The Non-English Sources
Paul Knobel
Bibliography of homosexuality:
the non-English sources
(author, title sequence with commentary on languages)
New York, 16-22 June 2009, Sydney, 29 October 2009
© Paul Knobel 2009
Introduction
This bibliography, which comes to 4,600 records in 39 non English languages, derives from Worldcat and comes to 97,715 words. Worldcat, emanating from the United States, is the largest union catalog of libraries in the world and covers the world, with national libraries, university and research libraries increasingly joining. The bibliography was made 15–22 June 2009 when searches for the subject term "homosexuality" by individual languages were done using the Limit to: Language box (eg "homosexuality" plus "Afrikaans", "homosexuality" plus "Arabic"). It must be emphasized here that records in other languages using subject terms for homosexuality used by catalogers in other languages (eg "homosexualität" used by German library catalogers) do not appear; however, English language catalogers have done in my view a fairly thorough job of cataloging books relating primarily to homosexuality in non-English languages. Even so not all known works on homosexuality in a language can be counted on to be found by a subject search for “homosexuality” for the simple reason that “homosexuality” is not always used as s subject descriptor when it is appropriate to be used.
The bibliography supplements the annotated bibliographies of homosexuality of Wayne R. Dynes, Homosexuality: an annotated bibliography (1987) and Gary Simes, Bibliography of homosexuality: a research guide to the University of Sydney Library (1998), both of which cover the world, the latter being modeled on the former. These two works together constitute coverage of the subject to 1998 and contain 4,858 and 6,129 items respectively. However, there has been an accelerated volume of published works on homosexuality since 1998 and probably half the works in A bibliography of homosexuality: the non-English sources are new. Though the items are unannotated, records can be searched on Worldcat where the complete library record with subject terms and other details (for example pagination and whether there are illustrations) gives more information. See also the huge gay history internet site of Paul Halsall, People with a History, which concluded in 1998 (the internet pages of Rictor Norton in Great Britain are excellent for English works as indeed is general internet searching.) There is also much information on the legal, social and historical background to gay male poetry—and thus to male homosexuality in general—in my Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry, published in a Filemaker Pro database in 2002, which covers the world, and which was reprinted in 2009 as a pdf file coming to 2,900 pages in 12 point Times Roman (in all some 1.02 million words). I also contributed many items to Gary Simes's 1998 bibliography. English language entries in Worldcat with subject "homosexuality" numbered 19,000 works in June 2009, that is at present nearly five times those in non English languages. Overall Worldcat had 25,000 entries relating to subject "homosexuality" in June 2009. A keyword search of Worldcat for “homosexuality” would of course produce more works: such a search on 28 October 2009 produced 52,277 items (including 17,716 books, 27,715 acticles, 2,851 visual materials, 1941 journals and 1,1864 internet resources).
The work has been published to make the non English sources available, especially to English speakers, but also to readers of other languages who it was felt would benefit from them (eg readers of Korean may want to know of developments in research into homosexuality in Chinese and Japanese while correspondingly readers of French may want to know of developments in Spanish, Italian and Greek or even Russian and say, Chinese). Library catalogs increasingly have non roman scripts so records are usually both in these scripts as well as roman script.
Works cataloged in Worldcat cover the following formats: books, the internet (web sites are being increasingly archived), visual sources (including film, dvd, video and television), archival, serials (that is periodicals, sometimes called journals in English), sound, computer and articles. A breakdown of found works in any search appears in each of these categories with the found set of records in a column to the left.
The records are listed alphabetically by language. Within languages, periodicals appear first, then works without authors and then works with authors (listed alphabetically by author). Some works have more than 2 records; these works have been left since frequently duplicates in the brief form given here give additional information on a work. The following 39 languages were found to have records with the subject term "homosexuality" (totals of records found are listed after each language): Afrikaans 26, Arabic 29, Catalan 14, Chinese 308, Croatian 4, Czech 30, Danish 50, Dutch 237, Finnish 16, French 1029, German 1044, Greek, ancient 1, Greek, modern 32, Hebrew 80, Hindi 2, Hungarian 12, Icelandic 1, Indonesian (so called in Worldcat, but known in Indonesia, the world's fifth most populous country as Bahasa Indonesia, "the Indonesian language") 24, French 1029, Italian 192, Japanese 206, Korean 23, Latin 2, Latvian 1, Lithuanian 2, Malay 3, Malayalam 1, Maori 1, Norwegian 38, Persian 2, Polish 36, Portuguese 221, Romanian 1, Russian 50, Spanish 751, Swedish 102, Thai 11, Turkish 36 and Urdu 3. This makes a total of 4,621 records.
The 10 most frequent languages for works relating to homosexuality apart from English (with, as already noted, 19,000 records in Worldcat in June 2009) were German 1044, French 1029, Spanish 751, Chinese 318, Dutch 237, Portuguese 221, Japanese 206, Italian 192, Swedish 102 and Hebrew with 80 records.
As can be seen the records are not exhaustive for each language (Ancient Greek has much more than 1 work on homosexuality and Latin many more than 2). Authors whose works deal with homosexuality or have it as a major focus of their writing eg the ancient Latin writer Martial may not appear directly though works on them do (eg in German a work discussing homosexuality in Martial by H P Obermayer); similarly the one work in this bibliography referring to ancient Greek refers to a commentary on Plato’s Symposium. Using "homosexuality" as a keyword will almost invariably bring up more records than using it as a subject term. But works given the subject term "homosexuality" by library catalogers can be regarded as of scholarly importance (and even the fact that they have entries in Worldcat shows importance). The number of records found may also relate to whether libraries have put records on Worldcat and the state of cataloging in libraries (eg, as already noted, whether "homosexuality" is given as subject term when it should; however in my experience subject term cataloging for homosexuality is usually very reliable: that is, it usually appears when it would be expected).
General comments
As already noted several formats are included in Worldcat records. Gay periodicals are increasingly being cataloged though holdings may be few (sometimes only1 library). Coverage overall varies from language to language but film is reasonably well represented for major gay films as is translation of such gay literary works as Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and André Gide's defence of homosexuality Corydon; however coverage of programs of gay and lesbian film festivals which now take place in many countries is poor. Books on television are starting to appear though individual programs are still rare; radio, one of the most important means of communicating homosexuality ever, is barely present (the great encyclopedia of Keith Howes, Broadcasting It (1993) on English television and radio in the UK, US and Australia is still a landmark work). In languages with a few hundred works there will usually be coverage of gay history, literature, literary criticism, art and music, as well as types of homosexuality (including increasingly books for young adults), social aspects, law and some coverage of science. Articles have been found to be especially helpful; they include book reviews and can be expected to grow considerably in numbers in coming years. Generally the periodicals listed can be accepted as the more important ones in a language (for a complete list of periodicals see the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives list, the largest in the world at over 7,200 titles and now available on the internet).
Overall trends include gay histories of particular nationalities (which frequently, but not always equate to particular languages) as well as an increasing number of histories of cities (eg Hamburg, Basel and Stockholm). Gay language dictionaries proliferate (eg in Dutch, French and Portuguese; for English a manuscript of gay language has been completed by Dr Gary Simes of Sydney though is as yet unpublished (but see his published A dictionary of Australian underworld slang (1993) which includes gay words). There is also increasing scientific discussion of homosexuality, including from the point of view of evolution and of the conceptualization of homosexuality. Translations into several languages of notable works include C A Tripp's The Homosexual Matrix, F M Mondimore's A Natural History of Homosexuality, Charles Silverstein's Joy of Gay Sex and Robert Aldrich's edited work Gay Life and Culture. Some languages, usually those spoken in countries in which male homosexuality was once illegal (eg Spain and Germany) have extensive works on law (English also has many works eg the barrister Montgomery Hyde's The other love: an historical and contemporary survey of homosexuality in Britain (1970) relies on court cases, which can of course be problematical as the full truth rarely emerges in them).
Generally research on homosexuality has occurred in countries which are democracies; it is notable that, after the fall of Communism in eastern Europe, in 1989, a flood of gay works has appeared in Russian and is beginning in other east European languages (eg Czech). It is also notable that in China where male homosexuality is not illegal some 308 words are listed; this total can be expected to grow considerably in coming years since China is experiencing an increasingly open gay movement. The recent 3 July 2009 decriminalization of male homosexual acts in India will undoubtedly promote openness of discussion though reassessment started with such works as Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000).
It must be emphasized that only works in non English languages are included here, so, for instance, English language histories of a particular nationality do not appear (eg Bret Hinsch's Passions of the Cut Sleeve (1990), which is a history of homosexuality in China). Many works cited are of course rare works in English speaking countries like the United States, Great Britain, and Canada and sometimes are not held at all in libraries in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand and many other countries. Library resources all over the world need to be built up.
A couple of what appear to be incorrect catalog records (works appearing for instance in a language group which appear to be not from that language) have been noticed; these have been left since removal of such a record could be based on a false assumption.
Finally all records cited can be checked by searching Worldcat or a country's national union catalog, such as Libraries Australia in Australia or in Great Britain COPAC.
Some notes on the languages and works from perusal of the records
Afrikanns, the language of people descended from the Dutch in South Africa is close to Dutch and Dutch should also be perused for works relating to South Africa. Arabic shows a growing corpus of works (internet sites proliferate, usually created by the Arabic speaking diaspora and emanating from the United States, though none is archived here). Catalan is spoken in the province of Catalunya in northeastern Spain, whose capital is Bcrcelona. where there is a strong independence movement; A Ferrarons in 2008 published a short history of twentieth century gay Spain in Catalan. Just as Catalan works may be relevant for Spain so Spanish works may also be relevant for Catalan. Chinese has a growing body of work with several gay histories, eg by Zhang Zhaizhou (a librarian at the National Library in Beijing whose real name is Zhang Jie), and the noted sexologist and author of over 30 books, Liu Dalin. The earliest modern history dates from 1964 and was compiled in Hong Kong and published under the noses of the homophobic British by Weixingshiguanzhaizhu (Committee of Scholars), the identity of whom is now known to be Liang Xiao Zhong (information from Zhang Jie). Homosexuality is not illegal in China. To date much material emanates from Hong Kong including, so far, the only generally circulating gay periodicals. In 2009 Shanghai held a gay pride week which opened with the screening on 6 June 2009 of the first film on Chinese activism, Queer China, Comrade China (which has English subtitles and can be bought on the internet for 30 Chinese yuan, less than $4 US); this film does not yet appear on Worldcat.
In Czech J Fanel's Gay Historie is a 500 page work (copy sighted: The Library of Congress, Washington). In Danish the work of Wilhelm Rosen, 2 very large volumes of essays covering the period 1628 to 1912 deserves mention. Dutch has a very solid body of work dating from a 1922 gay library catalog (see under Catalogus in the Dutch section). There are several histories, much discussion of literary works and several biographical works. The work of Gert Hekma is outstanding.
No country has taken homosexuality more seriously than France, where male homosexual sex has been legal since 1791. French works exhaustively cover the subject with a literary tradition going back to François Villon (about 1431– about 1463) with an outstanding one from the mid nineteenth century on. The current periodical Têtu is one of the finest gay periodicals ever both in coverage and artistically (in general, digital photography has enhanced gay periodicals greatly) while its predecesser Gai Pied (1979–1992) was also outstanding. There have been many recent historical works, dictionaries of famous gays (as in German), works on film (also prominent in Italian) and discussion of the conceptualization of homosexuality. The novelist and gay scholar Dominique Fernandez was recently elected to France's most prestigious body, the Académie française. Only one work by the influential philosopher Michel Foucault appears but he is the French writer who has had the most influence abroard in recent years (he was also a member of the prestigious Collège de France). In fact no philosopher since Plato has been more influential in gay affairs than Foucault. (A recent history of gay France from 1942 by Scott Gunther does not appear as it is in English.) Claude Courouve has compiled a notable dictionary of French gay words as well as important basic bibliographies. Prominent are works on André Gide, the foremost gay writer in France of the last century after the novelist Marcel Proust, the writer of one of the longest novels ever, who continues to fascinate as does the writer Jean Genet, who produced what is still one of the greatest gay films in the 1949 Un Chant d'amour.
In Finnish, where there is a very open gay movement (as is the case in Iceland, which has the world's first openly gay prime minister, a lesbian); H Kalha's book on the major gay artist Magnus Enckell is notable.
German has the largest number of works. It also has the largest list of non English periodicals (which date from 1896 with the famous Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for sexual intermediaries) which continued to 1923). There are fine bibliographies by Manfred Herzer of non literary works (1982) and a less professional one by E G Welter on homosexuality overall (1964). All aspects of homosexuality appear in German discourse which goes back to the 1830s at least when a Swiss milliner Heinrich Hössli published a passionate 2 volume defence of homosexuality with the first modern anthology of gay writings in a European language; discussion of literature, art and gay music are well represented. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay doctor and activist who wrote what is still a landmark work, the 1914 1000 page volume translated into English only in 2000 as The Homosexuality of Men and Women, is one of the foremost scholars; this work has the first extensive list of male homosexuals, mainly Europeans, though a 1910 work by Albert Moll whose German title means famous homosexuals had a prior shorter list. There have recently been a spate of works on the Nazi period 1933-1945 (and one biography by Luther Mochtar plausibly alleging the Nazi leader and German dictator, Adolf Hitler, was homosexual; this work does not appear in the works cited). A gay reading of Goethe has appeared (by Karl Hugo Pruys) and was translated into English as The Tiger's Tender Touch: the erotic life of Goethe, but does not appear since "homosexuality" was amazingly not added as a cataloging term.
For Ancient Greek it is interesting that the only work is a 1776 edition of Plato's Symposium edited by H Estienne. The Symposium, a discussion of love, is a foundation work in homosexuality. Modern Greek has an increasing volume of works, including several gay poetry anthologies, a much reprinted gay dictionary compiled by Elias Petropoulos and two works on the Byzantine period.
The two works in Hindi are sure to be a precursor of many more now male homosexuality has been legalized. The love manual the Kama Sutra originally written in Sanskrit (though translated into Hindi) and with a chapter on homosexuality does not appear; nor does Ruth Vanita's and Saleem Kidwai’s recent survey of gay India in literary and historical documents, Same-Sex Love in India, published in English.