Proust and bicycle riders

Back when I was an undergraduate at Yale, in the 1980s, an annual highlight of what then were called the Gay and Lesbian Awareness Days (GLAD — shortly thereafter BGLAD, and presumably still later an even longer acronym) was a talk by historian John Boswell with the title “Jews, Gay People, and Bicycle Riders”. The then-late-30s Boswell taught one of the very popular history courses of that era; he was one of very few openly gay professors at that time, and something of a cultural hero to many of my fellow students. The lecture described Boswell’s research into the history of attitudes toward homosexuality in the Catholic Church. (Boswell was himself Catholic.) His basic argument was that it is a fundamental error to extrapolate back from recent progress toward toleration and acceptance of homosexuality, to assume that the more distant past must have been even more benighted and repressive, more clearly condemnatory when not simply ignoring the existence of same-sex relationships. He was proud of having discovered a 4th century Catholic same-sex marriage ceremony text — the first I had heard of the very notion of same-sex marriage. But more generally, he argued that there had been waves of repression and acceptance, corresponding to waves of urbanisation and parochial retrenchment, and that the periods of hostility or outright violent repression toward gay men essentially coincided with the periods of antisemitic attacks.

The title refers a this famous Nazi-era joke, from the 1920s or early 1930s, that exists in many variants, but goes something like this: A Jew is bicycling on a Berlin street, when he is set upon by a gang of SA thugs who shove him off his bike. “Hey, Jew!” they jeer. “Who is responsible for Germany’s defeat in the World War?” The terrified victim replies, “The Jews, of course. And the bicyclists.” The Nazis are confused. “Why the bicyclists?” To which the man replies, “Why the Jews?”

Anyway, I thought this linking of hostility toward Jews and homosexuals was novel to Boswell, but then I read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, and came across this passage:

Proust… was a true exponent of this society, for he was involved in both of its most fashionable “vices”, which he… interconnected in the “darkest comparison which ever has been made on behalf of Western Judaism”: the “vice” of Jewishness and the “vice” of homosexuality.

It is somewhat shocking to see Arendt referring to Judaism as a vice — this is part of a broader technical technical argument that she was making about the uneasy position of Jews in European society — but almost as astonishing to see her, writing in the 1950s, putting “vice” in quotation marks when referring to homosexuality. It seems remarkable that she, at that time, would have felt the need to distance herself from such an expression of disapproval. I would have thought that precisely at that time it would have taken a great effort of imagination to see homosexuality as not definitionally a vice

.