"Centaur", photograph by A/Z, available with other photographs and drawings at Fine Art America;
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"No evidence supports the common idea that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are incompatible; much data suggests the contrary" (: 9).
"Far fewer people are aware that Oscar Wilde was a husband and father than that he was gay and had a male lover" (: 10).
"It is unlikely that at any time in Western history have gay people been the victims of more widespread and vehement intolerance than during the first half of the twentieth century" (: 23).
"Richard lion Heart, Edward II, the Duc d'Orléans, the Prince de la Roche sur Yon, the Grande Condé, the Maréchal de Vendôme — all these men noted for matial skill or valor were also noted for being gay" (: 25).
"... beauty was not considered exclusively in terms of youth... 'as garland bearers for Athena, old men are often chosen, demonstrating that there is beauty in every stage of life'" [Xenophon, Symposium 4.17] (: 29, n. 54).
"In a now famous remark, Edward Gibbon observed that 'of the first fifteen emperors Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct', meaning heterosexual. If Gibbon was right, the Roman Empire was ruled for almost 200 consecutive years by men whose homosexual interests, if not exclusive, were sufficiently noteworthy to be recorded for posterity" (: 61).
"In fact intense love relations between persons of the same gender figure prominently in the Old Testament — e.g. Saul and David, David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi — and were celebrated throughout the Middle Ages in both ecclesiastical and popular literature as examples of extraordinary devotion, sometimes with distinctly erotic overtones" (: 105).
"Sexuality appears to have been largely a matter of indifference to Jesus. His comments on sexual mores are extremely few, especially in comparison with the frequency of his observations on such matters as wealth and demonic possession, which were largely ignored by later Christians... When confronted with adulterers, he recommended no punishment and clearly suggested that the sins anyone else might have committed were of equal gravity" (: 114).
"A Christian contemporary in the West, Ausonius, kept in his library volumes of homosexual literature which were considered scandalous even by Roman standards... and took delight in translating from Greek to Latin such tidbits as Strato's puzzle about four sex acts being performed simultaneously by three men" (: 132).
"Saint Augustine himself, writing in this tradition, expressed the love he felt for a friend of his youth, whose death so desolated him that he was driven to God in unbearable pain..." (: 135).
"Almost without exception the few laws against homosexual behaviour passed before the thirteenth century were enacted by civil authorities without advice or support from the church" (: 174).
"Regular confession and spiritual direction were in any case not widespread in the Middle Ages outside areas directly controlled by cathedral chapters or religious orders. Except for the clergy, few people made regular confessions more than once a year" (: 182).
"An entire genre of Germanic literature revolves around ceremonial insults... in which one warrior accuses another of having been sexually passive with him or others... It seems probable from the sum of the evidence that among some of the Germans certain men fulfilled a role similar to that of the berdache among American Indians, adopting feminine social roles and being sexually passive to another male, and such relationships may have been institutionalized as 'marriages' among them" (: 184).
"... most Muslim cultures have treated homosexuality with indifference, if not admiration. Almost without exception the classic works of Arabic poetry and prose, from Abu Nuwas to the Thousand and One Nights, treat gay people and their sexuality with respect and casual acceptance... The Arabic language contains a huge vocabulary of gay erotic terminology, with dozens of words just to describe types of male prostitutes" (: 194).
"Poems about the physical allore of a young man's first beard constitute an entire genre of Arabic poetry" (: 195).
"Homosexual love imagery was a standard currency of Islamic mystical writings both in and out of Spain. Many of the authors of gay erotic poetry on the Iberian peninsula were teachers of the Qur'an, religious leaders, or judges; almost all wrote conventional religious verse as well as love poetry" (: 197).
"Only anal intercourse with a married man seemed to Burchard a grave sin, but even if committed habitually this sin did not incur a penalty as severe as for a single instance of heterosexual adultery" (: 205).
"The twelfth-century 'revival' of love included gay people and their passions no less than other... the proportion of gay literature surviving from this period is astonishing" (: 209).
"... it is difficult to question the unanimity and equanimity with which chroniclers allude to the sexual orientation of Richard Lion Heart, the crusading king whose valor became the symbol of chivalric idealism... Richard gave every indication of being profoundly Catholic: he heard mass daily for much of his life and was the driving force behind the third crusade" (: 231).
"Homosexuality occurs so frequently in the [Arabian] Nights that it would be impossible to cite even the major instances" (: 257, n. 54).
"Most of the attitudes of fanaticism and intolerance which are today thought of as characteristically 'medieval' were in fact common only to the later Middle Ages... Perhaps the single most prominent aspect of the period from the later twelfth to the fourteenth century was a sedulous quest for intellectual and institutional uniformity and corporatism throughout Europe" (: 269-70).
"The Franciscans came perilously close to being declared heretical before their final acceptance by the church" (: 275).
****John Boswell, Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality: gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century (University of Chicago Press, 1980).
"... a certain Theron chopped off his own thumb and challenged a rival erastes to do the same... The most remarkable anecdote of this kind, however, comes from the early fourth century B.C... [and] tells of a man willing to die for a youth about whom he knew no more than the visual stimulus of bodily beauty could tell him" (: 51).
"... a boy is compared to a horse which, ‘sated with barley’, has ‘come back to our stable wanting a good charioteer’... ‘Barley’ (krithai) is comic slang for ‘penis’..." (: 58-9).
"... the publicity associated with modern ‘pin-ups’ belonged to males rather than females..." (: 66).
"Timarkhos, according to Aiskhines, was in just such a position while supported as an expensive male prostitute by Misgolas; his money went on luxurious food, gambling, hetairai and girl-musicians, and later in life he allegedly displayed a highly-developed heterosexual appetite, pursuing other men’s wives" (: 67).
"The analogy between an ancient homosexual and modern heterosexual society can be pursued further if we extend the category ‘modern’ to include the presentation of respectable British society in the literature of the nineteenth century. The good woman, in this literature, does not desire or seek sexual intercourse…" (: 90).
"The assumption that all homosexual submission is mercenary, and with this a total silence on the possible emergence of extreme devotion, courage and self-sacrifice from a homosexual relationship, is analogous to another characteristic feature of comedy, the assumption that all holders of administrative offices feather their own nests" (: 145).
****Sir Kenneth James Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Duckworth, 1978).
"Research over the past ten years has tended to confirm... that boy-inseminating ritualized homosexuality in certain traditional societies of Melanesia is prehistoric... Comparative scholars such as Greenberg believe that this tradition should be seen as a survival of a Paleolithic practice once widespread throughout the world" (: xv).
"Through successive sexual experiences with males and females, I would guess, first only with males—and later with younger boys in addition to marital sex—the East Bay man becomes a whole social and sexual person. It is a sexual course of life, incidentally, that never alters until death, since East Bay adult men, after they are married, and even as grandfathers, may continue inseminating boys" (: xxxii).
"'The ideological reason for insemination is to "grow" the boys into men, but homosexuality appears for all practical intents and purposes to be grounded in personal affection rather than obligation'" [Knauft] (: xxxii).
"Initial reports in this area [Lower Fly River] came from the Fly River delta and Kiwai Island... These small tribal groups were once fierce warriors. All males were initiated into a secret cult... Beardmore... a missionary, first mentioned that 'sodomy is regularly indulged in' on the left bank of the Fly'" (: 18).
"Given the available Melanesian data, our survey conservatively results in between 10 to 20 percent of all Melanesian cultures having ritualized homosexuality as defined" (: 56).
"[Ritualized homosexuality] does not make these males into what we Westerners call 'homosexuals'; these data instead challenge our own views about what that category means, and what parts of nature and nurture it is made from. Perhaps we should now better look to understand how the fluidity of the human condition allows this Melanesian phenomena and what, in a general sense, bisexuality is all about" (: 65).
****Gilbert H. Herdt (Ed.), Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (University of California Press, 1993).
"Although homosexual roles may be recognized, mere involvement in a sexual relationship with someone of the same sex does not become the basis for classifying someone as a distinct type of person. This remains true in all the early civilizations, as well as in feudal social systems" (: 14).
"In Greek or Roman antiquity, homosexuality was not—as far as we can tell—rare, and was not assumed to reflect something intrinsically distinctive about those who engaged in it" (: 17).
"Although most berdaches seem to have maintained the role for life, Spier tells of a Klamath adolescent who wore women's garb and perfomed women's tasks, but later abandoned the female and became a chief who married seven wives" (: 43).
"The manang bali of the Iban (Sea Dyak) of turn-of-the-century Sarawak (in northwestern Borneo) adopted female costume in obedience to supernatural instructions conveyed in dreams and seduced young men. Toward the end of the nineteenth century they were populars as curers—in fact, they were the most highly regarded of shamans" (; 57).
"Until recently, Mangaia, one of the Cook Islands, had several transvestites, but ccording to Marshall, they did not choose male sexual partners. Nor did the transvestites of Rapa, south of the Society Islands. Indeed, one extremely effeminate man had a wife and several children" (: 59).
"The extremely wide dispersion of the transvestite shaman role, among peoples whose later ways of life have been very diverse, suggests that the role does date back to the late Paleolithic (if not earlier)" (: 64).
"Lafitau, a French Jesuit missionary in early-eighteenth-century Canada, describes intense and socially recognized 'special friendships' among Indians from coast to coast..." (: 70).
"In addition to marrying Hera and chasing nymphs and women, the Greek Zeus adbucted Ganymede. Apollo impregnated nymphs and women, but also fell in love with the male Hyacinth. Poseidon, who married Amphitrite and pursued Demeter, also raped Tantalus" (: 93).
"... one of the assinu's [male-homosexual cult prostitute] functions was to serve as the receptive sexual partner of male worshipers in anal intercourse, perhaps particularly with those who wanted trouble to leave them..." (: 97).
"The aristocratic warrior societies do seem to have had extensive male homosexuality, which was completely accepted... According to Aristotle, the Celts steemed homosexuality... Diodorus Siculus found Celtic women charming, and every indicator of their social status suggests that it was quite high. Nevertheless, he added, 'the men are much keener on their own sex; they lie around on animal skins and enjoy themselves...'" (: 111).
"The city of Thebes maintained an elite Sacred Band of three hundred homosexual lovers—older heniochoi (charioteers) and their young paraibatai (companions), who were given a complete set of military equipment on reaching maturity" (: 115).
"The potentates of the East found eunuchs politically invaluable" (: 123).
"...biblical references to Sodom do not even mention homosexuality; they suggest that the city was destroyed because of its inhospitality to guests... even if—as I have argued— homosexuality was involved, it was not consensual homosexuality but homosexual rape" (: 136).
"... Greeks assumed that ordinarily sexual choices were not mutually exclusive, but rather that people were generally capable of responding erotically to beauty in both sexes... It was said of Alcibiades... 'that in his adolescence he drew away the husbands from their wives, and as a young man the wives from their husbands'" (: 144).
"To be sure, it was recognized that some men preferred women, and others, male partners. Atheneus, for example, remarked that Alexander the Great was indifferent to women but passionate for males" (: 145).
"This preference for youths stemmed from the intensely competitive individualism of Greek male culture... When the partners were of similar social status (brother, friends), possession implied status derogation, and this was an insult... Most men accommodated these status considerations by choosing a status inferior (a slave or prostitute), or a free younger partner, whose youth made him ineligible for military service or political office..." (: 146-47).
"Polybus, a Greek historian who visited Rome in the second century B.C., reported that most young men had male lovers. Many of the leading figures in Roman literary life in the late Republic—Catullus, Tibullus, Vergil, and Horace—wrote homophile poetry" (: 154).
"Many a young [Roman] man had a concubinus—a male slave to use sexually before marriage" (157).
"When the Aztecs and Incas legislated against homosexuality, they may have been trying to substitute the political state and its official religion for the shamans of tribal society... [who] were frequently male-to-female tranvestites who engaged in sexual relations with other men..." (: 165).
"Notwithstanding the opposition of Islamic religious law, a de facto acceptance of male homosexuality has prevailed in Arab lands down to the modern era, though in some times and places discretion has been required" (: 177).
"The Vendidad was a product of the Parthian period, the work of magis who synthesized the Zoroastrian cult with the older Aryan fire worship. Their hatred of Hellenistic culture may have added to an earlier opposition to cult prostitution, producing an expecially extreme hostility to homosexuality" (: 189).
"The treatment of sexual offenses in Leviticus suggests that the level of anxiety with sex was quite high" (: 195).
"For Plato, the ideal life was to be spent seeking and discussing Beauty, Truth, and Good. Although bodily perfection could inspire this pursuit, lust itself was evil because it leads to an undignified, slavish, animallike surrender to the passions" (: 203).
"[Morton Smith] concludes that Jesus broke sharply with Jewish legal restrictions, believing that his religious-magical powers gave him and his followers freedom to disobey the Law. He thinks Jesus conducted secret baptismal initiations at which mystical secrets were imparted, and at which ritual homossexual intercourse may have taken place..." (: 217).
"Pederasty, [John Chrysostom] insists, is so dangerous, and yet so omnipresent, that to protect them from it, boys should be sent to live in monasteries for one or two dozen years starting in late childhood" (: 222).
"Had [Augustine] endorsed the doctrine that only virgins could be saved, he would have had to accept the absolute impossibility of his own salvation" (: 224-25).
"Cult tranvestism persisted for centuries in Scandinavia, along with other pagan religious practices and a traditional way of life" (: 243).
"Evidently the Vandals' horror of effeminacy, on which Salvian commented, did not preclude submission to pederasty when it was military advantageous—and probably in other circumstances" (: 249).
"In [the chanson that commemorates the life of William Marshall (1145-1219)] King Henry II loves his page, who is his first cousin. After expelling William from his court for having an affair with his wife, Henry got rid of his wife and displayed great affection for William... In Lancelot, Sir Gawain prays that God turn him into a beautiful woman so that he will be loved by the unknown knight" (: 257).
"Male homosexuality... in Japan... during the feudal age... flourished among the military aristocracy. A samurai warrior went to battle accompanied by a favorite youth, who also served as a sexual partner... Literary sources depict the relationships as highly romantic, sustained by undying loyality... The relationships were not only accepted, but considered extremely desirable, especially in those regions of Japan where physical strenght and military prowess were highly prized" (: 260).
"By the year 1300, Europe had become distinctly less hospitable to those who engaged in homosexual acts than it had been two hundred years earlier" (: 279).
"... church's claim that it, rather than the secular rulers, should exercise spiritual authority, was not easy to maintain while the moral standards of the clergy were so vulnerable to criticism" (: 281).
"Projecting one's own unacceptable desires onto someone else is ... reaction formation... hostility toward those believed to be homosexual should be greater if they are one's own sex, for it is they who as potential sexual partners should arouse the greatest anxiety... (: 289).
"In Russia, homosexuality had long been under church jurisdiction, but at the start of the eighteenth century Peter the Great, who often slept with his soldiers, hypocritically made the prohibition [against homosexuality] secular" (: 303).
"According to Saint Bernardino of Sienna, Florence and other early-fifteenth-century Tuscan cities had such a reputation for sodomy that Genoa would not hire Tuscan schoolmasters, and boys walking down the streets of Florence were in greater danger than girls of being sexually assaulted" (: 305).
"Antonio Becadelli's widely read Hermaphroditus... was made court poet at Pavia and was knighted at Naples... Cellini's sodomy convictions did not stand in the way of his receiving comissions from the church for his sculptures... Many of the homosexually active men were also actively heterosexual... Cellini had affairs with women and eventually married. Caravaggio lived for years with one of his male models, but later had a relationship with a woman... [they] probably identified themselves and were considered by others as libertines" (: 308-309).
"The conjuncture of extremely harsh legislation justified primarily on religious grounds, erratic enforcement, and popular indifference, punctuated by infrequent episodes of repression, remained characteristic of social responses to homosexuality from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century, but began to change in the modern era" (: 347).
"Benthan, the philosopher of rational hedonism, argued that same-sex love was thoroughly innocuous, and rebutted one argument after another for its criminalization. Fearing the prejudices against homosexuality would jeopardize his reform program—and possibly his life—he never published these writings. Charles Fourier went even further..." (: 351).
"The new capitalist order contributed to this stigmatization and to the intensification of prosecutions which occurred late in the century in the United States, England, and Europe. It did so by intensifying competition between men, by sharpening the sexual division of labor and strengthening the ideology of the family, and by stimulating the invention of medical explanations of social deviance" (: 356).
"[Freud] was aware of his own erotic attraction to Fliess, which he would surely have been reluctant to label a sign of degeneracy. Nor could he easily label his patients degenerate... Freud had assisted one of his teachers in research on sex alternation in crustacea and was thus quite familiar with these findings. They were widely interpreted as demonstrating that sexuality was complex..." (: 423).
"In 1905 [Freud] told a newspaper reporter that 'homosexuals must not be treated as sick people, for a perverse orientation is far from being a sickness'... Though Freud may have built on the scientific discoveries of others, the particular emphases in his work reflect the culture and political milieu of fin-de-siècle Vienna. The Austrian aristocracy of the late nineteenth century had neither been defeated by the haute bourgeoisie nor assimilated to it. As the latter became more affluent, they began to emulate the sensuosity and aestheticism of the aristocracy... eroticism pervaded the art of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oscar Kokoschka" (: 426).
"An experimental study of aggression toward homosexuals... found that male-heterosexual college students who had negative views of homosexuality were more aggressive toward homosexual targets they believed to be similar to themselves than toward those they considered dissimilar. When the targets were heterosexual, the response pattern was just the opposite... This difference in patterns of agressiveness suggests that hostility toward homosexuals may be provoked by an irrational sense of personal threat aroused by unconscious homosexual impulses" (: 448).
****David F. Greenberg. The Construction of Homosexuality (The University of Chicago Press, 1988).
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