Pages Passed From Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English From 1748 to 1914. - book reviews

The best way to understand what Mark Mitchell and

David Leavitt have produced in their fascinating new

anthology Pages Passed From Hand to Hand is to take a

moment to look through the rest of your copy of The

Advocate. Now imagine being homosexual in a time when

there was no such thing as The Advocate, when the

flourishing public gay and lesbian culture of our time did

not exist.

It wasn't so long ago that libraries kept our classics

locked up. Indirection, codes, euphemism, and secrecy

structured and restricted access to the gay world. Still, we

did find one another. Pages Passed From Hand to Hand

republishes writing that homosexuals once collected and

shared in secret for stimulation and sustenance. This

invaluable collection is like reverse science fiction, allowing

us to travel backward in time and experience an age when

gays took enormous risks in order to read and speak the

truth even in private.

These writings are still being passed from hand to hand.

In their research Mitchell and Leavitt describe reading

"photocopies of photocopies that scholars and

antiquarians sent to us; books of which only one copy

existed in one `special collection.'" They've chosen works

by English and American authors familiar and unfamiliar,

homosexual and not. Like other writers of their day,

Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Henry

James (writers often thought nowadays

to have been gay) contribute coded

selections. But readers who are alert to

same-sex desire can, as they always have,

see through the surfaces of the stories to

their and homosexual themes.

The real discoveries here are works

that have been lost to the reading public.

They are often hauntingly familiar, partly

because they have been incorporated into

the gay literature we know but also

because they concern the same

uncomfortable and confused feelings gays

experience even now.

The collection includes works from

1748 to 1914, the year in which novelist

E.M. Forster posthumously broke

through the codes and dealt openly with

homosexual love in his classic Maurice.

Some writings deal with gay subjects,

including stories by Ambrose Bierce and

Kenneth Grahame (of Wind in the

Willows fame) and an excerpt from Owen

Wister's The Virginian: A Horseman of the

Plains. Then there are works by writers

who were themselves gay: E.F. Benson,

Saki, and Forster. Maurice, which

concludes the collection, has never

seemed so affecting as it does coming at

the end of the tradition that formed it.

Each gay reader will respond

differently to different selections, but this

gay reader was especially delighted with

Alan Dale's 1889 novella A Marriage

Below Zero. It tells the story of a young

Englishwoman's marriage to a

homosexual--from her point of view. The few who

know this work have seen it as

homophobic and negative. But I gratefully

agree with Mitchell and Leavitt that its

unsympathetic first-person narrative is

appropriate, as if Mrs. Oscar Wilde were

writing about her marriage.

The writers here are inevitably a

remarkable bunch--peculiar and admirable,

as people must be to brook sexual

convention. Their work is full of fun,

eros, torment, romance, and men and

boys of all sorts, seen through the

kaleidoscope of desire, shame, pity,

hatred, friendship, and love. This book

belongs in every gay library, to be read

and reread. It is like a time capsule,

carefully secreted in the cornerstone of

our gay foundation and now restored to

us as a reminder and a treasure.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group