Reviewed by Evelyn Hartogh

Censoring Sexuality offers personal accounts of how people renegotiate their freedom in relation to the legal and social restrictions imposed to regulate sexual behaviour. Paul Bailey’s introductory essay is a mixture of personal history and discussion of the outing of artists and writers such as Marcel Proust, Francis Bacon, Quentin Crisp, John Gielgud and Noel Coward. The latter half of the book is a collection of Russian literature suppressed during the Soviet era, and contemporary accounts of people surviving being gay in hostile environments in Romania, Cairo, Israel, Palestine and Morocco.

The voices from the Middle East in this collection are autobiographical, deeply personal, and often upsetting, while the documents from Eastern Europe are deeply romantic and utopian works of literature now unfettered by censorship. In Romania, significant law reforms took place in 1996 and 2001, while in Russia it was 1994 when the law ceased to criminalize consensual same sex acts. Homosexuality remains a taboo in Muslim countries, and incurs the death penalty in some. Many homosexuals flee Palestine into Israel, where the society is more accepting of same sex relationships. Others negotiate the secret societies in their own countries to find a way to “live as a homosexual” (139).

Intelligentsia and the artists already mentioned here, seemed to face relatively benign intolerance of their sexual preference compared to the often horrific accounts of torture, danger and fear in the documents from Soviet and Muslim countries. However, for lesbians in Muslim countries, the situation can sometimes be quite different; sexual segregation means women are able to spend a great deal of time together alone. The women still must live in fear of punishment, or even the death sentence, if their relationship were to be made public, but they are less likely than men to be suspected.

Bailey’s own essay deals primarily with men in the public eye, and the ways in which men’s very occupation of the public sphere put their sexuality under great scrutiny than woman, “lesbians simply didn’t exist as far as the tawdry rags were concerned” (10). Lesbian relationships, although they must be kept secretive, have, in a patriarchal society, a socially designated private space in which to flourish. This is in marked contrast to public spaces that gay men often use to meet one another that increase their risk of exposure.

Sir John Gielgud’s outing after a public lavatory incident did not harm his career, although Noel Coward complained he had “let the side down” (64) because Gielgud’s exposure threatened “those homosexuals for whole discretion and secrecy were necessary forms of survival” (64). Persecution of homosexuality, through European law, took the form of suggesting, “homosexuality is a subject beyond discussion and debate” (51). This pressure for secrecy from both sides meant the law could often ignore hate crimes, and gay bashings and murders of openly gay men could be “left deliberately unsolved by the police” (52). In the majority of the documents, that comprise the latter half of Bailey’s book, the police themselves are the instigators of violence, torture and deprivation of liberty of homosexuals.

Suppressed Soviet documents, survival stories of queers in Muslim countries, and Bailey’s own account of hiding his identity; all have in common the state of living in fear. The consequences of being outed as gay may vary from country to country, but the self-censorship, mistrust, and lack of security, seem to be universal.

Censoring Sexuality Series: Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century
(2008)

by Paul Bailey
Berg Publishers (distributed in Australia through Footprint)
ISBN-13: 9781905422562

160pp AUD$29.95