Gays, Fascists... and Otters

Henry Williamson and Gavin Maxwell both wrote storybooks about otters. Williamson's most famous book was Tarka the Otter and Maxwell's was Ring of Bright Water.

In 1935, Henry Williamson visited the National Socialist Congress at Nuremberg and was greatly impressed, particularly with the Hitler Youth movement, whose healthy outlook on life he compared with the sickly youth of the London slums. He developed a great admiration for Hitler which he never really lost. He subsequently joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1937.

At the start of World War II Williamson was briefly held under Defence Regulation 18B for his well-known political views, but was released after only a weekend in police custody.

Williamson's publisher was a man called Michael Seymour Sewell, usually now known by his religious name Brocard Sewell. Sewell became a Catholic convert in 1931 and a Carmelite friar in 1952. In his subsequent career as editor, publisher, printer and writer, he commemorated and wrote up a number of lesser literary lights, including the gay Catholic paedophile Frederick Rolfe and the pederastic Catholic occultist Montague Summers. He also wrote on distributist figures and the circle of the Catholic paedophile artist Eric Gill. As noted by Oswald Mosley biographer Stephen Dorril, Sewell was himself a member of the Distributist League and the British Union of Fascists. He engaged during the 1960s in a high-profile controversy, speaking out against the Catholic Church's teachings on contraception.

Gavin Maxwell was "privately homosexual" and had affairs with various teenage boys in Morocco and at his seaside cottage on the west coast of Scotland.

Abel Hermant

Yet another right-wing gay French intellectual who got done for collaborationism, Abel Hermant was indeed an early (1885) contributor to the classic French gay Catholic boarding school genre. Having been a respected member of the Académie française, he was unceremoniously chucked out after the Second World War for having been pro-Nazi.

According to Wikipedia,

Hermant was born in Paris, the son of an architect. He received a degree from the École Normale Supérieure in 1880, and published his first volume of verse in 1883, The Contempt. After several youthful novels, he moved to ironic analysis of the popular mores of the Belle Époque and achieved popular success. His first semi-autobiographical novel, Monsieur Rabossonof 1884, established his reputation as a satirical social observer. Its follow-up Le Cavalier Miserey of 1887, dealt with the issue of homosexuals in the military.

...

By 1899 Hermant was well-connected in society; for instance he was the guest of Anna de Noailles at Évian-les-Bains, where he became friends with Marcel Proust. After a number of tries Hermant was elected to the Académie française on 30 June 1927.

During World War II Hermant's contributions to Jean Luchaire's pro-Nazi evening daily Les Nouveaux Temps, beginning in 1940, his open support of the Vichy regime, and his criticisms of the French Army, marked him as a collaborator. At over 80 years of age, he was sentenced to life in prison on 15 December 1945. Hermant achieved the negative distinction of being one of the four "immortals" removed from the Académie française after World War II for collaboration with Germany. Hermant and Abel Bonnard were expelled outright, in disgrace; Charles Maurras of Action Française and Marshall Philippe Pétain had their seats declared vacant and were not replaced until their deaths.

Pardoned and released in 1948, Abel Hermant tried to justify his conduct during the Occupation in his Thirteenth Notebook. He died shortly thereafter.

Hermant's early work La Mission de Cruchod (Jean-Baptiste) was republished two years ago with a new title and (mysteriously!) a picture of St Dominic Savio on the cover. (Don't ask me why, but do the Google search. Perhaps they just didn't know who he was!)

According to the current publisher's blurb, the story is about George, a beautiful blond fourteen-year-old American boy who, having been enrolled by his parents in a French boarding school in Lausanne, becomes the object of "particular friendship" of another boy, Jean-Baptiste, who is three years his senior. The protestant Jean-Baptiste falls in love with the younger boy at first sight, but, having once tried (and failed) to make love to him, then embarks on a new mission to convert the Catholic George to Calvinism - a "holy" cause which subsequently develops into a darkly possessive, jealous and despotic relationship.

Fascist Gays vs. Gay Neo-Fascists

When analysing the riddle of gay fascists, the question we must ask again and again is of course Which comes first, the fascism or the homosexuality? And not in terms of historic psychological or political development! Rather, is a man a fascist who happens to be gay or a gay who happens to be a fascist? Is fascism merely a means to achieving a more gay-friendly world, or is homosexuality part and parcel of his fascist mentality? If a man is a gay xenophobe, for example, is he for real? Is he genuinely concerned that hordes of foreigners (i.e. Muslims) will not "accept his sexuality" and are determined to kill him? (After all, normally the intrinsic Marxism of most gays makes it quite unusual for them to take any sort of right-wing political stance about anything. And if he's in the closet then, is the xenophobia just a ploy to put other right-wing people off the scent?) Or could he at a certain level be using his homosexuality as a cover for his bigotry? (Now that homosexuals are a protected group, could the racists ones be starting to push their luck?)


Fascist Gays
These are really right-wing liberals (or possibly neocons). My feeling is that normally they use their gayness to justify their xenophobia. In England certainly, right-wing gays tend to be very much of the liberal right/left. They're often academics and intellectuals, such as David Starkey and Alan Sked (the founder of UKIP), or Madsen Pirie (of the Adam Smith Institute) or Douglas Murray (who before he became almost the only English intellectual to out himself as a neoconservative, wrote a literary biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, who, like his gay lover Oscar Wilde, ended up becoming a devout Catholic). I'm sure there are similar people in America. Chris Crain and Jeff Gannon, anyone? - not to mention the Log Cabin Republican, GayPatriot and GOProud gangs - not to mention the notorious Peter Thiel, who is so right-wing in a libertarian sense that he is actually anti-democracy - which, if you think about it, is even more right-wing! But the American Left is much more homogenous and tightly knit, in keeping with America's duolithic society. There is very little room for any sort of split between gays and Muslims, for example. (Witness the hilariously awful film-version of V for Vendetta, where Muslims are such obvious, natural allies of the gays in their struggle against the Christian fascists!) On the continent, however, these sorts of people do exist, though they tend to be labelled "far right". Really they're neoconservative liberals. Geert Wilders is a good example, even though he isn't gay, because his politics are very much in the footsteps of Pim Fortuyn. Wilders is also a lapsed Catholic, and in France too the "far Right" FN are ditching traditionalist Catholicism in favour of racism of the neo-libertarian variety.


Closet Cases
Often of course adopting "right-wing" positions can, potentially, be a way of disguising one's sexuality. In Europe still there are people like Jorg Haider - another lapsed Catholic - who just happened to be gay. Haider was more of a closeted "traditionalist" rather than an openly gay neocon. The German post-war nationalist right has also had its fair share of secret poofs in high places. Michael Kühnen had to quit when he found out, so did Bela Ewald Althans. Similar things, it is now quite clear, used to go on in the old British National Front. Nicky Crane was notorious in his day. Martin Webster hasn't improved with age. And looking further afield, Terreblanche was presumably supposed to fit into this tradition, though to be honest liberal post-mortem fantasies about him probably owed more to the ongoing gay liberal sex fantasies about fascism (i.e. P J O'Rourke's famous nostrum but applied to homosexuals). Perhaps Ian McKellen will end up playing Terreblanche in the anti- biopic: it could be his version of Martin Shaw's Rhodes! Either way, I'm sure Peter Tatchell will enjoy it. (The implication of the film JFK, would seem to be that these were the sorts of people who killed Oliver Stone's hero.) And let's not forget Frank Collin!

Gay Neo-Fascists

In reality, as we have seen, fascism is a good means and end when it comes to justifying all sorts of whacky sorts of sexual deviancy. Then again, of course, there are the genuinely right-wing, genuinely gay pederasts. Michel Caignet would be a good example for France, Jessie Dumanch (perhaps) for Germany. James O'Meara (formerly of Where the Wild Boys Are) seems to think along similar lines.You can't really tell me that Dr. Fredrick Töben isn't a bit of a woofter on the side. And it's worth bearing in mind quite how many boylovers have been from a conservative, militaristic background. (For some reason Nona leaves General Gordon and Wilfrid Owen off his list of famous perverts and doesn't mention the famous Verlaine/Rimbaud relationship at all.) Think of T E Lawrence and Laszlo Almasy. Think of the Round Table Conspiracy - which the Marxist Left tried to associate with the Catholic Church of St Pius X - see here, here and here, and so on! (Then of course there are always modern right-wing gay classics such as American Psycho and Fight Club!) The 2005 German documentary film Männer, Helden, schwule Nazis sounds as if it gave a good overview of modern "Far-Right" gay subculture. (I haven't actually seen it.)

Lapsed Pagan Paedos (and Vampires!)

The first and probably the last "pagan" novel I ever tried to read was Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon.

To be honest, even as a moderately observant Catholic teenager, going to Confession semi-regularly, I'd have lapped up the incest. It was the paedophilia that actually made me freak out. So it came as an odd sort of relief to find out eventually that the author herself was actually married to an outspoken paedophile - albeit a gay one. (Now there's a surprise! And that last link is from this site, BTW.)

Before she died, however, Marion Zimmer Bradley gave up on her experimentations with witchcraft/paganism (and presumably gay and lesbian fantasy porn) and returned to the Episcopalianism of her childhood. Not unlike Anne Rice, I suppose, who returned to her traditionalist Catholicism after a bout of cancer (or some such unpleasantness)!

Rice's lapsation had seemingly gone hand in hand with writing homo-erotic/paedophile vampire stories such as Interview with the Vampire, in much the same gay paedo "Catholic" vampire tradition as Montague Summers. At the same time, she also brought her son Christopher up as a homosexual. (Now apparently he writes gay pseudo-porn of his own, but I remember seeing a TV interview with him before his looks went, and he was truly scrumptious!)

Sadly, Rice wrote only one Catholic book, about Jesus when he was a little boy. She also posted a bit on the traddy web forum Angel Queen. (And yes, that is what it was called.) And then she promptly lapsed again when it turned out that (Quelle horreur!) actually the Catholic Church is not terribly keen on gay marriage.

When in Rome...

To my mind this is another example of people seeing what they want to see.

The above is taken from side B of the Warren Cup. It clearly shows a handsome Roman youth making sweet gay love to a prepubescent boy. But it has been taken by some as evidence that “anal” sex is not a “modern” thing.

Personally I'm not convinced. Whatever the neo-Marxist-style revisionist historians of the “gay rights” movement may claim, Roman homosexuality (for which, of course, they had no word) wasn’t quite the same thing as it is today. My suspicion is that “anal” sex probably is quite modern, given that the Roman custom when males had sex with each other was “intercrural” intercourse rather than full penetration. And that, apparently, is what we're seeing here.

Up the bum was in fact taboo, though it seems to me quite likely that, that being the case, it was also thought of as being hilariously funny.

And that of course is the problem with objects like the Warren Cup: we have no idea of the "context". Was it supposed to be simply raunchy? Or was it supposed to be a joke?

Or, indeed, why not both?

'Le Vainqueur'

by Martial Adolphe Thabard

There's no doubt that this is Zeus and Ganymede, and there's not much more suspicion that the title refers to anything other than sex. This is Zeus and Ganymede doing it, but this time with the little boy on top as the bird writhes underneath in an agony of sexual expectation.

Britten's German Boy

On the 'plane, on my way to a very enjoyable and all too brief holiday in Germany, I read in The Times's obits (which I don't normally peruse because I tend to avoid the Murdoch Press but this time I was on a BA flight so it was free) the melancholy news that one of Benjamin Britten's boys had died. He was only 96.

A very handsome young German lad, whom Britten had originally met in Florence during the halcyon early days of the Nazi regime in Germany, Wolff Scherchen (who would later change his name to the more English-sounding John Woolford) described their first encounter.

They first met at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Florence in March 1934, when Wulff was 13. He was with his father, a well-known conductor, while the 20-year-old Britten was in Italy to hear a performance of his Phantasy Quartet. Scherchen’s recollection was that it poured with rain and Britten shared his raincoat. “He opened it out, stuck his right arm into the right sleeve and got me to put my left arm into the left sleeve. The mac was big enough to accommodate us both.” 

[Telegraph]

Whatever else one can say about Britten, he didn't waste time.