Wilhelm James J. Gay and Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology from Sappho to Michelangelo

Routledge, 1995. — 344 p.Rutgers medievalist Wilhelm's ambitious survey collects European homoerotic poetry from 7th century BCE Greece through the Italian Renaissance. Though Dante, Chaucer, and others deploying gay characters are included, as are a scattering of anti-homosexual polemicists, the voice of these poems is typically a mature gay man (Sappho is one of but a few women represented), the object a smooth-cheeked youth. Selections from medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetry provide some of this anthology's most disarming reading? Eg, Imn Shuhaid's "he passed me in a herd of deer, a smiling moon with lucky teeth"? As well as evidencing the improbable license apparently then possible under Islamic rule. Though generally capable, the translators sometimes resort to anachronisms (a calculator in a Juvenal satire?) and contemporary subculture argot to mixed effect. And aside from brief introductions to each section and to individual poets, the annotations are minimal? Too minimal, perhaps, for many a lay reader without a literary dictionary immediately at hand.