Gregory Woods, _Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World_

THE SUBTITLE IS misleading, I would say, insofar as it suggests the book has a central argument along the lines of "Gay culture liberated the modern world by...," along with definitions of "gay," "modern," and "liberated." This is not that book (though Woods could write that book, I expect). This is something more like a survey of LGBTQ presence in and contribution to a variety of artistic and cultural milieus in (mainly, but not exclusively) Europe during (mainly, but not exclusively) the years  from World War I to the 1960s.

Was the subtitle the publisher's idea, I wonder?

Well, whoever does write a book about gay culture liberating the modern world will definitely profit from keeping this book at their elbow. There's been nothing like it since Jeffrey Meyers's serviceable but long outdated Homosexuality and Literature, and Woods's book is not only more up-to-date, but also more detailed, more comprehensive, and better grounded in the culture it studies. It is a great complement to Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization, which only gets as far as about 1800; Woods's scholarship rivals Crompton's but his style (thankfully) is not as dry.

As someone particularly interested in Anglophone literature between the world wars, I can only say the book is a goddamn goldmine.

Anyone out there wondering what "Homintern" means? It's a British joke dating to the 1930s, authorship disputed (as Woods discusses). The "Comintern" was shorthand for the Third Communist International, supposedly the master committee for international co-ordination among Communist parties, but in fact Moscow-dominated and eventually little more than another instrument of Soviet foreign policy. It had a reputation for being a network of manipulation of unguessable extent, and some wit (Auden? Connolly?) adopted the word to express the idea that literary homosexuals too had a kind of support network of unguessable extent, manipulating who reviewed what, who got which editorial post, etc.

Sounds insidious, right? Because straight male writers never indulge in log-rolling, or give their friends hyperbolic blurbs, or nudge grants and appointments in certain ways, or abuse their privileges in any way whatsoever. Yep, everything fair and above board.

So the book's title is a joke on the joke. Did 20th century gay writers know each other, network with each other, support each other? Yes, sometimes, and we're all the better off because they did.