Robert Aldrich

The French Revolution never ceases to fascinate. Marie-Antoinette and Robespierre, the storming of the Bastille and the 'Marseillaise', the Terror and its guillotine ...

The author of this handsomely produced volume claims in his opening sentence, ‘The sex lives of celebrities (and the less famous) always excite the curiosity of others.’ For the sake of his book he’d better be right, because what follows are more than eighty gay histories and/or partnerships, each moving inexorably to the matter of sexual orientation and declaration – reluctant or otherwise. Aldrich is probably right. Think of all those journals whose covers you browse while waiting in the supermarket queue, inviting you to speculate on, say, the vicissitudes of Brangelina. Recent political controversies about gay marriage rights or the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy of the US armed forces provide a contemporary context for Aldrich.

‘One would have to be extremely naïve not to know immediately upon entering his room what was what when one saw the decoration with its reproduction Greek statues of hermaphrodites, and its strange collection of pictures, each boasting a posterior, mixed with pictures of pretty young men from the local garrison which the talented dilettante has made himself and continues to make.’

One of the remarkable feats of Claire Denis’ recent film Beau Travail is to turn ironing into an erotic spectacle. That most humble of ‘travails’ becomes an important part of the ceaseless, sizzling ballet that the director makes of the daily round of a group of present-day French Legionnaires stationed in Djibouti. The feat is not remarked on in Robert Aldrich’s near-to-encyclopedic Colonialism and Homosexuality, though the film is duly listed in his epilogue, ‘After the Empire’. It certainly qualifies as one of the most vivid recent reminders of that long tradition he traces of representing ‘the whole of the North African world … as a sensuous experience’ – and a sensual one.