BOOK REVIEW - Homophobia: A History.
David Murray
TTFN
D.
====
http://www.salon.com/sex/feature/2000/08/15/homophobia/index1.html
The propulsion of revulsion
The history of homosexuality, from Greece to the McCarthy hearing, in the new
book "Homophobia: A History."
By Michael Alvear
"Homophobia: A History", By Byrne Fone, Metropolitan Books 480 pages,
Nonfiction
Other epithets may bring out fists, but "fag" often brings out guns.
Homosexuality, as City University of New York historian Byrne Fone notes in
his new book, "Homophobia: A History," is the most powerful slur and "the
last acceptable prejudice."
His book, a history of homophobia beginning with antiquity and ending
with the passage of the first civil union law for gays in Vermont, is without
question the preeminent historical account of the hate that dare speak its
name.
How did love and sex between men start out as a noble ideal, practiced by
the majority of the population and approved for centuries by both religion
and law, and turn out to be one of the most vicious and sustained
persecutions in recorded history?
How did sex between men start out as an admired act of masculinity and
end up as a shameful badge of effeminacy? How did homosexual love and sex,
which were seen as important to the development of virtue, nobility and the
foundation of a strong society, become an enemy of the state?
Fone answers these questions in exquisite detail with a masterful command
of history, a balanced interpretation of contradictory documents and an
explosive set of assertions that fly against the conventional view of not
just homophobes but of gay people themselves.
This is the kind of work that, despite some enormous flaws, marks the
beginning of a new understanding of history's oldest hate -- its ignition,
trajectory, growth and, recently, its attenuation.
Fone begins his epic in antiquity, where the words "homosexual" or
"homosexuality" did not exist, despite the fact that man-to-man sex was
ubiquitous. Sexual identity didn't exist, but sex between men did. In fact,
"paiderastia" was a Greek philosophical concept idealizing same-sex desire.
It was expected for older men to mentor younger men, teaching them how to
hunt, fight and take their place as noble citizens. This teacher/student,
love/beloved relationship was as sexual as it was social.
Paiderasty was governed by centuries of tradition and substantiated by
scores of paintings (showing older and younger men copulating) and literature
(poems in "Book Twelve of the Greek Anthology" are almost exclusively devoted
to the love of young men). Fone paints antiquity with an expert hand, using
chisel-trim brushes for corners and edges, and rollers for the flat areas
that don't need much detail.
The book is peppered with small examples of nearly every assertion he
makes. For instance, proving Greece's elevation of man-boy love to nobility,
he quotes Phaedrus, a character in one of Plato's greatest works,
"Symposium." Phaedrus declares "there can be no greater benefit for a boy
than to have a worthy lover ... nor for a lover than to have a worthy object
of his affection." Greeks saw love between men as a way to acquire virtue
and "ambition for what is noble."
Greek law and religion didn't mention homosexual acts, but Greek society
passed harsh judgment on them if they defied accepted norms. There were homo
do's and homo don'ts: Don't shtup the underage, don't rape, don't prostitute
yourself; and no congress with slaves.
Both homophobes and gay activists today would be shocked at the history
Fone uncovered. The former because gay sex was revered as a way of building,
not destroying, family values, and the latter because homosexual sex was
reviled if the participants were effeminate.
Historians rarely discover rock-like truths. Truth comes in pebbles, in
layer upon layer of sediment that often rises to the level of agreed-upon
fact. Fone's meticulous book, weighted down with 38 pages of footnotes,
makes the ground of his asserted truths safe to walk on. There is no major
or minor assertion that isn't backed up with acres and acres of evidence.
Fone sprinkles his opinion like a gourmand -- a pinch here, a pinch there
-- but at times he sounds like he's writing a polemic rather than an account
of history. You start wondering if he's bending facts to fit his view. To
his credit he avoids this through most of the book until he reaches the
1980s, where he starts sounding like a P.R. flack for the Gay and Lesbian
Alliance Against Defamation.
Fone is at his best when he lets the facts speak for themselves. And one
inescapable fact is that the greatest civilization on Earth, the civilization
we still hold in awe several millennia later, was founded in part by a belief
in the nobility of homosexual love. Today, society thinks men who engage in
sex are fairies and sinners. Greeks thought they were masculine and
virtuous. Warrior, hunter, citizen, husband and boy-lover: These were the
characteristics of masculine identity.
Greeks didn't care whether the object of desire was male or female. What
they cared about most was upholding the status of the adult male, which could
only be done if the object of his penetration was passive (women or boys).
Antiquity's growing condemnation of effeminacy in males foreshadowed the
historical construction of homophobia. It wasn't gay sex that repulsed
Greeks; it was effeminate men, who they believed subverted masculinity.
As the Roman Empire ascended, they too celebrated love and sex between
men. Roman art pictured homosexual desire openly on wall paintings, coins,
artifacts, jewelry, terra cotta lamps and flasks. The propriety of
homosexual acts, as in Greece, was predicated more on the power and status of
the penetrator and penetrated than with gender. Romans had an exalted term
for men who properly engaged in homosexual acts: "vir." It symbolized the
ideal man, who penetrates other men but himself is not penetrated.
The biggest difference between Roman and Greek perceptions of same-sex
desire is that the Romans didn't believe sexual relations between men was a
path toward political, spiritual and ethical ideals. They just thought it
was a great way to get off.
Romans took the derision of effeminacy to newer and more vicious heights.
It was masculine to enjoy penetrating or receiving oral sex from another
man. It was effeminate to enjoy being penetrated or giving head. Being
penetrated was a necessary indignity boys had to put up with to attain civic
manhood. It was the price they paid to become a man, but once they became
men they were to give up the passive role. Funny thing was, a lot of those
men didn't want to give up the passive role, infuriating Roman society.
And herein lies one of the truly startling points in Fone's book: Greeks
and Romans at first feared effeminacy not because it threatened family values
or the social order, but because -- are you ready for this? -- it threatened
to take the masculinity out of gay sex, making the act incompatible with the
nobility of the male citizen. If effeminacy were associated with homosexual
acts, as detractors were increasingly charging, then real men would have to
stop enjoying it. The rising condemnation of effeminacy was, at first, an
attempt to preserve the privilege of having sex with boys.
The contempt for effeminacy in men became increasingly rabid in later
antiquity and set up a harbinger of the persecutions to come for any
homosexual act, be it receptive or not.
The ascension of Christianity snatched same-sex desire off its
historically noble pedestal and flung it into the fiery pit of hell.
Christianity separated what antiquity united -- flesh and spirit. Abstinence
and celibacy, not pleasure and sex, were the road to the hereafter. Now,
procreation was the only justification for sexual desire. Same-sex acts
could not result in children; therefore they became the enemy of all that is
good.
By the fourth century the Roman Empire officially became Christian. Fone
does a great job of not only tracing the birth and direction of Christian
laws against homosexual acts, but provides the law verbatim from historical
tracts, making for unstoppable reading. For example, in 342 a new
anti-homosexual edict became law: "When a man submits to men, the way a woman
does ... We order the statutes to arise, and the laws to be armed with an
avenging sword, that those guilty of such infamous crimes ... be subjected to
exquisite penalties."
Christianity cemented the transformation of what was once a noble ideal
to an infamous crime, what was once enraptured pleasure to an "exquisite"
penalty.
And that was just the beginning.
In 533 the emperor of Constantinople extended the death penalty to
homosexual acts, translating Judeo-Christian condemnation into legal
punishment and institutionalizing homophobia into law.
Soon, sodomy became the worst of all sexual sins. In the definitive
canonical statement on sodomy, Thomas Aquinas in the mid-1200s said sex with
the wrong gender is second only to murder in its seriousness, suggesting that
men preferring sex with other men are a species apart, what Fone calls "a
race of sinners." Aquinas felt adultery, incest and rape were preferable to
men loving each other because at least those sins result in procreation,
God's intention.
The biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah became the basis for the
torture, imprisonment and murder of men with same-sex desires. Fone's take
on the story is one of the high points of the book. He presents clear and
reasoned evidence that the interpretation of one single and very disputed
word in the story of Sodom became a license to harvest so much of humanity
from the church's killing fields.
The dawn of the 14th century saw Europe's first execution for sodomy. A
knife maker was burned alive for engaging in what the church called an act
"detested by God." Thousands of executions followed in the next centuries,
especially with the Inquisition. In France, officials burned records of
sodomy trials along with the perpetrator because the sin was "so hideous that
it should not be named."
Fone's biggest flaw, and it is big, is that he writes as if his themes
were allergic to chronology. He often jumps back and forth between
timelines, an annoying device for the linearly limited. For example, he'll
end a chapter on the Middle Ages, skip a couple of centuries ahead, then
spend a considerable amount of time back on the Middle Ages again. Somebody
needs to take the reverse thruster out of his time-machine rocket.
This back-and-forth may have even confused the author. What else could
explain ending Chapter 8 with "... sodomy was increasingly taken to mean
sexual acts between persons of the same sex ..." and starting Chapter 9 with
"... the Church introduced a powerful new word -- 'sodomy' to name any
non-procreative sexual act."
Huh?
At any rate, "sodomite" became an all-purpose epithet to disparage the
church's enemies, of which it had many. When Arab armies captured Jerusalem,
they labeled Muslims with it. Whole cities would be accused of sodomy. One
writer noted that "All Tuscans are drawn to cock." Germans thought Italy,
especially Florence, was the "mother of sodomy" and called sodomites
"Florenzers."
The church often used the charge of sodomy to acquire wealth and
property. Laws were formulated so that conviction of the charge forfeited
the perpetrator's assets to the church. In a classic turnabout, King Henry
VIII consolidated England's power over the Roman church in much the same way.
He created sodomy laws, charged Roman-controlled English churches with the
vile practice and shut them down, conveniently forfeiting their wealth to his
empire. Charging somebody with sodomy wasn't just an ecclesiastic cleansing,
it was a get-rich-quick scheme.
England's shift of authority from church to state meant the adjudication
and punishment of sodomy was now a government, not a religious, matter. The
unmentionable sin was now a state-defined crime, and it offered up sodomites
as a new class of villain -- Enemy of the State.
The Enlightenment saw the European decriminalization of sodomy. Voltaire
publicly opposed the death penalty, arguing sodomy was harmless and the
Marquis de Sade was one of the earliest and most articulate defenders of
tolerating sodomites.
In the late 1800s England reduced the death penalty for sodomy to life in
prison. They also removed mention of sodomy and replaced it with "gross
indecency," a term with which Oscar Wilde became intimately familiar.
England's refusal to even name the act provoked Wilde's lover to write the
most famous description of homosexual love: "The love that dare not speak its
name."
By the early 1900s the words "homosexual" and "heterosexual," coined by a
journalist, became common. Conceptions of homosexuality as a medical problem
also emerged then. Now the homosexual wasn't just a sinner and a criminal,
he was also medically sick.
After World War I, the military became obsessed with rooting out
homosexuals from its ranks. In a 1918 essay, "Homosexuality -- A Military
Menace," the writer states "... from a military point of view the
homosexualist is not only dangerous but ineffective as a fighter." It wasn't
explained then or even now how a homosexual is too weak to fight against the
enemy, but too dangerous for his fellow soldiers.
In 1948 the Kinsey Report put homosexuality squarely in the mainstream
consciousness of homophobic America, announcing that 37 percent of American
males had some homosexual experience and that 4 to 10 percent of American men
were exclusively homosexual. The report cleared the benches for a rumble in
which Time and Newsweek led the pile-on.
Soon, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed that "sexual perverts have infiltrated
our government" and were "perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists." By
1950 the federal government had issued a document, "Employment of Homosexuals
and other Sex Perverts in Government," setting the stage for yet more labels
for homosexuals: Communists, security leaks and, most of all, traitors.
The McCarthy trials, oddly enough, helped spur the creation of the modern
homosexual rights movement in the United States. Harry Hay, the founding
father of the American homosexual liberation movement, formed the Mattachine
Society in 1951 as a response to the trials.
Fone's book pretty much falls apart after that, replacing rigorous
research with admonishments and hopes. His take on late 20th century events
becomes a list without the fist of insight. Luckily, we're at the end of the
book when this happens.
Despite its flaws, "Homophobia: A History" is a major addition to the
understanding of the calamity that befell what Greeks thought of as the
highest love possible. It's destined to become the tarmac for reconnaissance
missions into the future of one of history's longest-running hatreds.
About the writer: Michael Alvear is the author of "Slouching Through
Gomorrah," a syndicated culture critique. He lives in Atlanta.
Hugh Young
<davidrmuN...@yahoo.com> said:
>http://www.salon.com/sex/feature/2000/08/15/homophobia/index1.html
>The propulsion of revulsion
>The history of homosexuality, from Greece to the McCarthy hearing, in the new
>book "Homophobia: A History."
>By Michael Alvear
>"Homophobia: A History", By Byrne Fone, Metropolitan Books 480 pages,
>Nonfiction
> In the late 1800s England reduced the death penalty for sodomy to life in
>prison. They also removed mention of sodomy and replaced it with "gross
>indecency," a term with which Oscar Wilde became intimately familiar.
They certainly did not. They added a new crime (late at night when
many MPs were nodding) while passing a bill about child prostitution.
Sodomy was still illegal as a separate offence, but one much harder to
prove.
>England's refusal to even name the act
? Queensbury could name it, even if he couldn't spell it ("To Oscar
Wilde, posing Somdomite")
> provoked Wilde's lover to write the
>most famous description of homosexual love: "The love that dare not speak its
>name."
Nothing to do with the act.
Bosie did not write a "description" he wrote a sonnet very seldom
quoted in full, "Two Loves": the first is the personified love of man
and woman and the second just says "I am the love that dare not speak
its name".
It was left to Wilde to define it at his trial:
"The love that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great
affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and
Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and
such as you find in the sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare. It
is that deep, spriritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.
It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare
and Michaelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It
is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be
described as "the love that dares not speak its name," and on account
of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is
the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It
is intellectual and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a
younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has
all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be
so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and
sometimes puts one in the pillory for it."
Of course Wilde was on trial not for that love, so defined, but for
sex with renters.
--
Hugh Young, Pukerua Bay, Nuclear-free Aotearoa / New Zealand
Overnight editing! http://www.wn.planet.gen.nz/~hugh/