The pink elephant in the room or Polish media on gay interest things

[Martinus]

I just read three extensive reviews of Alan Hollinghurst's most recent book (The Stranger's Child) in Polish newspapers, each with a longer-than-usual bio note on the author and his past books (including, giving a short synopsis of the story in The Swimming Library and The Line of Beauty).

Can you imagine that neither of these makes so much as a suggestion that the author or any of his books may have something to do with homosexuality? 

Are the media in your country like this too, or were they like this and if so when?

[Valmy]

I don't think so...but then I do not read too many book reviews and even then not about books that deal with homosexuality.

[Eddie Teach]

Maybe Polish book reviewers are so enlightened they don't see sexual orientation, much like Stephen Colbert and grumbler don't see race.

[garbon]

Maybe Polish book reviewers are so enlightened they don't see sexual orientation, much like Stephen Colbert and grumbler don't see race.

Of course, minus the fact that they deal with homosexuality, Hollinghurst's novels wouldn't really be of note.

[Syt]

I think gayness/lesbianism might get mentioned in Austro-German publications if it's relevant to the topic at hand. If not relevant then it might be gleaned from notes in the text (e.g. "his partner" or "her wife" or some such). By and large I don't think it's mentioned or cared about much.

[garbon]

I think gayness/lesbianism might get mentioned in Austro-German publications if it's relevant to the topic at hand.

Yeah I think Marti should have added in the first post that Hollinghurst is a celebrated gay author.  You can't really discuss his works without mentioning homosexuality - as that's largely what they are about.

[Martinus]

I think gayness/lesbianism might get mentioned in Austro-German publications if it's relevant to the topic at hand.

Yeah I think Marti should have added in the first post that Hollinghurst is a celebrated gay author.  You can't really discuss his works without mentioning homosexuality - as that's largely what they are about.

Yeah, sorry, I assumed people here are familiar with his works (as they have been recommended to me in the past). Pretty much every book of his (and definitely The Swimming Pool Library and Line of Beauty) center around one or more gay characters, and homosexuality (and the treatment thereof in the British society over decades) are the central theme.

This is doubly ironic, considering that his latest book is about a gay poet who writes a poem for his gay lover in 1910 and promptly gets killed in the trenches of WWI - with the poem then serving as a recurring motif in a book that spans the 20th century and depicts changes in the attitudes towards homosexuality in the UK, as the poem is interpreted, reinterpreted and straight-washed by subsequent generations of critics - with the Polish reviewers pretty much doing the same to Hollinghurst's work.

To give you an example, The Swimming Pool Library starts with two gay male friends, who fuck various guys (with *very* graphic descriptions of anal sex), but develop a crush on each other. This is described as "a story of two good friends, each searching for someone to love".

[Sheilbh]

That does seem extraordinary.  Maybe it's a progressive policy.  They're going to trick someone like my mum looking for a new book to read into buying 'The Line of Beauty' ('a young graduate's poignant search for purpose in Thatcher's Britain') and they'll end up far more open-minded about the gay

I don't think this happens in Britain much.  There's a few occasions when it happens though.  For example the obituaries of Norman St. John Stevas who was a member of Thatcher's cabinet and a moderate, High Tory critic.  Because he was never 'out' most obit writers observed that but laced their articles with suggestions to anyone who paid any sort of attention to what they were reading.  The Telegraph:

Lord St John of Fawsley
Lord St John of Fawsley, the former Conservative MP Norman St John-Stevas, who has died aged 82, served as Arts Minister and Leader of the House under Margaret Thatcher and later as Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission; he was also something of a work of art and national treasure himself.


Lord St John of Fawsley Photo: REX
6:42PM GMT 05 Mar 2012

The Royal Fine Art Commission, of which he served three terms as chairman from 1985 to 1999, described itself as "the ultimate authority for consultation on matters of taste and aesthetics" — a remit which fitted Lord St John to perfection. Like Oscar Wilde, he put his genius into his life, affecting the flamboyant mannerisms of an Edwardian aesthete (proffering his hand in papal fashion, lapsing into Latin, deliberately mispronouncing modern words). At his Northamptonshire rectory he amassed an impressive collection of Victorian bric à brac and royal memorabilia, including photographs and mementos of the Royal family and a pair of Queen Victoria's undergarments.

Irrepressible, witty and disarmingly immodest, Lord St John was an expert on much else besides aesthetics. In the 1990s, during the break-up of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, he became known for his frequent television appearances in which he would give the nation the benefit of his expertise on the attendant constitutional implications, a role in which he claimed extensive knowledge of the inner workings and private thoughts of the Royal family.

It was never entirely clear how much direct access he had, though he was certainly a great friend of Princess Margaret, whose framed likeness, prominently displayed behind him, graced many an official photograph. But that did not stop him assuring the nation that, for example, the young princes bore no grudge against Camilla Parker Bowles, or that the Prince of Wales was a loyal member of the Church of England with no intention of converting to Islam. When criticised for his willingness to pontificate on any royal issue, however trivial, he explained that his motivation was a "desire to do what one can to help the monarchy and help the Queen".

In his role as Arts Minister in Mrs Thatcher's first administration, Norman St John-Stevas was said to be one of the only cabinet members allowed to tease the Prime Minister, whom he referred to as "the Blessed One", "the Leaderene" or (unaccountably) "Heather". He liked to tell the story of how he asked to be excused from a meeting because he had a reception to go to. "But I'm going to the same function," protested Mrs Thatcher. "Yes, but it takes me so much longer to change," replied St John-Stevas. Yet it seemed that Mrs Thatcher did not see the need for a licensed jester — particularly one so well-known for his indiscretions with the press over lunch.

For St John-Stevas did not so much leak as gush, providing an entertaining running commentary on the foibles of his colleagues (on whom he bestowed nicknames), spiced up with fruity society tittle-tattle. "The trouble with you, Norman," one listener complained, "is that you're such a compulsive name dropper." "The Queen said exactly the same to me yesterday," came the rejoinder. His ministerial career proved short-lived. In January 1981 he found himself exiled from the charmed circle in Mrs Thatcher's first cabinet reshuffle.

Yet those inclined to dismiss him as a lightweight were mistaken. Behind the affectations lurked a sharp intellect and a prodigious talent for networking. "People say you have to be nice to people on the way up because you might need them on the way down. But on my way down I've met people I never want to see again," he said after his dismissal. The quip was irresistible but misleading, for Norman St John-Stevas had a genius for making and keeping friends, and to those favoured with his friendship he was ever kind and loyal. After being sacked by Mrs Thatcher, he was duly rewarded with the appointments for which he became better known and which provided rich opportunities for him to play the aristocrat he had somehow always seemed to be.

His Who's Who entry reveals that Norman Anthony Francis St John-Stevas was the only son of an engineer and company director, Stephen Stevas, and his wife, Kitty St John O'Connor, and that he was born in London on May 18 1929 ("the same birthday as his late Martyred Imperial Majesty Nicholas II"). There was some confusion later when it was discovered that his birth certificate gave his Christian names as Norman Panayea St John, his father's name as Spyro Stevas and occupation as "hotel proprietor". St John-Stevas explained that his mother had hyphenated the name St John after she had divorced her husband. His father had qualified as an engineer but had never practised and had gone into business in hotels and property.

Certainly St John-Stevas was closer to his Irish Catholic mother. He was sent to Ratcliffe, a small Roman Catholic school near Leicester. He then spent six months in Rome studying for the priesthood but discovered he had no vocation. Instead he went up to Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge, where he became president of the Union and famous for things like jumping into the river in evening dress. After graduating with a First in Law, he went on to Christ Church, Oxford, where he was secretary of the Union and obtained a Second in the examination for Bachelor of Civil Law. He was called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1952.

But he "never practised, only preached", and became a noted academic lawyer, lecturing and tutoring at Yale, at Southampton University, King's College, London, and at Oxford. His career during the 1950s was studded with prizes — the Blackstone and Harmsworth Scholarship in 1952; the Blackstone Prize in 1953; The Yorke Prize of Cambridge University in 1957; a fellowship at Yale Law School in 1958; a Fulbright award; and a Fund for the Republic fellowship in 1958. He lectured all over the United States and held a visiting professorship at the university of California at Santa Barbara. From 1954 to 1959 he was legal adviser to Sir Alan Herbert's Committee on book censorship. His Obscenity and the Law was published in 1956 and became a key work of reference during subsequent reforms.

In 1959 he joined The Economist, at first to edit the collected works of Bagehot, a mammoth and scholarly task that eventually saw the light of day as a series of 15 beautifully produced and highly regarded volumes published between 1966 and 1986. He also became the magazine's correspondent on law, the Church and politics.

Having contested the hopeless seat of Dagenham in 1951, St John-Stevas won Chelmsford for the Tories in 1964, and remained its MP until his elevation to the Lords in 1987. In Edward Heath's administration, he was Parliamentary Undersecretary at the Department of Education and Minister of State for the Arts. Although generally regarded as a "wet", he supported Mrs Thatcher for the Conservative leadership against Ted Heath and became Opposition spokesman on education, in which role he got on famously badly with his populist Right-wing colleague Rhodes (later Sir Rhodes) Boyson, to whom he gave the ironic nickname "Colossus". It came as a relief when, in 1978, he was made shadow Leader of the House. After the Conservative victory in 1979, he was appointed Leader of the House, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Arts.

Despite becoming better known for his contributions to the arts, St John-Stevas made his most enduring contribution as Leader of the House. He inaugurated the present system of parliamentary select committees, placing them on a departmental basis and ensuring that membership was not controlled by the party whips.

His dismissal in January 1981 was a devastating blow, but he had no shortage of friends in the arts world and took on a clutch of appointments on national bodies concerned with theatre, dance, music and the decorative arts. He was created a life peer as Lord St John of Fawsley in 1987.

His time at the Royal Fine Art Commission was not entirely uncontroversial. The Commission had been a dozy quango which, for many years, could hardly even be bothered to produce an annual report, and it was hoped that his appointment would inject a bit of panache and excitement. It did, and he changed the public image of the Commission considerably. But critics accused him of turning it into a personal publicity vehicle (one annual report featured no fewer than six full-colour photographs showing the chairman striking one pose after another in the company of the great and good), and of allowing his own wayward preferences to take precedence over the views of the experts.

There was, for example, the affair of the Millennium wheel on the South Bank (now known as the London Eye), which was the subject of a blistering public attack by the Commission, even though at least three commissioners strongly supported the design. After a bad-tempered meeting at which Lord St John was reportedly rude to the architects concerned, the Commission's secretary, Sherban Cantacuzino, wrote to the architects saying: "I am sure that he enjoys putting people down, all of us have suffered from his bullying."

Problems magnified after Lord St John was elected Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1991. Academic politics proved highly diverting, and his frequent absences from the Commission's offices in London raised eyebrows. In 1994 the government called in the retired civil servant Sir Geoffrey Chipperfield to examine the Commission. His conclusions were devastating: the Commission acted arbitrarily and was not respected, and the chairman's office and car were over-lavish for a publicly funded body. Any other chairman would probably have had to resign, but Lord St John defied all predictions and was reappointed for a third term in 1995.

His time at Emmanuel College, from 1991 to 1996, was equally tumultuous. It was said that the dons of the historically Puritan institution first had doubts about whether they had chosen the right man when several of his friends were caught naked one night in the Fellows Garden swimming pool. While he certainly raised the college's profile (albeit particularly in such outlets as House and Garden and Hello!), there was controversy on the high table over the lavish refurbishment of the Master's Lodge and an expensive new extension to the college which some saw as a monument to the Master rather than a useful addition.

Some fellows were furious that Mohammed Fayed had donated £250,000 to the project, his reward being a "Harrods Room" and honorary membership of the college — a distinction invented by the Master. So bad was the feeling in some quarters that one tutor started handing out copies of the Master's pronouncements in his role as "constitutional expert" with a prize for the student who spotted the greatest number of legal mistakes.

Lord St John was also accused of spending an excessive amount of time with a small clique of mainly public school-educated young men who, it was alleged, were favoured with introductions to royalty and captains of industry, to dinners at White's, private theatrical performances at the Master's Lodge and long, affectionate letters. Such special privileges were extended to very few. Other undergraduates would recall the Master cutting them off in mid-sentence with some disparaging remark in Latin. To bitchy colleagues in other colleges, Emmanuel became known as "Mein Camp".

Second only to royalty in Lord St John's affections was the papacy. One of the rooms in his house was virtually a shrine to Pius IX, and in 1982 he published Pope John Paul II: his travels and mission. He himself was known to appear at official functions wearing the insignia of a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem (he was Grand Bailiff and head of the order in England and Wales).

In Who's Who Lord St John described himself, somewhat superfluously, as "unmarried" (the description, coming after details of his parentage, led at least one profile writer to describe him, erroneously, as "illegitimate"). He had a close friend who was a merchant banker, but claimed to be "celibate" or "chaste".

I think the Guardian is similarly silent:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/mar/05/lord-st-john-of-fawsley

The Economist outs him though:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2012/03/obituary-bagehot
Lord St John of Fawsley, born May 18 1929, died March 2 2012

[Syt]

Oh, come now, you could write an obit like that about CdM, and while he might be a confirmed bachelor, he's not gay, dammit!

[Zoupa]

I find it more interesting to note which passages Sheilbh highlighted as indications of sexual orientation. 

[Martinus]

That does seem extraordinary.  Maybe it's a progressive policy.  They're going to trick someone like my mum looking for a new book to read into buying 'The Line of Beauty' ('a young graduate's poignant search for purpose in Thatcher's Britain') and they'll end up far more open-minded about the gay

I think it's a bit of both. Incidentally, several reviews/teasers of "Brokeback Mountain" and "Single Man" here did not bother to mention these movies may have something to do with "teh ghey" either. I think it's the not-anti-gay heteros writing these in a misguided attempt to get people to see a movie they would have otherwise skipped had they know there is gayness in them.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Having read the thread it seems that a discussion of the author's homosexuality would have been relevant. Perhaps Polish journalism has only recently moved on from the "all poofs are perverts" line and are now now studiously avoiding mentioning it at all 

The case of St John-Stevas reminds me of the way such matters were addressed by a generation that have almost all died. Theoretically there were stringent laws about the practice of homosexuality, but this was counter-balanced by the attitude that other people's sex lives were "none of our business". So it was illegal but that did not prevent the existence and huge popularity of many flamboyantly camp figures in British public life. This is where Oscar Wilde made his mistake, he started down the legal route and the legal system destroyed him  . With greater sexual openness in the late 50s and early 60s the position of homosexuals actually deteriorated in the UK, thus leading to the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in 1967.

[Martinus]

Having now read a very open-about-homosexuality review of Hollinghurst's latest book in another newspaper, I have to conclude that the other "reviewers" probably limited themselves to reading blurbs on the cover of the Polish edition of the book - which actually do studiously avoid mentioning that the book you are holding has anything to do with homosexuality, as they want to sell it to house wives.

[Zanza]

I think gayness/lesbianism might get mentioned in Austro-German publications if it's relevant to the topic at hand. If not relevant then it might be gleaned from notes in the text (e.g. "his partner" or "her wife" or some such). By and large I don't think it's mentioned or cared about much.

I just put the name Alan Hollinghurst into Google News and found a longer text on his latest book in the conservative daily FAZ. It clearly said that it is among other things about homosexual relationships.