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, from his school days on, and was wonderfully verbose about gay matters in his writings. However, he was not above writing a friend to ask them not to discuss his orientation, or adding to the same letter a sudden unusual, and rather transparent, postscript about having just spotted a ravishing blonde woman in a cafe. When the writer Andre Gide, the most prominent French advocate for homosexuality of their time, made a remark about Proust’s sexuality, Marcel tossed off a livid letter suggesting damning remarks could be made about Gide too if he could not hold his tongue. (Carter 117.) Proust is fooling no one about his now-famous orientation, and we love him for it. So why doesn’t he seem to love the Baron for it? Why, as has often been asked, did so brave a homosexual in writing about homosexuality go so far out of his way to make his otherwise very autobiographical narrator heterosexual? The same question is asked about his Judaism, as he was part-Jewish but made the hero of his novel Christian.

Having spent almost exactly three months this summer reading all 3,300 pages of Proust’s great seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu, in the original French, or Remembrance of Things Past in the original English translation), I was struck by all the things one is supposed to be struck by when reading this amazing and enduring marathon of a novel: the delicate portrait of memory and childhood, the poignant arc documenting the peak and decline of the French aristocracy at the end of the Belle Epoque, the stinging touch with the comic and the ironic. And I was excited by its close and expansive examination of a gay culture that is otherwise mostly hidden to us. Nonetheless I was also struck by how neatly the book fits a recurring theme in a certain canon of great gay works that I read in the last six months. This “canon” was selected by me at pleasure (as Eve Kasofsky Sedgwick said of the books she selected for her iconic contribution to queer literary theory, Between Men). The books I picked ranged from 1891 to 1956. The recurring theme that caught my eye in them is that they all either document or display a healthy dose of what my generation of gay persons are often inclined to call (clumsily) gay self-loathing. I know I’m using an anachronism here, applying the standards of the present to the past, and using a term that gets misused to boot. But the impact of shame in these books is striking and well worth tracking.

It was Sedgwick, in her second book Epistemology of the Closet, who posited that In Search of Lost Time helped form the foundation both of a newly emerging homosexual canon—and  a “homophobic” canon. “Billy Budd and Dorian Gray are among the texts that have set the terms for a modern homosexual identity,” Sedgwick wrote. “And in the Euro-American culture of the past century it has been notable that foundational texts of modern gay culture--A la recherche du temps perdu and Death in Venice, for instance, along with Dorian Gray and Billy Budd—have often been the identical texts that mobilized and promulgated the most potent images and categories for (what is now visible as) the canon of homophobic mastery” (Epistemology 49).

This brilliant observation is just about orphaned in the introduction of Sedgwick’s second iconic book. She observes this interesting truth and then moves on to other related matters. The present essay, though it’s not an attempt to enter the fields of queer studies or Proust scholarship, elaborates on Sedgwick’s fascinating assertion, by looking at the 11 or so books I coincidentally read this year that demonstrate its accuracy. They include all seven parts of Proust’s masterwork, but also Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956), Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891). Taken together they create a complicated picture of an evolution of gay literature that reveals how unavoidable shame was to the gay person in the first half of the 20^th century and the last decade of the 19th.

The application of the word “self-loathing” to Proust is somewhat controversial. Gide complained to Proust himself that the young writer had emphasized the difficulty of the gay life at the exclusion of its joy. On the one hand the use of words like self-loathing is not an uncommon response from modern readers. One reader on Reddit three years ago, for example, made the synonym “self-hate” the centerpiece of their commentary: “The thing that started to wear me down about the later books is the gay self hate,” the Redditor wrote. “The light and intelligence of the writing gets dimmer--it’s not as good because you feel it isn’t true or he isn’t saying what he really wants to say.” On the other hand, certain critics have leapt to Proust’s defense on this count. “Proust was neither an anti-Semite nor a homophobe,” Harold Bloom wrote in his book The Western Canon. “Proust’s humor can seem harsh in regard to the masochistic homosexuality of Charlus or the Jewish insecurities of the unpleasant Bloch, but we do Proust violence if we judge him to be chagrined by either his Jewish ancestry or his homosexual orientation” (Bloom 368-369).

But why would we assume he lacks the slightest degree of chagrin? He himself said that the pressure not to be a homosexual in his time was so great that only true homosexuals ever followed their passions. What homosexual in 1913 when Proust’s started publishing his masterpiece or in 1922 when he died halfway through could resist the influence of shame? What I would like to remember about Proust is his groundbreaking compassion and sympathy for what he called the “race” of homosexuals, “a race weighed down by a curse that must live with lies and deceit, since they know that their desire, the greatest joy in life for any creature, is held to be punishable and shameful and dare not speak its name.” But equally memorable are his bitterly negative statements about his fellow homosexuals. He could not even bring himself to endorse a movement to support their cause: “I’ve sought to forestall for the time being the terrible error which would consist, in the same way as a Zionist movement has been encouraged, in creating a sodomist movement and in rebuilding Sodom.” Proust goes so far, if satirically, as to suggest God should have smote all the homosexuals in Sodom when he had the chance:

“All the guilty sodomists were allowed to escape, even if, catching sight of a young boy they looked back, like Lot’s wife, without being changed, like her, into a pillar of salt. That’s how they had an abundant posterity with whom this remained a habitual gesture, exactly as with those debauched women who, while pretending to look at a display of shoes in a shop window, look round at a student. These descendants of the sodomists, so numerous that we can apply another verse from Genesis to them: ‘If a man be able to number the dust of the earth, so thy seed also shall be numbered’, have established themselves over all the earth, they’ve had access to all the professions and are so easily admitted into the most exclusive clubs that when a sodomist is not allowed to enter, the black balls mostly belong to the sodomists themselves, but who are careful to lay the blame on that sodomy, having inherited the lie which allowed their ancestors to leave the accursed city. It’s possible they will go back there one day. For they certainly form in every land an Oriental colony, cultured, musical, slanderous, composed of charming qualities and unbearable defects.”

It is of course a mark of how good a writer Proust is that he attempted to master, and largely succeeded in mastering, both these “charming qualities” and these “unbearable defects.” But it’s easy to underestimate how stinging—and general—his depiction of the “defects” can be. Bloom is not the only one who suggests the depiction of Charlus is the only place he gets sharp about homosexuals. So does historian Saul Friedländer in his slim 2020 volume of Proust criticism, Proustian Uncertainties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time. Friedländer attempts to answer the question I raised above, of why the narrator is heterosexual. As an example of the dual nature of Proust’s depiction of homosexuals he cites the following passage from Sodom and Gomorrah saying that Charlus:

"…was frightening and looked like an excommunicate, the various compromises to which he had been driven by the need to indulge his taste and to keep it secret having had the effect of bringing to the surface of his face precisely what the Baron sought to conceal, a debauched life betrayed by moral degeneration. This last, indeed, whatever be its cause, is easily detected, for it is never slow to materalise and proliferates upon a face, especially on the cheeks and round the eyes, as physically as the ochreous yellows of jaundice or the repulsive reds of a skin disease. Nor was it merely in the cheeks, or rather the chaps, of this painted face, in the mammiferous chest, the fleshy rump of this body abandoned to self-indulgence and invaded by obesity, that there now lingered, spreading like a film of oil, the vice at one time so jealously confined by M. de Charlus in the most secret recesses of his being. Now it overflowed into his speech."  

Friedländer then goes on to write as though this passage were the only negative one about homosexuality, which is far from true. He asks, quite reasonably, whether Proust had commercial motives for making his narrator straight and Christian. “I do not know,” he concludes (Friedländer 57). Bloom, for his part, rejected this line of thought. “Proust is so great an artist that his aesthetic dignity deserves our seeking aesthetic motives for what were essentially aesthetic decisions. Is it a better novel if the narrator is a Christian homosexual?” Bloom concludes, as Friedländer notes, that “it would spoil the novel’s mythology of the Cities on the Plain if the Narrator could not distance himself from homosexuals and Jews alike.” (Bloom 376). But why should a homosexual writer have to distance himself from homosexuality for aesthetic reasons any more than a straight writer must distance himself from heterosexuality for this sort of aesthetic purity?

Ultimately it hurts Proust’s credibility as a “sexologist” (something the introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition implies he aspires to be) to distance himself only from that which he himself is rather than what he is not. And it’s worth noting how far ahead of his time Proust was on sexology. “Really, Baron,” an academic character says at one point in volume six to Charlus, “if the General Board of the University ever decides to set up a chair in homosexuality, I shall put your name forward at once.” Proust presumably had no idea how real such a position would eventually be. Lest he seem too laudatory, Proust’s academic adds: “No, perhaps a special Institute of Psychopathology would suit you better.”

Proust’s own father was a sort of sexologist in his own right. A clinician who theorized about and treated sexual disorders, Achille Adrien Proust shared a great many of his theories about the “disorder” of “inversion” with Proust himself, says William C. Carter in his relevantly themed minibiography Proust in Love: “Marcel's friend Robert de Billy saw the elder Dr. Proust's influence in his son's attempts to diagnose the various manifestations of sexuality, in his refusal to establish a ‘hierarchy’ of such passions, in striving to remain objective, in the belief that no ‘disorder should be glorious or shameful,’ and in understanding the relative nature of sexual mores” (Carter 18). Robert de Billy did think, that implies, that Proust too saw homosexuality as a disorder. He was of his time and that was the understanding that predominated. But if that is indeed what Proust meant by inversion then his writing demonstrates why it has taken so long for that diagnosis to shake itself from culture’s view of homosexuality. In fact, of course, it persists today despite the American Psychological Association’s removal of homosexuality from the list of disorders as far back as 1973. “Homophobic mastery,” indeed.

The rest of the “canon”

Perhaps one reason that the self-loathing aspect of Proust’s writing came to the fore in my reading of the Search is that I started the year by reading what may be the greatest portrait of that emotion in the canon, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. The book is so effective at depicting its lead character’s self-disgust in the decade before Stonewall that it seems to turn up “gay self-hate” in other works like barium sulfate turns up the image of tumors on a gastrointestinal CT scan. Hence not all of the books in my little canon are necessarily best described by the term “self-loathing,” but they all show the impact of shame on the characters and in some cases the authors. Baldwin’s lead character, a blonde, white American who frequents Paris’ gay scene in the 1950s, is seemingly incapable of carrying out a simple love affair with a hot Frenchman without constant contradictory thoughts of disdain. A characteristic thought from our narrator about Giovanni, the Frenchman: “While I felt his anguish entering me, like acid in his sweat, and felt that my heart would burst for him, I also wondered, with an unwilling, unbelieving contempt, why I had thought him strong.” The narrator’s comment on members of the gay community: “Guillame’s disgusting. They all are.” Additionally, an American difficulty showing affection is contrasted ostensibly with the French manner, but implicitly with French gay people specifically: “These people have a different style from us. They’re much more demonstrative. I can’t help it. I just can’t—do all that.”  

Not long after I read Baldwin’s novel I picked up Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, a key gay-themed novel that was shocking and advanced for its era. Vidal’s book was different from Baldwin’s, less explicitly about self-revulsion. I had been expecting a somewhat butch gay romance between athletic men, which is what I’d heard about it. Vidal himself had pointed out such a story was unprecedented. “Until then, American novels of ‘inversion’ dealt with transvestites or with lonely bookish boys who married unhappily and pined for Marines. I broke that mold” (Vidal xiii). What surprised me was that like Proust the book painted a sweeping portrait of gay life in multiple scenes and communities of the American 1940s, including Hollywood’s closeted gay scene. Running through the whole book, however, was the lead character’s ambivalence about gay life. Unlike Baldwin’s narrator, Jim Willard is unambivalent about who he’s chosen for himself as a partner. But with that choice, his childhood jock friend Bob, unavailable, he distances himself from other homosexuals. Here are his thoughts after a lover, Paul Sullivan, with whom he has an ambivalent relationship, tells him he is like other gays:

“Sullivan had revealed him to himself as just like the others, varying hardly at all from what must be a familiar pattern. With self-knowledge came alarm. If he was really like the others, then what sort of future could he have? Endless drifting, promiscuity, defeat? No. It was not possible. He was different, Bob was different. After all, hadn't he been able to fool everyone, even those like himself, even Sullivan? Deliberately he banished the unsought revelation to that part of his brain where he disposed of unpleasant memories” (Vidal 85).

When Vidal was preparing to release The City and the Pillar he sent copies of the novel to all the gay writers he admired. One of them was Thomas Mann, who lived a semi-closeted existence as a married man with many children. Mann sent back a terse word of praise and misspelled Vidal’s name. But years later, as Vidal explains in the preface to an edition of City, Gore discovered Mann had written extensively about the novel in his diaries: “Friday 24 .. [19]50. … In the evening continued reading The City and the Pillar. Interesting, yes,. An important human document, of excellent and enlightening truthfulness. The sexual, the affairs with various men, is still incomprehensible to us. How can one sleep with men”? (Vidal xviii). Death in Venice, was the third of the gay-themed classics I read this year, and the most disturbing as Mann’s lead character’s attraction is (platonically) to a child. It is often discussed in the context of self-loathing, as for example the lead, once he becomes obsessed with a boy, begins painting his face and attempting to be made up to look much younger. Mann paints the picture of how ridiculous he looks in this attempt. Uncomfortable with himself, Mann’s antihero fits into the panorama of the century’s portraits of self-loathing or at any rate self-ambivalence.

Famously, the early works of gay literature often depicted great tragedies that seemed to “punish” their heroes. Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic example. I read an edition of the novel that featured material that Wilde had cut from the finished work at the prompting of his publishers, and that made clear what had been cut and what had not. The publishers axed sections that made clear Wilde’s painter Basil is in love with the antihero Dorian Gray, and otherwise held Wilde back whenever he got explicit. But even Wilde’s draft is darkly negative about homosexuality. As is widely known to even those who have not read the novel, Basil paints a large portrait of Dorian that ends up changing as though by magic, becoming more gruesome whenever Dorian commits a sin. In the penultimate moments of the book the portrait is hideous, and Dorian looks like a million bucks, never aging. But late in the book Basil confronts Dorian about rumors he’s been hearing. “Why is it that every young man that you take up seems to come to grief, to go to the bad at once?” Wilde had Basil ask Dorian in an early draft. The publishers had him change that line to “Why is your friendship so hateful to young men?” (Wilde 179). On the next page, Wilde’s original Basil remarks, “What about your country house, and the life that is led there? It is quite sufficient to say of a young man that he goes to stay at Selby Royal, for people to sneer and titter.” The second sentence in that line was struck out by publishers. Even the finished novel, though, is nearly explicit that Dorian’s mounting sins have to do with a certain effeminate difference that was characteristic of his author, who was eventually convicted of “gross indecency” with a younger man.  

“Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and Dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for [Dorian]. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that he affected from time to time, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall Club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies. For, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the London of his own day what to imperial Neronian Rome the author of the Satyricon had once been, yet in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum, to be consulted on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a neck-tie, or the conduct of a cane. He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realisation” (Wilde 152-153).

The Satyricon is another notorious book from gay literary history, in this case Rome under the emperor Nero, and “arbiter elegantiarum” is the title its author Petronius was granted by the emperor before his fortunes turned and Nero demanded he commit suicide. In assuming knowledge of these things, and in referencing the Satyricon at all, Wilde is more than hinting to his audience what Dorian’s vice is. And as Sedgwick pointed out, the novel’s depiction of Dorian’s corruption became a foundational fixture in the canon of “homophobic mastery.”

Back to Proust

Proust may have met Wilde (as a possibly apocryphal tale has it) and included references to the great gay writer in his masterpiece (Carter 87-89). Though France had no laws against homosexuality in Proust’s time, unlike England, Wilde’s tragedy influenced him in more than one way. He was probably emboldened and restrained, both, by his example. But the legacy of shame is one impact. Even volume one of In Search of Lost Time, though it details a heterosexual boy’s childhood in famously gorgeous detail, contains a gay scene, between two girls. When his first lesbian characters express their love, Proust’s narrator uses the word “evil” multiple times to describe them. Ostensibly this is because the girls have spat on a picture of one of the girls’ father, and the word evil is used from the girl’s perspective. But the strength of the word is to modern ears shocking as his initial description of lesbian love, particularly when you consider that he didn’t even believe evil existed until 1896, as Friedländer reports. He changed his mind about the existence of evil because of the Dreyfuss Affair, a political scandal in France the influence of which coats his novels (Friedländer 64). 1896 is before the first volume was written, but his change of mind nonetheless makes his word choice intriguing. Proust empathizes with the lesbian girl, Mademoiselle Vintueil, but the intensity of the word that he uses to portray her revulsion to her own feelings feels like it comes from an author who understood the extremity self-loathing can reach. Here’s Proust’s use of the word evil:

“Sadists of Mademoiselle Vintueil’s sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the privilege of the wicked. And when they allow themselves to yield to it for a moment, they are trying to climb into the skin of the wicked, and to make their accomplices do likewise, so as to have the illusion, for a moment, of escaping from their own tender-hearted and virtuous natures into the inhuman world of pleasure. … It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed attractive to her; it was pleasure itself that she saw as evil. And since, each time she indulged in it, it was accompanied by perverse thoughts that at other times had no place in her virtuous nature, she came to see pleasure as something diabolical, to identify it with Evil..”

From then on, most of the depictions of lesbian love are from the perspective of jealous males, a subject that has been treated extensively in the literature, particularly in the excellent Proust’s Lesbianism by Elisabeth Ladenson. The depiction of “Gomorrah,” as the lesbian world is known in Proust, is at least as fraught from the perspective of a discussion of “gay self-hate” as the depiction of “Sodom,” as Proust calls the gay male world.

The complexity of Proust’s relationship to the subject is honest and perplexing and off-putting at times. What sticks with me, however, is that even Proust’s ambivalent heterosexual narrator uses the word “beauty” to describe the first male gay relationship he spies. He pours his comic skill into the scene, but pauses to remark on its poignancy: “In any case this scene was not entirely comical, it was marked by something strange, or natural if you will, whose beauty continued to increase.” The beauty of In Search of Lost Time continues to increase over time as well, even though it bears witness to an era when attitudes towards gay life were complicated even for its champions. The painful honesty in its commitment to tell multiple sides of the gay story only enriches the experience of reading the masterwork.

Select Bibliography

• Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.
• Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. New York: Houghton and Mifflin Publishing. 1994.
• Carter, William. Proust in Love. Yale University Press, 2006.
• Friedländer, Saul. Proustian Uncertainties: On Reading and Rereading In Search of Lost Time. New York: Other Press, 2020.
• Ladenson, Elisabeth. Proust’s Lesbianism. Cornell University Press, 1999.
• Mann, Thomas. Heim, Michael Henry, translator. Death in Venice. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
• Proust, Marcel. The Swann Way. Oxford University Press, 2023.
• Proust, Marcel. In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom. Oxford University Press, 2025.
• Proust, Marcel. The Guermantes Way. Oxford University Press, 2026.
• Proust, Marcel. Sodom and Gomorrah. Oxford University Press, 2026.
• Proust, Marcel. The Prisoner. New York: Penguin Classics, 2019.
• Proust, Marcel. The Fugitive. New York: Penguin Classics, 2021.
• Proust, Marcel. Finding Time Again. New York: Penguin Classics, 2023.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men. New York: Columbia University, 2015.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 1990.
• Vidal, Gore. The City and the Pillar. New York: Random House, 1995.
• Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: JamboInk, 2023.