Gregory Woods: Homintern

Gregory Woods’ Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World is an interesting look at some of the queer people and communities who have undeniably influenced modern cultural development, from Oscar Wilde to Yukio Mishima, and how these artists and communities have been viewed.

Woods begins by defining his idea of the Homintern (a play on the international Communist organisation, Comintern, which advocated world communism): “The Homintern is the international presence of lesbians and gay men in modern life. Imagined as a single network, it is either one of the major creative forces in the cultural development of the past century, or a sinister conspiracy against the moral and material interests of nation states. You decide.”

However, Woods makes it clear that he is not speaking of some actual secret organisation or conspiracy to make the world more queer, but rather a loose conceptualisation of the international community of queer cultural workers, the artists, writers, musicians, critics, aesthetes, sponsors and patrons who held salons and operated clubs and galleries and publishing houses and other businesses and establishments where culture makers could gather, disseminate their works and perspectives, pass on their world views to future generations, straight and queer. But at the same time, he reminds us that the “homosexual” has frequently been seen as a fifth columnist, as a security risk, as a traitor more inclined to identify with “his” own kind across international birders than with his country if birth.

“There was no such thing as the ‘Homintern’. It was a joke, a nightmare, or a dream, depending on one’s point of view; but, despite its lack of substance, it still occupied a solid and prominent site near the centre of modern life. ... The coining of the expression ‘Homintern’ is often attributed to Cyril Connolly, less often to Maurice Bowra, and sometimes to W.H. Auden; but Anthony Powell thought its source was Jocelyn Brooke, and Harold Norse claimed it for himself. Most plausibly, it was the felicitous invention of many minds, unknown to each other, at more or less the same time. Anyone who pronounced the relatively new word ‘homosexual’ with a short first ‘o’ – and that is likely to have included anyone with a classical education – could have made the camp pun. ‘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’. In fact, the Homosexual International was sometimes only superficially international and sometimes only half-heartedly homosexual: it was also a matter of surfaces, fashions and styles. The term tended to be applied to networks only of men, in part because those who thought of such a potential conspiracy as a threat tended not to think of women, let alone lesbian women, as having sufficient influence to be worth worrying about.”

Woods also reminds us of the at-times commonly held belief that “homosexual cliques” controlled access to the cultural world, offering preferential access to artists who were gay themselves, or incorporated gay aesthetics into their work. The Homintern may not exist, but it has been, and still is, believed to exist (think of the religious right’s harping on a mythical ‘gay agenda’), and thus affects the ways in which queer people, communities and culture are seen and treated.

Woods begins his meditation on the interactions of gay aesthetics with the larger scope of modern culture with an examination of the influences of Oscar Wilde - his art, his role in the aesthetic movement, and his homosexuality, imprisonment and exile. Wilde’s work influenced a generation of continental writers, many of them also homosexual, but the tragic circumstances of his later life reinforced an association between aestheticism, decadence, and sexual deviance, and motivated a generation of straight writers to “butch up” as much as possible to avoid any suspicion that they might be “like Oscar Wilde.”

He also notes the effects of psychological and psychoanalytical exploration of sexuality, including deviant sexuality, centred around such German and Austrian thinkers as Freud and Kraft-Ebbing. Woods suggests that these effects were particularly pronounced in England: “The fact that the new sciences of sexology and psychoanalysis were of predominantly German and Austrian origins inspired in some British nationalists and jingoists the suspicion that sodomy itself was being promoted by a conspiracy of German-speaking perverts against the moral purity of the British Empire.”

From these beginnings - which in combination mark the end of an era where gay sexuality was kept hidden and as unremarked as possible, by all but the most daring of wilful outcasts, and the start of the modern era of sexual ferment and freedom when the love that once dared not speak its name became able to shout it proudly in the streets - Woods takes us on a tour of queer engagement with culture and public discourse, from the literary salons of Natalie Barney to the ballet company of Sergei Diaghilev, from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and the Weimar Republic’s Berlin club scene to the idyllic pleasures of sultry Capri, and on to the post-war “Sodom-on-Hudson,” Greenwich Village.

The book reads like a massive combination cultural tour guide and gossip sheet to all things queer, following a somewhat idiosyncratic itinerary through the 20th century, stopping frequently to exclaim “something interesting was said here” or “here is where these people were” - and then proceeding to tell you absolutely everything about it. As an organising conceit, the idea of the Homintern allows Woods to trace connections, networks, of acquaintance, of influence, of correspondence, of personal relationship, between people, places and even times, giving a sense of organicity to the idea of queer culture(s). It is a “who’s who” of queer artists and thinkers, and a celebration of their lives, scandals and achievements.

What is lacking, unfortunately, is an actual argument in support of the grand claim made in the book’s subtitle. There is much exploration of the minutiae of gay culture, but not much critical exploration of its themes and subjects, or indeed of its influence on mainstream culture. What critical analysis there is, is mostly about theories of homosexuality, and the ways in which changes in society influenced attitudes towards being gay.

What this book offers, essentially, is a vicarious journey through the lives of a number of well-known creative gay people, rarely rising above the level of reportage about their notable achievements, social habits and domestic arrangements. The depth of detail, and the research involved to produce such a tome, is impressive. However, the Homintern ultimately dissolves into a simple narrative of who worked with whom, who vacationed with whom, where they partied and with whom they slept while they did all that. I don’t know what I was expecting from a book so expansively titled, but what I got was little more than a crowded landscape of biographical notes about people linked by a common sexual orientation and shared occupation.

Arthur J. Ammann: Lethal Decisions

Dr. Arthur J. Ammann’s book on the AIDS epidemic, Lethal ​Decisions: ​The ​Unnecessary ​Deaths ​of ​Women ​and ​Children ​from ​HIV/AIDS, focuses on an aspect of the victimology of AIDS that most of the other books I’ve read have paid limited attention to - the specific concerns of pediatric AIDS and the way the epidemic has affected mothers and their children.

Ammann is a pediatric immunologist, and is the first doctor who publicly identified the presence of HIV in children. His subsequent work was directed to understanding the methods of transmission between mothers and children, and advocating for appropriate care for this vulnerable population.

Ammann begins his account with the early findings of Dr. Michael Gottlieb, the physician who first reported a strange new immunological disorder appearing among young gay men. Ammann’s interest was professional. As he reports, “...I was working as a professor of pediatric immunology at Moffitt Hospital at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, where I had established the first immunology laboratory devoted to the study and diagnosis of genetically acquired immunodeficiencies in both children and adults.”

In August 1981, Ammann was invited to join an ad hoc study group exploring the new disorder, and his lab was chosen as the site for immunologic tests on patients. He soon developed an immunologic profile of the adults - so far, all gay men - with the disorder, but before long, he was confronted with the existence of three children - daughters of a woman who was both a sex worker and an IV drug user - with a similar profile. Testing of the mother showed that she too had the profile characteristic of a AIDS patient. This immediately suggested to Ammann that the condition was caused by an infectious agent. Discovery of a fourth child with the same profile, who has received multiple blood transfusions, added strength to the hypothesis that the infectious agent was blood-borne.

Ammann, along with Selma Dritz, the head of the San Francisco Public Health Department, Herb Perkins of the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank and Harold Jaffee of the CDC were the first to publicise the risks of contracting AIDS from blood transfusions snd other blood products. Later, he would work closely with Elizabeth Glaser in founding the Pediatric AIDS Foundation to further research into HIV infection and treatment in children, and, in response to the need for advocacy for at-risk mothers and children in developing countries, would establish a nonprofit foundation called Global Strategies for HIV Prevention.

Ammann’s narrative of the AIDS epidemic focuses on the effects of the actions, opinions and decisions of all the various actors involved on the risks faced by women, and particularly, children. From blood banks to governments to media to pharmaceutical companies to NGOs, his focus is on the children placed at risk by delays, by denialists, by misinformation, by the valuing of profit over human lives, by failures in planning, funding and implementation of the best available treatments, particularly in developing nations.

Ammann delivers a stinging critique of the response of the American blood and blood products industry to this revelation, stating “...it became ever more obvious that the primary concern driving most people in the blood banking community was their economic preservation and liability. In contrast to the medical research community, which rushed to put all its energy into identifying the infectious agent that caused AIDS, the American Red Cross and other blood banks chose to funnel their efforts, and their vast financial resources, into convincing the public that blood transfusions were completely safe.” He is also critical of the response of the American government, charging that they, like the blood industry, sought to deceive the public about the risks of AIDS. He also discusses at length the problems in obtaining FDA approval for the use of HIV drugs on children, despite their demonstrated efficacy in controlling the disease in adults. His scorn for those who disputed and denied the scientific evidence connecting HIV infection and AIDS, and for the media that gave denialists a stage from which to spread their misinformation, is clear, as is his outrage at the deaths resulting from the availability of denialist narratives.

One issue which he returns to is the approach to AIDS prevention and treatment in developing countries. He points the finger at the attitudes of influential actors on the global scene, particularly in the wealthy, developed nations - including pharmaceutical corporations and the World Health Organisation. Despite the emergence of treatments which dramatically reduced mother-to-child transmission, “...WHO, national ministries of health, and US government-supported research grants would turn a deaf ear and continue to recommend treatment regimens that would neither control HIV progression to AIDS nor dramatically reduce perinatal HIV transmission.” Ammann writes with anger and sorrow of those who began to see the numbers of infections and deaths of children decline with the widespread use of preventative drug therapies, but allowed women and children in poorer countries to remain at risk.

“I sensed that the impact of the successful treatment of HIV by ARVs in the United States and the dramatic decline in perinatal HIV transmission was diminishing the sense of urgency over the much larger and overwhelming HIV/AIDS epidemic in low-income countries. The numbers were telling—fewer than two hundred newly infected infants in one year in the United States but more than 600,000 each year in the developing world.”

At the same time, Ammann is generous in his mentions of many of the scientists, medical researchers, activists, and sponsors and donors who made possible advances in pediatric AIDS research and treatment. He speaks with admiration of Elizabeth Glaser, one of the key co-founders if the Pediatric AIDS foundation, and details the research of many of the scientists whose work was instrumental in finding answers and new treatments, including those funded by the foundation.

Ammann’s personal involvement with some of the key organisations responsible for funding and managing AIDS research means that, unlike many of the other AIDS narratives I’ve been reading, the story here is about the people and processes involved in the scientific quest for treatments. He looks at the actions of other actors in terms of how they helped or hindered both scientific research, and the implementation of findings, and he consistently reports the costs in terms of maternal and infant infection and mortality. Amman draws attention to a number of issues related to ethics in research and treatment, from the decision of the WHO to release treatment guidelines that recommended an inferior standard of care, to the design and implementation of research studies in poorer countries that so flagrantly violated standards of ethics that they would not have been allowed to proceed in developed nations.

A large segment of the book is devoted to accounts of the work undertaken by Ammann’s Global Strategies foundation in various countries, from the Dominican Republic to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These accounts highlight the difficulties in delivering treatment on the ground in countries plagued by poverty, violence and civil unrest.

In spite of the concentrated efforts of dedicated individuals like Dr. Ammann, the problem of pediatric AIDS remains. As he notes, “At the time of this writing in 2016, 300,000 infants still become infected each year, not because there is no treatment to prevent HIV transmission, but because of delays in protecting women from acquiring HIV infection and in implementing HAART [highly active antiretroviral therapy] for those already infected.”