Re: Length Gays Hot Passion HD.
Martial Salleh
"Huang Jiulang" (Chinese: 黄九郎; pinyin: Hung Jiǔlng) is a short story by Pu Songling first published in the third volume of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. The story features He Shican, a homosexual studio owner who becomes smitten with Huang Jiulang, a fox spirit, and their subsequent lives as a reborn government official and the lover of another gay official, respectively. "Huang Jiulang" is notable for being a full-length narrative on homosexuality in China; one of its English translated titles, "Cut Sleeve", alludes to Emperor Ai of Han's same-sex relationship with Dong Xian.
Pu Songling was a Qing dynasty author active in the seventeenth century. Homosexuality in China was regarded as a taboo and "off-centre" practice. Chinese society saw homosexuality as an "illness (...) (or) addiction (癖) over which one does not have control" that stemmed from "sexual frustration or sense of inferiority".[1]
An oft-used euphemism during Pu's time for male homosexuality was "cut-sleeve", a reference to "the passion of the cut sleeve" between Liu Xin, better known as Emperor Ai of Han, and Han politician Dong Xian.[2] According to History of the Han, the emperor, upon finding Dong sleeping on his sleeve, and having been called to a meeting while lying with his lover, cut off his sleeve rather than stir the boy from his sleep.[3]
A mule-riding middle-aged woman and a young man pass by a studio. The studio's owner He Shican (何师参), a homosexual, straight away falls in love with the boy, whom he describes as "a quite extraordinary personal beauty".[4] The next day, a besotted He bumps into the boy, who later on introduces himself as Huang Jiulang (黄九郎).[5] The two develop a friendship and upon inviting him into his residence for a drink, He makes known his affection for Huang. However, his sexual advances towards Huang are unsuccessful and the latter leaves. He is crestfallen and becomes emaciated. Huang soon learns of this; revealing that he too is gay, he reluctantly agrees to copulate with He, on the condition that he procures some medicine for Huang's ailing mother.[6]
He Shican's condition improves, but he learns from his doctor that he has been possessed, with his life on the line. Huang confirms that he is a fox spirit but He remains incredulous.[7] Shortly after He's health deteriorates rapidly and he dies, leaving Huang devastated.[8] Simultaneously, court censor Gong[9] commits suicide with his wife, in fear of the corrupt Provincial Treasurer of Shaanxi, Wang,[9] whom he was a fierce critic of. He's spirit occupies the dead official's body; incidentally, Gong was also He's childhood familiar. Wang, now Governor, learns of this resurrection and starts to hound him. He Shican desperately returns to Huang, wanting to rekindle their romance. Huang refuses and instead refers He to his female cousin, whom he instantly takes a liking to.[10]
Yet the threat of the Shaanxi governor remains and He beseeches Huang to help him out, upon learning that Wang is homosexual as well.[11] The governor receives Huang and is "utterly captivated"; he begins to obsess himself with Huang and his health is slowly sapped. Eventually he dies, and Huang inherits much of his wealth.[12] Meanwhile, his cousin and He, apparently having become heterosexual, tie the knot.[11] Complementing the tale is a "Jesting Judgement" by Pu Songling; the poem echoes Mengzi's belief that "(t)he coming together in sexual congress of man and woman is one of the great natural bonds in human relations."[12]
Most scholars of Chinese literature are in agreement that "Huang Jiulang" is both criticising and satirising homosexuality in China. Judith T. Zeitlin writes in Historian of the Strange that the story, which "has a fixed penchant for homosexuality", "starts to slip into comedy when as a reward for his devotion he is 'converted' to heterosexuality in his next incarnation". She then criticises Pu's appended poem as "an amazingly arcane and rather hostile parody in parallel prose on homosexual practices".[13] John Minford, who translated the story in the Penguin edition of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, takes the opposite conclusion, that the poem "pokes fun at the anti-homosexual lobby" by spoofing "pedantic neo-Confucian prudery".[14] Finally, Stevenson and Wu (2012) consider that "on the surface [the tale is] poorly structured", and that Pu was ultimately unsuccessful in exploring one of the themes of greater importance in the story, that of the unseen, which concerns here both the supernatural and the unseen motivations of its characters. They recommend not drawing serious conclusions from the appended poem, whose title they translate as "Amusing Assessment".[15] "Huang Jiulang" is frequently cited as a prominent example of homosexual erotica in Chinese literature; Xiao (1997) remarks that "Huang Jiulang's act of love ended up killing He Shican".[16]
The story is titled "Huang Jiulang" (黄九郎), after one of the main characters. It was translated into English by John Minford in 2006 as "Cut Sleeve"; one of the opening lines reveals that the protagonist He Shican is "of the Cut Sleeve persuasion".[a] Sidney L. Sondergard's translation of the story, released in 2008, is titled Huang the Ninth.[17] The story was translated into Russian by Vasily Alekseyev in 1923.[18]
"Death in Venice" belongs to that group of short novels (or novellas, or long short stories) whose cultural importance is out of all proportion to their length. One thinks also of "Heart of Darkness," "Notes From Underground," "The Turn of the Screw," "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Bear," among others. And when you consider that the authors of each of those stories also wrote much longer works that hardly anyone ever reads, you can't help thinking there's a lesson there for would-be authors of Great Books.
Despite its portrayal of the glorious Adriatic port city as a cesspool of disease, duplicity and decadence -- well, actually, because of that portrayal -- Thomas Mann's mini-masterpiece (and Luchino Visconti's overripe 1971 film version) helped lure the aesthetes of the Western world back to Venice more effectively than any tourist-board brochure. (It certainly did more than Henry James' interminable "Wings of the Dove," which is also set there and bears some thematic similarities to Mann's story.) Today you'll pay upward of 400 euros a night to stay at the Hotel des Bains, on the Lido beachfront, where middle-aged Prussian novelist Gustav von Aschenbach pursues his ill-fated passion for a teenage Polish boy. The proprietors will be glad to confirm that, yes indeed, Mann himself stayed there in 1911 -- and so did a certain sailor-suited lad named Wladyslaw Moes (who was no older than 10 or 11).
Dare I even suggest that this fixation with the quasi-scandalous biographical incident behind "Death in Venice" -- now the subject of doctoral dissertations and entries in "Fodor's Italy" -- is, to some significant extent, missing the point? It can be difficult to remember that we're dealing with a work of fiction here, and an especially crafty and meticulous one at that. Like all of Mann's other books, "Death in Venice" is a nest of interlocking keys and symbols in which scarcely a word is wasted, a careful balance of opposing polarities and apparent contradictions in which no final, definitive interpretation can defeat all others. This is a book about Italy written by a German, a book about homosexual love written by a married man who fathered six children, a book about a man who debases himself and embraces his own death written by a man who lived to age 80 as the very embodiment of bourgeois literary respectability.
Whatever "Death in Venice" is, it isn't exactly autobiography. Mann went to Venice and apparently he saw a beautiful boy there. But he was traveling with his wife and brother, while Aschenbach is a solitary widower. Mann was 36, still a rising young writer, while Aschenbach is in his 50s, past the apogee of an illustrious career. And whatever Mann may have thought or felt about young Wladyslaw Moes, it did not drive him to die alone on the Lido, consumed by lust and fever.
There can be no question, however, that "Death in Venice" is a book about homosexual passion -- in the eyes of some gay literary scholars and queer-studies theorists, it has virtually become the book about homosexual passion -- and that fact has affected its reception all along. Generations of earlier scholars expended immense amounts of intellectual wattage trying to deny or rationalize the author's evident fascination with male-male ardor. Even today, some critical guides to "Death in Venice" explain it principally as an allegorical study of artistic creativity and its pitfalls, or as a modern interpretation of classical myth. These interpretations can be defended, but they tended to overlook the obvious fact that Aschenbach's predicament would never have seemed so dire or his obsession so doomed if its object had been a teenage girl instead of a boy.
Gay readers were understandably enraged by scholarly efforts to aestheticize the queerness out of "Death in Venice," and the post-Stonewall academic revolution has produced a valuable corrective. But the reliance on biographical detail -- whether it's Mann's encounter with young Moes in Venice (which, like Aschenbach's with his Tadzio, amounted to nothing) or the struggle with sexual identity revealed in Mann's letters and diaries -- has risked tumbling out of the gondola in the other direction. The fact that "Death in Venice" is based to some degree on an event from Mann's life, and even the fact that Mann himself may have been homosexual or bisexual, do not mean that the book is only about those things, or that it amounts to no more than an anguished Freudian confession thinly coated with imagination.
At the risk of sounding like a middlebrow hetero liberal, let me insist that it would be unfortunate if future generations read "Death in Venice" as a "paradigmatic master-text of homosexual eroticism," in the phrase of critic and novelist Gilbert Adair. It can no more be boiled down to such a formulation than "Heart of Darkness" can be described as being entirely about colonial Africa, or "The Old Man and the Sea" as about fishing.
7fc3f7cf58