1. An Era of Idylls
If any particular genre can be called a homosexual genre, the
evidence would point most convincingly to the pastoral tradition
- from Theocritus' Idylls to the
chapter entitled "Bee and Orchid" in Marcel Proust's
Cities of the Plain, from Walt
Whitman's Calamus Leaves to A. E.
Housman's Shropshire Lad, from Mark
Twain's Huckleberry Finn to Richard
Amory's underground pulp novel Song of the
Loon, from Gerard Manley Hopkins' ballads on boys
bathing to Sanford Friedman's
Totempole, from all the Greek poets'
praise of boys in the gymnasia to all the flashbacks to
adolescent experience in Boy Scout camps in American gay fiction
in the 1960s. In its origins, homosexual love was an integral
part of the pastoral tradition.
Seven of the thirty idylls completed by Theocritus are
essentially homoerotic: in the fifth idyll two shepherds good-
naturedly accuse each other of pederasty (one accusing the other
of anal rape in the bushes), using colloquial expressions that
are "obscene" enough to be printed in Latin in some
modern English translations from the Greek (a notorious pedantic
practice that makes merely vulgar passages seem especially wicked
- and easier to locate); in the seventh idyll Aratus is
passionately in love with a boy; in the twelfth idyll a lover
addresses his absent beloved and describes a kissing contest
amongst boys in honour of Diocles, lover of Philolaus; in the
thirteenth idyll Hercules frantically searches for his beloved
Hylas; in the twenty-third idyll a lover commits suicide and is
revenged by a statue of Eros falling upon his faithless beloved;
in the twenty-ninth idyll a lover speaks to his inconstant and
immature beloved; and in the thirtieth idyll a rejected suitor
reflects upon the heartbreak caused by the love of lads.
Theocritus portrays the homosexual lover as one who experiences
fleeting moments of gaiety ending in dejected frustration and
pensive memory - the very same way in which he portrays
heterosexual lovers.
Generally the sodomy in Theocritus'
Idylls is that of healthy virility
rather than the "abominable filthiness" seen by many
Renaissance polemicists who otherwise adopted the conventions of
the pastoral. Theocritus' work was unavailable to most
Renaissance writers, and their imitations are almost always
secondhand, by way of Virgil and French pastoralists. But the
very first English translation of selected pieces, the anonymous
Sixe Idillia of 1588, contains an
insightful comment about the paradoxical love-death relationship
between the boy-surrogate (Adonis) and the sacred king wearing
the totem skin (the boar). The boar pleads his case to Venus:
Theocritus's immediate imitators, Bion and Moschus and some
unknown writers, emphasized the elegiac potential of the death
of the boy-surrogate. Hercules' frantic search for Hylas is the
archetype and motivation underlying Venus' lament for the death
of Adonis, and Bion in "Lament for Adonis" borrows
lines directly from Theocritus' thirteenth idyll to describe her
frantic approach to Adonis' bier. Venus is not so much the
goddess herself as a transvestite sacred king disguised as the
goddess; the figure of the female Venus is the inevitable outcome
of Hercules wearing the lion-skin of the totem Mother Goddess or
the female attire while serving Omphale. According to Herodotus,
the god Mithra was worshipped as the goddesses Mylitta
of Babylon, Venus of Assyria, and Anaitis of Armenia. Readers who
see Shakespeare disguised as Venus pursuing Master W. H.
disguised as Adonis are reading the poem with its proper
archetypal context, as recently recognized by Ted Hughes'
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete
Being.
Moschus's similar "Lament for Bion" shows that neither
Bion nor the narrator are exclusively heterosexual:
Meandering across the continent, Venantius Fortunatus (530-603)
chanted Virgil rather than the Psalms as he lay at night under
the open sky, till he stopped at Poitiers in 567 and became
Bishop. He writes to his friend Rucco, deacon in far-away Paris:
From about 1150 onwards, anti-homosexual prejudice usurped the
humanistic throne of Greek love. In the twelfth century it became
fashionable - and politic - to repent one's wanton youth, as did
Marbod, Bishop of Rennes:
The first vernacular mystery play, The Killing of
Abel (1450), though it is not in the pastoral-
mythological tradition, contains some pertinent comments upon the
first two shepherds on earth. Cain, who in the play may have a
homosexual liaison with the Devil as well as with the boy Garcio,
seems to desire to form such a relationship with Abel:
The minor imitators of Virgil who wrote during the thirteenth
century seem to have studiously avoided imitating the second
eclogue itself, perhaps because of the increasingly zealous
Christian condemnation of the beastly sins of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The Virgilian tradition was rather inactive until Dante revived
it in the fifteenth century, this time in the form of epistolary
eclogues. Dante's eclogues in turn influenced the eclogues of
Boccaccio and Petrarch, who popularized the use of Ovidian
mythology. Petrarch bears the responsibility for the allegorical
obscurity of later pastoral literature, for he would use, for
example, the myth of Zeus's rape of the lowly shepherd Ganymede
as merely a fanciful indication that one Giovanni Colonna was
suddenly promoted to the Cardinalate; whether Petrarch had any
other connotations in mind we cannot know. Boccaccio, however,
was very explicit, and in his tenth eclogue he introduces the
ghost of Prince Lycidas who has been sent to hell because of his
thievery and his homosexual affairs; as W. Leonard Grant points
out in Neo-Latin Literature and the
Pastoral, "the Mise-en-scene seems
intentionally modeled on the passage in the Divina
Commedia in which the dead Brunetto Latini
converses with Dante"; Latini has been sent to hell because
of his homosexuality (Inferno, Book
10). Boccaccio perhaps chose the name "Lycidas" because
it comes from the Greek lykos, meaning "wolf,"
and may retain the homosexual connotations of the wolf in the
folklore of lycanthropy. These implications may have been
forgotten by the time Milton wrote his pastoral lament for
another Lycidas.
The three literary traditions or genres which critics associate
most closely with the Renaissance achievement are fundamentally
homoerotic: (1) the entire pastoral tradition, with its elegiac
laments and lovers' complaints; (2) the Ovidian erotic
mythological tradition, with its host of androgynous young men;
and (3) the friendship tradition, with its belief that the love
of man and youth is a higher form of affection than the
"phrensie" of loving women, and its belief in the
narcissistic phenomenon of "one soul in bodies twain."
The Elizabethan dramatic tradition is primarily heterosexual, but
a significant number of Renaissance plays focus upon the
transvestite "maid in man's attire" motif, as in
Shakespeare's As You Like It; the
caricature of the fop or dandy in the comedy of humours; and the
Love versus Honour plot (i.e. heterosexual love for a mistress
versus homosexual loyalty to a comrade) that was to dominate the
Restoration heroic drama, as in Thomas Otway's Venice
Preserved (1682). The only Renaissance literary
tradition from which favourable views of homosexual love are
rigidly excluded is Christian polemic or moralism, and even here
one finds curious references to Christ as the bleeding Adonis,
or the ascending Ganymede, or the Eros of brotherly love.
The Renaissance writers reincarnated Eros of their own accord,
but by way of the Latin tradition rather than the Greek
tradition. In early Greek thought, Eros was both Eros
Pandemos and Eros Uranos, simultaneously sensual
and spiritual, profane and sacred - a totality. But in Rome he
was fragmented into the homosexual Eros Pandemos of the
lyricists; the ethical Eros Uranos of the philosophers; and the
heterosexual Eros Pandemos of the followers of Venus, who now
became the patroness of heterosexual love, whereas her forerunner
Urania had been the patroness of homosexual love. During the
early Middle Ages, Eros became allegorized into a spiritual Eros
in the service of Aphrodite Urania as the Virgin Mary; during the
late Middle Ages, he acquired more bodily form, but became a
child rather than a lad, until at last he ended up as a
decorative cherub on picture frames and pediments. These cherubim
were to fill the canvases of the Renaissance masters, and they
are often indistinguishable from the infant Christ. But with
painters such as Caravaggio and Parmigiano, the child began
growing up again, and he regained his earlier erotic features as
an Anacreontic mischievous lad. Contrary to the common opinion,
however, the figure of Cupid appeared in numerous homoerotic
works as well as in Petrarchan poets' praises of their fair
mistresses; often the mistress is merely a stage prop which
allows the sonneteer to dwell upon the lovely features of the
Cupid reflected from her eyes. But Eros seldom regained the
primordial totality which he once had in Plato's
Phaedrus. Seeking truth through the
veil of Ovid, the Renaissance writers were forced to use later
models of the refined boy-surrogate such as Adonis, Ganymede, and
Narcissus rather than the historically earlier prototypes of
Socratic Eros or pre-Hellenic Hylas. The specific figure of Hylas
seldom appears in Renaissance literature, but he is certainly the
icon behind his most frequent manifestations as Adonis or
Ganymede. Edmund Spenser has intimations of this fact when he
describes the lad named Fancy in The Faerie
Queene (1589-96):
The so-called eternal triangle has undergone mutations in its
literary history. From originally consisting of three men, it has
become a triangle of one male who loves another male who loves
a female in Mantuan (and later in Spenser, Barnfield, and
Shakespeare); and finally it becomes a triangle of two males who
love the same female in modern literature. In other words, it is
heterosexualized. But the homosexual origin of this triangle -
even in modern television situation comedy or the popular song
"The Tennessee Waltz" - can still be detected by the
importance placed upon the fact that one of the men is not merely
a strange interloper, but in every case the best friend
of the other. The real tragedy, even pathos, of the eternal
triangle in most literature is the breaking-up of this male bond.
It is indeed ironic that the eternal triangle is neither eternal
nor heterosexual.
The unnamed female, who is responsible for this severance, in
Mantuan's eclogue is a veritable high priestess fit for the
slaughter, a "white haird trull of twenty years."
Amyntas is a boy-surrogate dies for no other reason than
religious destiny: "What part of welking wrought thy woe;
that didst deserue no yll; / What curssed corner of the Heauens
did thee untimely kill." He dies because of the
"Phrensie" of his love for the maidenly trull. Had
Amyntas lived, he would have been the incarnation of both Pan,
the master-musician "With Oaten quill and pleasant
pipe," and Apollo, the paragon of poet-shepherds, who,
according to the myth recounted in the eclogue, once took on the
guise of a shepherd in the Amphrisian fields. Amyntas is both the
Dionysian spirit of fertility and the Apollonian deity of the
sky; his death is the death of the year in seasonal ritual.
Since one dare not entertain for too long the notion that the
gods are capable of such unmitigated perfidy, the blame finally
comes to rest upon the shoulders of womankind. In the extended
antifeminist diatribe of the fourth eclogue, Mantuan lists the
women who have overpowered their men: Tarpeia, Medea, Helen,
Byblis, Myrrha, Semyramis, and so forth. He assigns to women in
general the unlovable qualities of being "curst, cruell,
puft with pride," irrational, "threatfull, thirsting
blood," "quareling apes" and
"Sorceresses." This misogynist invective was continued
by Alexander Barclay in his Certayne
Egloges (1570), and even extended to include
all women, but Barclay's eclogues contain little
distinction in themselves, and add nothing of either positive or
negative value to the homosexual pastoral tradition. Misogyny as
such is more characteristic of Christian literature and the
letters of St Paul, although classical literature commonly takes
the view that masculine love is superior.
It is rather intriguing to speculate on how Hercules' frenzy for
Hylas and Venus' frenzy for Adonis have become the
"phrensie" of heterosexual love in the Renaissance. The
transition from the frenzy of a man for a man, then a
transvestite for a man, then a woman for a man, to the frenzy of
a man for a woman most likely resulted from the classical and
Platonic view that heterosexual love is entirely irrational and
thus destroys the rational value of the male bond which was
necessary for climbing the ladder of perfection. The religious
frenzy of the dance in pagan ritual becomes the irrational frenzy
of heterosexual love seen as witchcraft and sorcery. Barnabe
Googe in his Eglogs, Epytaphes, and
Sonnettes (1563) had specifically condemned the
frenzies of both homosexual love and heterosexual love. His
eclogues are much less imitative and much more personal than the
very traditional and conventional ones by Barclay, and rather
interesting to read in spite of his medieval Christian moralizing
and lack of compassion. Googe, like many other Renaissance
writers, suspects that women make themselves appear desirable to
men by means of enchantment: "the greatest grief no doubt
/ Is to be Venus thrall," or the helpless captive
of the literally bewitching powers of the goddess who has now
become the high priestess of an anti-Christian witch-cult. But
Googe leaves little room for any erotic alternatives, and he
accepts heterosexuality only if it will curb homosexual desire:
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Venus, to thee I sweare,
We need not view this as a case of homosexual bestiality, but the
homoerotic implications are obvious. They are more explicitly
present in the unknown poet's translation of Idyll 20, which
contains a catalogue of gods who have loved neatherds, ending
with "and thou, al daie / O mighty Jupiter but for a
shepeheardes boy didst straie."
. . .
Thy husband faire and tall
I minded not to kill;
But as an image still
I him beheld for love [i.e., Eros]
Which made me forward shove,
His thigh that naked was
Thinking to kisse, alas!
. . .
Why beare I in my snowt
These needless teeth about?
Herdsman, the gifts of all the Muses died
The medieval tradition had a limited and limiting influence upon
Renaissance mythological conceptions, but although medieval
poetry did not give a very strong impetus to the homosexual
pastoral-mythological tradition, it is nevertheless relevant to
an examination of the development of common homosexual themes.
Ernest R. Curtius in European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages discusses several examples of
"unprejudiced erotic candor" in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, and it is safe to say that although the poetic
Muses would have preferred a rose garden to the cloister, life
in a medieval monastery was as often gay as solemn. The scholarly
monks poured over the antique manuscripts every morning - but
each afternoon they recited pagan Latin epigrams with their young
pupils, and in the evenings abbot and novice together learned the
more subtle realities of brotherly love. In the shadow of the
risen Christ the brotherhood glimpsed the risen Ganymede - were
not both of them shepherds, and had not both ascended directly
into heaven? The love of Jesus for John, of David for Jonathan,
were but manifestations of the love of Achilles for Patroclus,
of Corydon for Alexis, of Hercules for Hylas. The austere moral
fibre of Christianity would not bloom till the late twelfth
century, and from 400 to 1100 A.D. the new religion was still
pagan in tone. Surely Bacchus still revelled near the wine-press
whose amber liquid brought money to the abbey. And surely Eros
still shot his arrows from the plane trees in whose cooling
shades wandering scholars rested betimes with wandering
minstrels. "Here's Death twitching my ear, "Live,"
says he, "for I'm coming"" - so runs the earthly
wisdom which prompts drinking-songs and love lyrics addressed to
men as well as maids. Baudri of Meung-sur-Loire (1046-1130),
abbot of the monastery of Bourgueil, Archbishop of Dol in
Brittany, proudly boasts:
With you, warm girlish kisses, and the brave
Sweet lips of boys; . . .
. . .
Close to his bosom Eros he could snatch [i.e. ravish]
And Aphrodite's passion could rouse.
(trans. Henry Harmon Chamberlin)
I wrote to maids, and wrote to lads no less,
It is merely a matter of relatively modern cultural prejudice
that the love of Abelard for Heloise is better remembered than
the equally poignant love of Ausonius for Paulinus of Nola.
Ausonius (310-395), professor of rhetoric at the University of
Bordeaux, tutor to the Emperor Gratian, Consul of a province,
loved above all others his pupil Paulinus, his younger by some
forty years. But Paulinus suddenly and without explanation left
for Spain, where for four years he answered none of Ausonius'
imploring letters. Finally he replied, with great compassion, but
still declined to return to Ausonius. Ausonius wandered in the
fields of sorrow
Some things I wrote, 'tis true, which treat of love;
And songs of mine have pleased both he's and she's.
. . . in deep woods, in mournful light,
Ausonius almost self-consciously portrays himself as Apollo
lamenting his boyfriend Hyacinthus.
And lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams,
Upon whose banks in the dim light grow old
Flowers that were once bewailed names of kings [and
boys].
(trans. Helen Waddell, who suppressed the concluding
words et puerorum)
Swift as the waves beneath an east wind breaking,
The pang of separation, caused often by pilgrimages, is a
frequent theme, as in lines exchanged between Colman the Irishman
to a younger man of the same name. Hrabanus Maurus (776-856),
abbot of Tours, similarly writes to Grimold, abbot of St Gall:
Dark as beneath a winter sky the sea,
So to my heart crowd memories awaking,
So dark, O love, my spirit without thee.
Earth's self shall go and the swift wheel of heaven
Grimold was also the friend of Walafrid Strabo (809-849), a pupil
whom he sent to the bitterly cold abbey of Fulda to study under
his friend Hrabanus. But Walafrid, displeased, wrote back to
Grimold:
Perish and pass, before our love shall cease.
Fool that I was, a scholar I would be,
The patron saints of the monastery of Gembloux were the entire
Sacred Band of Thebes, the Greek army consisting of 150 pairs of
homosexual lovers, now canonized. Sigebert (1030-1112), lover of
the Abbot Olbert, wove in memory of this army a garland of lowly
privet blossoms:
For learning's sake I left my country,
No luck have I and no man cares for me.
Even in the house it is cold as snow,
My frozen bed's no pleasure to me now,
I'm never warm enough in it to go
To quiet sleep.
(trans. Waddell)
Clumsy the work, a silly weight to carry,
St Anselm had a passion for writing love letters to men. To
Gondulph, "soul most beloved of my soul," he decares
"withersoever thou goest, my love follows thee; and wherever
I remain, my longing embraces thee." Medieval epistolary
passion finds its epitome in his letters to William, "My
most dearly beloved" (mi charissime) appearing more
than a dozen times in one letter. Supposedly Anselm was trying
to convert William to the Christian faith, but his clearer desire
was for William to come love with him at the Abbey of Bec:
"delay not thy so great good, and fulfil my yearning for
thee, that I may have thee for my companion in following
Christ." Such subconscious subterfuge is permissible when
the goal is to strive together on the road to the heavenly
Jerusalem.
And yet revile it not, for it is love.
My mind did stray, loving with hot desire . . .
Marbod wrote this in his old age. More typical of the earlier
centuries was the unknown Veronese cleric who in the ninth
century wept for
Was not or he or she dearer to me than sight?
But now, O winged boy, love's sire, I lock thee out!
Distasteful to me now the embrace of either sex.
. . . that boy who disdainfully
And we are indeed fortunate that from the ruins of manuscripts
destroyed or defaced by later zealots, who scratched out or
covered with pitch the offending lines, we can now and then
retrieve a fragment of ageless beauty, such as Hilary's
unblushing plea to his boyfriend, an archetypal formosus
puer, written in the early twelfth century:
Scorns the entreaties I utter, ah, painfully!
You that was mine is my rival's tomorrow,
While I for my fawn like a stricken deer sorrow!
Hair of gold and face all beauty, neck of slender
white,
But the Golden Age would not come again for some centuries yet,
and by the fourteenth century Chaucer could portray the typical
homosexual as an immoral debauched syphilitic, in the person of
his Pardoner, who sings "Come hider, love, to me" to
the Summoner, and who is threatened with having his testicles
crushed by that amiable tavern-keeper Harry Bailey. In many
medieval mystery plays, the wicked Herod is portrayed as the
archfaggot, just as in the movie Jesus Christ
Superstar.
Speech to ear and mind delightful - why, though, praise for
these?
For in every part's perfection, not a fault hast thou,
Save - protesting chastity jars with forms so fair!
Ah, believe me, were the Golden Age to come again,
Ganymede should be no longer slave to highest Jove;
Thou, to heaven ravished, shouldst by day his cup
refill,
Thou by night shouldst give him kisses, nectar far more
sweet.
(trans. Ernest R. Curtius)
Com kis myn ars, me list not ban,
These scenes (which are censored in some scholarly modern
editions) very likely allude to the osculis posterioris
of the Knights Templars and the witch-cult of Western Europe. It
may seem sacrilegious, but Cain and Abel, like Hercules and
Antaeus, form the primordial pair-bond that wrestles until death.
Another homoerotic pair common to medieval literature is Lechery
and Idleness. In the Scots poet William Dunbar's description of
the Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, written in 1507, these two
figures "led thay uthir by the tersis [and] fycket with
thair ersis" (led each other by the penis and fucked with
their asses).
. . .
Com nar, and other drife or hald,
And kys the dwillis toute!
Go gres thi shepe under the toute,
For that is the most lefe.
[Come kiss my ass, I won't curse. Come near and kiss
the devil's buttocks! Go grease your sheep under their
buttocks, for that is dear to you; lines 49-65]
. . . a lovely boy
As a result of this wayward pursuit of the archetype, these
writers seldom created a picture of Erotic love that was not
coloured by the over-refinement of Sidney or the decadence of
Marlowe or the guilt of Shakespeare. The greatest single tragedy
of Renaissance art and literature is that few people were able
to read Plato or the early poets in the original Greek. Their
nearest prototype to the true Eros was the ideal Shepherd's
Swain, a figure who combined the manly Roman virtues of Virgil
with the Sicilian sensuousness of Theocritus. This icon lacked
the political and philosophical values of Socratic Eros, values
which were relegated to the highly systematic, undramatic and
dull qualities of Eros Uranos in works such as Marsilio Ficino's
Commentary on Plato's Symposium (1473).
For the most part, the shepherd as Eros was a figure of fantasy
and desire rather than reality and love, as illustrated in this
conventional portrait from Michael Drayton's Endimion
and Phoebe (1595):
. . .
Matchable ether to that ympe of Troy,
Whom Jove did love and chose his cup to bear,
Or that same daintie lad, which was so deare
To great Alcides [Hercules].
(3. 12. 7)
Endimion, the lovely Shepheards boy,
In the fifteenth century a rediscovery of classical manuscripts
held by Byzantine merchants stimulated many new imitators of
Virgil, particularly Baptista Mantuanus, whose work henceforth
became the primary source for most of the later pastoral
literature. Mantuan's third eclogue, the major single influence
upon specifically elegiac eclogues, called epicedia,
involves the passionate lament of one shepherd for a younger
shepherd and his consolation by an older shepherd. Although the
specifically erotic element has by now been sublimated into
"friendship," this eclogue is nevertheless the
standard-bearer of the homosexual pastoral tradition having its
sources in Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, and Virgil. In spite of a
tendency towards melodramatic overstatement, George Tubervile's
English translation in The Eglogs of the Poet B.
Mantuan Carmelitan (1567) accurately captures
Mantuan's predominantly literary and moral concerns (unlike the
personal and playful concerns of Theocritus). This eclogue
alludes to Virgil as "Tytrus (belou'de / of his
Alexis)," indicating that Tubervile was aware of
the autobiographical homoerotic nature of Virgil's second eclogue
(Tytrus was the pastoral name Virgil adopted for himself). The
eclogue contains Fortunatus' lament for Amyntas, the "Wofull
wretched Boy that in / [his] tender years didst die" because
of his unrestrained "Phrensie" for an unnamed
shepherdess. The Virgilian prototype has thus been transformed
into a more acceptable Christian pattern, by substituting a
moralistic Fortunatus for an infatuated Corydon; by having
Amyntas decently die, whereas Alexis indecorously ran off with
another man; and by substituting a shadowy female character in
place of Alexis' new male lover Iolas. But the lament, the
absence, the deep male friendship, the tone of infatuation, and
the love for another as the cause of the absence - as well as
clear literary imitation - remain the common denominators of the
archetype and its descendants.
Endimion, great Phoebes onely joy,
Endimion, in whose pure-shining eyes
The naked Faries daunst the heydegies.
The shag-haird Satyrs Mountain-climing race,
Have been made tame by gazing in his face.
For this boyes love, the water-Nymphs have wept,
Stealing oft times to kisse him whilst he slept:
And tasting once the Nectar of his breath,
Surfet with sweet, and languish unto death;
And Jove oft-times bent to lascivious sport,
And coming where Endimion did resort,
Hath courted him, inflamed with desire,
Thinking some Nymph was cloth'd in boyes attire.
I shall not nede (I thynke) to byd the, to detest the
Cryme,
His parenthetical "though it be muche" reveals him as
a medieval monk at heart. Having admonished his hapless young
companion to choose the lesser of two devilish fires to quench
his adolescent urgings, Googe advises the self-discipline of
worship, though worship of the Christian deity:
Of wycked loue, that Ioue did vse, in
Ganimedes tyme,
For rather wolde I (though it be much) that thou shuldest
seake the fyre,
Of lawfull Loue, that I haue tolde, than burne wyth such
desyre.
Not he, whom Poets old haue faynd, to lyue in Heauen
Hye,
The renascence of the homosexual pastoral will not come until the
next generation, but the very fact that homosexual love can be
so openly attacked in the pastoral indicates how close it is to
the surface.
Embracyng Boyes: (O fylthy thyng) in beastly Lecherye.
Go on to 2. Edmund Spenser. Go to Pastoral Bibliography.
Return to The Homosexual Pastoral Tradition
Rictor Norton, "An Era of Idylls",
The Homosexual Pastoral Tradition, 20 June 2008 <http://rictornorton.co.uk/pastor01.htm>.
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