1. ELIT 10
CLASS

2. GAY BARS

3. AGENDA
Presentation: 1928-1934
Discussion:
• Freud
• “Slater’s Pins have no Points”
• “Arthur Snatchfold”
• “The Sea Change”
Author Introduction
• John Horne Burns

4. PRESENTATION: 1928-
1934
1928: The Well of Loneliness is published. It
is a lesbian novel by the English author
Radclyffe Hall. It follows the life of Stephen
Gordon, an Englishwoman from an
upperclass family whose “sexual inversion”
is apparent from an early age.
1928: Orlando is published by Virginia
Woolf. This more coded text, Woolf’s love
letter to Vita Sackville West, is not banned
for obscenity as Hall’s novel is.
1930 Encyclopedia of Sexual Knowledge
illustrates first “sex-change” procedures.

5. 1933: Adolf Hitler become Chancellor of Germany
1933 The National Socialist German Workers Party
bans homosexual groups. Homosexuals are sent to
concentration camps. Homosexual prisoners in
NAZI war camps were marked with a colored cloth
triangle to denote their offence or origin. The usual
triangle was about five centimeters across, but for
homosexuals the triangle was larger so that it could
be recognized from a distance. The triangles were
placed point down and stitched onto the left breast
pocket of the jacket and coat and the outside right
trouser leg.

7. GET INTO
DISCUSSION GROUPS

8. VOCABULARY TO KNOW
1. Homophobia
2. Internalized
homophobia
3. Heterosexism
4. Compulsory
heterosexuality
5. Heterocentrism
6. Essentialism
7. Biological
essentialism
8. Social
Constructionism
9. Homoerotic
10. Homosocial
11. Closeted
12. Canonized
13. Separatists
14. Coded
Lesbian/Homosexual
15. Drag
16. Drag queen
17. Butch
18. Camp
19. Sensibility

9. WHAT IS
PSYCHOGENESIS?

10. PSYCHOGENESIS
the psychological cause to
which a mental illness or
behavioral disturbance may
be attributed (as distinct
from a physical cause).

11. THE QUESTIONS?
“Readers unversed in psychoanalysis will
long have been awaiting an answer to two
other questions. Did this homosexual girl
show physical characteristics plainly
belonging to the opposite sex, and did the
case prove to be one of congenital or
acquired (later-developed)
homosexuality?” ( Freud 6).

12. FROM FREUD

14. QHQS: “THE PSYCHOGENESIS OF A
CASE OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN A
WOMAN”
Q: Why go through so much trying to understand and attempt to fix
homosexuality?
Q: If the natural state is bisexuality, as Freud suggests briefly in the work,
then how is it that either heterosexuality or homosexuality could be better
or worse for the psyche of an “afflicted” person who has “barred” the
undesired sex?
Q: What does Freud mean when writes “About six months after this
episode the parents sought medical advice and entrusted
the physician with the task of bringing their daughter back to a normal
state of mind”? What are they trying to correct, the suicidality or
homosexuality? Shouldn’t they be more worried that the girl tried to kill
herself?
Q : Can straight people understand LGBTQQAIP ever?

16. Knole House

17. Sissinghurst

18. IN HER SHORT FICTION, WOOLF GENERALLY
FOCUSED ON PHYSICAL DETAIL AND
EXPERIMENTED WITH STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS
TECHNIQUES, INTERIOR
MONOLOGUE, (HER HALLMARK) AND
SYMBOLISM TO CAPTURE THE SUBJECTIVE
WORKINGS OF HUMAN THOUGHT.
Principal characters
Fanny Wilcot: Julia Craye’s piano pupil
Julia Craye: a spinster piano teacher
Julius Craye: Julia’s brother, a ‘famous
archeologist’
Miss Polly Kingston: principal of the Archer Street
College of Music, a friend of the Craye family

19. QHQ: “SLATER’S PINS
HAVE NO POINTS”
Q: How does the title of the story relate to the way the story was
written?
Q: What is the connection between Slater’s pins and Julia?
Q: Why does Julia compare men to ogres? Did Fanny relate to Julia
with the same lack of desire for men?
Q: Is Fanny a attracted to Miss Craye or is she just curious about
her?
Q: Was Miss Craye’s brother Julius in love with Miss Kingston?
Q: Did Julius Craye commit suicide?
Q: Why does the writer use quotation marks when she describes
Julia’s brother as a “famous archaeologist”?

20. THE ENDING
“She saw Julia open her arms; saw her blaze; saw
her kindle. Out of the night she burnt like a dead
white star. Julia kissed her on the lips. Julia
possessed her.”
Woolf on “Slater’s Pins”:
“Sixty pounds just received from America for my
little Sapphist story of which the Editor has not
seen the point.”

21. “ARTHUR SNATCHFOLD”
Although Forster did not publish his
fiction after 1928, he continued to
write occasional stories, nearly all
with homosexual themes. The Life to
Come and Other Stories collects
these gay fictions that Forster did
not publish during his lifetime.
Typical Forster themes are also
present in this fiction, particularly
that of the undeveloped heart. In the
most highly regarded stories, a
character's denial of love reveals the
constricting effects of conventional
society and leads to his physical,
emotional, or spiritual death.

22. CHARACTER LIST
Sir Richard Conway: A business man of experience
and a decent human being
Mr. and Mrs. Donaldson: Business allies of
Conway, though inferior. Conway is staying with
them.
The milk man: a proper youth who greets Conway
as an equal.
Mr. Clifford Clarke: Another business man.
Assorted service workers.

23. QHQS: “ARTHUR
SNATCHFOLD”
Q: Could Conway have possibly known that milkman
was the suspect before hearing Donaldson speak on it?
Did Donaldson have any suspicions that Conway had
ties with the suspect after he told Conway the name?
Q: [Are] there parallels [between], “Arthur Snatchfold”
and how status affects those who are punished? Does
Conway not turn himself because he had much more to
lose than Arthur? Is this just self entitlement?

24. “A SEA CHANGE”
Ernest Hemingway's "The Sea
Change" was first published in 1931.
Although it is one of Hemingway's
lesser known stories, it has received
critical attention for its thematic
focus on bisexuality, especially in
light of the posthumous publication
of The Garden of Eden, which also
explores its characters' sexual
experimentation and gender
presentation. Although
homosexuality was a controversial
subject in the early 1930s, it was not
foreign to Hemingway's experience.
Among his close friends, for
instance, was lesbian Gertrude
Stein.

25. “A SEA CHANGE” AND
LITERARY ALLUSION
The story's title comes from Ariel's song in The Tempest by
William Shakespeare.
Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

26. ALEXANDER POPE
1688-1744
From “Essay on Man, Epistle II”
“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her
face,
We first endure, then pity, then
embrace.”

27. CHARACTER LIST
The man: Phil
The girl: Phil’s girlfriend who is
breaking up with him.
James, the Barman: watches the
break up while thinking about a horse.
Various customers:

28. QHQS: “A SEA CHANGE”
Q: Why doesn’t the girl have a name?
Q: What role do the two men play in the bar?
Q: Was the man in the couple (Phil) possibly bisexual as well?
Q: When Phil says he’s a “different man,” does that mean he has
decided on his sexuality? Has he chosen to be gay?
Q: What does Phil mean by “I’ll understand all the time. All day and
all night. Especially all night. I’ll understand. You don’t have to
worry about that?”

29. Q: Why does Ernest Hemingway write in a style so
focused on dialogue as opposed to description of
the surroundings or other aspects? How does this
affect and contribute to the readers’ experience?
Why do you think Hemingway remains so vague
about the couples’ dialogue, despite focusing on
the dialogue the whole story?
Q: What effect does the lack of detail have on this
story, and how does this contribute to its message
on LGBTQ issues?

30. AUTHOR INTRODUCTION:
JOHN HORNE BURNS
American author John Horne Burns (1916–
1953) led a brief and controversial life, and as a
writer, transformed many of his darkest
experiences into literature. During World War II,
he worked mainly in military intelligence. His
first novel, The Gallery (1947), a series of
portraits, is based on his wartime experiences; it
is one of the first novels to unapologetically
depict gay life in the military. The book’s most
significant portrait is of Momma, the proprietress
of the Galleria’s gay bar, where, every day but
Sunday, gay soldiers from every branch of the Grand Alliance gather to drink
and cruise. Whether Momma’s Bar ever really existed or was simply Burns’s
earnest dream is unclear and, in a way, irrelevant: for someone as evasive
about his own sexuality as a gay man of his generation had to be —
ostentatiously “dating” and pretending periodically to have a fiancée — it was
more than a startlingly ringing endorsement of gay culture; it was an act of
enormous and atypical, almost inexplicable, courage.

31. HOMEWORK
Read:
“From a Letter to an
American Mother”
Sigmund Freud 1935
“Momma” by John
Horne Burns 1947
Post #5: QHQ
“Momma”