FEAR AND SELF-LOATHING IN PROUST AND THE GAY CANON
Marcel Proust’s iconic character the Baron de Charlus, his narrator tells us, is fooling himself that no one knows he’s gay. Charlus throws verbal daggers at other men he suspects to be gay, effusively praises Balzac for writing about gay people, and carelessly remarks about the good looks of the man everyone knows him (but no one admits they know him) to be sleeping with. “When Monsieur de Charlus was not talking about his admiration for Morel’s good looks,” Proust’s narrator says, “as if they were nothing to do with a proclivity—known as vice—he held forth about this vice, but as though it had absolutely nothing to do with him. Occasionally he didn’t even hesitate to call it by its name.” This passage, from the new Oxford World Classics translation of Sodom and Gomorrah , which came out last week, is perhaps a case of the floral-patterned ceramic teacup calling the floral-patterned ceramic tea pot floral-patterned. Proust lived a remarkably “out” life as a homosexual for his time, fr...