billy budd: the essential gay masterwork of the 19th 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unpublished until it was rediscovered and published in 1924.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.
_-_Billy_Budd_manuscript_1.jpg)
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).
