Hi, Chris.

> It should
> turn up here on TV, if it is a Ch 4 production and I can gat hold off
> Ch4 productions, if I need too.

Prolly just as well -- I'm not always as you might say reliable.  <g>

> I suspect this historical
> interest in British enlightenment homosexuality may be some of Jeffrey
> Weekes influence?

???

> what you were saying about the term gay is also interesting. It is not
> really as 19th century as people think. It can also be traced way back
> etymologically to old French (and then Latin) and had a meaning of
> sexually loose women, lesbianism and male homosexuality or sodomites.

Hey, could you expand on this, and/or document it?  Rictor and I were mostly
batting it around in terms of strict English usage, and never touched on the
etymology.  OK if I pass the above para back to Rictor?  I'd guess,
generally, we can all agree that whatever else, it's pre-19thC.

> The term jail, from gaol, also links to gay, as a gay hole,
> etymologically, in the same way. (From old French gai  and hole.)

Um ... At first blush, this looks like folk-etymology.  But I'm not at my
best and brightest at half four in the morning, so leave me think on this,
hey?

> There
> is also a possible link to Ganymede as catamite as well as the French
> galliard, which can be linked.

Cf. Rosalind's cover name as a boy in AYLI -- the name is one of the locks
for a gay reading of that play.  Don't go for it myself, for reasons I won't
go into now.  (Turns on how Rosalind is established as a female figure at
the beginning of the play in the way that Viola isn't in 12N.)

["Ganymede's Mouse" -- I once wrote a poem called that.  Wonder where I put
it?  Sort-of gay version of Lesbia's Sparrow, as I remember.]

> Trust you know the pillory origin of
> fuck... for unnatural carnal knowledge. To be pillorised is to be
> fucked.

Um ...  As with gaol.  Sceptical glance from me.

Mind you, "unnatural carnal knowledge" -- wasn't the cover term for +all+
'illicit sexual acts', from fornication to sodomy, in England in the
Renaissance, "sodomitical acts"?

[I'm not prepared to go to the stage -- stake! -- for that -- I got it from
a gay colleague, and I was never absolutely convinced, and I've never seen
it documented.  Might have been, and I simply missed it, but.]

> (I must get around to getting a better French translation
> dictionary. The Collins French concise and the OED can be a bit limited
> together. Anyone able to suggest a better French dictionary, by any
> chance?)

Harrap's 2-Vol for French?  The OED is shit on slang, and peculiarly shitty
on sexual slang.  Get anything by Patridge you can get cheap.  He's still
often the best.

> This provides a reading of Milton, too. The folly without father born as
> a reference to sodomy and promiscuous women understood as not being the
> patriarchal property of men. This links to Milton's theory of production
> as purely creative production which Marx draws on for his theory of
> non-productive labour. Non-production in Marx is a theory of creativity,
> which doesn't follow a productive historical line the way productive
> labour or work does. That is, from Milton's theory of creativity, linked
> not to the line of the father, but as a creative folly. A reading of
> Milton which often gets passed over blindly. Thought this may be of some
> interest, anyway. (Not a Milton expert, myself.)

Well ... I'm tempted to pass this back to a Milton specialist that I nearly
got married to once.

Actually, I will -- if nothing else, it'll have the steam coming out her
ears.

Beyond me, matey -- you might be right, but Mitlon's not my territory.  <g>

Cheers,

Robin

(back to the teapot)

[PS -- to Chris -- Have you read Kerrigan's intro to his edition of
Shakespeare's Sonnets?  (Penguin here, and prolly also in Australia.)  I
don't agree with all his conclusions, but he's done his homework.

Also have you come on Greg Woods' poems?  (Or, possibly, his Queer Theory
academic work?)  If not, I'll bet you'd like them.  The poems, that is.

A year or so ago, there was this conference at Loughborough, Crossing
Boundaries it was called of all things, and at the end of one evening, Greg
and Gill Spraggs gave a joint poetry reading.  (I think Greg had delivered a
formal paper at the conference.)

After two minutes, I was hiccoughing with laughter.  Then I realised that
NOBODY else was laughing.

"Oh, shite!" I thought, "Here am I exhibiting the Classic Heterosexual Male
Response to Gay Writing," and tried to bite my tongue.  After about five
minutes I heard this decorous giggle somewhere nearby.  It was one of my
lesbian colleagues.  "Ah," I thought, "it's OK then," and concentrated on
not breaking anything.  Greg reading (somehow his poems aren't +quite+ so
funny on the page) really cracked me up.

Gill wasn't laughing, and was scowling at me, but that was par for the
course -- usually it meant, "Oh  god, Robin's about to say or has just said
something particularly stupid about Greek again!" and anyway, she had to
follow Greg after the break, so was probably focused on what she was going
to read herself, and the scowl was her default for me.

But you know what?  In an audience of 30+ deeply p-c academics, who at the
end of Greg's reading applauded politely, indeed almost enthusiastically, it
wasn't just that nobody was laughing, none of them even cracked a smile.

I said to Greg afterwards, "Hey, does it never bother you that nobody laughs
at your poems?"

"You get used to it, Robin, you get used to it."

Sad, that.

R2.  ]