It may have started as a joke, but it was taken all too seriously by those whom it infuriated.Ī costume design for a Ballets Russes production of Alexander Tcherepnin’s Narcisse, 1911. Homintern was the name various people jokingly coined to describe a sprawling, informal network of contacts that occupied a prominent site near the centre of modern life. Lenin had established the Comintern (Communist International) in 1919. That it was a hot issue in the 1920s and 1930s accounts for the invention of the idea of the Homintern. Today, lesbians and gay men maintain a cultural visibility that is not new: it has been built up over a century and more.īut the question of gay influence is not entirely gratuitous. But let’s not get too excited: you have to run down the lists quite a long way before coming to Alan Hollinghurst, who won the Man Booker prize in 2004 and Marlon James last year, and to Thom Gunn and Duffy, who won the first and second Forward prizes in 19 respectively. Only two weeks previously, Jackie Kay had been named as the new makar, the national poet for Scotland. (Not many lesbians, though, at this stratospheric level.) Had the Ted Hughes panel been formally dressed, they might have come festooned with their medals: Kay with the MBE, Smith the CBE, and Duffy the OBE, CBE and DBE. The Order of Merit includes Neil MacGregor and Hockney again. Skim down the lists of the higher national honours and you’ll find, among the Companions of Honour, David Hockney, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Howard Hodgkin and the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. It could be that official recognition is a relevant indicator here.
However, I feel comfortable with having raised the issue, since it prompts interesting questions about the nature and influence of gay culture – whether it is a stagnant oxbow or a strong current at the centre of the mainstream. And it would have been no less irrelevant if they had decided to give the prize to the short-listed poet Chris Beckett, who happens to be a gay man. The individuals in question were not there to represent a sexual minority, even if they were representatives of it. Of course, by highlighting the sexualities of these writers, I’m engaging in much the same impertinence.