Douglas Messerli | Billy Budd: The Essential Gay Masterwork of the 19th Century [essay]

 

billy budd: the essential gay masterwork of the 19^th  century

by Douglas Messerli

 

After writing his great homoerotic works culminating in the masterpiece Moby Dick in 1851, Melville penned one final work in Billy Budd in 1881, left unpublished until it was rediscovered and published in 1924.

      There were a great many works through the 19th century, of course, with sublimated and even somewhat openly gay subjects. Oscar Wilde, for example, wrote many a work infused with gay humor and coded plots from The Importance of Being Earnest, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and his final Salome. Edgar Allan Poe was seen, particularly by European writers, as a model for sublimated gay texts, particularly in his stories about doppelgangers and in The Fall of the House of Usher. Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud scandalized many a European for their love played out in public and poetic writings. Robert Louis Stevenson steeped his great story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the myth of the bipartite individual, one a good doctor and the other a closeted monster who preyed on both women and men. And there were many others before such as the US poet Walt Whitman who openly celebrated male love and the male body.

     Yet somehow Melville’s Billy Budd seems to summarize the glorious beauty and goodness of gay life without ever once using a language that actually says anything specifically about male on male sex.

                                                                              First page of the original manuscript.

 

      As Dana Silva summarizes in his essay “Exploring Homoeroticism in Herman Melville’s Novella Billy Budd, Sailor: “Although Billy Budd was not published until 1924, the novella is considered to be one of  ‘only about fifty works of western literature in the nineteenth century [that] can be said to treat the subject of male homosexuality more or less openly’ (Graham Robb, Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century). Melville incorporates the sub-theme of homoeroticism into the main theme of good versus evil in Billy Budd, Sailor, by personifying male homosexuality in the complex relationship between two seamen, Billy Budd and Claggart.”

      How to do we know Billy is gay since he may be far to innocent to have even engage in homosexual sex? Mostly because we gay men and women told you so. We recognize him as one of us, beautiful and desirable to a ship of men desperate for sex and longing who suddenly have witnessed a lovely body amongst their rough-hewn, aging, and flogged selves. And even the better preserved, well dressed navy officers such as Captain Vere, Mr. Redburn, Mr. Flint, and the Master-of-Arms John Claggart immediately recognized his goodness, bodily readiness, and primarily his “handsomeness.” If the evil Claggart had been able to admit to his desire of Billy’s body he would have readily raped him. We know the men below deck utterly adored and enjoyed his company—whatever that might mean on a ship full of sailors who have not had sex in months or even years. He immediately becomes their lucky charm and leader, offering them something other than the endlessly hard work and punishment of impressed sailors. He was the Marilyn Monroe of male pin-ups in a day before men fetishized men and women instead of simply acting out sexual fulfillment.

      Before the 20th century, particularly in the frontiers of every culture and in poorer families, men often shared the bed with other men, women with women, sometimes children with the elders. Lincoln did so. Men wrote flowery love letters to other men, Melville to Hawthorne. Whether or not that meant sexual encounters is unknowable, but it would not have been exceptional.

      More importantly, these 19th century writers had no language, as we do today, to describe gay behavior. The word homosexual did not even exist until the early 20th century, and although gay was occasionally applied to male on male relationships in a kind of gipsy and theatrical argot, it did not necessarily mean precisely what we mean by it today. Besides in that century and previously people felt no need to categorize human sexuality. Some might be opposed to sexuality in general, but it was simply presumed that men sometimes had sex with other men and that women bonded in special ways with one another that needn’t be discussed. Some men preferred boys and some women simply preferred the company of their own sex. Others cross-dressed. Despite the Victorian social attitudes to sex in general, sexuality as a behavior did not need to be slotted into categories. People had sex of all sorts, and that was the end of it.

     Not totally, of course. Men were often punished for not fulfilling their “God-given” roles of heterosexually protecting and procreating with the female sex. Some were arrested and even tortured. But more generally, it was understood that men did and could still form close homosocial and even homoerotic relationships with other men. The church and societal ostracization would punish them for their fornications.

     It’s only near the 20th century that people such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, and Karl Abraham that social scientists began to separate out types of sexual behavior, applying words such as Urnings (yearnings) and Honosexualität (homosexuality) to our language regarding sexuality, attempting to explain such relationships in the context of family life.

    Today, we know Billy Budd is a gay novel because we have made it so. It stands to reason that a ship full of beefy sailors encountering a young beauty who was innocent enough to believe in the goodness of all things would have been greedily taken into their hearts and bodily pleasures.

     With the exception of Whitman’s joyful abandonment to the male body, Billy was our first truly gay hero. Beyond all the monsters such as Dr. Jekyll, Roderick Usher, Dorian Gray, and even Paul Verlaine, Billy Budd was pure, beautiful, and just plain breathtaking to look at even if he is often portrayed by older opera performers who don’t look like the Billy of Peter Ustinov’s film version. He wore no masks, betrayed no individuals, and couldn’t even speak very well when cornered into a stammer, but he remained a pretty model of what a gay man could be, where his body and face spoke for his inner heart. Isn’t that what all gay men to desire to depict in their generally careful representations of themselves to the world: we are a society of would-be Billy Budds.

     Jeffrey Meyers in his truly excellent essay on Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd opera in the Gay and Lesbian Review, makes it clear what Billy is up against regarding both Claggart and Vere in the world of the British Navy.

 

 “Billy Budd, an unusual subject for an opera, has an inarticulate hero, an elusive narrator, and an all-male cast in the claustrophobic setting of a ship. The story is simple: on a Royal Navy vessel, during the war with revolutionary France in 1797, John Claggart, the Master-at-Arms who’s responsible for discipline on board, is a brutal sadist who resents the youth and innocence of Billy Budd. He accuses Billy of fomenting a mutiny. Billy strikes and kills him, and Captain Vere allows him to be sentenced to death. The cruel officers are very different from Jane Austen’s idealized naval heroes. The harsh conditions justify Samuel Johnson’s observation that ‘being in a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned.’” They also support Winston Churchill’s succinct statement that ‘the traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy, and the lash.’”

 

     Later in his essay he summarizes the real problems that lead to Billy’s hanging:

 

     “Since homosexual love could not be made explicit in 1951, Vere’s feelings and motives remain ambiguous. But the opera suggests that both Claggart and Vere are in love with the beautiful Billy. Melville noted that Billy’s aristocratic appearance connected him to Vere. Since Claggart cannot allow himself to have sex with Billy, he torments him instead. Since Vere cannot have sex with Billy, he must hang him. He wants to remove the source of temptation and corruption and have him die at the peak of his perfect beauty. Vere finishes what Claggart had begun and, as Michael Wilcox (1997) concludes, ‘allowed himself to become Claggart’s instrument of destruction.’

      Vere, like Claggart and Billy, is also guilty. Billy’s final benediction—“Starry Vere, God bless you!”—proves his inherent purity and innocence. In his retrospective Epilogue that concludes the opera, Vere tries to exonerate himself. His self-serving speech evokes ‘the peace of God which passeth all understanding’ (Philippians 4:7) when claiming: ‘the love that passes understanding has come to me.’ But when Vere suggests his complicity with the diabolical Claggart and admits, “It is I whom the devil awaits,” he confesses that he has committed a sin by choosing revenge over pity and by hanging instead of saving the ‘angel of God.’ Billy is victimized twice: by Claggart’s false accusation and Vere’s blind obedience to the Articles of War. He is also sacrificed by their refusal to recognize their deepest desires and the self-hatred aroused by their tormenting homosexuality.”

 

     Billy is gay because there is no other way to describe him, a man totally happy to live his life among other men like Old Dansker, Neuling, Squeak, and the various younger cabin boys. He loves his role as foretopman, and the company of those below with whom he sings joyful sailor chanteys. He aspires to work even closer with the officers, and does not at perceive his impressment as anything out of the ordinary. He has simply left the ship “The Rights of Man,” for the “Indomitable” which even comprehending the meaning of what he has had to given up to be there or just how vulnerable his new voyage truly is. He reminds me of myself entering my first gay bar experience in New York City with all the utter almost trembling joy I felt in meeting up with the ruffians within, with absolutely no clue of their envy or my eventual regret.

 

Los Angeles, May 14, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).