This is a heartfelt tour of sinology's gay male closet, the door for some of the scholars and “aesthetes” who journeyed from the West to China locked more tightly than for others. By consulting archives and attempting personal contact with surviving family and friends (not all of whom agreed to talk), historian Mungello tells the “story of how twenty-three different men with same-sex desire fled to China and influenced history” (p. 1). Mungello might have said “twenty-three same men,” since in the end what one takes away is their shared expatriation (for Arthur Waley, virtual rather than real), not their disparate origins (America, Britain, France, Germany, Holland).

Mungello, whose impetus for writing this study was “an attraction that I myself felt, although for many years I thought it was merely a personal idiosyncrasy that did not apply to others” (p. 2), is often a detective seeking proof of “same-sex desire” in forebears who left little or no certain evidence behind. Middle-aged bachelorhood or an apparent mariage blanc suffices to indict. Some, says Mungello, sought refuge from homophobia at home; others were attracted to “the reorientation of Western aesthetics toward China” (p. 1) in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But these two impulses are surely related. Mungello himself is an example of a young man (I was one, too) who started to study the Chinese language “because of the beauty and exotic qualities of its characters” (p. 2) but later followed the lure from the calligraphic to the carnal. We might just as well have been attracted to a graceful Arabic script, or the sensual splendor of Italian churches—indeed, the move to Beijing was just an extension of the queer flight to an accommodating Maghreb or Mediterranean, or for that matter from Muncie to the Castro.

Josef Schedel went to China in 1909 for the boy-actors, as did Edmund Backhouse. Others had broader tastes, such as Harold Witter Bynner, Vincenz Hundhausen, and Harold Acton (who fairly haunts this book). Some wore the collar (Father Matteo Ripa, Adam Schall von Bell), many bore resplendent names (George Soulié de Morant, Johannes Jacobus Maria De Groot, Laurence Chalfant Stevens Sickman). I was struck at what a small world it is: I am at best only two or three professional generations removed from his subjects. I remember meeting David Kidd in Kyoto in the early 1970s, and my employer, Yale, comes across as the veritable Sotadic Zone of sinological inversion. (Intriguingly, Mungello claims “very few homosexual scholars have been identified at Harvard” (p. 101), though Glen William Baxter is a massive exception.)

Marston Anderson, who appears both near the beginning and the end of the book, preceded me on the faculty of my present department. He and Howard Wechsler (with his own Yale connections) are the two gay men here who died of HIV/AIDS, thus precluding much opportunity for cowering in a closet. Mungello says Anderson was “far more repressed” than Wechsler. “He fought his same-sex desires with an intensity that led him to conceive a child,” undisclosed to his friends and family until the day of his funeral. “He remained,” Mungello insists, “deeply closeted until his death” (p. 23). There is no footnote leading the reader to a source for this access into Anderson's mind, and one wonders how Mungello knows. New Haven lore differs somewhat on this point. We should be cautious in believing we know the heart of another.

There is little levity in these biographies, though I did chuckle when, after reading that Sickman complained to a friend that “I have too many hormones,” Mungello comments, “He appeared to have few sexual partners, although appearances among closeted homosexuals can be misleading, particularly if they complain of having too many hormones” (p. 134). Not many pages later, however, Mungello ends his book on a sour note. He suggests my own work on Western homosexuals in Japan displays “racist candor” and “personal egotism” in historicizing the politics of color in sexual relations between white and Asian men: the consequence, he fears, of the “consciously cultivated subjectivity of queer theory.” Mungello prefers to think of China as Oz, that made-up place at the end of a yellow brick road, where some take “the beauty of young Chinese men” to be “a flower at the peak of bloom, an object of timeless beauty” (p. 140): outside of history and anchored in place for the pleasure of our gaze. Generous readers of Western Queers in China may find this charming, but others will wonder if there is something flowers might want to tell us.

Throughout, Mungello asks a familiar question—What links a (Western, male) homosexual orientation with a passion for Asia?—but from a newer perspective: China hands in the Age of Imperialism. His book is informed, entertaining, and melancholy in equal measure. The heart may be unfathomable, but Mungello has proven it is there.