Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures

George Haggerty, Bonnie Zimmerman, George Haggerty, Bonnie Zimmerman

• Publisher: Garland Science
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135578701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Beginning in 1869, when the study of homosexuality can be said to have begun with the establishment of sexology, this Encyclopedia offers accounts of the most important international developments in an area that now occupies a critical place in many fields of academic endeavours. While gays and lesbians have shared many aspects of life, their histories and cultures developed in profoundly different ways. To reflect this crucial fact, the Encyclopedia has been prepared in two separate volumes assuring that both histories receive full, unbiased attention and that a broad range of human experience is covered.
Written by some of the most famous names in the field, as well as new researchers this is intended as a reference for students and scholars in all areas of study, as well as the general public.

S

Saba, Umberto (1883–1957)

Italian poet Umberto Saba was brought up by his mother and aunts in the Jewish quarter of the city of Trieste. After a year’s military service in Italy in 1908, he returned to Trieste, where he married. His wife, Carolina (Lina), bore a daughter, Lina (Linuccia), in l910.

In 1919 Saba bought a bookstore from which he published Il canzoniere (The Songbook, 1921), a collection of his poems. The book went through successive editions and expansions in 1945, 1951, and 1961. Its most famous, anthologized poems are addressed to his wife or his daughter. But the collection also contains paeans to the attractions of boyhood—not an idealized boyhood of classical spirituality but the rough-and-tumble of real creatures who enjoy such profane pursuits as football and masturbation. From memories of his first affair to affectionate encounters in old age, Saba records his love of boys with a clarity of focus that makes no excuses for desires he regards as self-explanatory.

In 1953, at age seventy, Saba began a short novel, Ernesto, based on his adolescence. It is a rite-of-passage narrative, fully dedicated to the concept of the passing phase: Ernesto has a sexual affair with a man for whom he works, then allows a prostitute to relieve him of his heterosexual virginity, then meets and starts to love a younger boy, and finally catches sight of the young woman who will eventually become his wife. Ernesto was posthumously published in 1975, and Salvatore Samperi’s film version was released in 1983. Gregory Woods

Bibliography

Aymone, R. Saba e la psicoanalaisi . Naples: Guida, 1971.

Pinchera, A. Umberto Saba . Florence: Nuova Italia, 1974.

See also Italian Literature; Italy; Love Poetry, the Petrarchan Tradition

Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de (1740–1814)

The Marquis de Sade produced four major novels, many short stories, dialogues, plays, pamphlets, letters, journals, and a number of still unpublished works. Still more has been lost, as many of Sade’s unpublished papers fell into the hands of the Nazis and were destroyed during the German occupation of France in World War II.

Damned by both royal and revolutionary authorities, Sade’s writing is now recognized as crucial to the development of erotic discourse. The inventor of a philosophical system based on perversion, Sade took the values of the Anglo-European Enlightenment to their ultimate extreme. Profoundly anti-Christian, as was the earlier writing of Diderot and Voltaire, Sade wrote vast novels that functioned as exhaustive and exhausting catalogs of sexual deviance. In his fictional worlds, virtue is always punished and vice rewarded; self-interest and the will to power alone guarantee a human happiness that approaches a Zen-like serenity. Sade’s successful libertine is no frenzied sensualist but a perverse stoic, a man (and sometimes a woman) who uses sadomasochism as a means to achieve detachment from others and from the self. She or he achieves apathetic sovereignty, and this status is open to any who can achieve such emotional, ideological self-mastery.

Sade was born in Paris and was raised primarily by his grandmother and educated by his uncle, a worldly abbot, who openly kept two mistresses—a mother and daughter—in his house. At ten, he attended a Jesuit lycée, and at fourteen he joined the Light Horse regiment of the king. At twenty-three, he married Renée-Pelagie de Montreuil, a match arranged by his father. He engaged in a series of increasingly violent orgies that resulted in scandal, complaints, and eventual imprisonment. While Sade enjoyed the cooperation of his wife in these schemes, it was his mother-in-law who had him incarcerated in 1777 under a lettre de cachot, a system that sanctioned imprisonment without trial. Escaping from an escort bringing him to his appeal in 1778, Sade was discovered, rearrested, and remained imprisoned for the next eleven years.

Sade wrote his most important work during his many incarcerations. It was in Vincennes and then at the Bastille that he composed One Hundred Days of Sodom, Justine, and Aline and Valcour. Released in 1790, Sade was rearrested in 1793 as a suspected enemy of the revolution; he wrote Philosophy in the Bedroom during this time and was subsequently released in 1794. In 1801 he was apprehended at the office of his publisher, Masse, where police found illustrated editions of The New Justine and Juliette. He was imprisoned again and transferred to Charenton Asylum in 1803, where he died.

Stephanie Hammer

Bibliography

Allison, David, Mark Roberts, and Allan Weiss, eds. Sade and Narrative Transgression . Cambridge: Cambridge Uni, 1995.

Blanchot, Maurice, intro. The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings . New York: Grove Press, 1965.

Crosland, Margaret, trans. and ed. The Passionate Philosopher: A Marquis de Sade Reader . London: Peter Owen, 1991.

See also France; French Literature; Sadomasochism

Sadomasochism

The abbreviation S/M points to both sadist/masochist and slave/master, while the slash indicates for some that the two roles are in general not exclusive but reversible. The term sadomasochism was coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia sexualis (1890). He defined it as mostly imaginary pleasure in pain. The word has noble ancestry as it derived from the names of Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), and Sir Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836– 1895).

Perhaps because most sexual relations in history had been unequal and exploitative, sadomasochism found shelter in normal sexuality and came to the fore only in the late nineteenth century when equality and democracy became erotic ideals. But unlike homosexuality, sadomasochism did not produce an important subculture, movement, or press until after World War II. It was seen by psychiatrists as well as by the general public as a major and dangerous perversion that in the end would lead to lust murder.

Since the fifties a gay and since the seventies a lesbian leather scene developed in which S/M played an important part. The connection with leather was accidental; Sacher-Masoch’s favorite fetish was fur, and Sade liked satin for boys. Fetishes like high heels, uniforms, slave collars, and brandings express relations of unequality. S/M is often linked not only to fetishes but also to other “perversions” like bestiality, golden showers, scat, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and so on. All kinds of bondage are used in S/M.

Contemporary advocates have come up with a series of claims. S/M should be a consensual game that has little to do with cruelty or violence. The abuse should often be more psychical than physical. According to them, the masochist is the master of the game who sets the rules that the sadist subsequently applies for mutual pleasure. When limits are transgressed, the masochist indicates with a code word that the game has to be interrupted or ended. This conventional apology may be functional to disclaim criticisms that S/M is harmful and abusive, racist, patriarchal, and homophobic, but it does not fit the excesses of desire that become apparent in S/M.

Leo Bersani criticizes apologetic work because he believes S/M does not undermine but repeats social structures of dominance and submission, masculinity and femininity, active and passive roles, penetrating and unclosing, power and subservience. He suggests that S/M will not “survive an antifascist rethinking of power structures.” Notwithstanding his firm critique, he points to Freud’s concept of “self-shattering” that would apply to masochism and enable nonidentitarian politics.

Gilles Deleuze in his book on Sacher-Masoch eulogized earlier male masochists as exemplary outlaws who have given up their prerogatives and annihilated the figure of the father. According to him and Anita Phillips, sadist and masochist are not complementary but very different figures. If the masochist indeed sets the rules of the sex game, he needs not a sadist but a simulacrum of a sadist.

Sade, Georges Bataille, and other writers have focused not on rules for desire but on desirable transgressions. Annie LeBrun has pointed to the abyss of desire that Sade disclosed. He has been presented most often as a sadistic torturer while his foremost interests were masochistic—to be fucked and whipped. His loss of self in literary and real scenes of rape and torture might well be analyzed as a corporal revolution against the dictates of religion that suffocated sexual desire. Masochism could be considered at the historical conjunction of Sade’s and still of our time as a way to experience sexual desire in its extremes of torture and filth.

A century before Nietzsche, Sade went beyond good and evil by delving into abysmal pleasures. These were not any longer the forbidden and unmentionable vices excoriated by Christianity but lustful transgressions that should be stimulated by sexy stories and practical philosophy. Passion offered Sade in the eighteenth century a way beyond restraints and denials of his time. He desired not so much destruction of self but of the ancien régime to create new political configurations and sexual pleasures. His utopia were castles, boudoirs, and bordellos devoted to a surrender to sexual abjection.

Sade’s work offers a persuasive alternative for contemporary culture that remains confined by limits set on sex by ideas of chastity, love, and normalcy. Sadian philosophy goes beyond concepts of identity and community, volition and consensus, private and public, male and female, and so forth. Such dichotomies are under postmodern attack because they fix sexuality in closets of paralyzed preferences and stagnant practices.

Sadism and masochism have different forms that separate and intermingle, have different backgrounds and perspectives, need specific explanations, and work within certain social and historical contexts. Nowadays they represent desires, lifestyles, and cultures that seem to be on the rise. The question will become not so much whether S/M can withstand an antifascist inquiry but what desires we lust for. Gert Hekma

Bibliography

Bersani, Leo. “The Gay Daddy.” In Homos. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Deleuze, Gilles. Présentation de Sacher-Masoch . Paris, 1967. Translated as Coldness and Cruelty . New York: Zone Books, 1991.

LeBrun, Annie. Soudain, un bloc d’abîme, Sade . Paris, 1986.

Mains, Geoff. Urban Ab Originals. A Celebration of Leather Sexuality . San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1984.

Phillips, Anita. A Defence of Masochism . London: St. Martin’s, 1998.

Samois. Coming to Power. Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M . Boston: Alyson, 1981.

Thompson, Bill. Sadomasochism . London: Cassell, 1994.

Townsend, Larry. The Leatherman’s Handbook . New York: Masquerade, 1972.

Weinberg, Thomas, and G.W.Levi Kamel, eds. S and M. Studies in Sadomasochism . Buffalo: Prometheus, 1983.

See also Freud, Sigmund; Krafft-Ebing, Richard von; Leathermen; Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de; Sex Practice: Watersports and Scat; Sexual Violence

Safer Sex

The concept of safer sex was introduced in the early 1980s in response to

• suspicions that what came to be called Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) has a viral causal agent. This was later confirmed and the agent was discovered to be the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)
• empirical epidemiological information about the rapid spread of AIDS
• alarming and tragic numbers of illnesses and deaths from AIDS among gay men in the United States and heterosexuals in Africa

These factors led people to believe that what came to be called HIV, and therefore AIDS, could be spread through sexual behaviors. The task, then, was to identify which behaviors are risky and what measures can be taken to reduce this risk. The results are what we know as safer sex. Safer-sex programs include informational meetings, social gatherings, journal and periodical articles, social skills training, theater and visual arts, and media campaigns.

Buzz Sense in his safe sex club in San Francisco, 1989. Photo by Marc Geller.

Philosophies underlying safer sex include belief in

• social obligation to educate about sexual behaviors and their risks
• social obligation to provide access to condoms as a means of reducing risk
• individual responsibility for implementing safer-sex practices

HIV can be transmitted via the following bodily fluids:

• semen
• blood, including menstrual blood
• breast milk
• vaginal fluids

While the phrase “safer sex” is in common usage, we are speaking of risk reduction, not absolute safety. In addition, the level of risk for any behavior is situational. A behavior that may be relatively safe, for example, when neither partner has cuts, broken skin, or bleeding gums may be high risk when one has these conditions.

These behaviors are unsafe:

• anal intercourse without a latex condom
• sharing needles
• vaginal intercourse without a latex condom
• exchanging blood

These behaviors are thought to be low or moderate risk:

• vaginal oral sex
• penile oral sex
• deep kissing

Given the potentially devastating results of HIV transmission, it is recommended that one err on the side of safety.

Because of the risk of reinfection, or infection with a different strain of HIV, it is c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Contributors
• Subject Guide
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• Y
• Z