6 - The homoerotics of travel: people, ideas, genres

Summary

If there is some truth to the adage that there are two basic plots - person leaves home, and stranger comes to town - it is even truer that stories about same sex desire involve selves changed through travel. Protagonists move from the rural to the urban, occasionally from the urban back to the rural, and often from one country to another, in search of more congenial climes and of the hidden self. When people travel so do ideas. Ideas about same-sex desire have circulated between cultures throughout recorded history and cross-fertilized one another. Opposition to homosexuality often takes the form of blaming other cultures for importing it into one's own supposedly pristine society. As John Boswell points out, this tendency is evident in classical antiquity as well as in medieval Europe; it is much more pernicious and widespread today. The current wave of globalization, which has had many precursors throughout history, brings a new twist to the debate. LGBT movements in developing countries are frequently seen as manifestations of neo-imperialism, with 'third world' queer people mindlessly imitating 'first world' identities, like 'gay', 'lesbian' and 'homosexual'. This is the left-wing counterpart of the right-wing claim that homosexuality is an import from the 'West'.