Today, lesbians and gay men maintain a cultural visibility that is not new: it has been built up over a century and more.īut the question of gay influence is not entirely gratuitous. That it was a hot issue in the 1920s and 1930s accounts for the invention of the idea of the Homintern.
Lenin had established the Comintern (Communist International) in 1919. Homintern was the name various people jokingly coined to describe a sprawling, informal network of contacts that occupied a prominent site near the centre of modern life.
It may have started as a joke, but it was taken all too seriously by those whom it infuriated.Ī costume design for a Ballets Russes production of Alexander Tcherepnin’s Narcisse, 1911.
