If there are any more university-press bookstores around, look for Gregory Woods' Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (Yale) in the section called Dish, just left of Cookbooks (Ancient Sumerian Tapas , Burnt Sugar: 10 Best Desserts from Cleopatra's Library). Devotees of LGBT cultural history who buy it will want to file it at home under Reference, Frequent �" but, best of all, LGBT readers of all stripes may keep it on their nightstands. It's delicious, satisfying reading. Even readers knowledgeable about post-Oscar Wilde gay culture are unlikely to read more than a paragraph or two without learning something they did not know, and I cheerfully confess that my most frequent margin note was "!!!".
In Homintern, Woods' career-capping "summa," the noted British gender-studies specialist and LGBT historian marshals the findings of a lifetime's avid research around a single, clear organizing idea. He defines his tongue-twisting central term in a taut first sentence: "The Homintern is the international presence of lesbians and gay men in modern life." The wary reader will have noted the similarity to "Comintern," Lenin's Communist International. Woods is characteristically thorough in listing all the individuals who may have coined the gay-altered term. "'Homintern' was the name Connolly, Auden and others jokingly gave the sprawling, informal network of friendships that Cold War conspiracy theorists would later come to think of as 'the international homosexual conspiracy.'" To reduce Woods' intricately woven, 350-page tapestry into a hypothesis and response, the research question would be, Was there a Homintern?, and the answer would be a rip-roaring Yes. To the corollary question, Was it a conspiracy?, the answer would depend on how you viewed gay culture, one of the unquestioned driving forces of modernity itself.
Woods is clear that during the last century's Cold War, "national-security" agencies, and none more that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, "followed the Soviets and the Nazis by starting to take seriously the very existence of homosexuals as a potentially subversive conspiracy." But the author traces the political trends in their cultural undercurrents and manifestations, allowing his book to press beyond such questions as, Did you have to be/know/like/associate with homosexuals to get anywhere in the world of culture?, or, Did you have to be a Friend of Dorothy's to take part in the phenomenon by means of which The Wizard of Oz became one of the best-selling and most-loved movies of all time?
The range and depth of Woods' scholarship are remarkable, but the power of Homintern owes as much to the unabated vitality of his writing. In subchapters of a few pages each, he walks the reader through matters as complex as the scientific interest in other-sexuality that emerged in 19th-century Germany and the tortured history of individual nations' laws regarding the criminality of homosexuality. Still, the preponderance of evidence is regularly offset by the more engaging accounts of the travels of gay individuals and groups.
Early on is his detailed look at the complex of artistic forces that spun around Serge Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, a saga that has not altogether faded when we read, hundreds of pages later, that when Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, who had had a brief, restrained affair with teenage Russian refugee Boris Kochno, and who had packed the boy off to Warsaw in the lad's best interest, next met Kochno in Paris, he was Diaghilev's latest conquest.
Books as scholarly and scrupulously documented as Homintern are years in the making. I couldn't help wondering if the time lapse accounted for Woods' neglecting to confirm or deny Robert Craft's shocking "revelation" of 2013, namely, that at the time of the legendary 1913 Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky was involved sexually and romantically with men.
The cavalcade of creators and innovators that tumble through Woods' pages is all but overwhelming, but about the time the sheer density of information (and the complexity of the personal networks) verges on overkill, Woods brings the reader back to earth with the smilingly mundane. Who would not want to know that the prima ballerina of the Swedish Ballet, outraged (and fearful of being upstaged) by the gay goings-on around her, decried a "cult of Vaseline?"
Given its scope, Homintern is remarkably even-handed, taking in individuals from cultures North and South, East and West, high and low. The author gives all credit where it is due but is unsparing in his characterizations of the more unsavory personalities, such as Philip Johnson, American architect of the International School, who picked up a penniless Virgil Thomson, eventually a highly influential composer and music critic, in Paris, treating him with ship fare home. And lesbians get, if not quite equal time, deep and serious consideration.
Woods is particularly strong about individuals who warrant a more prominent place on our present-day cultural map than they have. His thumbnail portraits of Natalie Barney, Federico Garcia Lorca, Manuel Puig and the ill-starred Pier Paolo Pasolini are correcting, balancing and thoughtful. And if you, like me, think you're versed in historical gay fiction, you're in for a shock; sprinkled among Woods' pages is a vast syllabus that could last a queer devotee a lifetime.