Jeb Boswell (may Allah be pleased with him notwithstanding) was the very worst sort of middle-class New England homo - the busily-liberal kind who was determined to show that bum-sexiness among men was inoffensive to respectable Catholic folk, even if that meant grossly misrepresenting the history of sexuality in late antiquity and the middle ages. His books were overblown and largely fictitious, and he was torn apart by much better scholars - including boylovers William A Percy and Warren Johansson (who were also quite wrong, but for different and possibly better reasons). Dying of AIDS was indeed among Jeb's achievements (as was mastering Old Church Slavonic - which I do genuinely envy), but he was 47 when he died, so not exactly young and not as photogenic as those book covers would lead you to believe. Anyway, I guess it's fairly predictable that he would be - um - lionised in an era when the homos are the paragons of the conservative establishment, and the naive Realism that Boswell propounded (even to a politely baffled Foucault) is the stuff of political slogans everywhere. I recently read a bumper sticker that said "If God didn't love gays there wouldn't be any" - and I felt the ghost of John Boswell slithering unctiously into the soul of our age. |