown more interest [in] or curiosity for modern art than the heterosexual.”
[...] One outcome of this sense that homosexual people existed in large numbers while still remaining more or less invisible to the naked eye was the suspicion that when they got together they were likely to engage in something more, something even worse than the indulging of a perversion. Notoriously, the networks of homosexuality seemed to transcend many more formal social and political boundaries, reifying crossovers not only between national and ethnic cultures, but between high society and the demi-mondes of bohemian artists, and so forth. The Homintern certainly helped cross-fertilise the arts. The history of cafes and bars in Europe and Latin America is full of artistic groups whose drinking and smoking oiled the wheels of conversation, helping to integrate gay men into mainstream cultural development....
EXCERPT: For years gay people were tolerated in the arts – and were then accused of taking over. Gregory Woods traces the networks of writers, artists, intellectuals and film stars who transformed 20th-century culture...
. . . Today, lesbians and gay men maintain a cultural visibility that is not new: it has been built up over a century and more. But the question of gay influence is not entirely gratuitous. That it was a hot issue in the 1920s and 1930s accounts for the invention of the idea of the Homintern. Lenin had established the Comintern (Communist International) in 1919. Homintern was the name various people jokingly coined to describe a sprawling, informal network of contacts that occupied a prominent site near the centre of modern life. It may have started as a joke, but it was taken all too seriously by those whom it infuriated.
What exactly was the Homintern? Was it any more than a loose web of similar vested interests? Were parts of it ever distinct communities or subcultures? To what extent was influence used by homosexual powerbrokers (Diaghilev in the Ballets Russes, Hugh Beaumont in London’s West End theatres, David Geffen in Hollywood) to further the careers of other homosexuals? Were they defensive formations, created by the attacks of influential heterosexuals? In short, how far is the existence of the Homintern true, how far a myth?
[...] During a discussion in 1949, when the architect Frank Lloyd Wright said that “this movement which we call modern art and painting has been greatly, or is greatly, in debt to homosexualism”, he was trying to present modernism as unacceptable; but on the same occasion Marcel Duchamp identified lesbians and gay men as being largely responsible for the healthy state of the arts: “I believe the homosexual public has shown more interest [in] or curiosity for modern art than the heterosexual.”
[...] One outcome of this sense that homosexual people existed in large numbers while still remaining more or less invisible to the naked eye was the suspicion that when they got together they were likely to engage in something more, something even worse than the indulging of a perversion. Notoriously, the networks of homosexuality seemed to transcend many more formal social and political boundaries, reifying crossovers not only between national and ethnic cultures, but between high society and the demi-mondes of bohemian artists, and so forth. The Homintern certainly helped cross-fertilise the arts. The history of cafes and bars in Europe and Latin America is full of artistic groups whose drinking and smoking oiled the wheels of conversation, helping to integrate gay men into mainstream cultural development....