Homosexuality

A History (From Ancient Greece to Gay Liberation)

Vern L. Bullough

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367174224
• eBook ISBN: 9780429615191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1979. This is at once a look at the realities of homosexuality in history and an examination of the myths that have grown up around it. The record of practices and prejudices moves from biblical and classical through early and medieval Christian, Renaissance, and Victorian times, to our own era of dramatic changes. It looks at prominent figures who were homosexuals, the theories that have flourished and faded, the differing attitudes toward male and female homosexuality, persecution, and contemporary changes. This classic work is a fascinating historical perspective of all the factors that have shaped and changed our attitudes from ancient times to the present.

Chapter 1

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PAST DEFINITIONS
AND EXPLANATIONS

Homosexuality has been called among other things a sin, an illness, a way of life, a normal variant of sexual behavior, a behavior disturbance, and a crime. Homosexuals are said to have been “born that way,” been enticed into homosexuality by an adult, been turned to homosexuality by the lack of a strong parent, been made homosexuals by a dominating parent, been trapped in the gang stage of child development, been unable to attract a person of the opposite sex, been oversexed or sexually deficient, been at a lower level of human evolution, been rebels against a bourgeois materialist society, or been victims of various kinds of traumatic experiences.

Terms such as “queer,” “fag,” “fairy,” and “pervert” have been applied to them as individuals, and at various times in history they have been put in asylums, imprisoned, executed, medicated, psychoanalyzed, and ostracized; yet they have continued to exist. Most survived by remaining in the closet—that is, they never publicly proclaimed themselves but sought to mask their sexual preference by living and acting as did their neighbors. Though we may stereotype the male homosexual as effeminate and the female homosexual as masculine, and apply such terms as “queen” and “butch,” homosexuals, unless they want to be, are for the most part not easily identified. Though the stereotypes do exist, only a minority of homosexuals of either sex conform to them.

Only in recent years have a significant number of individuals publicly proclaimed their homosexuality and campaigned openly for better treatment. Most of those who have publicly emerged proclaim themselves as “gay,” a term originally applied to prostitutes and intended to suggest the “immoral” life they led. By using such a term the gays have followed other minority groups such as blacks and Chicanos who by adopting feared derogatory terminology to describe themselves have undercut the sting and the hostility of the terms applied by others.

In going public, homosexuals undoubtedly risk creating a backlash, particularly if a hostile and uninformed public assumes that homosexuality is growing, threatening to undermine the family and traditional values. By not going public, however, and pretending not to exist in any numbers, the homosexuals remain the victims of society, subject to all kinds of persecution. In Nazi Germany, homosexuals were put into concentration camps, while in Communist Cuba, they were tossed into political prisons, and when Castro’s government finally opened the prisons, they were still denied the rights of ordinary citizens. In the United States, they have been subject to police harassment, entrapment, imprisonment, and exposure. Government repression has been encouraged by public pressure, since not only institutions such as churches but also individual family members have looked with such hostility upon homosexuality that homosexuals inevitably adopted a poor self-image. Suicide, alcoholism, and similar attempts to escape public opprobrium have been common. Even if homosexuals returned to their anonymity, homosexuality would not disappear; it would simply give those segments of society who do not want to face the reality the illusion that it had.

It does exist, however, and as far as history can tell us, it has always existed. Homosexuality existed in ancient Egypt, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, in ancient China, and in ancient India. Many American Indian tribes had institutionalized homosexuality, at least the male variety, into the role of the berdache (the male woman), while other primitive groups have chosen their shamans from them. Some societies in the past have idealized homosexual love, as did the ancient Greeks, while others have harshly condemned it, as did the ancient Jews. In general, male homosexuality has been subject to most of the condemnation, while female homosexuality, lesbianism, has been ignored. This double standard may have existed so long because the males who have dominated the writing of history and the making of laws have assumed that women were nothing without men, and that no sex could take place without a penis being involved. It can, however, and does.

If society has been uncertain about how to deal with homosexuality, one of the major reasons is that we have known so little about it. One of the earliest explanations was that put forth by a participant in Plato’s Symposium who explained that mankind originally had been composed of individuals with four legs and four arms whom the gods had eventually divided into two people. Some of these double people had, however, been composed entirely of male or female elements, and after they had been separated, they spent their lives trying to get back to their original other half. Thus homosexual as much as heterosexual love was part of nature’s plan.¹ Other Greek writers felt that individuals became homosexuals because at conception they were neither truly male nor female, or because of a defect (disease?) inherited from the parents. Aristotle put this belief on a somewhat more scientific basis by stating that homosexuals are born in a condition in which part of them is incapacitated. In this sense the individual himself is not responsible for his action. Aristotle, however, added that some people remain homosexual by habit since men “take a pleasure in whatever they are accustomed to do.”² This implied that homosexuality was both an acquired condition and a congenital defect; both of these explanations appear in much of western history.

The medical explanations advanced by the Greek physician Soranus, who lived in the first half of the second century A.D., incorporated the ideas of both Plato and Aristotle. His work was summarized by Caelius Aurelianus in Acute and Chronic Diseases.

People find it hard to believe that effeminate men or pathics [Greek malthacoe] really exist. The fact is that, though the practices of such persons are unnatural to human beings, lust overcomes modesty and puts to shameful use parts intended for other functions. That is, in the case of certain individuals, there is no limit to their desire, and no hope of satisfying it; and they cannot be content with their own lot, the lot which divine providence had marked out for them in assigning functions to the parts of the body. They even adopt the dress, walk, and other characteristics of women. Now this condition is different from a bodily disease; it is rather an affliction of a diseased mind. Indeed, often out of passion and in rare cases out of respect for certain persons to whom they are beholden, these pathics suddenly change their character and for a while try to give proof of their virility. But since they are not aware of their limitations, they are again the victims of excesses, subjecting their virility to too great a strain and consequently involving themselves in worse vices. And it is our opinion that these persons suffer no impairment of sensation. For, as Soranus says, this affliction comes from a corrupt and debased mind. Indeed, the victims of this malady may be compared to the women who are called tribades because they pursue both kinds of love. These women are more eager to lie with women than with men; in fact, they pursue women with almost masculine jealousy, and when they are freed or temporarily relieved of their passion … [t]hey rush, as if victims of continual intoxication, to new forms of lust, and sustained by the disgraceful mode of life, they rejoice in the abuse of their sexual powers.

Soranus held that no bodily treatment could be applied to overcome the disease, since the mind rather than the body had been affected. Moreover, unlike most other such diseases, this one became stronger as the body grew older, causing a hideous and ever-increasing lust. This was because in the

years when the body is still strong and can perform the normal functions of love, the sexual desire (of those persons) assumes a dual aspect, in which the soul is excited sometimes while playing a passive role and sometimes while playing an active role. But in the case of old men who have lost their virile powers, all their sexual desire is turned in the opposite direction and consequently exerts a stronger demand for the feminine role in love. In fact, many infer that this is a reason why boys too are victims of this affliction. For, like old men, they do not possess virile powers; that is, they have not yet attained those powers which have already deserted the aged.³

In short, young people have to be watched particularly closely since they are so vulnerable. This aspect was emphasized by the medieval writers on the subject.

St. Albertus Magnus (1206–80), for example, agreed that homosexuality proceeded from a burning frenzy (without explaining the source of this frenzy) and that individuals who became addicted to such behavior seldom succeeded in freeing themselves, but he believed that homosexuality was also contagious and could spread rapidly from one person to another.⁴ By implication one had to be watchful, particularly over the young. Not all writers were so concerned, and Voltaire (1694–1778) explained the attraction of young boys in a different way:

It is always the male that attracts the female. The young males of our species, reared together, feeling this force that nature begins to develop in them, and not finding the natural object of their instinct, throw themselves upon that which resembles it. A young boy will often, by the freshness of his complexion, by the intensity of his coloration, and by the sweetness of his eyes, resemble a beautiful girl for the space of two or three years; if he is in love, it is because nature is misunderstood; on becoming attached to the one who has these beauties, one renders homage to sex, and when age has made this resemblance vanish, the errors cease … .⁵

In the nineteenth century there was growing concern about the causes of homosexuality. Much of this new concern was related to the rapid growth of the major European and American cities; urbanism brought with it greater diversity in sexual preferences. Prostitution, for example, became a major concern of nineteenth-century reformers, and with new attention being paid to female prostitution, male prostitution also came under investigation. The pioneer in this respect was F. Carlier, a police official in Paris, who felt that police were working in the dark when it came to homosexuality. Since prostitution was legal in France and homosexual activity between consenting adults was not punishable, it was only when male prostitution became an affront to public decency or when minors were seduced that it became a matter of police concern. The police nonetheless began to keep tabs on the growing homosexual community.

Carlier found that there were 7,242 homosexuals (he called them pederasts) in Paris who had come to the attention of the police—3,049 native-born Parisians, 3,709 provincials, and 484 foreigners. Less than half of the group, in his opinion, could be convicted of illegal acts. Carlier was particularly concerned with the “professionals” who dressed and acted as women, not only because they were the most noticeable, but because they were also most likely to be a cause of complaint to the police.⁶ Carlier’s study was made in the 1880s when the population of Paris was approaching 2,300,000, and though known homosexuals (i.e., known to the police) amounted to less than. 3 percent of the total population, they were sufficiently numerous to come together and exchange ideas, to develop their own argot, and to begin to challenge some of the assumptions society made about them.

One of the first to do so was Karl Heinrichs Ulrichs (1825–95), who, under his own name and under the pseudonym Numa Numantius, poured out a series of polemical, analytical, and theoretical pamphlets about homosexuality in the years between 1865 and 1875. Ulrichs argued that the instincts he found in himself were not “abnormal’ but were inborn and therefore natural. He was also concerned with attempting to find non-derogatory terms to describe individuals who had sexual preferences like his own. He coined the term urning, from an allusion to the god Uranus in Plato’s Symposium, to describe homosexual individuals. Not content with this, he developed a whole vocabulary: an urningin was a female homosexual; a dioning (after Dionysius) a heterosexual male; a homosexual who preferred effeminate males a mannling, and one who preferred powerful masculine types a weibling. There were many others.

Ulrich taught that up to a certain stage of development the sexes were the same, after which a threefold division took place: male, female, and urning (or urningin), the last group made up of individuals who had the physical features of one sex and the sexual instinct of the other. The result was an inversion of sexual desires. Since normal males have rudimentary breasts and normal females have a rudimentary penis, it was understandable in his opinion why people would fail to develop along the expected lines, and why a body might have one sex and the soul another.⁷ His explanation of a third sex appears often in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, as does his description of a male soul imprisoned in a female body and vice versa.

The concern with naming and identifying same-sex love was not restricted to Ulrichs. The term “homosexual’ was coined by a Hungarian writer, Karoly Maria Benkert, who, under the pseudonym Kertbeny in 1869, published a pamphlet on the subject.⁸ He wrote:

In addition to the normal sexual urge in men and women, Nature in her sovereign mood has endowed at birth certain male and female individuals with the homosexual urge, thus placing them in a sexual bondage which renders them physically and psychically incapable—even with the best intention—of normal erection. This urge creates in advance a direct horror of the opposite sex, and the victim of this passion finds it impossible to suppress the feelings which individuals of his own sex exercise upon him.⁹

“Homosexuality,” a philologically awkward hybrid of Greek and Latin elements, came to be the term applied to people who love those of the same sex, while “heterosexuality,” equally philologically impure, came to be applied to those who gained pleasure from the opposite sex. But what was homosexuality? Could a person be homosexual without engaging in sex? As various writers attempted to wrestle with these problems, such terms as “homoerotic” (aroused by the same sex), “homophile” (lover of the same sex), and “homophobe” (hater of homosexuality) appeared.

Since the nineteenth century was an age of science, and science was seen as giving answers to many of the traditional problems of society, it was perhaps inevitable that science, or at least the medical portion of the scientific community, also become interested in homosexuality as a research subject. The first physician to attempt to put the study of homosexuality on a more scientific basis was Carl Westphal (1833–90), professor of psychiatry at Berlin. In 1869 Westphal published the case history of a young woman who, from her earliest years, liked to dress as a boy, cared more for boys...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. Past Definitions and Explanations
• 2. Religion and Homosexuality
• 3. The Law and Homosexuality
• 4. Repressed Evidence
• 5. The Movement
• 6. Out of the Closet
• 7. Homosexuals as Victims: Scapegoating and Politics
• 8. Schools and Homosexuals
• 9. Lesbianism
• 10. Cross-Dressing: Transvestism, Transsexualism, and Homosexuality
• 11. Who Were the Homosexuals?
• 12. Homosexuality Today
• Guide to Further Reading
• Notes
• Index