![]() ![]() ![]() Proust has some fun with his opening potted history of, as he has it, "inversion", but he tempers his playfulness with serious analysis of what it means to be gay in a conservative, albeit relatively tolerant, upper class milieu. Indeed, it becomes apparent that Marcel - in an interesting bit of wish fulfilment, perhaps - is one of the only heterosexuals in his circle, if not in all of Parisian high society.įrom the "caressing games" of young women to entire consulates staffed by youths chosen for their looks, athleticism and proclivities, Sodom and Gomorah would be a piece of high camp if it was less insightful about the sexual currents that influence, if not govern, all aspects of daily life. Others were less fulsome, including his friend and publisher André Gide, who castigated Proust for his cowardice in making his main character heterosexual. Indeed, following his death several essayists even praised Proust's bravery for carrying out the research necessary to tackle such subjects. ![]() But his reading public knew him only by his works, and therefore he was able to write these extraordinarily frank accounts of the Parisian homosexual demi-monde without attracting (to his noted regret) any scandal. Knowing this would have appalled him, undemonstrative as he was, if he had been aware of it. It was no secret among those who knew Proust - even in passing - that he was gay. From Marcel's chance witnessing of a spur of the moment coupling between an aristocrat and a tailor to the male bordellos of Paris, the book bulges with accounts of love at its most urgent, jealous, lubricious and clandestine. If volume one of In Search of Lost Time represents the novel's overture, and volumes two and three are concerned chiefly with Marcel's jejune preconceptions about society and their subsequent explosion, then Sodom and Gomorrah is, as its title suggests, unabashedly about forbidden passions. ![]()
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