Deep Gossip

by Henry Abelove
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003
128 pp., illus. 5 b/w, Trade, $25.95
ISBN: 0-8166-3826-8.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

If you ever wondered what Freud thought of homosexuality, how heterosexuality came to be penetration-oriented, how an 'action' differs from a demonstration, or what turned gay and lesbian people into queers here's a wonderful book for you.

Deep Gossip is taken from a eulogic poem by Allen Ginsberg on the demise of his fellow gay author Frank O'Hara. Henry Abelove chose it as a title to indicate that the knowledge it contains is illicit but "indispensable for those who are in any sense or measure disempowered, as those who experience funny emotions may be, and it is deep whenever it circulates in subterranean ways and touches on matters hard to grasp and of crucial concern." I cannot think of a title that is more appropriate to convey the sense of intimacy and urgency in this mixture of historical, philosophical, political and literary essays.

Abelove covers a very wide range of subjects, and he treats each and every one in a lucid way, starting with a seemingly unimportant event or observation, developing the theme slowly and with humour, only to arrive at a startling conclusion, a point that rings loudly and clearly.

In the opening essay, Freud’s own writings and his refusal to treat the homosexual son of a well-to-do American lady as such, lead the author to a draw a summary history of the moral rejection of homosexuality by American analysts.

"Some speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse during the Long Eighteenth Century in England" is by far the most daring essay. Equally interesting for historians of sexuality as for students of economic history, the author conjectures that the rise of the industrial mode of production coincides with a change in the meaning and practice of heterosexuality. Statistics show a fast increase in the population of England in the period 1680-1830. Historians have never convincingly and completely explained what caused this increase, but Abelove reinterprets the figures and the facts and comes to the conclusion that heterosexual practice actually and mentally changed over that span of time. Some practices like mutual masturbation and oral and anal contact were gradually 'banned' to the realm of foreplay while 'sex' became to mean 'penis in vagina, vagina round penis, with seminal emission uninterrupted'. Sex became more productive in the process and the birthrate rose accordingly. Meanwhile, the work-week was restructured as well. Mondays and even Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which had been days of leisure and play, were turned in productive days——a process necessitated by the demands of industrial production. Sundays became, so to speak, foreplay-days, introductory days for a week full of labour. The analogy is clear, the coincidence too startling to be overlooked.

Three more essays in this collection treat some aspects of the history of queerness in America. One on Thoreau and the Queer Nation movement, one on the founding father of gay/lesbian studies, Francis Otto Matthiessen, and the last one on the literary inspirations of the Gay Liberation Front.

Whatever your conviction or practice, or, as Freud would have understood it, whatever aspect of your polymorphic sexuality is more pronounced, this is an utterly readable and enjoyable book by an erudite yet unpretentious author who likes his piece of gossip.