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John Addington Symonds
(1840 - 1893)
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 Gay
Lives : Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to
Paul Monette by Paul A. Robinson
Paul Robinson's Gay Lives is a
comprehensive study of how the gay male memoir evolved over the
course of the 20th century. Focusing on writers from Great
Britain, France, and the United States, Robinson creates a series
of dialogues among his 14 subjects as he examines how each deals
with issues such as what it means to be a "man," how to
view oneself in relationship to a gay community, and how one deals
with having, or claiming, an outsider identity. Quoting at length
from writers such as John Addington Symonds (who can be viewed as
the father of the modern gay memoir), André Gide, G. Lowes
Dickinson (a close friend of E.M. Forster), and contemporary
writers including the late Paul Monette and Martin Duberman, Gay
Lives is not only a crash course on gay literary history but a
meditation on how often gay men (in varying degrees of
closetedness) have greatly influenced what we call
"mainstream culture." It is perhaps here that Gay
Lives is most startling; Robinson both explicitly and
implicitly forces us to reexamine how ideas of the personal, the
political, and truth shape all writing. Gay Lives is an
important--and provocative--addition to the critical literature on
life writing. --Michael Bronski
Other books on John Addington Symonds:
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Compiled by Rictor Norton
Excerpt:
John Addington Symonds was in the forefront of
the "bourgeois radical" men and women with socialist
ideals who were destined to reform public opinion in the 1890s. He
was a dynamic member of that remarkable group of men concerned
with art who worked towards a revival of culture, often in
conjunction with politics: John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde.
His specific contribution to the regeneration of society was as a
pioneer in the field of gay rights; he was the first modern
historian of (male) homosexuality, and the first advocate of gay
liberation in Britain. When he read Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium
in 1858, he realized that the ignoble behaviour of his fellow
schoolboys at Harrow had an illustrious past, and when he read
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in 1865 he became
convinced that comradeship had the potential for a no less
illustrious future. Most of his writings became part of a great magnum
opus on the love of man for man, and much of what he did was
devoted to the cause of homosexual liberation...
This is an excellent site for Symonds resources!
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From The Knitting Circle
Excerpt:
He realised that he was homosexual at a very
early age and had vivid dreams of being in a room surrounded by
naked sailors. At Harrow school his innate timidity and
romanticism caused him to be disgusted by the abundant homosexual
activity available to the other boys there. His confusion led him
to accuse the Harrow headmaster, Dr Vaughan, of loving one of his
pupils, and with the help of his father, achieved the removal of
Dr Vaughan from the school. This malicious act was to haunt
Symonds later in life...
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From GayGate.com
Excerpt:
In 1854 he entered the prestigious Harrow
School, where he was revolted by the rampant homosexual behavior
of the boys around him. As he wrote in his extraordinary Memoirs,
which were suppressed by his literary executor and unpublished
until 1984, "Every boy of good looks had a female name, and
was recognized either as a public prostitute or as some bigger
fellow's 'bitch.' Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a
boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk in the dormitories
and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there one could
not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports
of naked boys in bed together...
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First appeared in a book of essays, In The
Key of Blue.
The sexcentenary of Beatrice Portinari, which
was celebrated two years ago at Florence, compelled the student of
Dante's life and writings once more to consider the relation of
the poet to his lady. Are we to accept as truths of history the
facts related by Boccaccio-namely, that Dante's father took him at
the age of nine to a May-day feast in the house of Folco
Portinari, and that there he beheld Beatrice, the daughter of his
host, for the first time: "She was a child of eight
then," says Boccaccio, "more fit to be an angel than a
girl." Are we to accept the incidents of the "Vita
Nuova" literally? In that record of his earliest life
experience, Dante says that love on this occasion took possession
of his soul, and that henceforth he worshipped Beatrice, till the
day of her death, with steadfast silent adoration...
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From sonnets.org
This site hosts the following:
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