Decadence and Catholicism (review)

Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. 403.

Does a failure to produce enjoyable prose ever indicate a failure to enjoy anal sex? If so, when? Let us consider the case of two colleagues with whom I happen to have had no intercourse whatsoever.

Fifteen years ago, Leo Bersani began “Is the Rectum a Grave?” with the dubious claim that most of us hate sex–sodomy in particular. “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it” (October 43 [Winter 1987]: 197-222.). Five years ago, and shortly after taking a whack at Bersani in a very mean, very funny review of Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), Ellis Hanson qualified the claim. Many gay men, we learn in Decadence and Catholicism, hate sex, including, unbelievably enough, every single author Hanson considers –Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Huysmans, to name a few of the French, Pater, Wilde, and Firbank, to name a few of the English. Blame the false promise of both scriptural and hagiographic porn, Hanson suggests: “Anyone who has learned about sexuality from the Bible or the lives of the saints must surely be in for a grave disappointment upon encountering the real thing” (17). (Rousseau, of course, faced a secular version of the problem.)