The propulsion of revulsion
JohnM
<Mi...@home.net.nz> writes
>The propulsion of revulsion
>
>The history of homosexuality, from Greece to the McCarthy hearing, in the
>new book "Homophobia: A History", by Byrne Fone, Metropolitan Books 480
>pages, Nonfiction
>
>
>Review By Michael Alvear www.salon.com
-- the book sounds great - and I'll order it.
Hope, though it does not have a Eurocentric bent - if I may
use the word. From your Maoris to the Brazilian Indians and
from the Chinese to the Zulu every culture has had its own
view of homosexuality.
--
JohnM in search of a sig...dammit!
Web site http://www.scroll.demon.co.uk/spaver.htm
Brazil 500 travelogue http://www.scroll.demon.co.uk/brazil/index.htm
Mike
The history of homosexuality, from Greece to the McCarthy hearing, in the
new book "Homophobia: A History", by Byrne Fone, Metropolitan Books 480
pages, Nonfiction
Review By Michael Alvear www.salon.com
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.
FROM Salon, August 15, 2000
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