China to Join the West -- in Denying the Obvious Sexuality of Former Leaders
Attorney and writer
Posted: 01/08/2016 4:13 pm EST
A new book slated for
release in Hong Kong next year is bringing China into yet another modern,
Western tradition: arguing over the sexual orientation of its former
leaders.
In The
Secret Emotional Life of Zhou Enlai, Hong Kong author Tsoi Wing-mui
reportedly posits that Zhou, mainland China's first Premier
and a fellow revolutionary alongside Mao Zedong, was secretly gay. Zhou was born
in 1898, "100 years early" to be an openly gay politician, Tsoi
writes.
Tsoi draws her
conclusions from her analysis of Zhou's journals, particularly his recorded
fondness for his junior schoolmate Li Fujing, without whom Zhou wrote he could
not live, and who Zhou wrote could "turn sorrow into joy," a sharp contrast with
Zhou's apparently lackluster feelings for his wife. Unsurprisingly, Tsoi's
reading differs from that of the more traditional historians of mainland China,
who have had decades to mull the same material. What Tsoi brings to the table as
a former executive editor of the liberal Open Magazine and an apparent
chronicler of gay issues is an understanding of queer reality and a willingness
to remark upon it. In this way, she is like American agitators who have pointed
out gay threads in their own past, often to the doubt and even derision of
mainstream scholars in the West.
America has had at least
two arguably gay presidents: Abraham Lincoln and James Buchanan. There is ample
historical evidence that both were, at the very least, bisexual. And in both
cases, the historical mainstream has strongly resisted the call to examine
themes that may seem obvious to modern readers. These experiences are likely to
predict the path of Zhou's modern story in China, where the state of LGBT rights
is similar to that of the U.S. several decades ago.
Starting in the
mid-aughts, some scholars began seriously considering the possibility that
Lincoln's adult relationships extended well beyond Mary Todd Lincoln, his wife
of 17 years. Psychologist and writer C.A. Tripp's The
Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,
published in 2005, shortly after Tripp's death, examined several seemingly queer
aspects of Lincoln's life. The most notable included a poem Lincoln wrote that
described a same-sex marriage; his recorded history of sharing a bed with other
men, a practice not unheard of in his time; and his relationship with two men,
his roommate and bedmate of four years, Joshua Speed, and his bodyguard David
Derickson, the latter of which inspired contemporary rumors. (Before their
impending marriages, Lincoln and Speed exchanged fraught letters exposing
surprising anxieties about each one's own nuptials.) A great-great niece of
William Herndon, Lincoln's longtime friend and eventual biographer, has also
reported that her family has passed from generation to generation the story
that Herndon and Lincoln were lovers.
A 2005 review of Tripp's work published
in the New
York Times accurately noted that
modern notions of homosexuality don't apply to Lincoln's era. Other scholars
were also quick to seize on that idea. Writing in Time magazine, essayist Joshua Wolf
Shenk argued that "[r]ecent claims that Lincoln was gay -- based on a tortured
misreading of conventional 19th century sleeping arrangements -- resemble the
long-standing efforts to draft the famously nonsectarian man for one Christian
denomination or another." Shenk railed against Tripp's "'epistemological
hubris'" in assigning modern notions of sexuality to a time when "men could be
openly affectionate with one another, physically and verbally, without having to
stake their identity on it," and noted with seeming derision that Tripp's
newfangled electronic search of Lincoln's records "yielded the delicious bit
that Lincoln's New Salem, Ill., friend William Greene considered his thighs 'as
perfect as a human being's could be.'"
Shenk was hardly alone in his views; much of the mainstream has
viewed Tripp's take on Lincoln as ahistorical, suspicious and, apparently, immature.
This is hardly a surprise; any time a gay historian claims a kinship with a
historical figure, he or she is accused of inventing the connection in order to
manufacture an affinity with that figure. Straight historians seem oblivious to
the idea that this criticism could apply equally to them when they assume,
without any supporting evidence, that a given historical figure was
heterosexual.
Straight
historians also seem to believe that if a comfortingly de-sexualized explanation
for a historical fact exists, it necessarily negates the sexual possibilities.
Take the example of Lincoln's practice of sharing a bed with another man, known
as co-sleeping. While the practice may not be inherently gay, it's a necessary
prerequisite for an awful lot of gay acts, knowledge of which is reflected
in old, homophobic
criminal laws. But Shenk argued that co-sleeping was
merely akin to the modern sharing of houses and apartments by men, apparently
oblivious to the fact that that's exactly what many gay couples do nowadays. (Do
one hundred percent straight friends really sign letters to each other with the
tagline "Yours forever," as Lincoln and Speed did?)
Buchanan should be
an easier case, both because he was more obviously queer and is a less revered
historical figure. But even he hasn't been allowed to simply be gay, and
identity groups aren't exactly lining up to lay claim to the president who
apparently approved of the Dred
Scott debacle, described slavery in the
territories in his inaugural address as "happily, a matter of but little
practical importance" just before the South seceded, and went to war with
Mormons in Utah. The only president to never marry, Buchanan was a lifelong
bachelor who lived for 10 years with Democratic senator
William Rufus King. Even at the time, others said they knew exactly what was going on: Andrew Jackson
referred to Buchanan as "Aunt Nancy," while Alabamans called King "Aunt Fancy,"
and others considered King to be Buchanan's "better half" and "his wife." When
King moved away to become an ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote that he was "now 'solitary and alone,'
having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several
gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of
them."
Yet even with such
seemingly overwhelming evidence of a male-male sexual and romantic relationship,
there are still those who argue that labeling Buchanan as "gay" injects too much
contemporary understanding into an alien historical context. A 2012 article in Time magazine noted that "[o]ther historians, however,
believe that his relationship with King was in fact more complex than that, and
that the book is far from closed on the matter of Buchanan's sexuality." One
wonders what more Buchanan could have done to show that he was gay short of
overtly committing the very acts that would have gotten him arrested in his
time.
To be sure, the Zhou
deniers in China will have not just mainstream culture on their side, but the
force of a Communist Party unwilling to revisit a resolutely heteronormative
founding narrative. The book, or its assertions on Zhou, will almost certainly
be banned in the mainland, as Tsoi herself acknowledges. But observers rightly
decrying the party-state's censorship should remember that much of the
opposition Zhou, and Tsoi, are likely to face will parallel what Lincoln,
Buchanan and their modern biographers have faced in the United States.
Ostensibly straight mainstream historians will claim that Tsoi is a revisionist,
that she is applying ahistorical labels, or even that she is sensationalizing
normal, platonic male affection.
The arguments for Zhou's
heterosexuality will be as biased as those for Lincoln's and Buchanan's -- and
for that matter, other famous historical figures like William Shakespeare and
Susan B. Anthony. Straight academics will insist with straight faces that by
default all previous human beings conformed to a particular idea of sexuality,
ignoring the natural (and statistically inevitable) human variation that has
spread LGBT identity throughout the globe, and across generations. We are doing
a disservice to our natural diversity when we insist that historical figures
must be straight until conclusively proven otherwise, yet need no evidence to be
presumed heterosexual. Whatever the evidence reveals in Zhou's case, these
debates should help us explore both our past and our present understandings of
sexual orientation, be they American or Chinese, gay or straight -- or anywhere
else along the great spectrum of human identity.
