C


Cabaret
See Variety, Revue, and Cabaret Entertainment.

Caesar, [Gaius] Julius (100-44 b.c.)
Roman politician, general, and author. Although of distinguished patri­cian lineage, Caesar was connected by marriage with the popular party. Accord­ingly, he found that his political career was hindered by the success of Sulla, who had triumphed over Marius, the leader of the popular forces. Refusing to divorce his wife Cornelia as Sulla had commanded, he found it prudent to join the military cam­paign in Asia Minor [81 b.c.). Exploiting his youthful good looks, together with the boundless charm for which he continued to be noted, he threw himself with relish into a scandalous liaison with king Nicomedes IV of Bithynia.
Returning to Rome, he maneu­vered successfully in the treacherous Senatorial politics of the day, forming an alliance (triumvirate) with Pornpey and Crassus. Beginning in 58 b.c. he undertook the nine-year conquest of Gaul, an achieve­ment he commemorated in the Gallic Wars, a masterpiece of trenchant Latin prose. Eventually, unfavorable events in Rome forced him to return and, crossing the River Rubicon, he undertook the con­quest of Italy itself. Becoming dictator, he initiated a vigorous program of legislation that foreshadowed the empire founded by his great-nephew Octavius, subsequently known as Augustus. On the Ides of March 44 Caesar was killed by a conspiracy headed by his associates Brutus and Crassus.
In addition to his three wives and several mistresses, Julius Caesar had a number of homosexual affairs. After serv­ing as the catamite of Nicomedes, as mentioned, Caesar was (according to Catullus) the cinaedus or hustler to one Mamurra. Ceaseless in sexual as in every other activity, he earned the sobriquet of "Husband to every woman and wife to every man." Sex and money were essen­tial barter for rising in the troubled period of Rome's Civil Wars. And in fact Octa­vius in turn was rumored to have ingrati­ated himself with his great-uncle through sexual availability.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Arthur D. Kahn, The Education of Julius Caesai: A Biogra­phy, a Reconstruction, New York: Schocken, 1986.
Warren Johansson

Calamus
This word derives from the Greek kalamos, a reed; and by extension a flute, fishing rod, and a reed pen. From the latter usage stems the Latin lapsus calami, a slip of the pen. Walt Whitman entitled the most overtly homoerotic and self-reveal­ing section of Leaves of Grass, "Cala­mus." He was thinking of one particular variety of plant, the sweet flag [Acorus calamus), as a symbol of male-male affec­tion. It must have appealed to him also because of the the traditional association of the calamus (=reed pen) with the writer's profession. Yet, from Greek mythology he may have known the story of Calamus, the son of a river god, who was united in tender love with another youth, Carpus. When Carpus was accidentally drowned, the grief-stricken Calamus was changed into a reed.
The English poet Algernon Char­les Swinburne (1837-1909), whose atti­tudes toward homosexuality were con­flicted, dubbed John Addington Symonds and his associates "Calamites," with a mocking echo of" catamites" and the pejo­rative nuance of the -ite ending. In his book Greek Love (New York, 1964), J. Z. Eglinton employed the term to designate the broader school of minor English and American homoerotic poets who flour­ished under the aegis of Whitman, Edward Carpenter, and Symonds (ca. 1890-1930). Timothy d'Arch Smith, the author of Love in Earnest (London, 1970), the standard work on the English poets in this group of writers and their themes, prefers to call them Uranians. However, Donald Mader, in the learned introduction to his edition of theMen and Boys anthology (New York, 1978), speaks of the American poets as "calamites."
Just as Whitman used the cala­mus to symbolize male homosexual at­traction, so some of the English Calamite/ Uranian poets favored the plant ladslove [Artemisia abrotanum), ostensibly because the odor of its sap resembled that of semen, but more likely just because of the name.

cambacérés, Jean-Jacques Regis de (1753-1824)
Arch-Chancellor of the French First Empire and editor of the Code Na­poleon. Born in Montpellier as the scion of an old noble family, Cambacérés became a lawyer in his birthplace and a counselor at the Cour des Comptes. Renouncing his title of nobility in 1790, he became active in the revolutionary movement. As a member of the National Assembly he did not vote for the death of Louis XVI, but did move for the execution of the death sen­tence. He withdrew from the murderous factional struggles of the 1790s to pursue his legal calling, with such success that following the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (1799), he became the second consul after Napoleon Bonaparte. When Napoleon became Emperor in 1804, he named Cambacérés Arch-Chancellor and in 1808 conferred on him the title of Duke of Parma. Great as was his influence with Napoleon, he failed to persuade him not to undertake the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. After the Restoration of Louis XVni to the throne he was forced into exile, but restored to his civil and political rights in 1818. He lived quietly in Paris until his death.
Cambacérés' greatest achieve­ment was the drafting of the Code Na­poleon, which was not a new set of laws but a revision and codification of all the legislative reforms since 1789 into a set of 28 separate codes to which the Emperor then attached his name. He was not re­sponsible for the silent omission of sod­omy from the criminal code; this step had been taken by the Constituent Assembly in 1791, and he was not even a member of the legislative committee of the Council of State that debated the draft of the penal code of 1810. But his reputation as a homosexual was such that when the ques­tion of allowing bachelors to adopt chil­dren arose, Napoleon asked him to speak for the proposal. As early as his days as second consul, the rumors of his homo­sexuality had reached the ears of the agents of Louis XVIII. Napoleon was fully aware of the truth of these allegations, but was too unprejudiced and astute to attach any significance to them in his evaluation of Cambacérés' character. Various stories, witticisms, and cartoons about the Arch-Chancellor's proclivities circulated dur­ing his years of power, and a number of women prominent during the First Em­pire - among them Madame de Staél - were his bitter enemies. As a consequence, as late as 1859 the City Council of Montpel­lier refused to erect a statue in his honor. For the same reason the memoirs of Cambacérés have remained unpublished and his family has denied historians access to its private archives.
While Cambacérès was a major figure in the entourage of Napoleon Bona­parte, the reform of the penal laws on homosexuality was not his doing; this action was rather the consequence of the philosophical trends of the eighteenth century and the critique of the criminal legislation of the Old Regime by such writers as Beccaria and Voltaire. No one statesman can be credited with the merit of this advance over the barbarity of previ­ous centuries. The prestige of Napoleon and the force of French arms fostered the spread of the code and marked the dawn of an era of toleration for the homosexuals of France and many other countries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jean-Louis Bory, Les cinq girouettes; ou, Servitudes et souplesses de .. . Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, duc de Parme, Paris: Ramsay, 1979; Numa Praetorius (pseudonym of Eugen Wilhelm), "Cambacérès, der Erzkanzler Napoleons I. und sein Ruf als Homosexueller," Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 13 (1912), 23-42.
Warren Johansson

Cambridge and Oxford
Residential colleges have domi­nated England's two ancient universities - sometimes verbally merged as "Ox­bridge" - which trace their origins to the twelfth century. Royal and aristocratic patronage, accentuated by the richly en­dowed, exquisite colleges in which fel­lows slept and dined, gave them an elite character often, though not always, con­ducive to academic excellence.
Early Indications. Following the clerical tradition of the Middle Ages, the dons were (until Gladstone's liberal re­forms in 1877) forbidden to marry. Temp­tation beckoned in the form of an endless supply of highborn and attractive under­graduates. After 1500 most trained aca­demically and (homo)sexually at the aristocratic public [i.e., private boarding] schools like Harrow and Winchester on a curriculum of Greek and Latin classics which, despite careful selection, could not be purged of pederastic motifs.
On early sodomites the curtain of silence lifts only occasionally. In 1739 the Rev. Robert Thistlethwayte, who had served as warden of Wadham College at Oxford for fifteen years, was charged with making a "sodomitical attempt" on Wil­liam French, an undergraduate. As deposi­tions to the grand jury revealed, Thistle­thwayte had shown a previous pattern of homosexual activity, and he fled to France, fearing mortal consequences. John Fenwick, known to have had homosexual relations as a student at Oxford, but not charged until 1797, when he had become a clergyman, also fled to the continent. At Cambridge George Gordon, Lord Byron, already in love at Harrow, had a relation­ship with a choirboy named John Edleston and formed lifelong friendships with John Cam Hobhouse, the dissipated Scrope Berdmore Davies, and the irreverent Charles Skinner Matthews - his correspon­dents and defenders when, having discov­ered a more open homosexuality in Italy and Greece, Byron went into exile.
Reformers and Aesthetes. The Victorians (1837-1901) strove to raise the standards of Britain's decayed educational establishment. In addition to the the uni­versities, the feeder system of the elite public schools had to be restructured. Unbeknownst to the reformers, public school boys fashioned a thriving homosex­ual subculture, with its social hierarchies and special vocabulary, and passed it on to the universities.
The mid-nineteenth century also saw a crisis of faith. Some like Cardinal Newman resolved this by converting to Roman Catholicism. Gravitating toward aestheticism, a creed with strong homo­sexual overtones, others - unlike the Ox­ford don Walter Pater, the pontiff of aes­theticism, who was most discrete about his sexual longings - became notorious, Oscar Wilde met Alfred Douglas when the latter was a handsome undergraduate at Oxford, and the Chameleon - which played a fateful role in Wilde's trial - was an Oxford undergraduate magazine whose single issue, cloyingly tinged with homoeroticism, appeared in December 1894.
The Cambridge Apostles. A remarkable example of intrainstitutional continuity is the Society of Apostles founded by students at Cambridge Univer­sity in 1820, whose members gathered once a week to hear papers on controver­sial topics. The first recruits to this distin­guished intellectual club were mainly clergymen, apparently of impeccable moral character. By the 1840s, however, intima­tions of homosexuality begin to emerge - though sometimes only in the form of the "Higher Sodomy," that is, nonsexual male bonding.
Later in the century a picturesque, bibulous, socialite don, Oscar Browning, nourished a special homosexual atmos­phere at Cambridge. In 1862 he began almost annual visits to Rome with an undergraduate in tow. As the novelist E. M. Forster, another Cantabrigian, was later to demonstrate, Italy played a special role for cultured Englishmen in search of sex­ual freedom.
The influence of the Cambridge Apostles radiated into the larger commu­nity. William Johnson, later Cory (elected in 1844), became a leading member of the Calamite group of pederastic poets. At the end of the century, the Cambridge atmos­phere was determined by the philosopher G. E. Moore (who was not homosexual) and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (who was). Then, in the early years of the pres­ent century, homosexual graduate Apostles, notably Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, formed a kind of adult branch in London, which became known as Bloomsbury. Most of the members of this literary and artistic group were con­nected with Cambridge through family ties if not by direct attendence.
The Oxbridge Heyday. A distinc­tive feature of Oxbridge is the social con­tact between dons and undergraduates, who daily drank sherry together and dined together in "commons" at the college where they had their rooms, on terms of familiarity that would be almost incon­ceivable at an American college. Until the Edwardian era, the two universities were by and large socially closed institutions that drew their student body from the cream of the upper classes, especially from the graduates of the public schools where adolescent homosexuality was rampant. Also, from the decline of medieval scho­lasticism until modern higher education policy opened its doors to scholarship holders from impecunious but talented families, Oxbridge offered far more a "playboy" than an intellectual setting, where the future politician, public ser­vant, or member of the House of Lords passed a stage in his cursus honorum. All these circumstances, together with intense and prestigious competition in sports if not in learning, made for homosexual contact between the dons and students and for the sort of bonding among under­graduates that readied Oxbridge alumni for their life roles as builders and adminis­trators of the British Empire.
But not all ran smoothly in the creation of future public servants. At Cambridge in the 1930s Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, and Donald McLean, all homosexual Apostles, converted to Marx­ism and became secret Soviet agents. Their unmasking during the Cold War occasioned speculation about a connection between the upper classes, homosexuality, and es­pionage. After the war, however, the homosexual complexion of the Cambr­idge Society of Apostles faded.
During the interwar years Oxford became more prominently identified with the homosexual sensibility. Figures such as Evelyn Waugh succumbed to it only for a time, but the poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender forged a lifetime com­radeship. In the depression of the 1930s many undergraduates converted to Marx­ism, as at Cambridge. Toward the end of his life, Auden returned to live at his Oxford college but found the atmosphere too much changed for his taste. The more demo­cratic emphasis of education after World War II, sparked by Labor governments, eroded both the privileges and mystique of Cambridge and Oxford. Moreover, gay liberation in the 1970s diffused homosex­ual life and the need for special redoubts of privileged homophilia at the universities and public schools receded.
Alfred L. Rowse, claiming to be unbiased, and Sir Kenneth Dover, profess­ing that he is straight and happily married, broke the taboo against writing on homo­sexuality which John Addington Symonds thought had barred him from a chair in classical scholarship and on which Sir Maurice Bowra never dared write a book or even an article. After World War II British universities proliferated. At Essex and Sussex, institutions on a new model, gay studies have emerged under auspices that encourage rethinking of established gen­der patterns.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Richard Deacon, The Cambridge Apostles, London: Robert Royce, 1985.
William A. Percy

Camp
Camp is a type of wit common to, but by no means exclusive to male homo­sexuals. A definition of the concept is elusive, but it may be tentatively circum­scribed by saying that camp consists of taking serious things frivolously and frivo­lous things seriously. Camp is not grounded in speech or writing as much as it is in gesture, performance, and public display. When it is verbal, it is expressed less through the discursive means of direct statement than through implication, in­nuendo, and intonation. As an art of indi­rection and suggestion, it was suited to the purposes of a group that found it impru­dent to confront culturally approved val­ues directly, but preferred to undermine them through send-ups and sly mockery. Because it is viewed, perhaps mistakenly, as relatively unthreatening, camp gains entree into the upscale worlds of chic and swank.
Roots of Camp. Camp has close links with the modern world of mass en­tertainment, and it may have found its first artistic outlet in late-nineteenth-century music halls, vaudeville, and pan­tomime. The word first appears in the slang of this period - the earliest printed attestation is from 1907 - where it refers to outrageous street behavior. The term has been plausibly traced to the French verb se camper, which can mean (among other things) to posture boldly. (In Australia, camp has acquired the common meaning of "gay, homosexual" without other qualification, but this usage is rare elsewhere, where heterosexuals and bisexuals may be "camp" with little fear of loss of reputation.)
Some recognize a gamut of low to high camp, ranging from the provocative behavior of a street queen determined to "camp up a storm" to the elegant writings of Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank. In­deed, Wilde's tour of America in 1882 was one of the first media successes of high camp. By definition camp is a form of exhibitionism that requires an audience; it cannot be done in the privacy of one's home - except as practice.
The targets of camp are good taste, marriage and the family, suburbia, sports, and the business world. Camp is thus a less hostile continuation of the trend of nine­teenth-century Bohemia to épater le bour­geois, to bait middle-class respectability. Undeniably, camp is subversive, but not too much so, for it depends for its survival on the patronage of high society, the enter­tainment world, advertising, and the media.
Antecedents and Analogues. Camp is characteristicly modern, yet ex­amples have been noted in earlier centu­ries, including the Roman writer Petronius, the Italian mannerist paintings of the six­teenth century, the précieuses of the French salons of the time of Louis XIV, Bel Canto opera, and in fops and dandies of various periods. To a large extent camp is in the eye of the beholder, so that Charles De Gaulle's stylized speeches and appearances may have been camp to scoffing Anglo-Saxons but not to his French followers.
Camp should be distinguished from several related phenomena. Classic satire strives to reinforce social solidarity by exposing its targets to withering ridi­cule, while camp narrows the distance between performer and victim, suggesting that the last laugh might actually be with the latter. Kitsch is uninentionalbad taste, while camp is always aware of the ele­ments of artifice and irony. A camp collec­tor can aquire kitsch objects, but only if they are displayed in a manner that indi­cates he knows what they are. Camp often employs elements of the decadent sensi­bility, but avoids heavy satanism and the macabre. Thus Joris-Karl Huysmans' nov­els are decadent, the Rocky Honor Picture Show is camp. Camp may employ the device of pastiche, that is, putting together components that have been "pinched" from different sources. However, not all pastiche is camp (Baroque oratorios, 1980s painting). The world of chic belongs exclu­sively to the affluent and fashionable, but even a guttersnipe can attempt camp. Bitchiness reflects underlying anger and a desire to wound; camp tolerantly views everyone as imperfect, but eminently salvageable. A frozen analogue of bitchi­ness, "attitude" requires striking a pose, but one that is too narrow and inflexible. Drag in the sense of a male impersonating a woman may be an element of camp, but ironically not if it is successful. If the transvestite's simulation is so complete that the observer is taken in, the element of conscious and detectable artifice that is essential to camp is lost. Camp is always presented with an invisible wink.
Representative Figures. Examples that would generally be recognized as camp are (in the theatre) Sarah Bernhardt, Noel Coward, Joe Ortori, Tallulah Bankhead, Danny LaRue and "impressionists" gener­ally; (in films) Fatty Arbuckle, Divine, Jayne Mansfield, Mae West, and Sean Connery (in the James Bond movies); (in literature) Wilde, Firbank, Jean Cocteau,
Cabriele D'Annunzio, Lytton Strachey, the Sitwells, Stevie Smith, Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy Parker, and Truman Capote; (in popular music), David Bowie, Boy George, Mickjagger, Grace Jones, and Bette Midler. By common consent the crown prince of camp in the 1960s and 1970s was Andy Warhol. His effect was,achieved not solely through his paintings and films, but through his trademark self-stylization that used New York's media factory as its megaphone. During this period, popular culture, formerly condemned by the intel­lectual elite, became fashionable, though it was usually approached in an arch, ironic context. The principle of shift of context, yielding incongruity, is a basic camp pro­cedure.
Conclusion. Perhaps it is not too much to say that camp aspires to fulfill Friedrich Nietzsche's precept of the rever­sal of all values. It certainly serves to bring into question established hierarchies of taste, as expressed in the scale from high brow to low brow. Proof of the accom­plishment of such subversion is the de­lighted cry: "It's so bad it's good!" By suggesting that inauthenticity pervades the performance and the thing satirized, the camp adept puts us on notice that the line between authenticity and inauthen­ticity is never easy to draw; it may even be nonexistent. The world of camp then serves to deconstruct the cult of seriousness and "values" that sought to fill the gap pro­duced by the fading of religion and tradi­tional class society in the West. Signifi­cantly, no equivalent of camp seems to exist in the Third World. The recognition and cultivation of camp is thus a distinc­tively modern phenomenon, belonging to a cultural landscape of doubt, alienation, relativism, and pluralism.
See also Humor; Variety, Revue, and Cabaret Entertainment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Mark Booth, Camp, London: Quartet, 1983; Philip Core, Camp: The Lie that Tells the Truth, New York: Putnam, 1984.
Wayne R. Dynes

Canaanites
The reference of the geographical term Canaan is complex. In ancient times "Canaan" was used to refer to an area between the Amanus Mountains in the north, the Sinai Peninsula on the south­west, the Mediterranean on the west, and, to the east, the Great Rift Valley (compris­ing the cleft between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges, the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River, and the Dead Sea), corresponding to modem Lebanon and Israel and parts of Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. The Old Testament also uses the term Canaanite to refer to members of the merchant class, because trade and com­merce remained in the hands of the older strata of the population inhabiting the coastal cities even after the Israelite land­owners and peasants had occupied the interior of the country. Hence the socio­economic opposition was paradoxically the reverse of that in some parts of early modem Europe, where Jews were mer­chants and traders in the midst of a rural native clientele.
Modem scholars use the term Canaanite to designate those aspects of Syro-Palestinian culture against which the religion of Moses defined itself; this usage leads to the simplified opposition of Israel­ite versus Canaanite. This is not a Biblical usage, since, for example, the Bible speaks of what we now call Hebrew as "the lan­guage of Canaan." The opposition does, however, reflect the dominant Biblical attitude toward the people of Phoenicia and Philistia and the non-Yahweh-worshipping elements of the population of Judah and the northern kingdom of Israel. Thus "Canaanite" is modem shorthand for what the core religious tradition of Israel opposed. There are many sources which can meaningfully be grouped to­gether as illuminating Canaanite culture, but the Hebrew Bible is the most informa­tive as well as one of the least reliable. Other sources include archeological re­mains as well as numerous texts, notably from the city of Ugarit in modem Syria (1400-1225 b.c).
Part of the character of Mosaic religion was adversarial, and the official and popular cults of Canaan provided much to oppose. Polytheistic devotions and po­litical appropriations of theology were among the features most opposed by Isra­elite prophets and priests. Sexual activi­ties that figured in fertility rites associated with the worship of Ishtar and Tammuz were also condemned, but the character of these is harder to deduce from the extant sources. That there was some degree of sexual license in Canaanite cult is certain, as is the role of female prostitutes serving male clients, but the texts are either laconic or formulated in a poetic language that is still being deciphered. The prophets, Hosea in particular, state clearly that the kodeshoth, or female hierodules, fornicated with the male worshippers, and hence make sexual infidelity a metaphor for Israel's departure from the service of Yahweh. In contrast, the role of non-Israelite male prostitutes, or kedeshlm, serving male clients seems to have been marginal. The institution of cultic "dogs" (attested in Deuteronomy, in one text from a Phoeni­cian colony on Cyprus, and in a Punic inscription from Carthage) is often associ­ated with male prostitution or homosexu­ality, but the institution remains obscure. (It has been associated with transvestism, which is not in itself a matter of sexuality. Although transvestism is well attested in the ancient Near East, it is notably absent from the Levant.)
Most interpretations of Canaan­ite religion and sexuality, from the rabbis and church fathers to the present, make up for a lack of information by fabulizing reconstruction. A few modem enthusiasts have glorified Canaan for its ostensibly permissive and celebratory attitude to­ward sexuality, but this view also seems unhistorical. Canaan remains the symbol of the cultural and religious tradition which Israel rejected and condemned, but whose rites and practices form the backdrop for the historical narratives of the Old Testament.
Michael Patrick O'Connor

Canada
A vast, unevenly developed na­tion, Canada's culture has been signifi­cantly shaped by influences from France, Britain, and the United States. Approxi­mately 75 percent of the population of 25 million is located in a 3000-mile long, 100-mile wide band along the top of the Ameri­can border, making the development and survival of a nation-wide gay movement difficult and rendering local and provin­cial activity particularly important.
New France. Prosecutions of sodomy are recorded among the settlers in New France in 1648 and 1691, the latter involving three men. The death penalty was not imposed on any of the accused, perhaps because the population was too thin in the colony to permit unnecessary reductions. The French settlements on the St. Lawrence with their capital at Quebec were the base for extensive journeys by explorers and missionaries far to the west and south (where they reached the other French colony of Louisiana, established in the seventeenth century, with New Or­leans, founded in 1718, as its capital). These trips familiarized the travelers with the North American Indian homosexual insti­tution known as the berdache. Following his experience as a missionary in New France in 1711-17, Joseph Francois Lafitau wrote the first attempt at a synthesis of the phenomenon. Expansion of European pat­terns, of course, spelled the end of Indian social customs, and the berdache was not rediscovered by North American homo­sexuals until the 1950s.
TheNineteenth Century. English-speaking Upper Canada (largely populated by loyalist refugees from the American Revolution) was rocked by a scandal cen­tering on Inspector-General George Herchmer Markland. This official, who was accustomed to having sexual relations with young men (usually soldiers) in his office, was forced to resign in 1838. Several other cases came to light in the 1840s.
With the coming of the Confed­eration in 1867, Canada required its own legislative structure. Yet in matters of sexual law, the British example was imi­tated almost slavishly everywhere for almost a century. Thus Westminster's 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, the law under which Oscar Wilde was later to be prosecuted, was dutifully copied the fol­lowing year by a Canadian law against indecent assault.
During the early pioneering days the Western provinces seem to have seen a good deal of variant sexual behavior that excited little notice. As in the United States, there are cases of women dressing as men: these may or may not have been lesbian. In the latter decades of the nine­teenth century Canada was swept hy the social purity movement of British and U.S. derivation. Through mass-circulation pamphlets and public meetings, the latter often held at churches, they sought to combat masturbation and other forms of nonprocreative sex, as individual pollu­tion and "race suicide." Such agitation, and the "civilizing process" in general, spelled the end of the relative sexual lib­erty of the Canadian West, and a number of prosecutions for buggery occurred there from 1880 to 1910.
Modem Canada. Typical urban gay subcultures emerged in major cities, with distinctive cruising grounds and places of entertainment. As with U.S. service personnel, participation in the two World Wars gave many men and women ideas of sexual freedom that they could not have otherwise obtained. In Montreal and Toronto after 1945 a more visible gay subculture focused mainly on "queen's circles," coteries formed around one or more central figures, who controled en­trance to the group and set its standards. Through the mentor-protege relations of such groups many young people were socialized into the gay subculture, in addi­tion to a much larger number of closeted persons with more tenuous links to the subculture. Canadian homosexuals had to face the same practices of metropolitan vice squads as did their American counter­parts - surveillance of cruising areas, en­trapment, raids on gay meeting places. The McCarthyite witch hunt against per­verts engendered a Canadian imitation, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police began to keep personal records, a practice that continued, on a smaller scale, into the 1970s. Legislation, repealed in 1977, was also passed against homosexuals as immi­grants on the model of the Walter- McCarran Act in the United States.
In due course, awareness of the American gay movement of the 1950s made its way over the border. Just as the Mattachine Society had begun on the U.S. west coast, the first organized Canadian gay group, the Association for Social Knowledge (ASK), began in Vancouver in 1964, generating a Newsletter and a social center. Later in 1964 two gay magazines began in Toronto, Two (imitating the Los Angeles ONE) and Gay (later Gay Interna­tional), apparently the first periodical in North America to use the vernacular word in its title. Subsequently, several French-language periodicals appeared in Quebec, culminating in Sortie (founded 1982). There have also been books, supplementing the larger body of francophone literature from France itself. Playwright Michel Tremblay, author of the trenchant Hosanna, has achieved international recognition. Sev­eral novels of the lesbian writer Marie-Claire Blais have been translated into English.
Even before American develop­ments, the official British Wolfenden Re­port of 1957 had made a significant impact on Canadian opinion. After some discus­sion the Ottawa parliament passed a new Criminal Code in May 1969, decriminaliz­ing homosexual conduct in private be­tween consenting adults. This change left gay public life still subject to harassment, but Canada only gradually adopted the new militant model of gay liberation in­troduced in the United States after the Stonewall Uprising of June 1969. In Febru­ary 1971 the Community Homophile Association of Toronto (CHAT) was formed, quickly becoming the country's most important gay organization. The fall of the same year saw the appearance of the first issue of the monthly, The Body Poli­tic, which in its heyday was North Amer­ica's finest gay paper. In Quebec, French-Canadian nationalism influenced gay or­ganizations, and in 1977 that province passed an antidiscrimination provision, part of the Charter of Human Rights, that initially had no equal in English-speaking Canada but was followed first by several cities, and then by Ontario in 1986 and the Yukon in 1987. The 1970s saw a rapid development of commercial gay enclaves in major cities - baths and bars, bookstores and boutiques. Toronto, in particular, gained a reputation of being the "San Fran­cisco of the North." There a magnet insti­tution, the Canadian Gay Archives, issued several publications, and scholarship be­gan to flourish, following - sometimes uncritically - New Left and French mod­els.
Heralding conservative shifts in many advanced industrial nations, this climate became more adverse in the late 1970s. The Body Politic was subjected to several prosecutions, a form of harass­ment which contributed to its demise in 1986. "Pornography," meaning gay publi­cations from abroad, was confiscated, bathhouses were repeatedly raided and charged with operating as "common bawdy houses." These attacks provoked justifi­able anger and resistance on the part of Canada's gay communities. The country settled into an uneasy, but probably stable peace, but as elsewhere the AIDS crisis has meant changes; significantly, many com­munities and linkages - including artis­tic, religious, entertainment, interior de­sign - have come together in support of charitable AIDS projects. Since the Third World communities in Canada are still relatively small, about 90 percent of the AIDS cases affect homosexual men.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. William Crawford, ed., Homosexuality in Canada: A Bibliography, Toronto: Canadian Gay Archives, 1984; Gary Kinsman, The Regulation of Desire: Sexuahty in Canada, Montreal: Black Rose, 1987; Paul-Franfois Sylvestre, Bougrerie en Nouvelle Prance, Hull: Editions Asticou, 1983.
Wayne R. Dynes

Canon Law
Canon law, jus canonicum, is the totality of the established rules of the Roman Catholic Church: canons (the decisions of councils), disciplinary regula­tions, decretals, and other texts collected from local bishops and councils as well as from the New Testament. Like Roman civil law, canon law is divided into pub­lic - the constitution of the church and its relation to other bodies - and private - the internal discipline of members.
History. Canon law falls into three periods: (1) from the beginning to the decretum of Gratian, Concordia discordantium canonum, completed shortly before 1150; (2) from then to the Council of Trent (1545-63); and (3) from the Tridentine Council to the present. Gratian's collec­tion completely superseded all earlier compilations and remained the text of the scholastics at medieval universities. In order to build a coherent system out of various precedents and writings of the Church Fathers, Gratian organized his five books on Roman law principles, thus in­troducing natural law, which became important in antisodomy provisions. In 1234 Gregory IX expanded the collection and created what in time came to be known as the Corpus juris canonici, the Five Books of Canon Law, as opposed to the Corpus juris civilis, the codification of Roman secular law by Justinian, to which were added the later Sextus in 1298 and the Clementines in 1317 to form seven books (to which two extravagantes were later added), all of which were over time glossed.
Increasingly homophobic theologians, often fanatic friars from Thomas Aquinas to Luca da Penne, continued to influence the glossators. With the aid of philosophy the Inquisition inspired feudal, royal, and municipal laws to order the fining, castra­tion, and even burning of sodomites - all penalties that remained foreign to Canon law proper. The Council of Trent reformed doctrine and discipline, elevating Thomas Aquinas to the rank of the most important doctor of the church. In the twentieth century the canon law was twice recodi­fied.
Early Antisodomy Provisions. As early as 177, Athenagoras had character­ized adulterers and pederasts as foes of Christianity and and subjected them to the harshest penalty the Church, itself still persecuted by the Roman state, could inflict: excommunication. Even before Constantine had ended the Roman state's persecution, the council of Elvira (305) had severely condemned pederasts. Canons 16 and 17 of the Council of Ancyra (314), mainly concerned with defining penance for those guilty of sin rather than with prescribing legal penalties, were interpreted as inflicting lengthy penances upon those guilty of sexual intercourse with males and excommunicating them from the church. Christian Emperors when they became heads of the church meted out savage penalties for unrepentant sodo­mites: the sons of Constantine the sword, and Theodosius and Justinian the aveng­ing flames.
Of the Germanic kingdoms that succeeded the Western Empire in the West, only the Visigothic in Spain (ca. 650) en­acted any penalty at all, namely castra­tion, in spite of Tacitus' famous remark long interpreted to mean that primitive Germans threw homosexuals into bogs. Irish and other penitentials treated homo­sexual offenses more severely than hetero­sexual ones, most often condemning anal intercourse, but prescribing greater sever­ity for anal than for oral sex, whether with a partner of the opposite or of the same gender. The early canons followed them in prescribing penance despite the death penalty in Leviticus and the fulminations of the Apostle Paul, Clement of Alexan­dria, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, and other Patristic authors. In fact, some penitentials were soon invested with ca­nonical authority. Writers of rules for monasticism tried to prevent homosexual acts by keeping candles lit in the dormitories all night and having an elderly monk sleep between two young ones, each in single beds.
Heightened Repression. Repres­sion reappeared in the eleventh century with an obsessive diatribe against all forms of "unnatural vice," the Liber Gomorrhianus of Peter Damian. Asserting that who­ever practiced sodomy was "tearing down the ramparts of the heavenly Jerusalem and rebuilding thewallsof ruined Sodom," his harsh denunciations presaged the atti­tude of the later councils and canonists. Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres published collections containing canons that condemned fellation, bestiality, ped­erasty, and sodomy, and prescribed severe penalties. In the Latin Kingdom of Jerusa­lem, which created a short-lived interface between Christianity and a more tolerant Islam, the council of Nablus, preoccupied with sodomy, decreed in 1120 that guilty men should be burnt at the stake.
Although Gratian's Decretum devoted little space to "unnatural" sexual­ity, at the end of the twelfth century Peter the Chanter devoted a long chapter of his Verbum abbreviatum to sodomy, and his circle seems to have originated a fantastic addition to the legend of the Nativity according to which, at the moment when the Virgin Mary was giving birth to Jesus, all sodomites died a sudden death. From then on, canonists regularly cite Justin­ian's Novella 77 that disasters such as famine, pestilence, and earthquake, to which many added floods and other natu­ral catastrophes, are divine retribution for "crimes against nature." The Third Lateran Council (1179) adopted a canon specifi­cally prohibiting "that incontinence which is against nature" and decreed that clerics guilty of unnatural vice must either forfeit clerical status or be confined perpetually in a monastery. Somewhat paradoxically, Bernard of Pavia held that since sodomy did not create affinity, it constituted no impediment to marriage.
The High and Late Middle Ages. From the second half of the thirteenth century, savage penalties for homosexual offenses become part of Western European legislation. Not merely a cause of misfor­tune for the whole community, sodomy is also repeatedly linked with heresy, and accusations of it become a convenient ingredient of political invective as popes hurled it against Frederick II, and a weapon in power struggles within the feudal ruling class. Popular belief inclined to ascribe this vice to the clergy - probably with much justification. Like the Scholastics, canon law treated homosexuality, bestiality, and masturbation as contra naturam, "con­trary to nature," because they excluded the possibility of procreation, which thus became the touchstone of sexual morality. Such crimes on the part of a religious constituted sacrilege, because his or her body was a vessel consecrated to the serv­ice of God. If publicly practiced or widely known, these offenses carried with them the sanction of infamy [infamia), a depri­vation of status that involved unfitness for holding most kinds of public office or positions of trust and deprivation of the right to appear in court as a plaintiff or witness. Ironically enough, the canonist Pierre de La Palud (ca. 1280-1342) had to explain at length why the church did not allow two males to marry each other and so legitimize their relationship.
Formally beginning at least as far-back as Gregory IX's commission to the Dominicans in 1232 to hunt down here­tics in southern France and elsewhere, the papal Inquisition in due course in certain regions extended its jurisdiction to sodo­mites as well, now viewed as allied with supernatural powers, demons, devils, and witches. The convicted were handed over to the secular authorities for punishment; in time the secular governments were to act independently of the Church in pre­scribing and enforcing the death penalty. Before execution, confessions were wrung from victims by torture, and often the trial records were burnt together with them. St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) denounced homosexual desire as a form of madness.
Modem Times. Given that secu­lar laws already prescribed the extreme penalty, canon law provisions against sodomy, renewed in the sixteenth centvwy as part of the Counter-Reformation, had few novelties. Considerable attention was given, however, to masturbation as well as to lesbianism and transvestism.
James A. Brundage poses the question: Why have medieval Christian beliefs and practices concerning sex en­dured so persistently? He offers three rea­sons: the continuity of the socioeconomic environment, the persistent identification of the erotic with the sacred, and the iner­tia of the law and its institutions. None of these factors fully explains why medieval beliefs survived even the cataclysm that altered the political and legal face of Eu­rope at the end of the eighteenth century, when under the influence of deistic and freemasonic ideas the law codes were rewritten and a new, liberal ethos began to inspire ever larger strata of society. In no small measure the continuity is rather to be explained by the intolerance that for­bade any criticism of Christian sexual morality and branded opponents of its norms as a "justifying their own filthy vices" - an argument reiterated as late as 1957 in a decision of the West German Constitutional Court upholding Paragraph 175 with specific reference to the doc­trines of the Church. In such a climate of opinion the sexual reform trend faced an uphill battle; and without an effective movement to change public opinion and bring pressure upon legislators, liberals were loath to expose themselves to oblo­quy and ridicule. In the United States it was only toward the end of the 1960s that a few Congressmen with "safe" seats began to speak in defense of gay rights. As a result of these changes the official position of the Roman curia came to be increasingly iso­lated, though its champions remained obdurate.
In 1904 the reactionary Pius X appointed a commission to prepare a new codification of the canon law. Because he condemned religious modernism, it is not surprising that the results of this labor, published in 1917 as Codex Juris Canonici, offered no innovations in sexual mo­rality.
The hope that the liberal meas­ures adopted in the aggiornamento or "renewal" initiated by the Second Vatican Council under John XXIII (pope, 1958-63), when conditions seemed more propitious, would lead to changes in Roman Catholic policy regarding homosexual conduct, was not fulfilled. A pontifical commission charged with the revision of canon law in 1962, when it was finally promulgated in 1983, explicitly reaffirmed traditional doctrines. The "Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics," issued by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on December 29, 1975, described homosexual acts as de­prived of their "essential and indispen­sable finality" (that is to say, having no procreative function); and being "intrinsi­cally disordered," in no case could they be approved. Reinforcing this statement was another issued by the same body, the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosex­ual Persons" of October 30, 1986, which led to the gradual expulsion from church premises in the United States of Dignity, the Catholic homosexual organization.
See also Law, Germanic; Law, Feudal and Royal; Law, Municipal.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period, Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1979; Jeannine Crammick and Pat Furey, eds.. The Vatican and Homosexuality, New York: Crossroad, 1988.
William A. Percy

Capital Crime, Homosexuality as a
With decriminalization of same-sex relations between consenting adults in many countries, and nonenforcement of existing laws in others, it may come as a shock that homosexual conduct was once judged worthy of death. Although only a few fanatics call for capital punishment nowadays, such barbarism has been a his­torical reality.
fudeo-Christian Sources. Accord­ing to the Holiness Code of Leviticus (in its present form, probably of the fifth century b. c.), "If a man lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have commit­ted an abomination [to ebah): they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20:13, reinforcing the earlier prohibition in 18:22). From this dire injunction, which applies to male homosexuals only, stem all later Western laws prescribing the death penalty for sodomy. Although our sources are silent as to how frequently the Levitical sanction was enforced (the method was probably stoning), it was endorsed with new argu­ments by some later Jewish rigorist think­ers, notably Philo of Alexandria (first cen­tury of our era).
After the Roman Empire's recog­nition of Christianity as effectively the state religion (a.d. 313), capital enactments against male homosexuality made their way into the Civil Law. One statute of 342 prescribed death by the sword, another of 390 indicated burning. As in the case of the Levitical injunction, it is not known how often these capital punishments were carried out; certainly burning would have been unlikely at this point, though decapi­tation with the sword would not. The emperor Justinian's sixth-century legisla­tion, however severe its attitude toward sexual variation, does not seem to have insisted on death, and a Visigothic code in Spain of ca. 650 specified castration. The penitentials which appeared in the early Middle Ages prescribe only regimes of penitence ranging from a few months to some years in duration.
The Later Middle Ages. A new wave of hostile legislation emerged in the twelfth century, starting with the Nablus Council of 1120, which specified burning. The prevalence of this penalty is based in part on the Sodom story, but it also reflects the parallel with heretics who were usu­ally burned. A somewhat later French law required execution only on the third of­fense. Unusual (and surely without effect) was the English Pleta, which called for death by drowning - probably a reminis­cence of Tacitus' Germania 12, where the Roman historian says that the ancient Teutons would drown corpore infames ("the infamous for their sexual vices") in bogs. (The Nazi Heinrich Himmler was later to urge revival of this practice.)
During the central Middle Ages a vicious rationalization became popular, claiming that sodomy was equivalent to murder (or worse) as it threatened the survival of the human race (found in the ecclesiastical writers Peter Damian, Peter Cantor, and Luca da Penne. This strange notion, anticipated by Philo of Alexandria, was still alive as late as 1895, when the magistrate in Oscar Wilde's trial repeated it in his sentence.
Available evidence suggests that capital penalties were enforced rather se­lectively: fewer than 1000 executions have been documented from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Apparently it was thought sufficient to stage a public execution from time to time in order to discourage the practice - or at least its public display. Following the Levitical tradition, lesbians were for a long time exempt from any punishment, but the Scholastic predilection for analogy even­tually brought them into the purview of some legislation. Yet fewer than ten les­bian executions are known, and some of these are doubtful, since other crimes were involved.
The Reformation and After. It might be thought that the age of Reforma­tion would have brought some relief in this grim onslaught of lawmaking - if only because a deeply divided society was pre­occupied with other problems. But not so, for the death penalty stipulated by article 116 of the Caroline Code of 1532, extend­ing the provision of the Bambergensis of 1507 throughout the Holy Roman Empire, provided a baneful model, followed almost immediately by Henry VDI's law of 1533, of paramount importance for English-speaking, common law countries. This Tudor legislation anchored the prohibi­tion of sodomy firmly in the fabric of the secular law as a felony, taking it out of the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts which were believed to have become lax.
While some Enlightenment thinkers, notably the great penal reformer Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), had been critical, credit for the first real break in the dismal pattern belongs to one of the emerg­ing United States. After several earlier reform attempts, in 1786 Pennsylvania substituted hard labor for death, to be followed by Austria in 1787 and Prussia in 1794. Just as antihomosexual legislation had crossed ideological lines in the 1530s, the mitigations were the product of two very different climates: the Quaker tradi­tion (transatlantically) and enlightened despotism (in Europe).
Decriminalization. In the wake of the French Revolution, the French National Assembly swept away the whole repressive apparatus of the ancien regime when it adopted a new criminal code in 1791. Then in 1810, the French Code Penal (as part of the Code Napoleon) eliminated homosexual conduct entirely from the penal law, a salutory step that has been followed in many countries since.
In Hitler's holocaust male homo­sexuals died in the concentration camps, though they were rarely officially con­demned to death. In the 1970s, the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran instituted execution for homosexuals (on spurious precedents derived from Islam). Such fanatical acts have been universally condemned by en­lightened opinion.
See also Canon Law; Law, Feudal and Royal; Law, Germanic; Law, Municipal; Sixteenth-Century Legislation.
Wayne R. Dynes

Capote, Truman (1924-1984)
American novelist and journal­ist. Capote became famous at the age of 24 with his elegant, evocative book Other Voices, Other Rooms, which concerns the growing consciousness of a boy seeking to comprehend the ambivalent inhabitants of a remote Mississippi house. Dubbed "swamp baroque," this short novel was easily assimilated into then-current no­tions of Southern decadence. Born in New Orleans, Capote lived most of his life in New York and at the homes of his jetset friends in Europe. He cherished a lifelong friendship with fellow writer Jack Dunphy. In 1966 he published In Cold Blood, a "nonfiction novel" about the seemingly senseless murder of a Kansas farm family by two drifters. In preparing for the book, Capote gained the confidence of the mur­derers, and was thus able to make vivid their sleazy mental universe.
The controversy surrounding this book elevated him to celebrity status, and he began a series of appearances on televi­sion talk shows, where his waspish wit amused, but where he often served the function (rivaled only by Liberace) of rein­forcing for a mass audience their stereo­type of a homosexual. During this period Capote became the confidant of rich and famous people, especially women, and he gathered their stories for incorporation in a major work which was intended to rival Marcel Proust. Yet when excerpts from this work-in-progress were published in magazines, not only were they found to be vulgar and lacking in insight, but Capote began to be dropped by the socialites he had so unsubtly satirized. Dismayed, the writer sank more and more into a miasma of alcohol, cocaine, and valium - his only consolation the devoted love, or so he claimed, of a succession of straight, prole­tarian young men whom he prized because of their very ordinariness. When a frag­ment, apparently all that has survived, of the magnum opus appeared posthumously as Answered Prayers in 1986, it had little more than gossip value. In retrospect Capote was not alone among American writers in being destroyed by his addic­tions. He will nonetheless be remembered for his earlier work, which remains to document the style of an era.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Gerald Clarke, Capote: A Biography, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da (1571-1610)
Italian painter. Trained in North­ern Italy, Caravaggio went to Rome as a young man where his meteoric career trans­formed the then-somnolent art scene and left a permanent impression on European art. Caravaggio came under the protection of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a homosexual prelate. During this period he painted several works showing ambiguous or androgynous young men, including The Musicians (New York, Metropolitan Museum). Efforts have been made to deny the homoerotic implications of these works, but they seem feeble. Modern heterosexual art historians have claimed that because of Caravaggio's relations with women he cannot have had a homosexual side - which not only denies Kinsey but what we know of dominant bisexual pat­terns in the era in which the artist lived.
His mature career began with a painting of St. Matthew and the Angel for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, which was rejected because the figure of the saint was considered too ple­beian. Although the artist produced a sec­ond, toned-down version, he continued to exploit a vein of dramatic realism that gave his work a direct impact not seen in art before, and rarely since.
Caravaggio had an adventurous, often violent life. His hot temper several times got him in trouble with the police, and in 1603 a rival artist sued him for libel. His career in Rome was terminated in 1606 when, during a game of racquets, he quarreled with a man and killed him. He fled to Naples and then Malta, where he assaulted a member of the Order. He died of fever in port near Rome, where he had hoped to obtain a pardon.
For a long time, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Caravaggio's reputation was in eclipse; he was considered a mere "tenebrist" who excelled only in painting shadows. He did not fit any of the accepted categories. Only after World War II did his reputation begin to climb, attaining remarkable heights in the 1980s, when even the abstract artist Frank Stella praised him. In 1986 Derek Jarman's stylish film Caravaggio was re­leased, presenting the artist as bisexual, but emphasizing the homosexual side.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, New York: Harper and Row, 1983,- Donald Posner, "Caravag­gio's Early Homoerotic Works," Art Quarterly, 24 (1971), 301-26.
Wayne R. Dynes

Carnival
See Mardi Gras and Masked Balls.

Carpenter, Edward (1844-1929)
English writer, mystical thinker, and Utopian socialist. Educated for the clergy at Cambridge University, Carpen­ter resigned from the Church of England in 1873 and taught for a time in the univer­sity extension movement in northern England, where he became increasingly attracted to socialism. Like his older con­temporary John Addington Symonds, Carpenter was a fervent admirer of Walt Whitman, whom he visited in Camden, New Jersey, in 1877 and 1884. His book-length poem Towards Democracy (1883) reflects both Whitman's style and ideas. At the same time he became involved in Hindu and Buddhist thought, visiting India and Ceylon in 1890. He believed that the redemption of a deeply flawed society had less to do with external reorganization than with individual self-realization lead­ing to the development of cosmic con­sciousness.
Carpenter put his ideals into prac­tice at his market-gardening farm at Millthorpe near Sheffield, where he lived with his working-class lover George Merrill. Like Symonds, Carpenter believed that such relationships could serve as a power­ful solvent to break down class barriers, and thus open the way to a new era of human happiness, which would be coop­erative rather than competitive. His re­turn to the "simple life" - which included vegetarianism and casual dress, a proto-hippie lifestyle - was part of his program of "exfoliation," a deliberate discarding of the husks of the old society in preparation for the dawning New Life. By the turn of the century his ideas, which also included support for women's rights, had achieved a broad international circulation.
Despite early discouragements from publishers and a malicious campaign of defamation that was waged against him, Carpenter produced books discussing homosexuality openly. His concept of "homogenic love" emphasized the help­ing role of the gentle male homosexual as an "intermediate type" between man and woman. Men of this kind were called to a special role in the inauguration of the New Life. In addition to this side of same-sex love, which had roots in the historic fig­ures of the berdache and the shaman, Carpenter also recognized the warrior homosexual, as seen in the Samurai. His 1902 gay anthology Ioläus, modeled on a similar German work edited by Elisar von Kupffer, was dubbed by the book trade "the bugger's bible." But there is no doubt that this work, and other widely distrib­uted volumes, helped to reinforce a sense of positive self-identity in a period of pro­found antihomosexual backlash in Eng­lish-speaking countries in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trials.
Carpenter's combination of Uto­pian socialism, mysticism, and feminism made him widely influential in the years before World War I, when his ideas were taken up by such major figures as D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster. Yet by his death in 1929 he was largely forgotten. In the 1960s, however, his reputation was revived by the intellectual side of the Counterculture, which he strikingly pre­figured. Many of his books were reissued, and his life was commemorated in a play by Noel Greig, "The Dear Love of Com­rades" (1981).
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Chushichi Tsuzuki, Edward Carpenter, 1844-1929: Prophet of Human Fellowship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Wayne R. Dynes

Cartoons
See Comic Strips.

Casement, Roger (1864-1916)
Irish diplomat and patriot. Sprung from an Anglo-Irish family, Casement studied at Ballymore Academy, then, left penniless by his father's extravagance, he settled in Liverpool as a clerk in a shipping company active in the West African trade. His first taste of Africa in 1883 drew him back to the continent which was just then being colonized by the European powers, and he spent the next twenty years of his life there. In 1903 he conducted an on-the-spot investigation of the abuses and atroci­ties perpetrated in the Congo Free State under the rule of King Leopold of Belgium.
In the course of the expedition he kept a journal that survived to play a fate­ful role at the end of his career. It consisted of quick, laconic, unreflective jottings, seldom of expressions of feeling, though there is a passage referring to the suicide of general Sir Hector Macdonald in Paris where homosexuality is termed "a terrible disease." But there are also elliptical rec­ords of homosexual encounters with the natives, whose genital size he particularly appreciated and coveted. The diaries re­veal a man habituated like many homo­sexuals of that day to living a double life without undue anxiety or reflection.
At the end of 1903 he composed a report which denounced Leopold's regime in the Congo as "an infamous, shameful system," in which "cruelty toward the blacks is the basis of administration, and bad faith towards all the other states the basis of commercial policy." The next post that Casement occupied was that of Brit­ish consul in Santos, Brazil, then a similar position in Para, finally that of Consul-General in Rio de Janeiro. In 1910 he en­gaged in an investigation of atrocities perpetrated against the native Indians in the rubber trade in the Putumayo basin of Peru, keeping another fateful and reveal­ing diary. Returning to England, he com­posed his report in the spring of 1911, and for his services he was knighted by King George V. Another trip to the Amazon basin followed, but illness forced him into early retirement in August of 1913.
At this point a new phase in Casement's life began with his attending a meeting of amateur Ulster Nationalists in Ballymoney in October 1913. He found himself caught up in the first flowering of the hopeless political conflict that plagues Ulster even today. Although Protestant and northerner by ancestry, he took up the cause of Irish independence, and invited by Eoin MacNeill to join the Irish Volun­teers founded in Dublin on November 25, he sensed that it meant a major new direc­tion in his lif e. The split between the north and the south gradually widened as Sir Edward Carson became ever more paro­chial in pursuing the interests of the Un­ionist North. The outbreak of World War I found Casement in the United States soliciting support for the Irish cause. The idea of a rapprochement with Germany was not strange to him; once England was defined as the enemy of Ireland, the enemy of England was Ireland's friend. In October he left for Germany, where his original intention was to persuade the imperial government to issue a declaration of friendly intentions toward Ireland. With Count Georg von Wedel, chief of the Eng­lish Department of the Foreign Ministry, he discussed a scheme to organize Irish prisoners of war in Germany into an Irish legion, and subsequently he visited a pris­oner-of-war camp at Limburg for recruit­ing purposes, but most of the prisoners proved to be violently anti-German. Un­daunted by this failure, Casement wrote to Sir Edward Grey, the British Prime Minis­ter, on February 1, 1915 renouncing all loyalty to Great Britain. A mere fifty Irish­men were recruited for the Brigade, and to the Germans Casement became less an ally than a nuisance.
On learning of the uprising planned for Easter Sunday of 1916, he resolved to return to Ireland on a German submarine so as to be in the thick of the action. After a series of mishaps Casement and two other men were put ashore at Banna Strand, but were quickly appre­hended by the Royal Irish Constabulary. Convicted of high treason in the wake of the Easter Sunday Rising, Casement was sentenced to death. His only hope was an appeal for clemency backed by sympathiz­ers and admirers who still respected him for his humanitarian deeds of the past. At this point the British intervened by circu­lating copies of pages from his private diaries, which - found in his lodgings - exposed his homosexual proclivities and actions. The knowledge or the rumor of the diaries alienated many potential sup­porters, and even turned some into bitter foes. On August 3, 1916 he was executed by hanging.
Casement's supporters denied the authenticity of the diaries for some forty years, but in 1959 the texts were finally published as The Black Diaries. Examina­tion of the autograph copies proved that forgery or interpolation would not have been possible. Casement was revealed for the judgment of all succeeding genera­tions as a homosexual - as one of those homosexuals whose patriotism, self-sacri­fice, and love for humanity could be over­shadowed but not obliterated by the mal­ice of their enemies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Brian Inglis, Roger Casement, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973; B. L. Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
Warren Johansson

Castrati
The castrati were male singers emasculated in boyhood to preserve the soprano or contralto range of their voices, who from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth played roles in Italian opera.
Historical Background. Eunuchs are attested from the dawn of civilization in the Near East, as the Bible and other ancient sources indicate; but at what point in time children began to be castrated specifically for the sake of their voices cannot now be determined. The historian Dio Cassius obscurely refers to such a practice in the reign of Septimius Severus (193-21 lj.However, the adoption of Chris­tianity first provided a genuine motive for their existence, as St. Paul had expressly forbidden women to sing in church (I Cor. 14:34; "mulier taceat in ecclesia") - an interdiction that prevailed everywhere until the seventeenth century, and in some places until much later, so that when high voices were required, boys, falsettists, or eunuchs had to be employed. Boys are commonly mischievous, unruly, and trou­blesome, and by the time they have really been trained their voices are usually on the edge of breaking; falsettists do not share these drawbacks, but their voices have a peculiar, unpleasant quality, and as a rule cannot attain as high a range as the so­prano.
At Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, it appears that eunuchs were constantly in use during the middle ages. Theodore Balsamon, tutor to the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (reigned 912-59) and possibly himself a eunuch, wrote a treatise in their defense in which he speaks of them as habitually employed as singers; while a eunuch named Manuil is recorded as having arrived at Smolensk in 1137 and having sung there. In the churches of the Byzantine capital soloists were censured for interpolating passages of coloratura into their music, as were later the castrati.
Castrati in European Music. The elaborate a cappella style, which began to flourish about the middle of the fifteenth century, required a much wider range of voices and a higher degree of virtuosity than anything that had gone before, and for this task the existing singers were inade­quate. The first response took the form of Spanish falsettists of a special kind, but by the end of the sixteenth century these had yielded to the castrati, who also domi­nated the new baroque art form - the op­era, which was the principal musical ac­tivity of the Italian nation in the next two centuries. Opera was unlike legitimate theatre in that it traveled well; it was the first form of musical entertainment that was both popular and to a certain degree international, so that a star system tran­scending national borders arose. Leading singers were discussed, criticized, and compared in fashionable drawing rooms from Lisbon to St. Petersburg. Most of the singers who attained such celebrity were castrati. If other nations had some form of native opera, this ranked lower on the cultural scale and was indifferently sung, while the Italian version enjoyed the high­est standard of singing that had ever been known, and will in all likelihood never again be attained. France alone refused admission to Italian singers, and virtually banned the castrati; but Frenchmen, like other Europeans, were full of praise for the opera of Italy.
Character and Status. Since no recording devices existed in the heyday of the castrati,.the modern critic has no way of judging the quality of their perfomv ance> yet six generations of music-lovers preferred the voices of these "half-men" to those of women themselves and of whole men. A practice that modern opinion would judge both strange and cruel prevailed in part because Christian society tolerated the mutilation of children who in most cases were bom of humble parents, since only a family hard pressed for money would consent to such a fate. In this economic stratum, however, it was accepted that any male child who betrayed the slightest aptitude for music should be sold into servitude, just as in modern Thailand children are sold by their parents to labor in factories or serve in brothels. The suc­cessful castrato naturally tried to conceal his humble origins and pose as the scion of an honorable family. The singing-masters of that era were responsible for the perfec­tion of the art of the castrati; no one since has rivaled them in perseverance and thor­oughness, and in their perfect command of the capabilities and shortcomings of the human vocal organs. They usually worked in a conservatorio, though sometimes they had their own singing schools or tutored pupils on the side.
Since canon law condemned cas­tration and threatened anyone involved in it with excommunication, which could be reinforced by civil penalties, the business had to be carried on more or less clandes­tinely, and everywhere prying questions brought only misleading and deceitful answers. The town of Lecce in Apulia, and Norcia, a small town in the Papal States about twenty miles east of Spoleto, are mentioned as notorious for the practice, though the castrati themselves came from all parts of the peninsula. The doctors most esteemed for their skill in the opera­tion were those of Bologna, and their serv­ices were in demand not just in Italy but abroad as well.
The operation itself was no guar­antee of future success, as sometimes the voice did not display itself, or the child proved to lack a natural aptitude for mu­sic. The educational practice of that day did not spare the rod, and the lessons were often lashed into the castrated boy. The curriculum entailed much hard work, and was thorough and comprehensive; as much attention was given to the theory of sing­ing as to its actual practice. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty, a castrato who had retained and embellished his voice, and passed the various tests with greater or lesser distinction, was considered ready for his debut. On contract to some opera house, he would often first be seen in a female part, for which his youth and fresh complexion would particularly suit him. His looks and unfamiliarity would per­haps gain him greater success than his art would have merited, to the rage and envy of his senior colleagues. Once his name was made, he would have his clique of admirers who attended en masse his every performance and extolled him as their idol; aristocratic ladies and gentlemen would fancy themselves in love with him and manipulate a piquant interview. Backstage, the rivalry with other singers could rage with intense virulence; and a castrato who was too vain and insolent might be assas­sinated by the hirelings of a rival's protec­tor. If, however, the performer did not please his audience, he would be doomed to touring small provincial opera houses, or to performing in a church choir. Dissat­isfied with his situation, he could set off for Bologna, the marketplace for the musi­cal profession in Italy, to better his for­tunes.
The castrati came in for a great amount of scurrilous and unkind abuse, and as their fame increased, so did the hatred of them. They were often castigated as malign creatures who lured men into homosexuality, and there were admittedly homosexual castrati, as Casanova's ac­counts of eighteenth-century Italy bear witness. He mentions meeting an abbe whom he took for a girl in disguise, but was later told that it was a famous cas­trate In Rome in X762, he attended a performance at which the prima donna was a castrato, the minion of Cardinal Borghese, who supped every evening with his protector. From his behavior on stage, "it was obvious that he hoped to inspire the love of those who liked him as a man, and probably would not have done so as a woman." He concludes by saying that the holy city of Rome forces every man to become a pederast, even if it does not believe in the effect of the illusion which the castrati provoke.
The Catholic Church does not permit eunuchs, or those known to be impotent, to marry; and this rule was applied to the castrati, so that they had no hope of heterosexual married life. The principle that marriage was solely for procreation barred any concession to a husband who could not father offspring. Hence the castrati were officially stamped as asexual beings, even if they clandes­tinely gratified their own and others' homosexual impulses.
Opponents of castration have claimed that the practice caused its vic­tims an early loss of voice and an untimely death, while others have affirmed that castration prolonged the life of the vocal cords, and even that of their owner. There is no solid evidence for either contention: the castrati had approximately the same life span as their contemporaries, and re­tired at roughly the same age as other singers. The operation appears to have had surprisingly little effect on the general health and well-being of the subject, any more than on his sexual impulses. The trauma was largely a psychological one, in an age when virility was deemed a sover­eign virtue.
Aftermath. Toward the end of the end of the eighteenth century castrati went out of fashion, and new styles in musical corrjposition led to the disappearance of these singers. Meyerbeer was the last composer of importance to write for the male soprano voice; his II Crociato in Egitto, produced at Venice in 1824, was designed especially for a castrato star. Succeeding generations regarded their memory with derision and disgust, and werj: happy to live in an age when such products of barbarism were no longer possible. A few castrati performed in the Vatican chapel and some other Roman churches until late in the nineteenth cen­tury, but their vogue on the operatic stage had long passed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera, London: Seeker & Warburg, 1956.
Warren Johansson

Castration
See Eunuchs.

Catamite
The Latin common noun, catamitus, designating a minion or kept boy, is usually derived from the Greek proper name Ganymede(s), the favorite of Zeus. Another possible source is Kadmilos, the companion of the Theban god Kabeiros. The word entered English in the sixteenth century as part of the Renaissance revival of classical literature, and has always re­tained a learned, quasiexotic aura. The term could also be used as a verbal adjec­tive, as "a catamited boy."
Ifi modern English the ter­mination -ire tends to be perceived as pejorative, as in Trotskyite (vs. Trotskyist) and sodomite. Hobo slang records a turn-of-the-century expression gey cat, for a neophyte or young greenhorn, of which the second element may be a truncated form of catamite, though this is uncertain. In keeping with the Active-Passive Con­trast, the catamite is commonly perceived as the passive partner of the sodomite or pederast.
See also Ingle; Minions and Fa­vorites.

Cather, Willa (1873-1947)
American novelist, short story writer, poet, and editor. Cather was born to a cultivated country family in Virginia. When she was nine the family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where the ruggedness of the frontier still persisted. Arriving at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in 1890 dressed as William Cather, her opposite-sex twin, Willa soon learned to tone down her image. Still she stood out as a brilliant eccentric. A large, ungainly girl, she was too outspoken and socially unsure of herself to adjust comfortably. She also had a habit of developing crushes on women: classmates, faculty wives, and acquaintances. The intensity of her feel­ing repelled its objects, and Willa would sulk. Nonetheless, her writing skills ma­tured and she joined a Lincoln newspaper as a reviewer. In her art reviews she praised the beauty of female sitters in portraits. Later, her device of male narrators in her novels allowed her to set forth the varied charms of female characters at length.
Cather did not long remain in Nebraska. She got a better job in Pitts­burgh, where she met Isabelle McClung, the beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter of a judge. Swept off her feet, Willa commit­ted herself without reservation. In return Isabelle granted affection but not passion. Although Isabelle married in 1916, her close connection with Willa lasted for forty years.
In the meantime Cather had been sending out her short stories to New York magazines, usually with little sucess. In 1903, however, she met Sam McClure, the aggressive editor of McClure's Magazine. Summoning her to New York, he said that he would print anything she cared to sub­mit. In 1905 he brought out her first vol­ume of short stories, The Troll Garden. In turn Cather moved to New York to work for McClure as an editor. She spent six years with him, acquiring a wide variety of writing skills, while her conviction that she should write out of her experience grew. Her new friend, the New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett, urged her to leave the magazine, which she finally did in 1912. Cather settled into a Greenwich Village apartment with her companion Edith Lewis, who was a copyeditor at the magazine. Together they created an or­derly life that allowed Cather to produce her masterpieces. One of her greatest pleas­ures was music, which meant more to her creative lif e than the conversation of New York intellectuals. As World War I ended, she had already written O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and her best-known novel, My Antonia. Successful from the first, the books allowed her to travel to the Southwest and to Europe. For forty years Lewis was her indispensable friend, com­panion, and secretary. To outsiders their relationship was a typical Boston mar­riage, an arrangement that suited two professional women. It is uncertain whether there was any genital aspect. Cather's heart was still pledged to Isabelle McClung.
Her novels tell little of sex and marriage. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) is the story of a French missionary priest in New Mexico, and My Antonia (1918) depicts the world of immigrant settlers in Nebraska's open spaces. In each the beauty and strength of the land is central. Cather is rightly regarded as a quintessentially American writer. But she was sophisticated as well, and her novels bear comparison with the best that Eng­land and Europe could offer at the time. She did not choose to become an open lesbian, though it was always women that she loved, their support that made her work possible. Unfortunately, she decided to destroy her letters to Isabelle McClung, but there survives a revealing series to Louise Pound, a dashing friend from her college days.
Drawing on a personal alchemy, she transmuted her feelings into the strong characters of her novels. As she put it: "Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself." Whether intentionally or not, the expression "thing not named" evokes an old tradition of homosexual love as unnameable. But Cather's triumph is that her need to veil her inner emotional life did not condemn her to silence, but inspired her great writ­ing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Sharon O'Brien, "The Thing Not Named: Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer," Signs (1984), 576-99; James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Evelyn Gettone

Catholic Church
See Christianity; Clergy, Gay; Monasticism; Papacy.

Catullus, Gaius Valerius (87-54)
Latin poet. Born at Verona, he spent most of his life in Rome, but kept a villa near his birthplace at Sirmio on Lake Garda. Often considered the best Republi­can poet, he imitated Sappho as well as other archaic, classical, and Hellenistic models, upon which he often improved, and which he combined with native Latin traditions to create stunning, original pieces. He wrote poems, 250 of which survive, of happiness and bitter disappoint­ment. Some are addressed to his high­born, married, then widowed mistress Clodia, the sister of Cicero's antagonist,
10 years his senior, whom he addressed as Lesbia (though with no insinuation of what we now call lesbianism), and who was unfaithful to him with other men. Homo­phobic Christian and modern schoolmas­ters have, however, greatly exaggerated the importance of the poems to Lesbia, which amount to no more than an eighth of the Catullan corpus.
Besides a wide variety of other verses, in some of which he criticized Caesar and Pompey, many of Catullus' poems were pederastic, addressed to his apparently aristocratic beloved Juventius. He was unusual among Romans in prefer­ring an aristocratic boy to a slave but made clear that most others preferred concubini, that is, male slaves with whom they slept. Sophisticated and fastidious, he set the standard for the Augustan poets of love Ovid, Horace, Vergil, and Propertius. In the Silver Age even Martial acknowledged his debt to Catullus' epigrams. Like those poets, and most specifically Tibullus, he showed little inhibition and equal attrac­tion to boys and women, but also shared the traditional attitude that the active, full-grown male partner degraded the pas­sive one, and that the threat to penetrate another male symbolized one's superior virility and power. On the other hand, the accusation of having been raped by an­other male has a largely negative force; Catullus poses as victim in order to insult the excessively Priapic male.
In Latin erotic poetry, as in its Greek sources after thefifth century, the boys have no family, no career, and no identity other than as athletes and slaves, with the sole exception of Juventius. Like most of the Hellenistic poets, their Roman imitators often sang of boys who demanded gifts or were even outright prostitutes. The older, still beardless boy was consid­ered superior to younger ones, so that eighteen was preferred to thirteen. Even in his wildest flights of imagination or rancor no Latin or Greek poet ever advised his listener to enjoy another adult male sexu­ally. So Catullus' homoerotic poetry is firmly in the tradition of the Hellenistic and the fashionable Roman attitude to­ward the love of boys.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jean Granarolo, L'Oeuvre de Catulle: Aspects religieux, éthiques et stylistiques, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967; Saara Lilja, Homosexual­ity in Republican and Augustan Rome (Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae, 74 [1982]).
William A. Percy

Cavafy, Constantine (1863-1935)
Leading poet in modem Greek. Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in a merchant family that had long been promi­nent under the Ottoman Empire. His fa­ther died when he was seven and his mother took him to England where they remained for seven years. In 1887 the Cavafy export business collapsed and the family returned to Alexandria, moving to Constantinople in 1882. Here the poet had his first love affair - with a cousin, George Psilliary. In 1885 Cavafy returned with his mother to Alexandria, where he found work in the Department of Irrigation. He remained there for over thirty years. As a young man he led an active street life, some of which is recorded in his poems. When his mother died in 1899, he moved to an apartment over a brothel in the Rue Lepsius. His only known long-term relationship was with Alexander Singopoulos, whom he made his heir.
The canon of Cavafy's works is small, consisting only of about 150 lyr­ics - though these have been supplemented after the writer's death by several score of unpublished and rejected works. In sub­ject matter his poetry ranges from histori­cal episodes of Hellenistic and Byzantine times to scenes of modem life. The histori­cal poems reveal his sense of kinship with the earlier phases of the Greek diaspora, together with the fin-de-siècle interest in late or "decadent" stages of civilization. His more personal poems in the latter mode are poignant reflections on the fleet­ing joys of youth, especially in the homoerotic sphere. Such poems as "In the Street" (1916), "Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old" (1927), and "The Mirror in the Front Hall" (1930) present a comprehen­sive picture of the urban gay man's world that is easily recognizable today: street cruising, one-night stands, pressures to remain closeted, regret at growing older, ethnic and social contrasts, and nurturing friendships. The cosmopolitan city of Alexandria in which these poems are set is now completely transformed, but Cavafy's vision of it stands as an incomparable metaphor for the awareness of spiritual exile that is a key component of modernist sensibility.
Though concise, Cavafy's lyrics have an extraordinary staying power, an indefinable aura, which largely survives the translation process. In the Greek origi­nals their subtle infusion of the inherited literary language with elements of the spoken vernacular has made them an important stylistic influence. Cavafy has achieved a considerable international repu­tation, thanks in part to such advocates as W. H. Auden, E. M. Carpenter, Lawrence Durrell, and Marguerite Yourcenar.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Works: Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton: Prince­ton University Press, 1975 (includes Greek texts en face); The Complete Poems of Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven, expanded ed., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Criticism: Carmen Capri-Karka, Love and the Symbohc Journey in the Poetry of Cavafy, Eliot and Seferis, New York: Pella, 1982 (with bibliography of Greek-language critical writings); Gregory Jusdanis, The Poetics of Cavafy: Textuality, Eroticism, History, Prince­ton: Princeton University Press, 1987; Edmund Keeley, Cavafy's Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976; Robert Liddell, Cavafy: A Critical Biography, New York: Schocken Books, 1974.
Wayne R. Dynes

Celibacy
The word celibate derives from the Latin caelebs, "unmarried." In mod­em usage celibacy generally means not only that one is unmarried but also ab­staining from sexual intercourse. Celibacy may be a matter of individual choice or it may be the condition of joining an institu­tion, as in Christian and Buddhist monas­teries. Historically, Christian "total insti­tutions" are enclaves which result from a social compromise in which a state of sexual asceticism, originally recommended as the ideal for all members of society, became mandatory for a defined minority only. Some inmates of Christian monas­teries and nunneries have rationalized that homosexual conduct, not constituting marriage and not necessarily extending to intercourse, does not represent a breach of vows. Others hold that monks may expe­rience homosexual feelings, but must not act on them.
Over the centuries many indi­viduals have adopted sexual abstinence either for a given period or for life. This option may reflect aversion to the sexual act ("frigidity"), or a conscious decision to husband energy for the accomplishment of some other goal.
In the twentieth century psychia­trist Wilhelm Reich and his followers regarded frequent heterosexual intercourse as the very definition of mental health. Less extreme, other sex reformers, who seek to free those they counsel from the shackles of puritanical self-denial, seem to imply that the modern individual must fulfill a sort of quota of sexual acts. Faced with such pressures, some individuals react against what they perceive as the tyranny of the cult of the orgasm and choose celi­bacy. With the development of the aids crisis in the 1980s, many are adopting celibacy less as a matter of personal prefer­ence than as a precaution. Their fears may be exaggerated, but some actually find relief in being excused from participating in the "sex race."
See also Asceticism; Buddhism; Monasticism.
Ward Houser

Cellini, Benvenuto (1500-1571)
Florentine sculptor, goldsmith, and memoirist. After early success as a goldsmith, Cellini could virtually write his own ticket as an artist, and he con­ducted a successful and peripatetic career in a number of places in Italy and France. His autobiography (written in 1558-62, and therefore not covering his last years) gives a highly colored account of the art­ist's motivation in these wanderings. A fervent admirer of Michelangelo in art, he conspicuously departed from the austerity of his mentor in his swashbuckling life, so that his name has become a byword for the profligacy and extravagance of the Renais­sance artist.
Cellini's sculpture Perseus (1545-54) was judged worthy of a place of honor in Florence's Loggia dei Lanzi near Michelangelo's superb David. In 1540-43 Cellini completed the daunting task for the salt-cellar of Francis I in France. This and other undertakings in that country served to consolidate the mannerist taste of Fontainebleau, with which Cellini was perfectly in tune.
During his later years he chose to reside in Florence, where his relations with grandduke Cosimo I were stormy. Once during a quarrel a rival artist Baccio Bandinelli cried out, "Oh keep quiet you dirty sodomite," an early instance of public la­beling. In 1527 he was called before a court for sexual irregularity, but the case appears to have been quashed. In 1557 he was placed under house arrest for sodomy, using the occasion to begin dictating his Autobi­ography, which more than any of his other works has made him famous. Some years later, apparently rehabilitated, he married the mother of some of his illegitimate children. In 1571 Cellini died and was buried with full honors in the church of the Santissima Annunziata.
One of his most personal works is the marble Ganymede of 1545-46 (Florence, Bargello), where the Phrygian youth stands next to the eagle, a manifes­tation of his abductor, Zeus. In his right hand Ganymede holds a small bird, evi­dently a love gift from his suitor. Other works heavy with male eroticism are the Narcissus and Apollo and Hyacinth (both Florence, Bargello).
Heir to the Renaissance tradition of the artist as a special being, exempt from ordinary demands of morality, Cellirji nonetheless fell afoul of changing reli­gious currents. The Council of Trent, which began meeting in 1545 during his middle years, was the belweather of this shift. After Cellini Italy saw only one other major artist in this grand homosexuay bisexual tradition, the painter Mich­elangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 - 1610f
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Luigi Greci, "Benvenuto Cellini nei delitti e nei processi fiorentini," Archivio di Antzopologia Criminale, 50 (1930), 342-85, 509-42; James Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance, New Haven: Yale Univer­sity Press, 1986.
Wayne R. Dynes

Celts, Ancient
In the first millennium b.c. the Celtic peoples expanded from their origi­nal homeland in Central Europe to occupy much of what is now France, the British Isles, and Northern Italy. Although Celtic languages are today confined to small areas in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Brittany, their heritage forms an important substra­tum of developing European culture, as seen, for example, in the legends of the Arthurian cycle.
In their dynamig period, bodies of Celts also moved eastward, where they encountered the ancient Greeks, who cele­brated their warlike character and their attachment to male homosexuality. In his PoHtics (II, 9:7-8), Aristotle compares the Spartans unfavorably with the Celts: under the influence of their wives the former have fallen into luxury, while the Celts Use their devotion to male love as a shield against such self-indulgence. Athenaeus ,(XJn, 603a; echoed by Diodorus Siculus and Strabo) says that although the Celts had beautiful women, they much preferred boys. Sometimes, he states, they would sleep on animal skins with a boyfriend on either side. This observation seems to reflect the fact that great warriors had two squires, each with his own horse.
Inasmuch as the ancient Celts were illiterate, we are compelled to rely on the scanty testimony of the Greeks and Romans. The wonderful specimens of Celtic art ("La Téne") found in tombs do not suffice to make up the gap. What is known suggests that homosexuality had an initiatory function among these warri­ors, not unlike that found among some Greek peoples. Whether all these manifes­tations derive in turn from a unitary pri­mordial Indo-European institution of ini­tiatory homosexuality, as Bernard Sergent has argued, must be regarded as still unproven.
In the late Roman Republic and the first century of the Empire most of the western Celtic peoples lost their independ­ence - with which their devotion to male love had been linked - and fell under the domination of Rome, with its more am­bivalent attitudes to homosexuality. The coming of Christianity finally severed the link with the old homoerotic traditions, although traces of them seem to have survived here and there in imaginative literature. The early Irish penitentials also show that homosexual love continued in the monasteries, while subject to continu­ing surveillance and repression.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Bernard Sergent, L'Homosexualité initiatique dans /'Europe ancienne, Paris: Payot, 1986.

Censorship and Obscenity
Censorship is the official prohibi­tion, whether by civil or ecclesiastical authorities, of the publication and circula­tion of printed and visual materials.
Basic Features. While in .former times the activity of censors focused pri­marily on the written word as the vehicle of subversive or sexually arousing dis­course, in recent decades emphasis has largely shifted to visual expression. This change in emphasis is not a tribute to the power of art as such, but a recognition that in the age of film and television a large portion of the population derives its infor­mation and entertainment almost exclu­sively from these sources. In the case of written materials, many regimes, as in the Soviet Union today, have permitted the circulation of nonprinted (handwritten or typewritten) copies of otherwise unaccept­able texts [samizdat). In North America in the past, some sexually explicit writings have been issued in this fashion. It has also been common to print materials abroad (tamizdat) and import them clandes­tinely - or to feign foreign issue through a false indication of place of publication.
The practice of tolerating certain hand-produced materials clearly shows that censorship is concerned not simply with the prohibition of materials, but with the size of the audience. A small elite, prepared to go to unusual trouble and to pay high prices, can be allowed materials that are denied to the masses. It is for this reason that medical and other books deal­ing with sexual matters formerly had the crucial details in Latin. This antidem­ocratic tendency, reserving sexually ex­plicit materials to the few who can pay the monetary or linguistic entry fee, was a factor in the United States court decisions of the 1960s overturning censorship.
Historical Perspectives. The urge to censor is probably ultimately rooted in fear of blasphemy, the apprehension that if utterances offensive to the gods are toler­ated their wrath will fall on the whole society, It was impiety toward the gods for which Socrates was tried and condemned in 399 b.c. The Roman erotic poet Ovid was banished by the puritanical emperor Augustus in a.d. 8.
On the whole neither classical antiquity nor the Middle Ages had an adequate system of surveillance that would permit prior restraint, a characteristic feature of censorship of the modem type. It is true that on a number of occasions, as Peter Abelard's Introductio ad Theologiam in 1120, works were condemned by medieval synods to be burned. However, no centralized machinery existed for the control of books. Since the monasteries had amonopoly on producing manuscripts, it was assumed that such oversight was not necessary. In fact the abbey scriptoria not only copied erotic materials from Greco-Roman times, but created their own new genres of this type. In any event, the medieval authorities were concerned more with doctrinal deviation than with ob­scenity.
The introduction of printing by Gutenberg in the mid-fifteenth century changed the whole picture. There was a much greater incidence of the issuing and circulation of heretical broadsides and brochures; without printing, the Reforma­tion, beginning in 1517, might never have taken place. Yet, in the view of the au­thorities, it was not too late to lock the bam door. The centralization of printing in the hands of a relatively few firms made it possible to scrutinize their intended productions before publication; only those that had passed the test and bore the imprimatur could be printed. It was then only necessary to make sure that heretical materials were not smuggled in from abroad. In Catholic countries this system was put in place by the establishment, under the Inquisition, with the Index of Prohibited Books in 1557. In countries where the Reformation took hold the control of books was generally assumed by the government. In .England the require­ment that books should be licenced for printing by theprivy council or other agents of the crown was introduced in 1538. These origins explain why the activity of censors was for long chiefly concerned with the printed word. Revealingly^this system is still in force in Communist countries today.
One other area in which censor­ship was widely practiced was the theatre/ where plays generally had to be licenced before being produced. In a few instances, as in England from 1642 to 1660, the the­atres could be entirely shut down. Even where they were not, an antitheatrical prejudice lingered in many countries, which had the effect of limiting the range of subjects that could be safely presented lest the ax fall on all performers.
In the visual arts a similar broad attack was aimed at certain types of mate­rial. In the seventh and eighth centuries all religious imagery was banned by the icono­clastic rulers of the Byzantine.Empire; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries similar attacks took place in Protestant countries of northwest Europe. Here, however, the prohibition was sacral in origin; images were said to contravene the Second Commandment.
The operation of censorship with regard to sexually explicit material may be seenin two seventeenth-century examples. The AlcibiadeFanciullo, a pederastic clas­sic, was apparently written by the Vene­tian Antonio Rocco and published anony­mously and clandestinely in 1652.Jnitials on the title page slyly Suggested that it was written by Aretino, who was long since dead and safely beyond the reach of the Inquisition. The French author Nicolas Chorier contrived an even more ambitious ruse for his pansexual dialogues of Aloisia Sigea (1658?), which purported to be a translation into Latin by a Dutch author (Jan de Meurs) working from a Spanish original by a learned woman. As the cen­sorship tightened in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, re­course to apparent - and increasingly real - foreign presses was ever more necessary. Many Frenchbooks, unwelcome to throne and altar, were published in Geneva, in Amsterdam, and in Germany. With the coming of the French revolution, how­ever, all restraints were off. Thus the large works which the Marquis de Sade had composed .in prison.were published, as well as two fascinating homosexual pamphlets Les enfans de Sodome and Les petits bougres au manege. Although con­trols were eventually tightened again, Paris gained the reputation (which lasted until about 1960) among English and American travelers as the place where "dirty books" could be obtained.
Anglo-American Censorship. England itself entered an era in which respectability at all costs was the watch­word. Through his prudish editions of Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) gave rise to the term "bowdlerize," At the ports an efficient customs service kept all but a trickle of works deemed to be obsceneirom coming in. In the United States, the morals crusader Anthony Comstock (1844 - 1915J not only fought successfully for stringent new legislation, but as head of the New York Society for the Suppres­sion of Vice he claimed responsibility for the destruction of 160 tons of literature and pictures. The restrictions on mailability proved to be particularly hard on pub­lishers of homosexual material, and this problem was not overcome until the ONE, Inc. case in 1954. A landmark in freedom to read books in the United States was the 1931 Ulysses case. Shortly thereafter, however, Hollywood instituted a system of self-censorship known as the "Hays Office." This device effectively prevented any direct representation of homosexual love on the silver screen for decades, the only exceptions being a very few foreign films shown at,art houses. During this period book publishers practiced their own form of self-censorship by insisting that novels featuring homosexual characters must doom them to an unhappy end.
Dismantling of Censorship. Only after World War II did the walls begin to come tumbling down in English-speaking countries. In Britain the publishers oí Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence were acquitted after a spectacular trial in 1960. In America Grove Press had obtained a favorable court decision on the mailability of Lady Chatterley in 1959; three years later the firm went on to publish Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer without diffi­culty. The travails of a book containing explicit homosexual passages, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, were more extended. In 1958 authorities at the University of Chicago refused to permit publication of excerpts in a campus liter­ary review. This led to the founding of a new journal, largely to publish the Burroughs text; once this had been done, a lengthy court battle ensued. Only in 1964was the way clear for the whole novel to be issued by Grove Press. (The book had been published in Paris in 1959.)
Subsequently, a series of United States Supreme Court decisions made censorship impractical, and for all intents and purposes it has ceased nationally, though local option is sometimes exer­cised. This cessation permitted the ap­pearance and sale of a mass of sexually explicit books, films, and magazines. The only restriction that is ubiquitously en­forced is the ban on "kiddy porn," photo­graphs and films of children engaging in sexual acts. In an unlikely de facto alli­ance, two groups emerged at the end of the 1970s in America to reestablish some form of censorship: one consisting of funda­mentalists and other religious conserva­tives; the other of feminist groups.
A new type of censorship has arisen in cases where public institutions become fearful of losinggovernment funds. In June 1989 the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, canceled a retrospective exhibition of the work of the late photog­rapher Robert Mapplethorpe containing explicit homoerotic images because of concern that Congress might slash the funds of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the sponsoring body. The cancellation was, however, vigorously protested, and as a result Mapplethorpe's work became better known than it had been previously.
See also Pornography; Private Presses.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. David Copp and Susan Wendell, eds.( Pornography and Censorship, Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1983; Michael Barry Goodman, Contem­porary Literary Censorship: The Case of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1981; Felice Flannery Goodman, Literature, Obscenity and the Law, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976.
Wayne R. Dynes

Cernuda, Luis (1902-1963)
Spanish poet. Cernuda was an unhappy man; his only major and endur­ing pleasure, the writing of poetry, was the focus of his intellectual life. He scorned careers, and supported himself by working in a bookstore and by commissioned trans­lations. During the Spanish Civil War Cernuda moved to England, later to the United States, in both of which countries he held university teaching posts, which were for him nothing more than a source of income. His last years were spent in Mexico, where he died.
Cernuda was a twentieth-century Romantic; he admired and wrote on the English and German romantic poets, and translated Hölderlin into Spanish. Timid, introspective, misogynistic, easily of­fended, in an isolation at least somewhat self-imposed, he permitted few to be his friends, and never had an enduring love relationship. He was obsessed with the loss of his youth and with the fugacity of sexual pleasure. His anger was expressed in withdrawal and in poetry, rather than activity in support of social change; Cer­nuda felt the world unworthy of efforts on its behalf.
Secure in his own gay identity, confident that he was correct and puritani­cal society wrong, Cernuda's primarily autobiographical poetry explores his own isolation and suffering. He sought to re­capture his lost youth in that of young sexual partners, and his Forbidden Pleas­ures and Where ObhvionDwells are openly pederastk; he was the first to publish on such topics in Spain. In addition to his verse, which was well received in literary circles, Cernuda was a frequent contribu­tor of critical essays to literary magazines. He published a lengthy essay on Andre Gide, from whose writings he learned that others felt as he did and that suffering could be expressed and alleviated through literary creation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Works: Poesía completa, 2nd revised edition, Barce­lona: Barral, 1977; Prosa completa, Barcelona: Barral, 1975; two partial translations are The Young Sailor and Other Poems, trans. Rick Lipinski, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1986; and The Poetry of Luis Cernuda, New York: New York University Press, 1971. Criticism: Rafael Martínez Nadal, Españoles en la Gran Bretaña: Luis Cernuda. El hombre y sus temas, Madrid: Hiperión, 1983.
Daniel Eísenberg

Cervantes, Miguel de (1547-1616)
Spanish novelist. Cervantes, probably of Jewish ancestry, is the last major representative of the Spanish hu­manism that was extinguished by the Counterreformation. That Cervantes might have had homosexual desires and experiences was first suggested in print in 1982 and restated more explicitly in 1987 (Rossi). There is much to support this suggestion: his teacher Juan López de Hoyos, to whom he remained close until his death in 1583, called him "my dear "beloved disciple"; Cervantes subse­quently spent a year in Italy, of which he always kept fond memories and wished to return. For five years he was a captive in Algiers, where he was on surprisingly good terms with a homosexual convert to Is­lam; he refers several times in his writings to the pederasty that flourished in the Ottoman empire,- on his return from Algiers he was accused of unspecified filthy acts. His marriage was unhappy, and women in his works are treated distantly. Like Manuel Azaña, he put a very high value on freedom.
While Cervantes presented the male-female relationship as the theoreti­cal ideal and goal for most people, the use of pairs of male friends is characteristic of his fiction, and questions of gender are often close to the surface. In his masterpiece Don Quixote (1605-15), which includes cross-dressing by both sexes, the middle-aged protagonist has never had, and has no interest in, sexual intercourse with a woman. A boy servant who appears fleetingly at the outset is replaced by the un­happily-married companion Sancho Panza. The two men come to love each other, although the love is not sexual.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Louis Combet, Cervantes ou les incertitudes du désir, Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1982 (review in MLN, 97 [1982], 422-27); Rosa Rossi, Ascoltare Cervantes, Milan: Riuniti, 1987 (Spanish translation, Escuchar a Cervantes, Valladolid: Ámbito, 1988); Luis Rosales, Cervantes y la libertad, 2nd éd., Madrid: Cultura Hispánica, 1985; Ruth El Saffar, "Cervantes and the Androgyne," Cervantes, 3 [1983], 35^19; idem, Beyond Fiction: The Recovery of the Feminine in the Novels of Cervantes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Daniel Eisenberg

Chastity
See Asceticism; Celibacy.

Chicago
At the beginning of the twentieth century, America's chief Midwestern city achieved a remarkable economic and cul­tural eminence. At that time a homosexual subculture with its own language, dress, mores, and institutions began to take shape on Chicago's south side. This develop­ment was owing largely to the tremendous influx of both foreign immigrants and native-born Americans from rural and small town areas who came not only for economic betterment but also to find per­sonal freedom and anonymity by escaping from a more traditional society. Taking root in the 1910s, this diverse subculture flourished openly throughout the 1920s, went underground during the 1930s, and resurfaced in the 1940s, especially after World Warn.
One of the first written descrip­tions of Chicago's homosexual subculture appears in the Chicago Vice Commission Report of 1910, which indicated that the increase in cases of sexual perversion was so great that the existence of whole "colo­nies" with their own world of meeting places had been uncovered. The report then gave a lengthy description of an in­vestigator's visit to a local bar frequented by homosexuals who were being enter­tained by female impersonators perform­ing "explicit" musical numbers! The commission also noted the alarming in­crease in male homosexual solicitation on Chicago's streets and in its parks, espe­cially Grant Park which served as head­quarters for a homosexual street gang known as "The Bluebirds."
This subculture was primarily located in two geographical locations: (1) the bohemian area known as "Tower-town" and (2) the hobo zone south of the Loop around West Madison and State streets. Although these areas overlapped and their physical boundaries constantly changed, each had a distinct identity and flavor to it. Chicago's bohemia attracted mostly persons of the middle class who were either artistically inclined or at least intellectually stimulated through associa­tion with the artists. Here one could find various restaurants, bars, studios, and cabarets that at least tolerated, if not wel­comed, the sexual outcast as an equal. One important place was the Seven Arts Club owned by Ed Classy, a well-known homo­sexual. What little information that has been found on the Seven Arts Club points to the fact that it served as a point of entry to the homosexual underground for many people.
On the other hand, "hobohemia" attracted a transient male population, many of whom were homosexuals from the working class. Here a large amount of homosexual prostitution existed as well as Turkish bathhouses, cheap hotels, "pig pens" (homosexual brothels), and the sleazier bars. One peculiar and popular "hobohemia" meeting place was Jack Jones' Dill Pickle Club which sought to promote a free exchange of ideas by pre­senting speakers on current controversial issues. One of the most successful presen­tations was on the pros and cons of sexual perversion. Another colorful hobohemia "institution" was Dr. Ben Reitman, the Hobo Doctor, who freely accepted homo­sexuals as his clients and friends and wrote one of the first medical studies on venereal disease among homosexuals.
An important tradition in the early decades of Chicago's homosexual community was the masquerade or "drag" ball held annually on or around Hallow­een. Fun-filled and outrageous, these gath­erings gave individuals a chance to inter­act with a diverse underground and thereby develop a sense of commonality and community. Although sanctioned by nei­ther public nor private agencies, the city government gave police protection to those persons in attendance and suspended, for this occasion only, the law against crossdressing in public.
Although Chicago's homosexu­als remained largely apolitical, it is Chi­cago that justly claims to be the birthplace of the first known homosexual organiza­tion in the United States. Inspired by the German homosexual rights movement, Henry Gerber and several other men formed the Society for Human Rights in 1924 in hopes of improving the life of homosexu­als by drawing attention to their plight and to serve as a social group where homosexu­als could find support and friendship. Short­lived due to the harassment and arrest of all its members, the Society, however, managed to produce two issues of a maga­zine [Friendship and Freedom) of which no copies are now known to exist. The ideals of these early pioneers later served to inspire the post-war homophile and gay liberation movements.
Although perhaps not as conspicu­ous as its counterparts on either coast, Chicago's gay/lesbian community began to increase rapidly in the hectic days of World War II and even more so in the postwar prosperity of the following dec­ades. By the early 1950s, the community began to assert a quiet, low-key presence, benefitting from the fact that Illinois be­came the first state to decriminalize homosexual conduct between consenting adults (1961). This continuing Midwest­ern approach to political activism has al­lowed a thriving, openly gay and lesbian community to make permanent inroads in changing the political and social atmos­phere in one of the America's major cities. A sign that the gay community had reached political maturity came on December 22, 1988, when the Chicago City Council adopted a gay rights ordinance, 28 to 17, over the opposition of the Catholic arch­diocese, after all the major candidates for mayor had endorsed the proposal. Two of them, incumbent Mayor Eugene Sawyer (who had voted against a gay rights bill in 1986), and Cook County State's Attorney Richard M. Daley, son of the legendary mayor "Boss" Daley and eventual winner of the election, vied with each other in lobbying for the ordinance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Chicago Vice Commission, The Social Evil in Chicago, Chicago: Gunthorp-Wafren Printing Co., 1910, reprinted New York: Amo, 1970.
Steven L. Lewis

Children
See Pedophilia.

China
The civilization of China emerged from prehistory during the first half of the second millennium b.c. in the valley of the HuangHe (Yellow River), spreading gradu­ally southwards. Over the centuries China has exercised extensive influence on Korea, Japan, and southeast Asia. Inasmuch as Chinese society has traditionally viewed male homosexuality and lesbianism as altogether different, their histories are separate and are consequently treated in sequence in this article.
Zhou Dynasty. As with many aspects of Chinese civilization, the origins of homosexuality are both ancient and obscure. The fragmentary nature of early sources, the bias of these records toward the experiences of a tiny social elite, and the lack of pronouns differentiated by gender in ancient Chinese all frustrate any attempt to recapture an accurate concep­tion of homosexuality in China's earliest periods. Only with the Eastern Zhou dy­nasty (722-221 b.c.) do reliable sources become available.
Duringthelatterpart of theZhou, homosexuality appears as a part of the sex lives of the rulers of many states of that era. Ancient records include homosexual relationships as unexceptional in nature and not needing justification or explana­tion. This tone of prosaic acceptance indi­cates that these authors considered homo­sexuality among the social elite to be fairly common and unremarkable. However, the political, ritual and social importance of the family unit made procreation a necessity. Bisexuality therefore became more accepted than exclusive homosexu­ality, a predominance continuing through­out Chinese history.
The Eastern Zhou produced sev­eral figures who became so associated with homosexuality that later generations in­voked their names as symbols of homosex­ual love, much in the same way that Euro­peans looked to Ganymede, Socrates, and Hadrian. These famous men included Mizi Xia, who offered his royal lover a half-
eaten peach, and Long Yang, who com­pared the fickle lover to a fisherman who tosses back a small fish when he catches a larger one. Subsequent references to "sharingpeaches" and "the passion of Lord Long Yang" became classical Chinese terms for homosexuality. Rather than adopt scientific terminology, with associations of sexual pathology, Chinese litterateurs preferred the aesthetic appeal of these lit­erary tropes.
Homosexual Emperors of the Han Dynasty. Although the unification of China with the fall of the Zhou induced fundamental changes in China's political and social order, homosexuality seems to have continued in forms similar to those it took in the previous dynasty. In fact the Former Han dynasty (206 b.c.-a.d. 9) saw the highpoint of homosexual influence at the Chinese court. For 150 years, emperors who were bisexual or exclusively homo­sexual ruled China. The Han dynastic history discusses in detail the fabulous wealth and powerful influence of majie favorites and their families, analogous to that of imperial consorts. The comprehen­sive Han history Records of the Historian {Shi ji) even includes a section of biogra­phies of these favorites, the author noting that their sexual charms proved more ef­fective than administrative talents in propelling them to the heights of power.
Several early Han emperors, such as Gaozu (r. 206-194 b.c.) and Wu (r. 140-86 b.c.) favored more than one man with their sexual attentions. This behavior paralleled the heterosexual polygamy popular at court and among wealthy families. Some of the imperial male favorites had special talents in fields such as astrology and medicine which originally brought themtotheruler's attention, while others obtained favor solely through their sexual charms. The desire to catch the emperor's eye at any cost, and thereby win substantial material rewards, fueled intense sartorial competi­tion as courtiers vied with one another to dazzle the Son of Heaven with ornate cloth­ing.
Dong Xian. The most famous favorite of the Han, Dong Xian, exempli­fies the rewards and dangers which could come to one of these men. He became the beloved of Emperor Ai (r. 6 b.c.-a.d. 1), the last adult emperor of the Former Han, and rose to power with his lover. The Han dynastic history records that Emperor Ai presented him with an enormous fortune and lists an extensive array of offices he held. Since Emperor Ai lacked sons or a designated heir, he proposed during his reign to cede his title to Dong Xian. Al­though his councilors had firmly resisted the notion, nevertheless on his deathbed Ai handed over the imperial seals to his beloved. This unorthodox succession lacked the support of the most powerful court factions, and so Dong Xian found himself compelled into suicide. The resulting political vacuum left the kingmaker Wang Mang in control and after a short period of nominal regency through child emperors, Wang Mang declared the over­throw of the Han dynasty. Thus the homo­sexual favoritism which helped shape the political topography throughout the For­mer Han was also present in its destruc­tion.
One incident in the life of Dong Xian became a timeless metaphor for homosexuality. A tersely worded account relates how Emperor Ai was sleeping with Dong Xian one afternoon when he was called to court. Rather than wake up his beloved, who was reclining across the emperor's sleeve, Ai took out a dagger and cut off the end of his garment. When courti­ers inquired after the missing fabric, Emperor Ai, told them what had happened.
This example of love moved his courtiers to cut off the ends of their own sleeves in imitation, beginning a new fashion trend. Ever since then, authors have used “cut sleeve" as a symbol of homosexuality. The periods of disunity following the Han produced a wider range of source materials which reflect the presence of homosexuality in classes other than the uppermost elite. Famed literary figures such as the "Seven Worthies of the Bam­boo Grove" admired one another's good looks quite openly, and the contempora­neous accounts in A New Account of Tales of the World (Shishuoxinyu) substantiate the wide diffusion of homosexuality in post-Han society. The honored poet Pan Yue and the master calligrapher Wang Xizhi both fervently admired male beauty. And the greatest intellectual force of the third century, Xi Kang (223-262), had a male lover.
Male Prostitution. During this period male prostitution also becomes evident, and is both celebrated and deni­grated in verse. The Jin dynasty (265-420) poet Zhang Hanbian wrote a glowing trib­ute to the fifteen-year-old boy prostitute Zhou Xiaoshi. In it he presents the boy's life as happy and carefree, "inclined to­ward extravagance and festiveness, gazing around at the leisurely and beautiful." A later poet, the Liang dynasty (502-557) figure Liu Zun, tried to present a more balanced view in a poem entitled "Many Blossoms." In this piece he shows the dangers and uncertainty associated with a boy prostitute's life. His Zhou Xiaoshi "knows both wounds and frivolity/ With­holding words, ashamed of communicat­ing." Although these poems take opposite perspectives on homosexual prostitution, the appearance of this theme as an inspira­tion for poetry points to the presence of a significant homosexual world complete with male prostitutes catering to the wealthy.
Of course homosexuality also continued among the social elite. Emper­ors such as Wei Wen (r. 220-227), Jin Diyi (r. 336-371), Liang Jianwen (r. 550-551) and several Tang dynasty rulers all had male favorites. These powerful men often preferred boys or eunuchs, although they sometimes also favored grown men.
By the Song dynasty (960-1280) a broadening of literary accounts makes available detailed information beyond the lives of emperors and literary figures. One source estimates that at the beginning of the dynasty in the Song capital alone there were;more than ten thousand male prosti­tutes inhabiting a maze of brothels known as "mist and moon workshops." A love of sensuality continued throughout the dy­nasty. A source describing the fall of the Songnotes "clothing, drink, andfoodwere all that they desired. Boys and girls were all that they lived for."
The high profile of male prostitu­tion led the Song rulers to take limited action against it. Many Confucian moral­ists objected to male prostitution because they saw the sexual passivity of a prosti­tute as extremely feminizing. In the early twelfth century, a law was codified which declared that male prostitutes would re­ceive one hundred strokes of a bamboo rod and pay a fine of fifty thousand cash. Considering the harsh legal penalties of the period, which included mutilation and death by slicing, this punishment was actually quite lenient. And it appears that the law was rarely if ever enforced, so it soon became a dead letter.
The revival and transformation of Confucian doctrine in the movement now referred to as Neo-Confucianism had influence far beyond metaphysics. On a practical level the movement enforced a more rigid view of the status of women and of sexual morality. In general, Confucians became more intolerant of any form of sexuality taking place outside of marriage. This was all part of an attempt to strengthen the family, held by Confucians to be the basic unit of society. The Song law prohib­iting male prostitution came as an early response to this new social ethos. Legal intervention peaked in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) when the Kang Xi Emperor (r. 1662-1723) took steps against the sexual procurement of young boys, homosexual rape, and even consentual homosexual acts.
A law codified in 1690 specifi­cally prohibits consensual homosexuality as part of an overall series of laws designed to strengthen the family. Although laws against rape of males were actively epforced, as demonstrated in a substantial body of Qing case law, it seems that the traditional government laissez-faire atti­tude toward male sexuality prevented enforcement of the law against consentual homosexual acts. After 1690 homosexual­ity continued as an open and prominant sexual force in Chinese society.
Flowering of the Ming Period. By the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) homosexu­ality had attained a high degree of repre­sentation in literature, erotic art, scholar­ship, and society as a whole. The rise of literacy and inexpensive printing gener­ated demand for popular literature such as Golden Lotus (Jin ping mei), depicting in colloquial language all forms of sexual conduct, and for erotic prints which pre­sented homosexuality visually. A thirst for knowledge of homosexual history led to the compilation of the anonymous Ming collection Records of the Cut Sleeve (Duan xiu pian) which contains vignettes of homosexual encounters culled from nearly two millennia of sources/This anthology is the first history of Chinese homosexual­ity, perhaps the first comprehensive homosexual history in any culture, and still serves as our primary guide to China's male homosexual past.
In Fujian province on the South China coast, a form of male marriage developed during the Ming. Two men were united, the older referred to as an "adop­tive older brother" [qixiong] and the younger as "adoptive younger brother" [qidi). The younger qidi would move into the qixiong* s household, where he would be treated as a son-in-law by his husband's parents. Throughout the marriage, which often lasted for twenty years, the qixiong was completely responsible for his younger husband's upkeep. Wealthy qixiong even adopted young boys who were raised as sons by the couple. At the end of each marriage, which was usually terminated because of the familial responsibilities of procreation, the older husband paid the x necessary price to acquire a suitable bride V>r his beloved qidi.
As China entered the Qing era, homosexuality continued to maintain a high profile. Besides several prominent Ming and Qing emperors who kept male favorites, a flourishing network of male brothels, and a popular class of male actor-prostitutes dominating the stage, Qing popular literature expanded on the homosexual themes explored during the Ming. The famous seventeenth century author Li Yu wrote several works featur­ing male homosexuality and lesbianism. The greatest Chinese work of prose fiction, Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), features a bisexual protagonist and many homosexual interludes. And the mid-nineteenth century saw the creation of A Mirror Ranking Precious Flowers (Pinhua baojian), a literary masterpiece detailing the romances of male actors and their scholar patrons.
Western Influences. The twenti­eth century ushered in a new age for all aspects of Chinese society; homosexuality was no exception. Within a few genera­tions, China shifted from a relative toler­ance of homosexuality to open hostility. The reasons for this change are complex and not yet completely understood. First, the creation of colloquial baihua literary language removed many potential readers from the difficult classical Chinese works which contained the native homosexual tradition. Also, the Chinese reformers early in the century began to see any divergence between their own society and that of the West as a iign of backwardness. This led to a restructuring of Chinese marriage and sexuality along more Western lines. The uncritical acceptance of Western science, which regarded homosexuality as patho­logical, added to the Chinese rejection of same-sex love. The end result is a contem­porary China in which the native homo­sexual tradition has been virtually forgot­ten and homosexuality is ironically seen as a recent importation from the decadent West.
Communist China. In the People's Republic of China, homosexual­ity is taken as a sign of bourgeois immor­ality and punished by "reeducation" in labor camps. Officially the incidence of homosexuality is quite low. Western psy­chologists, however, have noted that the official reporting of impotence is much higher in mainland China than in the West. It seems that many Chinese men, unfamil­iar with homosexual role models, inter­pret their sexuality solely according to their attraction to women. Nevertheless, a small gay subculture has begun to develop in the major cities since the end of the Maoist era. Fear of discovery and lack of privacy tend to limit the quality and dura­tion of homosexual relationships. And for the vast majority of Chinese living in the conservative countryside, homosexual contacts are much more difficult to come by.
Hong Kong. Modem Hong Kong has adopted many aspects of British law, including the criminalization of homo­sexuality. Until recently, the Hong Kong police were extremely active in searching out and prosecuting homosexuals. With the 1997 return of Hong Kong to China approaching, British liberals have sup­ported a last minute repeal of the sodomy law. This reform effort has been vigor­ously resisted by the colony's Chinese population. Despite official disapproval, the cosmopolitan sophistication of Hong Kong has guaranteed a relative toleration of the gay community. Gay bars and pri­vate parties provide an extensive social network for Hong Kong's homosexuals.
Taiwan. The situation for Chi­nese gays on Taiwan is improving. Since 1949, when Nationalist soldiers frequent­ing Taipei's New Park provided the nu­cleus of a gay community, this subculture has gradually expanded. Now it includes several bars and discos. The AIDS crisis has recently focused public attention on gay life, resulting in general public aware­ness of homosexuals. One of Taiwan's most well-known novelists, Pai Hsien-yung, has also raised general awareness with his successful novel about Taiwan gay life entitled The Outsiders (Niezi), which served as the basis for a 1986 film by the same title. There is no sodomy law in Taiwan, but gays still face intense social and family pressure against openly ex­pressing their sexuality. As a result, as in Hong Kong and the mainland, Taiwan's homosexuals almost always follow the traditional Chinese custom of entering into heterosexual marriage so as to raise a family.
Lesbianism. Traditionally, Chi­nese people have viewed male homosexu­ality and lesbianism as unrelated. Conse­quently, much of the information we have on male homosexuality in China does not apply to the female experience. Piecing together the Chinese lesbian past is frus­trated by the relative lack of source mate­rial. Since literature and scholarship were usually written by men and for men, as­pects of female sexuality unrelated to male concerns were almost always ignored.
Reliable accounts of lesbianism in China only date back as far as the Ming dynasty. Sex manuals of the period include instructions integrating lesbian acts with heterosexual intercourse as a way of vary­ing the sex lives of men with multiple concubines. And Ming erotic prints pictorially represent lesbian intercourse. Artifi­cial devices for stimulating the vagina and clitoris also survive.
Most of our information about lesbianism comes from popular literature. Li Yu's first play, Pitying the Fragrant Companion ("Lianxiangban"), describes a young married woman's love for a younger unmarried woman. The married woman convinces her husband to take her tal­ented beloved as a concubine. The three then live as a happy menage-a-trois free from jealousy. A more conventional les­bian love affair is detailed in Dream of the Red Chamber, in which a former actress regularly offers incense to the memory of her deceased beloved.
Lesbian Marriages. The most highly developed form of female relation­ship was the lesbian marriages formed by the exclusively female membership of "Golden Orchid Associations." A lesbian couple within this group could choose to undergo a marriage ceremony in which one partner was designated "husband" and the other "wife." After an exchange of ritual gifts, a wedding feast attended by female friends served to witness the mar­riage. These married lesbian couples could even adopt young girls, who in turn could inherit family property from the couple's parents. This ritual was not uncommon in nineteenth-century Guangzhou province. Prior to this, the only other honorable way for a woman to remain unmarried was to enter a Buddhist nunnery.
In modern China, lesbian con­tacts are severely limited by social pres­sures as well as by economic dependence on family and husband. The existence of Golden Orchid Associations became pos­sible only by the rise of a textile industry in south China which enabled women to become economically independent. The traditional social and economic attach­ment of women to the home has so far prevented the emergence in modem China of a lesbian community on even so limited a scale as that of male homosexuals.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Duanxiu pian (Records of the Cut Sleeve), in Xinagyan congshu, Shanghai, 1909-11; Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: A History of the Male Homosexual Tradition in China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990; Samshasha (Xiaoming Xiong) [Ng Siu Ming],. Zhongguo tongxingai shilu [History of Homosexuality in China), Hong Kong: Pink Triangle Press, 1984; Weixingshi guanshaizhu, Zhongguo tongxinghan mishi (Secret History of Chinese Homosexuahty), 2 vols., Hong Kong: Yuzhou chubanshe, 1964.
Bret Hinsch

Chizh, Vladimir Fiodorovich (1855-19?)
Russian psychiatrist. From a noble family from the government of Smolensk, in 18 78 Chizh was graduated with distinc­tion from the Medico-Chirurgical Acad­emy in Saint Petersburg and entered naval service. In 1880 he was appointed resident physician in the psychiatric division of the hospital on Kronstadt and, in the follow­ing year to the Primary Asylum for the Mentally and resident physician at the prison hospital in the Imperial capital. This position brought him into contact with a lesbian patient whom he described in a paper read in Saint Petersburg on February 1, 1882 and published under the title "K ucheniiu ob 'izvrashchenii polovogo chuvstva' [Die contrare Sexualempfindung)" [On the Doctrine of "Per­version of Sexual Feeling") in the Meditsinskie pribavleniia k Morskomu sborniku [Medical Supplements to the Naval Maga­zine] of the same year. The 26-year-old Russian author realized what the German and Austrian psychiatrists who wrote the first clinical papers on sexual inversion had missed: that so far from being a rare phenomenon, an isolated "freak of na­ture," homosexuality was the explanation of many of the cases of sodomy that came before the courts every day. As late as 1886, in the first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing pains­takingly enumerated all the individual case studies (35 in all) that had appeared in the psychiatric literature as if each one were some extraordinary discovery.
Meanwhile, Veniamin Mikhailovich Tarnovskii (1837-1906) had pub­lished a longer work entitled "Izvrashchenie polovogo chuvstva" [Perversion of Sexual Feeling] in the Vestnik klinicheskoii sudebnoipsikhiatrii i nevropatologii [Herald of Clinical and Forensic Psy­chiatry and Neuropathology] in 1884. Two years later a German version of his work appeared as Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes [The Mor­bid Manifestations of the Sexual Instinct], through which Chizh's insight reached the learned public of Central and Western Europe.
Followingthe Russification of the University of Iur'ev (now Tartu) by the government of Alexander HI in 1890, Chizh was named to the chair of nervous and mental diseases, a post he held to the end of his career. After attending the Fifth International Congress of Criminal An­thropology in Amsterdam in 1901, he wrote an unsympathetic account of Arnold Aletrino's paper on "The Social Situation of the Uranist" that was published in "Piatyi mezhdunarodnyi kongress kriminal'noi' antropologii v Amsterdame 9-14 sentiabria 1901 g." in Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii in 1902. His article reveals that the President of the Congress, Gerard Anton van Hamel ¡1842-1917), asked the repre­sentatives of the press not to print any­thing about the discussion of Aletrino's paper. This is an early example of how the psychiatric profession, when challenged by the homophile movement, took an overtly hostile stance in the hope of deny­ing the public access to the new under­standing of the subject which the experts who rallied to its support were promoting.
Warren Johansson

Christianity
The body of beliefs and practices characterizing Christianity, a religious tradition based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth ("the Christ") (ca. 3 b.c.-a.d. 33), was defined by the Christian church as it took shape under the empire of Rome. Inasmuch as this consolidation was achieved gradually and obscurely, it is difficult to say when the church and its ideology crystalized. By about a.d. 200, however, the church had come to recog­nize the texts making up the New Testa­ment as a single canon. After some hesita­tion, the Hebrew Bible, known to Chris­tians as the Old Testament, was taken from Judaism and also accepted as di­vinely inspired. From this point onwards, Christian doctrines were elaborated by a group of intellectuals, known as the Fa­thers of the Church or the Patristic writ­ers, beginning with such figures as Origen, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian.
It was these theologians who pieced together the often contradictory and ambiguous scriptural statements about sex and homosexuality into a consistent doctrine. Though they based their exege­sis upon the Bible, they were inevitably influenced by philosophical and religious currents of their own time, especially Greek Stoicism and Neo-Platonism and by rival mystery cults such as Manichaeanism and Gnosticism. Not all these interpreters of what the Christian message entailed agreed, and as a result there were compet­ing Christian groups, most of which were eventually eliminated. Still today there are differences on such sexually related topics as divorce, celibacy, and so forth between Roman Catholics and members of various eastern branches of Christianity which date from the foundations of Chris­tianity, including Coptic, Nestorian, and various Orthodox Churches. In practice, most of these churches have been more tolerant of homosexuality than the Ro­man Catholic Church and its Protestant offshoots.
Augustinianism. The dominant Christian attitude in the west has been what might be called the Augustinian one which essentially regarded celibacy as more desirable than marriage and only tolerated sexual activity within marriage for the purpose of procreation. St. Augustine (d. 430), one of the great scholars of the an­cient world, had converted to the austere faith of Manichaeanism after receiving a classical education. It seemed to his mind more suited to his Neo-Platonic and Stoic ideals than the Christianity of his mother. In Manichaean belief, which drew heavily from Zoroastrianism, intercourse leading to procreation was particularly evil be­cause it caused other souls to be impris­oned in bodies, thus continuing the cycle of good versus evil.
Augustine was a member of the Manichaean religion for some eleven years but never reached the stage of the Elect in part because of his inability to control his sexual appetites. He kept a mistress, fa­thered a child, and according to his own statement, struggled to overcome his lust­ful appetites everyday by praying: "Give me chastity, and continence, but do not give it yet." Recognizing his own inability to give up sexual intercourse, Augustine finally arrived at the conclusion that the only way to control his venereal desire was through marriage. He expelled his mis­tress and his son from his house, became engaged to a young girl not yet of age for wedlock (probably under 12 years of age), and planned a marriage. Unable to abstain from sex, he turned to prostitutes, went through a religious crisis, and in the proc­ess became converted to Christianity.
Miraculously, he found he could control his sexual desires and no longer even desired a wife. Once he managed to gain control of his own "lustful" desires, Augustine expressed hostility to the act of coitus. He reported that he knew nothing that brought "the manly mind down from the heights [more] than a woman's ca­resses, and that joining of bodies without which one cannot have a wife." It was through concupiscence or lust that the genitals lost the docility of innocence and were no longer amenable to the will. He accepted the Biblical statements that the Christian God had commanded human beings to multiply and propagate, and thus reproduction was to be tolerated, but he insisted that it be done without lust. He concluded that "We ought not to condemn marriage because of the evil of lust, nor must we praise lust because of the good of marriage."
Through marriage, and only through marriage, could the lust associ­ated with coitus be transferred to a duty, and then only when the act was employed for human generation. In his mind, absti­nence from sex was the highest good, but marriage was second, providing that the purpose of sex within marriage was for the purpose of procreation. All other sex was sinful including coitus within marriage not performed in the proper position (the female on her back and facing the male) and using the proper appendages and ori­fices (penis in vagina).
St. Augustine's views became the views of the western church centered in Rome. Taken literally, the Augustinian view was no more hostile to homosexual­ity than to any other form of non-procreative sex. In general there was no extensive discussion of homosexuality by any of the early Church Fathers, and most of the references are incidental. What references do occur, however, leave no doubt as to the basic hostility of these early theologians, and homosexual activities were usually classified as on the level of adultery. The Eastern Orthodox Churches on the other hand looked upon it somewhat less seri­ously, classifying it as equivalent to forni­cation.
The Medieval Church. The Au­gustinian views were modified in the thir­teenth century by St. Thomas Aquinas, who held that homosexual activities, though similar to other sins of lust, were more sinful because they were also sins against nature. The sins against nature in descending order were (I) masturbation, (2) intercourse in an unnatural position, (3) copulation with the same sex (homosexu­ality and lesbianism), and (4) sex with non-humans (bestiality). Aquinas was willing to concede that on the surface such sins were not as serious as adultery or rape or seduction, sexual activities which injured others, but he argued that since God had set the order of nature, and these activities contravened it, they were an injury to God and therefore more serious.
Communicating these theologi­cal concepts to the believers was not easy and was not always done consistently. Sermons, homilies, illustrations, were used by the early church although there was an ambivalence over whether people were more likely to adhere to the church belief system if the rewards of heaven were emphasized or whether the punishments of hell received the greatest attention. The medieval period saw both approaches used at different times and by different groups.
In general the church took con­trol over sexual matters until the four­teenth century, and so church teachings and laws are a key to understanding atti­tudes. One of the key sources in the early medieval Church is the penitential litera­ture. Originally penance had been a way of reconciling the sinner with God and had taken place through open confession. The earliest penitentials put sexual purity at a high premium, and failure to observe the sexual regulations was classified as equal to idolatry (reversion to paganism) and homicide. Ultimately public penance was replaced by private penance and confes­sion which was regulated by the manuals or penitentials designed to guide those who were hearing them. Most of the early penitentials classified homosexual and lesbian activities as equivalent to fornica­tion. Later ones classified such activities as equivalent to adultery although some writers distinguished between interfem­oral intercourse and anal intercourse and between fellatio or oral-genital contacts. Anal intercourse was regarded as being the most serious sin. There was, however, wide variation in the treatment of sexual activities in the penitentials, and this variation drew the scathing denunciation of St. Peter Damián (1007-1072), a homophobe, who in his Liber Gomorrhianus blasted the church's tolerance of homo­sexuality. He urged Pope Leo IX to set more rigorous standards for penitentials and to deal with the widespread homo­sexuality among the clergy and others. The pope accepted Peter's dedication of his work to him but emphasized that it was necessary for him as pope to season justice with mercy. Peter's treatise, how­ever, was the beginning of growing hostil­ity to homosexuality which also coincided with the growing power of the church.
Aiding and abetting these stronger actions against homosexuality was the growth of canon law. Among the earliest collections was the Decretum of Burchard of Worms (1000-1025), a contemporary of Damián, and Ivo of Chartres (1091-1116), who made a more complete collection than Burchard. Both collections contain numerous canons condemning sodomy, bestiality, fellatio, pederasty, and lesbian­ism. Building on these pioneering efforts was the work of the jurist Gratian who in about 1140 completed his A Harmony of Discordant Canons which revolutionized the study of canon law and gave it the intellectual coherence which it previously had lacked. In spite of the earlier efforts of Ivo and Burchard, Gratian paid relatively little attention to homosexuality although he did indicate that such activities were far more heinous than adultery or fornica­tion. By the late twelfth century, the hos­tile attitudes of Peter Damian had found their way into both the legal codes and the theological writings.
Increasingly, in fact, deviance from the church's code on sexual prefer­ence was equated with deviance from accepted church doctrine, that is homo­sexuals could be regarded as proponents of heresy. Sodomy came to be regarded as the most heinous of sexual offenses, even worse than incest, and as civil law began to take over from canon law, it could be punished as a capital crime. This seems to be most noticeable in the civil law enacted by various municipalities who starting from the church doctrine of heresy branded homosexuality as somethingwhich would bring divine wrath upon the inhabitants of those cities where it was widely practiced. These fears of homosexuality were par­ticularly noticeable in the fourteenth century when the advent of the Black Death led to some homosexuals' suffering particularly grisly punishments. Increas­ingly, in fact, civil law became far more hostile to homosexuality than canon law although the justification for the civil law provisions was often a religious one.
Protestantism. The trend toward civil control of sexuality was accentuated by the development of Protestantism in the sixteenth century although the Protes­tants were not any less hostile to homo­sexuality than the Catholic Church. Mar­tin Luther, for example, stated that homo­sexuality came from the devil and should be treated as the work of the devil. While John Calvin was not quite so hostile, he emphasized that homosexuality was a sin against nature.
In the sixteenth century accusa­tions of sexual licence, including sodomy, became part of the lexicon of invective of the Protestant-Catholic quarrel. Catho­lics denounced Calvin for his supposed pederasty, a charge that was completely unfounded. In the case of Calvin's lieuten­ant, Theodore deBéze however, a relation­ship with one Audebert seems to have some substance. In compensation Protes­tant writers repeatedly denounced the Papacy as a sink of sexual iniquity. Some­what surprisingly, Henry VUTs investiga­tors were unable to find much evidence of homosexual behavior in their enquiries leading to the dissolution of the monaster­ies in England. In 1730-31 the great Dutch persecution of sodomites occurred, and in the accompanying propaganda the old charges against Roman Catholicism were revived. In Catholic countries themselves, the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773 was preceded by accusations of sodomy.
The most detailed of the Angli­can writers on sexual matters, Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), did not regard homo­sexual behavior as any worse than any other sexual sins. He insisted in all cases that such matters as motive, occasion, and consequences of the act be considered; this perhaps is the first breakthrough in west­ern Christian attitudes since St. Augustine. Unfortunately, English civil law did not reflect this tolerance, and it was the civil law which by this time was dominant.
Modern Developments. In nine­teenth-century England, the rise of the Anglo-Catholic movement within the established Church, with its strong aes­thetic component, attracted many homo­sexual communicants. Yet no real changes in official church attitudes took place until the twentieth century, when a number of churches, led by the Quakers, the Angli­cans and the Unitarian-Universalists, in the period following World War n, modi­fied their stand on homosexuality. Their action was followed by many of the main­line Protestant Churches in the United States and elsewhere. Similar changes took place in some segments of Judaism, par­ticularly Reform Judaism, and even Con­servative Judaism.
To counter the refusal of evan­gelical and fundamentalist Protestants to change, the Metropolitan Community Church developed, emphasizing that Bib­lically, homosexuals were not anathema. Even among Churches which officially did not modify their stands, special homosex­ual groups and organizations such as Dig­nity, which has considerable support from many elements in the Catholic Church. Some religiously oriented organizations such as the Affirmation (gay Mormons), however, remain ostracized by the main religious body with which they would like to be affiliated.
Conclusion. Christian religions traditionally have been hostile not only to homosexuality but to sexuality in general. They were the dominant institutions in establishing attitudes about homosexual­ity which were not so much Biblical or even particularly Christian, but a reflec­tion of undercurrents of thought in exis­tence at the time Christianity emerged. These extraneous ideas about sex and homosexuality were incorporated into Christian teachings by theologians and canon lawyers who then erected a belief system upon them, and from the church they were communicated to the wider public at large. Only when these extrane­ous ideas are effectively challenged, as they have been in the last few decades, can the churches think through their attitudes and concepts about sexuality and homo­sexuality; this has been taking place in the last few decades, but there is still a long way to go.
See abo Churches, Gay; Clergy, Gay; Monasticism; Protestantism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; Vem L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976; Vem L. Bullough and James Brundage, eds., Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1982.
Vem L. Bullough

Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626-1689)
The daughter of Gustavus II Adolphus and Maria Eleonora of Bran­denburg, she lost her father at the age of six when he was killed in the Thirty Years War. Until 1644 Sweden was ruled by a regency headed by the Imperial Chancel­lor Axel Count Oxenstierna. The talented girl received an excellent education and was reared almost exclusively under male guidance. On December 17, 1644, she assumed personal rule, but remained an­other two years under Oxenstierna's influ­ence, then chose Gabriel de la Gardie as her chief counselor. More interested in science and art than in politics, she took little part in the negotiations at Bromsebro (1645) and Osnabnick (1647) that culmi­nated in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which redrew the political map of Europe on lines that largely remained until the French Revolution. She was a generous patron of the sciences, supported native scholars and corresponded with foreign ones, and attracted such intellects as Descartes and Grotius to her court. The former she is reputed to have asked for advice on her amorous disposition.
Her aversion to official duties, her extravagance, and the favor that she accorded to constantly changing and unworthy courtiers earned her the dis­pleasure of her subjects, and her growing sympathies for Catholicism provoked the resistance of the Lutheran clergy. At a session of the Parliament in Uppsala in 1654 she abdicated in favor of her cousin Karl-Gustav of Pfalz-Zweibriicken and his male descendants. In Brussels she con­verted secretly to Catholicism, then at Innsbruck she formally adopted the new faith and journeyed to Rome, where she kept a brilliant court and soon became the center of a circle of scholars. She under­took numerous travels, and attracted at­tention by her political activity in papal and ecclesiastical affairs and also in French, Polish, and above all Swedish matters. The friendship of Cardinal Azzolino, her ad­viser in financial and economic affairs, played a great role in the last years of her life. She died in Rome in 1689.
Contemporary accounts of Christina unanimously emphasize the masculine qualities of her personality. Her deep voice and her fondness for men's clothing are particularly noted. A descrip­tion of her by the Due de Guise mentions that "her hand is white and well-shaped, but resembles a man's more than a woman's. The face is large, all the features quite pronounced. . . . The footwear re­sembles a man's, and likewise she has a male voice, and almost her whole deport­ment is male too. She sets great store on appearing as an Amazon. She is as proud as her father. She speaks eight languages, French in particular like a native Pari­sian." Another account of her tells that "all in all, she struck me as a handsome little boy." The ascription of her homo­sexuality is based on the fact that she refused marriage, even with so distin­guished a suitor as the Kurfürst of Bran­denburg. On the other hand she is sup­posed to have had a series of erotic esca­pades with men, in particular the Italian Monaldesco, whom she later had mur­dered, allegedly because he learned of her lesbian tendencies. Only one of her female partners is known, Countess Ebba Sparre, whom she met in Paris in 1654 after her abdication. Many of her letters to the Countess contain the epithet "belle." The German historian Leopold von Ranke said of her that she was "the greatest princely woman from the race of intermediate types. Women's tasks she never assumed,... but on the other hand she sat boldly on horse­back. While hunting she hit the game with her first shot. She studied Tacitus and Plato and understood these authors at times better than did philologists by profession."
Christina of Sweden is thus a classic type of woman with a decidedly masculine intellect and personality that carried over, at least in part, into her sexual life. The film Queen Christina (1932), in which the heroine was played by the Swedish actress Greta Garbo in one of her memorable roles, resonated with homo­sexual and lesbian innuendo; it has served to reinforce the image of the queen in modern times.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Sophie Hoechstetter, "Christine, Königin von Schweden in ihrer Jugend," fahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 9(1908), 168-96; Albert Moll, Berühmte Homosexuelle, Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1910.
Warren Johansson

Chrysostom, John, Saint (ca. 347-407)
Greek patriarch of Constantin­ople, the first to claim its primacy over the eastern sees, and leading theologian of the Orthodox church. This most famous Greek father fully brought the extreme asceti­cism of the desert fathers into the main­stream of the church.
Chrysostom was educated at Antioch by the pagan sophist and rhetori­cian Libanius, more of whose works have survived than of any other pagan writer. After being baptized about 370, John re­tired to the desert for asceticism and study, but after ten years illness forced him to return to civilization. Ordained deacon in 381 and priest in 386, he won fame for his inspiring sermons and only reluctantly became bishop of Constantinople in 398. Having alienated many by strident criti­cism and fanaticism, including the em­press Eudoxia and bishops in the Eastern provinces, who were resentful of his at­tempts to subordinate them to his see which he deemed preeminent, he was deposed by the Synod of the Oak in 403. Banished, recalled by popular demand, and then banished again in 404, he died in exile in Armenia in 407.
For his eloquence he received the title Chrysostom, "Golden mouthed," but many Western scholars consider his theol­ogy mediocre. In the Antiochene tradi­tion, he expounded scripture historically, practically, and devotionally, denouncing luxury and demanding alms for the poor. His numerous writings fill volumes 47 to 64 in J.-P. Migne's Patrología Graeca. The people loved him for his charities and his support of hospitals, as well as for his devout and eloquent denunciations of the extravagance of courtiers. He forbade the clergy to keep "sisters" as servants, and confined wandering monks to monaster­ies where they could be disciplined. Upon his second deposition arranged by his numerous enemies, the populace set fire to the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia and the Senate House. In 437 the Emperor had to bring his bones back to the capital, implor­ing divine forgiveness for the empire's persecution of the saint. Probably the most venomous of a long Une of vehement early Christians who preached against Judaism, he was also the most violent of a long series of homophobes stretching back to St. Paul.
Chrysostom's invectives against homosexual sins reveal the paradoxes and circular reasoning in which the Christian apologist was trapped by his need to j ustify the apodictic prohibition of the Old Testa­ment in terms adequate to Greek philo­sophical notions of right and wrong. The Stoic reverence for nature and the Manichaean condemnation of pleasure both determined his rhetoric; on the one hand "the passions in fact are all dishonor­able," but on the other homosexual acts fail even to provide pleasure: "Sins against nature ... are more arduous and less rewarding, so much so that they cannot even claim to provide pleasure, since real pleasure is only according to nature." The later view that "excess of desire" led to homosexual depravity he expounded as the outcome of God's abandonment of those in question because of the heinous sin of - excess of desire. Aware that the Greeks had long practiced pederasty, he nevertheless denounced homosexuality as a loathsome invention, "a new and insuf­ferable crime." And he was among the first to rank homosexual sins as the supreme evil than which "nothingis more demented or noxious," though in other passages he let the rhetorician in him declare that "there are ten thousand sins equal to or worse than this one." He managed to rea­son that the male who takes the passive role with another not only loses his maleness but fails to become a woman; he forfeits his own sex without acquiring the opposite gender.
Chrysostom thought the gravity of homosexual transgression merited God's punishment of Sodom: "The very nature of the punishment reflected the nature of the sin [of the Sodomites]. Even as they devised a barren coitus, not having as its end the procreation of children, so did God bring on them a punishment as made the womb of the land forever barren and desti­tute of all fruit." Chrysostom is thus a classic exemplar of Christian unreason in regard to homosexuality, but also the prototype of preachers and moral reform­ers in later centuries who from the pulpit incited the authorities and the populace to campaigns of repression against those guilty of "unnatural vice." More homo­phobic even than St. Augustine, he set the stage for the persecutions that would fill the annals of the centuries to come.
William A. Percy

Chubb, Ralph Nicholas (1892-1960)
English writer and artist. His experiences connected with World War I created severe emotional stress which affected him for the rest of his life. Be­tween the two world wars, he retired to rural England and, in the tradition of Wil­liam Blake, he produced an astonishing series of hand-made illustrated books in limited editions. These include, among others, The Sun Spirit (1931), The Heav­enly Cupid (1934), Water-Cherubs (1937), and The Secret Country (1939). There were also some earlier and later works that do not match these books for quality.
Chubb's memory was rescued by the bibliophile Anthony Reid and the bookseller Timothy Smith, and his first editions are much sought after by a limited audience of pedophile men. A mystic, Chubb created a private mythology fo­cused on adolescent boys, especially the youngest ones, who were the erotic gods of his pantheon. Although he was a pacifist, this commitment did not stop him from sadistic fantasies about older teenagers. His books blended poetry, fiction, draw­ings, and paintings to create a never-never land where he was free to pursue hordes of naked boys. His real sexual life was un­happy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Timothy d'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Stephen Wayne Foster

Churches, Gay
The emergence of Christian churches with predominantly gay and lesbian congregations, as well as interest groups within or allied to existing denomi­nations, is a recent phenomenon, centered in the English-speaking world. There are records of homosexual monks, nuns, and priests, especially in the later Middle Ages and in early modern times, but no indica­tion that they even thought of organizing on the basis of their sexual preference. Christian homosexuals drawn to particu­lar parishes, where cliques occasionally even became a visible segment of the congregation, would not openly avow this shift in the church's character: they re­mained closeted gay Christians, so to speak.
The contemporary trend toward gay churches - and other religious organi­zations, including gay synagogues - is a product of the increasing visibility of the gay/lesbian movement in the 1960s, which in turn had its roots in the well publicized social assertion of the civil-rights and antiwar movements that preceded it. Per­ceived exclusion from full participation in mainstream churches impelled many gay men and lesbians to set up their own insti­tutions.
Background. A homoerotic at­mosphere enveloped the High Anglican movement as it emerged in Britain toward the middle of the nineteenth century. The emphasis on elaborate liturgy appealed to the aesthetic sense, while the revival in some sectors of clerical celibacy (as sug­gested by the alternative expression "Anglo-Catholicism," Roman Catholic clergy being always celibate) relieved homosexual priests from the traditional Protestant clerical marriage. Appalled by the goings on that they detected in some High Anglican parishes, members of the broad church attacked them as "un-Eng­lish and unmanly." This disapproval not­withstanding, the alliance of aestheticism with aspects of Anglicanism was destined to endure.
Out of this ferment came Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854-1934), who began his career as an obscure curate in the Church of England. After many years as a leader of the Theosophical Society in Ceylon, India, and Australia, Leadbeater founded the Liberal Catholic Church in Sydney in 1916; the organization's claim to apostolic succession was assured by his receiving his orders from a man who had obtained them from an Old Catholic bishop in England. A pederast, known familiarly as the "swish bish," Bishop Leadbeater liked to surround himself with boy aco­lytes. Although the Liberal Catholic church has since modified its original character, the atmosphere developed in Leadbeater's Sydney establishment gives it a claim of being the first gay church.
Gay people have emerged from all denominations. For converts, however, those with rich liturgical traditions seem to have more appeal (as Ptolemy antici­pated in the astrological classic Tetrabiblos [second century]) - suggesting a parallel with the well-known homosexual attach­ment to theatre and opera. This aspect need not preclude a deeper concern with religious values, as in tribal societies in which the berdache exercised priestly functions. At all events, until the 1960s many gay men and women felt drawn to particular congregations, largely because of the sympathetic reception they received there, regardless of whether the individual pastor was homosexual. Churches of choice tended to be theologically liberal, rather than conservative Protestant or Roman Catholic. Significantly, the first conven­tion of the Mattachine Society was held in 1953 at the First Universalist Church in Los Angeles, headed by the Reverend Wallace de Ortega Maxey.
In the early 1950s in England a group of Anglican clergy and physicians began to study the question of homosexu­ality under official ecclesiastical auspices. This work led in due course to the pioneer­ing study by Canon Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Chris­tian Tradition (1955), to the Wolfenden Report (1957), and to sodomy law reform (1967). Apart from his historical survey, Bailey sought to reinterpret some of the scriptural passages, holding, for example, that the Sodom story in Genesis 18-19 concerns not homosexuality, but inhospitality.
This controversial trend in exege­sis continued in the work of such scholars as John McNeill (a Jesuit until forced out of the order in 1987) and Roman Catholic convert Professor John Boswell of Yale, first to be promoted to that rank in an Ivy League university because of a major monograph on homosexuality. Despite the fact that these scriptural reinterpretations have not commanded assent among main­stream exegetes, gay churches have ea­gerly embraced them as the "enabling act" for their foundation, offering assurance -
at least in their own view - that Christian­ity was not primordially or essentially antihomosexual. Needless to say, this opti­mistic supposition puzzles and even scan­dalizes the average Christian believer.
Gay Religious Organizations. In 1968 the charismatic Reverend Troy Perry [originally ordained in a southern Pente­costal denomination) began the first American gay church with a handful of congregants in his southern California home. This was clearly an idea whose time had come. Three years later 600 men and women gathered each Sunday for services in a downtown Los Angeles building ac­quired by the Metropolitan Community Church, as the organization had come to be known. Missions spread the church to other American cities and abroad, chiefly in English-speaking countries. By 1983 the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) included 195 congregations in ten countries.
While attempting to maintain organizational unity around a broad ecu­menical theology, many UFMCC pastors (including Perry) are theologically conser­vative, taking a fundamentalist approach to scripture. In order to maintain this hermeneutic, they generally follow gay exegetes who deny the antihomosexual character of key passages in the Old and New Testament. Some maintain that Je­sus - an unmarried man in a Jewish milieu where marriage and procreation were de rigueur even for the religious elite - had a passionate relationship with John, the beloved disciple. Liturgically and socio­logically the UFMCC tends to be of a "low church" character, with notable excep­tions in some congregations. The evan­gelical-fundamentalist domination of the UFMCC may be regarded as a response to the homophobic vehemence of the main­stream fundamentalist churches, which drives gay Christians out of their fold with a vengeance and forces them into an exter­nal redoubt, in contrast to the relatively more tolerant atmosphere, hospitable to internal gay caucuses, of the more liberal churches.
Other gay churches with a gener­ally liberal approach developed in some American cities, contributing to therise of gay synagogues, beginning in New York in 1973 and spreading across the country and abroad. In Paris the Belgian Baptist Rever­end Joseph Doucé founded the the Centre du Christ Libérateur in 1976, which branched into some other European coun­tries, an exception to the rule that gay churches, like gay student groups, charac­terize English-speaking countries.
Although the UFMCC and the other gay churches exist outside the exist­ing denominations, many gay people have preferred to retain their connection with their own churches, securing within them a better situation for themselves. They form study groups, typically consisting of both homosexual and heterosexual per­sons, to reexamine church doctrine and pressure the denomination's governing body to adopt a statement in favor of gay rights. In 1963 a group of English Quakers (Friends) privately published the first state­ment of this kind. In 1970 the Unitarian Universalist Association (U.S.) and the Lutheran Church in America declared support, both with full denominational backing. Many other statements have fol­lowed (see Batchelor, appendix). Recogni­tion of the inherent dignity of homosexual persons has gained endorsement more readily than overt sexual relations; the latter are usually permitted only with the stipulation that lifetime fidelity be main­tained. Although a particular bone of contention has been ordination of homo­sexual men and women, some openly gay people have been consecrated, including the lesbian priest Ellen Barrett by New York's Anglican bishop Paul Moore, Jr. (1976), At its convention in the summer of 1988, the Assembly of the United Church of Canada with 800,000 members voted after long discussion to ordain worthy homosexual men and women - a decision that provoked threats of secession.
Many denominations have gay and lesbian affiliates, seeking official rec­ognition and sometimes holding services in established churches. Their prototype, the Catholic-linked Dignity, was founded in San Diego in 1969. It was quickly fol­lowed by an episcopal twin, Integrity (1972), and by Affinity (Mormon), Brethren/Mennonite Council on Gay Concerns, Evan­gelicals Concerned, the Seventh Day Adventist Kinship, and others. While they aim to function within their denomina­tions, many have found themselves forced outside. After a long period ofquasi-toleration, the publication of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's Vatican letter in 1986, perhaps inspired by the reactionary new American cardinals Law of Boston and O'Connor of New York, began a process of exclusion of Dignity itself, the largest group, which attracted about 7000 members at its zenith.
Rationale. Many participants hold that the purpose of the gay churches and organizations is not to set up perma­nent rivals to mainstream churches but to provide transitional institutions awaiting a time when the established denomina­tions welcome homosexual persons as full members. Nonreligious and atheist gays regard the new religious organizations as an aberration, a collaborationist move­ment, even a kind of surrender to the enemy - a negative view that cannot be readily dismissed considering the historic role of Christian churches in persecuting homosexuals.
Nonetheless, the organizational success of the gay groups speaks for itself. Because religion has deep roots in human lif e and psyche, many homosexuals in spite of the historical record seek outlets for their feelings somewhere in the Western religious tradition which has dominated the culture in which they were raised. Homosexuals are hardly the first group which has sought to alleviate oppression by working from within to change the attitudes and practices of their oppressors. In this respect the gay movement has more in common with the black civil rights movement which had a deep foundation in the black churches than with the feminist movement, which made little if any ap­peal to traditional religion. In any event, the persistent dialogue which has ensued with the leaders of the established churches has perhaps done more to undermine, di­lute, and perhaps eventually neutralize a major source of Western homophobia than all the appeals issued by homosexuals using purely secular, biologistic, and psycho­logical value systems. Mainstream leaders and their congregations are being educated and continually forced to rethink their positions. Progress within Protestant denominations is dramatic indeed, viewed from the perspective of centuries of Chris­tian homophobia. In recent decades clergy have routinely volunteered or been en­listed as allies in confrontations with homophobic insurgents, and provided criti­cal support for passage of gay rights bills, the ending of police harassment, and the like. It is a long way from burnings at the stake to the ordination of an avowedly homosexual priest in a major denomina­tion, and the gay Christian groups must be given credit for contributing to that evolu­tion.
Gay churches have also provided the wider community with leadership, money, volunteer workers, and demon­strators, meeting space, printing facilities, and publicity when these requisites were scarce. In some smaller towns the gay church is the only social facility that homosexuals can openly attend and the only venue where gay political activity is permitted.
Unlike most bars and baths, gay churches do not discriminate on the basis of age or looks. Pastors and congregations are committed to providing understanding and support: when all else fails they are there. Filling a genuine social need for their parishioners, gay churches are likely to continue.
See also Clergy, Gay; Heresy; Monasticism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edward Batchelor, Jr., ed., Homosexuality and Ethics, New York: Pilgrim Press, 1980; John Fortunato, Embracing the Exile: Healing Journeys of Gay Christians, New York: Seabury Press, 1982; Jeannine Grammick, ed., Homosexuahty and the CathoHc Church, Chicago: Thomas Moore Press, 1983; Robert Nugent, A Challenge to Love: Gay and Lesbian Cathohcs in the Church, New York: Crossroad, 1983; Troy Perry (with Charles Lucas), The Lord is My Shep­herd and He Knows I'm Gay, Los Angeles: Nash, 1972; Tom Swicegood, Our God Too, New York: Pyramid, 1974; Jim Wickliff, ed., In Celebration, Oak Park, IL: Integrity, 1975.
Wayne R. Dynes

Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106-43 B. C.)
Roman politician, orator, and writer, who left behind a corpus of Latin prose (speeches, treatises, letters) that make him one of the great authors of classical antiquity. Unsuccessful in politics, he was overestimated as a philosopher by the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and underestimated in modern times, but was and is ranked as one of the greatest masters of Latin style. His career as an orator began in 81 b.c, and from the very beginning his speeches revealed his rhetorical gifts. His denunciation of Verres, the proconsul who had plundered the province of Sicily, opened the way to his election as aedile, praetor, and then consul, but subsequently the intrigues of his enemies led to his banishment from Rome (58/57), followed by his triumphal return. In the civil war he took the side of Pompey and so failed again, but was pardoned by the victorious Caesar, after whose death he launched a rhetorical attack on Mark Antony. The formation of the triumvirate meant that Cicero was to be proscribed by his oppo­nent and murdered by his henchmen.
The theme of homosexuality fig­ures in Cicero's political writings as part of his invective. In the last turbulent century of the Roman republic in which he lived, a contrast between the austere virtue of earlier times and the luxury and vice of the present had become commonplace. Also, as we know from the slightly later genre of satirical poetry, a taste for salacious gossip had taken root in the metropolis. In his orations Cicero remorselessly flays the homosexual acts of his enemies, contrast­ing homosexual love with the passion inspired by women which is "far more of natural inspiration." The glorification of male dignity and virility goes hand in hand with the condemnation of effeminacy as unnatural and demeaning. Something of the Roman antipathy to Greek paiderasteia transpires from Cicero's condemna­tion of the nudity which the Greeks flaunted in their public baths and gymna­sia, and from his assertion that the Greeks were inconsistent in their notion of friend­ship. He pointedly noted: "Why is it that no one falls in love with an ugly youth or a handsome old man?" Effeminacy and passive homosexuality are unnatural and blameworthy in a free man, though Cicero remained enough under the influence of Greek mores to express no negative judg­ment on the practice of keeping handsome young slaves as minions of their master. The right of a free man to have sexual relations with his male slaves Cicero never challenges, though he distinguishes clearly between the slave in the entourage of his master and the "hustler" whose viciousness is imputed to his keeper. The Judaic condemnation of homosexuahty per se had not yet reached Rome, but the distinc­tion that had existed in Hellenic law and custom between acts worthy and unwor­thy of a citizen was adopted and even heightened by the combination of appeal to Roman civic virtue and his own rhetori­cal flair.
Cicero's denunciation of homo­sexual conduct in his enemies - not of exclusive "homosexuality," which is never in question - remained in the context of effeminacy, debauchery, and ether sexual offenses designated by the general term stuprum. He depicted the other side as living in a demimonde of vicious and cor­rupt associates who revel shamelessly in drunken orgies. The impudent Mark An­tony had a clientele of drunkards and debauchees like himself, his house was impúdica, "unchaste," and he himself was impurus, which is to be understood as the equivalent of Greek akáthartos, "impure," the term applied to the passive-effeminate homosexual who is defiled by the lust of others. The antithesis was the virile man who guards his honor in his relations with other men, who has not submitted to their sexual advances. Accordingly, the follow­ers of Cataline were denounced as young men who are impuii impudicique, ready amare et amari, "to love and to be loved," hence having both active and passive homosexual relations in a promiscuous manner. At the same time Cicero defended the honor of his clients by saying that the accusations against them are no more than malicious gossip.
The character of the freeman stood in contrast to the baseness of the slave who freely lent himself to the unchaste desires of his master. According to Cicero, Verres surrounded himself with slaves whose degradation infected his whole entourage, while treating free men as if they were slaves. The same inversion of the social hierarchy attached to Clodius as the heir of Cataline. The term patientia used with reference to Verres implies the passivity in sexual relations that is degrading and unworthy of a free man, just as in the case of Mark Antony, charged with having "prostitutedhimself to all," much like the Timarchus whom Aeschines had de­nounced centuries earlier in Athens for a like failing. The other aspect of passive homosexuality was the lapse into effemi­nacy, so that Cicero's enemies were ac­cused of delight in luxury, the adoption of women's gestures, and the wearing of feminine clothes and makeup.
Cicero's rhetoric thus had two sides: the attempt to discredit opponents by inflammatory imputations of homo­sexual conduct and of sexual immorality in general - a type of smear to be followed in political life down to modern times,- and his rigorous demarcation between the active and the passive partner in sexual relations, the active role being the only one worthy of a man and a citizen, the passive role being equated with effemi­nacy and servility. This view has its roots in the primary distinction made by classi­cal civilization between the active and the passive which, however, Cicero height­ened for his own tendentious ends. See also McCarthyism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Françoise Gonfroy, "Homosexualité et idéologie esclavagiste chez Cicéron," Dialogues d'histoire ancienne, 4 (1978), 219-62; Ilona Opelt, Die lateinischen Schimpfwörter und verwandte sprachliche Erscheinungen, Heidelberg: Winter, 1965.
Warren Johansson

Cinema
See Film.

Circles and Affinity Groups
Sociologists treat the group as a plurality of individuals defined by some principle of recruitment and by a set of membership rights and obligations. Some­times these groups may be visible, as in the case of medieval guilds and modem colle­giate fraternities and sororities; in other instances, as the freemasons and the illuminati, they are more or less secret. Homosexuals and lesbians do not belong in toto to any such well-defined grouping, though outside observers, such as the French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, have sometimes perceived them as forming such a fraternity. The clandestine marks of recognition whereby gay men and lesbians have communicated their nature to one another recall the more structured gestures of freemasons. Such comparisons aside, it is more useful to posit small groupings within the larger pool of homosexuals, and to employ looser concepts of association - such as circles, coteries, and cliques - as well as the con­temporary notion of networking, involv­ing patterns which are nurtured by indi­viduals interacting with others.
During the mid-eighteenth cen­tury the University of Leiden was the center of a remarkable homoerotic student circle, as documented by G. S. Rousseau. This mainly British group included the poet and physician Mark Akenside, as well as John Wilkes and Baron d'Holbach, who were both to distinguish themselves as radicals. At the end of the century a network formed around Lord Byron, though this was geo­graphically dispersed. The 1895 trials of Oscar Wilde served to make his London circle only too visible.
The Cambridge Apostles and Bloomsbury. A relatively well-docu­mented instance of a secret society with strong, continuing homoerotic overtones is the Society of Apostles founded by stu­dents at Cambridge University in 1820. Members gathered once a week to hear papers on controversial topics. The first members of this distinguished intellec­tual club were mainly clergymen, and apparently of impeccable moral character. By the 1840s, however, intimations of homosexuality begin to emerge - though sometimes only in the form of the "Higher Sodomy," that is, nonsexual male bonding and a conviction of the innate superiority of men over women. In the early years of the present century the Society served as a refuge for some gifted homosexuals who were made cautious by the reverberations of the Wilde affair. In the 1920s Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, both Apostles, became converted to Marxism and entered a clandestine career of espionage for the Soviet government. Once unmasked, then-activity occasioned hostile speculation about a purported connection among the upper classes, homosexuality, and spying. After World War II, however, the homo­sexual complexion of the Society faded.
The influence of the Apostles radiated into the larger community in several ways. William Johnson, later Cory (elected in 1844), became a leading mem­ber of the Calamité group of pédérastie poets. In the early years of the present century, homosexual Apostles graduates, notably Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, formed an adult offshoot in Lon­don, which became known as Bloomsbury. The members of this more loosely consti­tuted group of writers, artists, and think­ers were both homosexual and heterosex­ual (and bisexual in the case of Virginia Woolf and a few others), but they were united in their opposition to Victorian moralism and prescriptivism.
Expatriates in Paris. Across the channel at the same time there flourished in Paris an extraordinary constellation of expatriate lesbians, including Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Margaret Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas! Sylvia Beach and her French lover Adrienne Monnier both ran bookstores, that were fa­vorite gathering places of the avant-garde. These creative figures were not organized in a coherent group, but were nonetheless often perceived as such, giving Paris the reputation of a "Sapphic capital." Male homosexual expatriates were less promi­nent in the French capital; the publisher and writer Robert Mc Almon was an excep­tion. A lesser center at the same period was Florence, which attracted both male homosexuals and lesbians.
The Beat Generation. After World War II the beat group of American writers emerged, the central figures being William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg (both gay), and Jack Kerouac (bisexual). The venueof these writers was a shifting one, beginning in New York, and moving - depending on individual choice - to Paris, Mexico City, Tangiers, and San Francisco. The last city attracted its own creative circle, including the poet Robert Duncan and the filmmaker James Broughton. In conducting research to document intellectuals and others of the past, it is important to be attentive to friendship patterns; the "birds of a feather" principle will often lead to unexpected liaisons.
General Features. Undoubtedly there are countless circles and cliques that have been lost from sight, having produced no creative figures worthy of remembrance. Indeed the pattern of the clique surround­ing one or more "queens" (den-mother figures) was an almost ubiquitous feature of homosexual life before 1969. In the view of hostile outsiders, such groupings were stereotyped as "rings" on the pattern of criminal gangs. This idea need not be negative, however, as shown by the Swiss society (and magazine) DerKreis/Le Cercle (1932-67), the name of which conjures up the metaphor of a ring. And when the American homophile movement emerged in the 1950s, most local groups were ini­tially formed of people who had come to know each other through gay social cliques. This type of bonding also has its downside, and newcomers to activist groups, even today, may sometimes be dismayed by the invisible wall around the clique that con­trols the group.
Up to this point, groups have been discussed mainly in terms of interaction in single localities, cities in fact. Yet an­other type of linkage has existed in which individuals communicate over large dis­tances, originally by mail, now also by telephone and computer modem. Such a pattern has often been the case in gay scholarship. In the nineteenth century the independent scholar K. H. Ulrichs (1825-1895) had a circle of correspondents, most of whose names remain unknown to us because of the caution that they felt obliged to observe. More public and insti­tutional was the group formed by the Berlin Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (1897-1933), which had collaborators not only through much of Germany, but also in Austria, The Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the English-speaking countries. To­day many gay and lesbian scholars, unable to obtain academic posts, work as private individuals from their homes, relying on contacts with like-minded individuals to assist in developing and diffusing their discoveries and writings.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Catherine van Casselaer, Lot's Wife: Lesbian Paris, 1890-1914, Liverpool: Janus, 1986; Richard Deacon, The Cambridge Apostles, London: Robert Royce, 1985; G. s. Rousseau, "'In the House of Madam Vander Tasse': A Homosocial University Club in Early Modem Europe," Journal of Homosexuality, 16:1/2 (1988), 311-47.
Wayne R. Dynes

Circumcision
Male circumcision, or the cutting away of the foreskin of the penis, has been practiced by numerous peoples from re­motest antiquity as a religious custom, while to some modern homosexuals it has an aesthetic and erotic significance. It has been speculated that the custom origi­nated somewhere in Africa where water was scarce and the ability to wash was limited. Thus the Western Semites (Israel­ites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arabs, Edomites, Syrians), who lived in an area where water was never really plentiful, also observed the custom, while the Eastem Semites (Assyrians and Babylonians), in an area where water was more abun­dant, did not circumcise. This is true also of the Greeks and other Aegean peoples who always lived near the water.
In the fifth century b.c. the Greek historian Herodotus provided the follow­ing information about the ancient Egyp­tians: "They practice circumcision, while men of other nations - except those who have learnt from Egypt - leave their pri­vate parts as nature made them.... They circumcise themselves for cleanliness' sake, preferring to be clean rather than comely." [Histories, Bk. II). There is also some evidence that the Israelites learned it in Egypt [Exodus 4:24-26; Joshua 5:2-9). However, they may simply have adopted circumcision from their neighbors up to the time of their Babylonian Exile, for all those who lived around them until this time were also circumcised except for the coastal-dwelling Philistines, a people of Aegean origin who are often mentioned on the pages of the Old Testament quite dis­tinctly as "the uncircumcised" or "the unclean" (Judges 14:2; I Samuel 14:6). Around 1000 b.c. the Israelite king Saul demanded of David as a bride-price for his daughter Michal one hundred Philistine foreskins (I Samuel 18:25), alluding to the practice of stripping the foreskin off a slain foe.
Jesus never mentioned circumci­sion, though the Jewish rite was [Luke 2:21] performed upon him on his eighth day as it was with all other males of his community of faith - hence the designa­tion of the calendar in which the first day of the year is January 1 as "circumcision style." In the early church the party of Paul of Tarsus which opposed circumcision was victorious, and uncircumcised Greeks and Romans poured into the new faith, so that to this day the majority of European men have retained their foreskins. With the coming of the faith of Islam, however, in the seventh century the Middle East and North Africa became a stronghold of the practice of circumcision. Hindus and Buddhists avoid it, hence East Asians - and Amerindians - retain their foreskins.
Among Americans in general circumcision, was relatively rare until Victorian times when it was thought to be a deterrent to the practice of masturba­tion. But it was not until World War II that it came into widespread use, supposedly to overcome soldiers' occasional infections associated with poor hygiene. Circumci­sion of male infants became popular in the United States, but was believed unneces­sary in most of Europe.
In the late twentieth century the trend is being reversed in America as more and more medical articles - and some books - have argued that the operation in most cases is needless. In July 1986 Blue Shield of Philadelphia announced that it will no longer pay for routine infant circum­cision as a part of its childbirth insurance coverage, defining the operation as cos­metic and not essential to the health of the child. Recently Rosemary Romberg has gone so far as to argue that there may be numerous negative effects of routine in­fant circumcision and that the practice, in general, ought to be dropped. She cites remarkable cases in which a number of American Jews - or at least those who were born into the Jewish faith - have elected to do so.
Some male homosexuals have a decided preference for an uncircumcised ("uncut" or "unsliced") or circumcised partner, as the case may be. There are even groups of men who have retained their foreskins (and others who admire them); these individuals with generous or pro­nounced "curtains" are in demand. In a few rare cases the overhang of the foreskin suffices partially to sheath the partner's penis during sex. A few uncut men neglect personal hygiene to the point of allowing smegma ("cock cheese") to accumulate beneath the prepuce in a manner that tends to repel the partner, but this is easily remedied.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Bud Berkeley and Joe Tiffenbach, Circumcision: Its Past, Its Present, a) ... Its Future, San Francisco: Bud Berkeley, 1983-84; Rosemary Romberg, Circumcision: The Painful Dilemma, South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1985; Edward Wallerstein, Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy, New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1980.
Tom Horner

Class
Although class is one of the most commonly used political and sociological terms today, it is not easy to define. A degree of consensus obtains that a class system is hierarchical, allocating power according to rank order. A class structure in which all classes were equal would be a contradiction in terms. Class membership may be a function of income (the tradi­tional measure), occupation, education, residence, patterns of consumption, and even to a certain extent of ethnicity. The mix varies from one observer to another, so that class remains an "essentially con­tested concept" - that is, an idea whose very nature precludes final agreement, but which serves as a focal point for the dis­putes of various interest groups.
General Features. Apart from the debates of scholars, there is no doubt that contemporary American society (like that of other Western industrialized countries) has adopted a practical or folk classifica­tion of the concept that shows some stabil­ity. This lay model of class usually articu­lates in three main strata: upper, middle, and lower. Middle may be divided into upper- and lower-middle, and some recog­nize an "under-class" below the others. Taste preferences are generally a good index of popular judgments, so that grand opera, tennis, and sushi restaurants fall on one side of an invisible boundary, with coun­try music, bowling, and fast food on the other. Of course there are "taste-crossing" individuals and occasions, but the en­semble of such choices makes up a mosaic of ever-present reminders and reinforcers of the folk distinctions, which often come to the fore when persons anchored in dif­ferent strata seek to work together, as in a political campaign.
Class and Homosexuality. Be­cause class status is so intimately associ­ated with family identity and member­ship, homosexual behavior has often dis­counted and crossed class lines; in many cases homosexuals in search of partners - especially casual ones - need have little concern with what the family (or society) would think of the liaison, while hetero­sexuals must often choose their prospec­tive spouse within narrowly prescribed limits.
For some individuals, homosex­ual arrangements may offer a path to mobility between class strata, or more commonly for a positional improvement within a single class. Yet like most hetero­sexual marriages, most gay/lesbian unions are endogamous, in that like tends to bond with like: the partners come from the same class (and relatively similar strata therein). Still gay dyads of members stem­ming from contrasting class backgrounds do exist, though very little study has been made on how taste preferences are negoti­ated in such households. How is money made and spent? What compromises are needed so that entertainment and vaca­tions can be enjoyed together? How are the couple's friends chosen? Which of the two partners is more likely to compromise to "keep the peace"? Complications may ensue among lesbian couples because of the cross-cutting of the traditional butch-fem role contrast with class percep­tions. The butch woman is supposed to be "working class," but in the actual situ­ation it may be the fern who is.
Cross-Class Relationships. Short-term relationships are more likely to in­volve connections between persons of different strata and classes. Upper-class socialist gay men, such as Edward Carpen­ter and Daniel Guérin, rationalized their fondness for lower-class men by claiming that the encounters helped to promote harmony among classes. Such expecta­tions point to a Utopian-socialist rather than Marxist theoretical background, where the perception of class struggle is central. Certainly many politically unso­phisticated upper- and middle-class homo­sexuals prefer lower-class partners whom they perceive as "more macho." It has been proposed that this difference - to­gether with that of race, which often meshes with class in this arena - repre­sents a surrogate for the missing male-female dichotomy.
Viewed in historical perspective, such seemingly unlikely conjunctions may prolong an old linkage, at least in matters of sexual enjoyment, between the "rake," the aristocrat of easy morals, and the ac­commodating proletarian. These transient liaisons could present a dangerous side, as suggested by the expression current in the circle of Oscar Wilde: "feasting with pan­thers." When the arrangements worked, however, both ends of the social spectrum found themselves in alliance against the straight-laced morals of the emerging middle class, for whom respectability was an ideal to be honored at all costs.
When there are no children to raise there is more discretionary income, so that adopting a homosexual lifestyle provides a margin for class enhancement. The chances are particularly favored if the novice links up with a mentor more expe­rienced or wealthy than he or she is. An established gay man or lesbian may put resources which parents would use for raising the status of their children into helping a lover-protege. The mentor may also provide private lessons in manners and business acumen. Conversely, two men or two women living together across class lines may provoke from outsiders subtle or not-so-subtle ostracism that hinders career advancement. And the negative reaction of one or both sets of parents may cause anguish. Curiously, some parents seem to tolerate same-sex alliances by their offspring more easily than those that cross class or racial lines.
Internalizing the folk belief that homosexuals are more "artistic," some gay men cultivate musical, theatrical, and culinary tastes that are above their "sta­tion" - and above their income. Acquisi­tion of these refined preferences, together with "corrected" speech patterns, hinders easy communication with former peers, though there are many factors that work for geographical and psychological distance between homosexuals, on the one hand, and their families and original peer groups, on the other. Given their relative freedom, some individuals may be inclined to ex­periment with "class bending," sometimes with paradoxical results. Observations of the American metropolitan scene in the 1970s revealed that patrons of leather bars tended to be lawyers, physicians, and other professionals "dressing down" after a day at work, while the denizens of "fluff" es­tablishments were likely to be clerks and stockboys flaunting elegant gear that they could not wear on the job. There is class, and there is class fantasy.
Prostitution. A study of young men beginning a career of hustling showed that lower-class recruits entered it imme­diately on discovering the financial re­wards, sometimes suffering identity con­flicts as a result. Middle-class boys, less in need of money, often began their involve­ment in prostitution casually and margin­ally, taking their time about making a full commitment. As for the clients or "Johns," there is a major contrast between the working-class man who pays a street transvestite for quick oral sex in his car, the middle-class man who can only afford to rent a body occasionally for a few hours, and the wealthy connoisseur who "leases" his sex object, installing him in luxury as a semi-permanent resident.
Sexual Behavior. An interesting question is whether class differences af­fect what is done in bed. There seem to be considerable differences in the conceptu­alizations of homosexuality; the older model (strict dichotomy between inserter, who is considered "normal," and insertee, who is the only one labeled "gay/femi­nine") is more firmly entrenched, if not dominant, among the working class, while the newer model of reciprocality among two gay men prevails in the middle and upper classes. One consequence of the older model is that there is less of a psycho­logical barrier for lower-class males who consider themselves "straight," "normal," and "masculine" to participating in homo­sexual acts as long as they remain in the inserter role; for them it is not a homosex­ual act on their part. This is one reason why homosexuals from other classes who are content with the insertee role have frequently sought out macho partners from the working class; they are more likely to be willing than randomly-selected males from the middle class. Other factors which encourage "trade" behavior by working-class males are a more accepting attitude toward any activity done for income (such as prostitution), a greater familiarity with jailhouse sexual mores, and a lesser inter­est in sophisticated categorical schemes ("sex is sex; if it feels good, who cares what you call it").
In the 1940s Alfred C. Kinsey and his associates found significant distinc­tions of this kind among men based on educational level, which he found the best objective test for class status. His data indicated the highest incidence of homo­sexual activity among males who had at­tended high school but not college; at the same time he found the highest levels of homophobia in the same group. This may be explained by the difference in concep­tual models referred to above, under which males could experience what Kinsey called a "homosexual outlet" without thinking of themselves as homosexual, and while looking down on their sexual partners. But since a substantial proportion of the lower-class male interviewees were prisoners, the data cannot be considered wholly reli­able.
The Kinsey Institute data for females, which are more reliable (though not per se applicable to men as well), show that the percentage with homosexual experience to orgasm rises with educa­tional levels; at age 30 the females without college had a cumulative experience level of 9 or 10 percent, while those who had attended college had 17 percent and fe­males with some graduate school educa­tion had 24 percent. However, when data are limited to the period between adoles­cence and age 20, the girls with the lowest education show the most homosexual activity and the future college students the least.
Beginning with the sexual revo­lution of the 1960s (together with rising incomes) substantial changes occurred in sexual behavior in many sectors of the population, and class allegiances would have been unlikely to have deterred these shifts in the way that, say, religious con­viction did. Premarital sex became more accepted amongheterosexuals, while some homosexuals seemed willing to experi­ment in a broader range of sexual prac­tices, even including "way out" activities such as fisting.
It has been suggested that there are some variations in preferred sexual practice among classes, with lower-class men being more likely to prefer anal over oral sex, and middle-class men the oppo­site, but there are few hard data to support or contradict this hypothesis, which is based on anecdotal evidence.
Some homosexuals tend to eroti­cize a class other than their own. In Eng­land and France, for example, many edu­cated upper-class men have sought their partners exclusively among the working-class men, whose perceived overt mascu­linity is much prized. Conversely, some men of working-class background find great satisfaction in being accepted in jet-set circles. In white men attracted to blacks or the converse, the element of crossing class lines may be central.
Class boundaries in modem in­dustrial societies are more fluid than in times past, and this fluidity in turn has impacted on sexual behavior, though the consequences are not always easy to as­sess. Further shifts may be expected.
Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson

Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-ca. 215)
Greek church father. Born in Athens, probably of pagan and peasant ancestry, he is not to be confused with Clement, bishop of Rome, author of the New Testament epistle. After his conver­sion, Clement of Alexandria traveled widely to study under Christians, finally under the learned Pantaenus in Alexan­dria. Of the early Fathers, he had the most thorough knowledge of Greek literature. He quoted Homer, Hesiod, the dramatists,
and (most of all) Platonic and Stoic phi­losophers. Sometime before 200 he suc­ceeded Pantaenus, whom he praised for his orthodoxy, as head of the catechetical school at Alexandria, but in 202 he had to flee the persecution unleashed by the emperor Septimius Severus and perhaps died in Asia Minor. Although most of his works are lost, the chief ones form a trilogy: Hortatory Address to the Greeks, written ca. 190 to prove the superiority of Christi­anity to paganism and philosophy; Tutor, written ca. 190 or 195 about Christ's moral teaching as it should be applied to conduct in eating, drinking, dress, expenditure, and sex; and Miscellanies, written ca. 200-2in eight books proving the inferiority of Greek to Christian philosophy. Minor works include What Rich Man Shall be Saved} which urges scorn of worldly wealth.
Although Clement's Christianity has been criticized as being too Hellenized, his serene hope and classical learning helped convert the upper classes. His pseudo-Platonic doctrine that homosexu­ality was particularly noxious because it was "against nature" served to combine that strand of classical philosophy with Hellenistic Jewish homophobia, most tren­chantly exemplified by the Alexandrian philosopher Philo Judaeus (20 b.c- a.d. 45), to justify persecution of sodomites. He thus preceded and stimulated the homo­phobia of the Christian emperors, from Constantine's sons to Justinian, and of the two most influential Fathers, John Chrysostorn and Augustine of Hippo.
See also Patristic Writers.
William A. Percy

Clergy, Gay
One of the central paradoxes of the history of homosexuality, as well as of the history of Christianity, has been the role of gay clergy in the government and the functioning of an institution that outwardly condemned any form of sexual expression between members of the same sex. The question of gay clergy extends beyond the bounds of Christianity (the focus of the present article) to many relig­ions, including those of primitive peoples, as seen in the berdache and shamanism. This broad diffusion tends to confirm what Edward Carpenter claimed early in the twentieth century, that there is a psycho­logical affinity between religious ministry and homophilia.
The Early Centuries. Almost from the beginning, Christian clerics have been suspected and denounced by pagans, athe­ists, and anticlerical propagandists for homosexuality even more than the facts themselves merit. Among Greek and Roman orators, accusations of having prostituted oneself to other males or of having taken the passive role in adulthood became standard fare - deserved or not. Although there is no confirmation of the assertion that St. John, identified as the beloved disciple (John 13:23), was Jesus' sexual partner (as an anonymous Venetian and Christopher Marlowe claimed in the sixteenth century), pagan polemicists of the second and third centuries routinely accused Christians of ritual murder and cannibalism, incest and orgies both hetero­sexual and homosexual, notably in con­nection with the mass. As celibacy in­creased, especially among the monks who seemed particularly uncouth and threat­ening, such charges became more com­mon, and the writers of the monastic rules took care to legislate in such a way as to prevent homosexual activity [see, e.g., The Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 22). Indeed hermit monks, who had been accustomed to an individualistic way of life, were herded into the monasteries where they could be watched and regulated to reduce opportu­nities for vice and occasions for slander. Fasting and vigils were imposed to reduce libido. The space allotted to homosexual acts in the penitentials confirms that monks often sinned with their fellows and engaged in masturbation. The penitentials aimed at clerics ministering to Celtic and Germanic laymen indicate frequent homo­sexuality, onanism and in such agrarian societies, bestiality.
The CentralMiddle Ages. During the period of laxity that followed the Carolingian revival in the ninth century, sev­eral popes were particularly blatant. The patrician John XII (938-964) went so far as to model himself on the scandalous Ro­man emperor Heliogabalus, holding homo­sexual orgies in the papal palace - a prac­tice imitated by Benedict IX (1021-ca. 1052).
These excesses helped to bring on the rigorism of the Gregorian reform movement in the middle of the eleventh century. Yet paradoxically the enforce­ment of celibacy on priests and even at­tempts to impose it on those in lesser orders increased the danger of homosexu­ality. Peter Damián, who led the attack on Nicolaitism (nepotism within the church) around 1050, also denounced what he perceived, as widespread homosexuality among Italian priests. All the major ca­nonical collections of the high Middle Ages from Burchard of Worms, then Gratian and the Corpus Juris Canonici legislated against the abuse which undoubtedly in­creased as the seculars had to put aside their wives, concubines, and often even female housekeepers. Friars, who unlike the monks were free to wander among the laity without much supervision, became notorious as seducers of boys as well as women, whose confessions they often heard to the disgruntlement of parish priests. Many homosexual clergy, then as now, confessed to one another and were formally absolved. Indeed, the confessional at times became the locus of seduction.
Unlike the Roman Catholic church, Greek Orthodoxy has never adopted the principle of obligatory celi­bacy for the entire clergy. The result is that homosexuals are tracked into careers in the "black" or monastic clergy from which the high dignitaries of the Orthodox church are chosen, while the "white" or parish clergy are allowed to marry and have chil­dren. The offspring of the latter played a great role in the formation of the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The military orders were drawn, like the episcopate, mainly from the in­souciant lustful nobility. Many of these recruits proved wanting in serious reli­gious conviction or were placed often unwillingly by their relatives at an early age. Sometime suspicions arose of secret rites, as with the Knights Templars who paid dearly by being cruelly tortured and burned.
St. John (conventionally identi­fied with the beloved disciple) was only the most famous of a number of saints suspected by contemporaries or by mod­ern scholars. The eastern saints Sergius and Bacchus have been interpreted as a pair of lovers, but close examination of the evidence does not support the claim. In twelfth-century England St. Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx, left behind writings saturated with deep feeling for male spiritual friend­ship. Yet as in the case of many other medieval monks claimed by modern homophiles as "gay," this theme of amicitia probably belongs more to the realm of homosociality than homosexuality in any genital sense. Themartyr St. Sebastian has been a homosexual cult object at least since the second half of the nineteenth century, but there is no basis for assuming that he himself was homosexual. Peniten­tial flagellation, practiced by many monks, has secondary sexual connotations.
The hypocritical visitations of the Middle Ages and the papal inquisitions periodically unearthed homosexual clergy, as did secular courts, especially those of the Italian towns. The archdeacon Walter Map observed of St. Bernard of Clairvaux unsuccessfully atteirjpting to revive the corpse of a boy: "The Was the unhappicst monk of all. For I've never heard of any monk who lay down upon a boy that did not straightaway rise up after him. The abbot blushed and they went out as many laughed." Heretics accused Catholic clergy of sodomy just as the Catholics in turn accused Cathars and Fraticelli, the Beguines and Bogomils. Opponents of the popes sometimes accused them of sod­omy: Philip IV of France charged Boniface VHI not only with heresy, usury, and simony, but with sodomy and masturba­tion as well.
The Early Modern Period. The Renaissance in Italy, with its revival of classical antiquity and love of art, saw a number of popes who were interested in their own sex. Among them were the antipope John XXHI (d. 1419), who began his career as a pirate. Entering the clergy he quickly acquired the reputation of an unblushing libertine. The humanist pope Pius II (1405-1464) watched boys run naked in a race at Pienza, noting a boy "with fair hair and a beautiful body, though disfig­ured with mud." The vain Venetian Paul II (1417-1471) toyed with adopting the name Formosus ("beautiful"). Affecting the most lavish costumes, he was attacked by his enemies as "Our Lady of Pity." His succes­sor, Sixtus IV (1414 - 1482), made his mark as an art patron, erecting the Sistine chapel. He also elevated to the cardinalate a number of handsome young men. Julius II (1443-1513), another art-loving pope, pro­voked such scandal that he was arraigned under various charges, including that of sodomy, but he managed to survive the attempt to depose him. His successor, the extravagant Medici Leo X (1475-1521), became embroiled in intrigues to advance favorite nephews, a hobby that strained the treasury to the utmost. Julius III (1487-1555), who had presided over the Council of Trent before his pontificate, was nonetheless sometimes seen at offi­cial functions with catamites, one of whom he made a cardinal.
After the Reformation, Protes­tants - who rejected clerical celibacy and thereby made heterosexuality virtually obligatory for the clergy as well as the laity - undertook vigorous campaigns of slander directed at the homosexuality of the Catholic clergy. It has been claimed that Henry VIU's visitors greatly exagger­ated the extent of sodomy and every other vice among English monks in order to precipitate suppression of the monasteries and confiscation of their property, but the actual text of the correspondence between him and his agent in Scotland indicates that a "covert action" was intended and that imputed to the monks were such vices as laziness with which no court, even in the Middle Ages, would have concerned itself for a moment. Thus only Orthodoxy had the wisdom to divide its clergy into two groups, one of whom would be wholly dedicated to its service, while not depriving society of the offspring of the other. Given the virtual monopoly of higher education which the clergy enjoyed in the Middle Ages and even afterwards in many places, the Orthodox solution seems more viable than the Catholic or Protestant one.
Skeptics and libertines from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment also ridiculed the sodomitical practices of the clerics and monks as an example of the hypocrisy of the church, and of the idle, vicious, parasitic way of life that its clergy led, all the while urging others to absti­nence and self-denial in every form. Voltaire repeatedly suggested that the Jesuits liked young boys, and Pierre-Jean deBeranger (1789-1857) continued the anti-Jesuit tradition with a song about their propensity for spanking young boys.
The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. During the religious revival and triumph of bourgeois morality in the nine­teenth century, only leftists and eccen­trics continued to emphasize the homo­sexuality of the clergy. The anticlerical literature of the last decades of that cen­tury delighted in exposing cases in which a clergyman had committed a sexual of­fense, to the point where in 1911 the Pope had to issue the motu proprio decree Quamvis diligenter forbidding the Catho­lic laity to bring charges against the clergy before secular courts. This step unilater­ally abolished the principle of the equality of all citizens before the law established by the French Revolution, reinstating the "benefit of clergy" of the Middle Ages. The anticlerical literature of that period still needs study for the light that it can shed on the homosexual subculture of the clerical milieux. In England the Anglican High Church was particularly identified with effeminacy and homosexuality, a state of affairs that produced a certain amount of puritanical revulsion in the middle class.
The Communists and then the Nazis attacked clerics and their other enemies by charging homosexuality. The classic of Soviet anti-religious writing, The Bible for Believers and Unbelievers (1922), identified the "crime of Sodom" with the practices of the medieval monks, and vio­lation of Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code of the Reich was an accusation which the Nazis used against Catholic priests who may have been convicted solely on per­jured testimony.
Because of the decline in the number of applicants for the priesthood after World War II in England and Amer­ica, it has been estimated recently that more than 50 percent of Catholic priests under 40 in the United States today are gay, many of whom support Dignity (the gay Catholic organization), and also that 40 percent of Anglican priests are (in both countries). In the wake of the AIDS crisis in England an open attack on homosexuals in the church was mounted by conserva­tive circles.
One aspect of the gay liberation movement in the United States has been the demand for ordination of openly gay and lesbian postulants as members of the clergy, and several denominations, among them the United Church of Canada, have acquiesced - to the dismay of the tradi­tion-minded among their followers. Church organists as a professional class tend to be homosexual, for whatever de­nomination they practice their art, and in recent years some of them have " come out of the closet." Francis Cardinal Spellman (1889-1967) of New York was well-known in homosexual circles even while he pub­licly condemned every form of sexual "immorality" - and it was the only aspect of immorality about which he cared. A biography that was prepared for publica­tion after his death intended to reveal to the world the awful truth, but the archdio­cese intervened with the publisher to have the offending passages excised. In the final version Spellman's homosexuality was relegated to the category of rumor. Accord­ing to the French novelist Roger Peyrefitte, pope John XXHI (1881-1963) and, more plausibly, Paul VI (1897-1978) con­ducted homosexual affairs before their election.
The distinction between the androphile and the pederast extends to the gay clergy as well. Some homosexual members of the clergy - androphiles - seek only other adults as partners and move freely in the gay subculture of the large cities, while others are attracted only to adolescents or at times to even younger partners. In the mid-1980s in the Cajun area of Louisiana, the Roman Catholic church was embarrassed by the revelation that there were pedophile priests who had abused children in their parishes, and the families were able to collect such large sums in civil damages that the church could no longer obtain insurance to cover its potential liability in such cases. In fairness, however, it must be acknowl­edged that there are homosexual and les­bian religious who take their vows of celi­bacy seriously and abstain from any sex, even though as members of communities of their own gender they are exposed to temptations that would have no meaning for the exclusive heterosexual.
The plight of homosexuals as clergy of a religion that condemns all homosexual expression remains unre­solved, and will be a source of turbulence within the denominations for decades to come, until Christianity as a whole finds a modus vivendi with the phenomenon of attraction to one's own sex.
William A. Percy

Clift, Montgomery (1920-1966)
American actor. Born into an ambitious nouveau-riche family, Clift responded to guidance by becoming a successful child and adolescent actor. By the age of 20 he was starring with Lunt and Fontanne in Robert Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize-winning play There Shall Be No Night. At the same time he had his first serious affair - with a fellow actor. Mak­ing a national splash in the film The Search (1948), he was for a time one of Holly­wood's top romantic male leads. His brood­ing good looks appealed to both women and men, but some of his associates such as Frank Sinatra and the director John Huston taunted him for his homosexual­ity. Nonetheless, Clif t's career continued meteoric until his 1956 car crash, after which his face had to be reconstructed, but without complete success.
Clift suffered from a strong sense of internalized self-contempt, referring to himself as "the fag." At times he pursued desultory affairs with women, but more frequently sought out the company of hustlers and other companions in casual male sex. His abuse of alcohol and drugs increased as the years passed. In New York City Clift found a psychiatrist who tried to help him to accept his homosexuality, but at the cost of a crippling personal depend­ence. The actor's tortured life reflected not only the difficulty of being a homosexual in America in the middle decades of the twentieth century, but also the stresses caused by the hypocrisy of an entertain­ment industry seeking to protect its in­vestment in a talented, but "unstable" property.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift: A Biography, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Cliques
See Circles and Affinity Groups.

Clone
In current general usage, the word clone has come to mean "a living organ­ism created as a duplicate of another through genetic engineering." In addition, the word acquired a vogue use in gay circles in the late 1970s to designate an emergent male homosexual style.
First attracting attention as a definite type, it seems, in such enclaves of gaydom as San Francisco's Castro and New York's Greenwich Village, the gay clone wore short hair and a clipped moustache, while sporting (if possible) a sculpted chest with prominent pectorals. Clothing, typi­cally flannel shirts and leather, was cho­sen to accentuate these features. The in­tent was to create a masculine, even ma­cho image, while at the same time signal­ing one's orientation. Such signaling might be accentuated through gay semiotics - keys worn externally on a ring and a hand­kerchief, color-coded to indicate specific sexual wishes, placed in the back pocket. In public gathering places, especially bars, gay clones were said to be frequently ob­served "giving attitude," that is, assuming a scornful and haughty demeanor, and offering only laconic and surly replies when addressed.
The popularity of this style re­flected several converging tendencies. On the one hand, there was a rejection by a substantial portion of the gay male com­munity of both the effeminate mode (as prescribed by the traditional stereotype) and the androgynous mode (championed by early gay liberation), in favor of a mark­edly masculine style. Hostile observers were wont to say, of course, that the clone look was just another form of gay costum­ing, and therefore just as much "drag" as the looks it displaced, but this was surely not the motivation of those who adopted the trend. American culture itself had tended to promote rough-hewn, proletar­ian styles for men, television's adaptation of the Hollywood Western being the most notable source. Then there was the na­tional interest in physical fitness, which was surely a healthy reaction to the ne­glect of health and the body that the hippie style and the drug culture had fostered. Not surprisingly, the clone look was taken up in Europe and other places where local homosexuals eagerly followed changes in American gay fashions.
Jean-Paul Sartre has identified "seriation" as a key aspect of modern society - the tendency of individuals to assort themselves into "sets" character­ized by homologous features. Sartre gives the example of passengers taking a ticket and falling into line in numerical order at a bus stop. This social trend represents, of course, a symbolic mimicry of industrial mass production. In this light the "clon­ing" of the male homosexual may be viewed as part of a larger social process whereby a "nonconformist" subgroup fosters conformity in its ownrealm. Among the members of the subgroup behavioral norms are rigidly enforced by group con­sensus. Similar phenomena have been observed among the pachuco ("zoot suit") youth of the 1940s, the beatniks of the 1960s, and the skinheads of the-1980s. Such phenomena are not limited to groups usually seen as marginalized; Harold Rosenberg sardonically, but perhaps not unjustly styled American intellectuals as "a herd of independent minds."
The gay clone vogue also has a psychological dimension. One made one­self over as a clone in order to attract other clones, and success in cruising meant possessing someone similar to oneself. This quest for one's double is a major recurrent aspect of homosexual consciousness. It was perhaps first set forth in the Sympo­sium where Plato posits that all homo­sexuals are sundered halves of a once whole being. One's goal therefore is to find the mirror image who will dovetail with one­self and then to unite with him. To be sure, such aspirations have sometimes been stigmatized as egocentric narcissism, the wish of someone who does not truly seek an interpersonal relationship but only to mate with himself. A fascinating explora­tion of this concept appears in David Gerrold's science fiction novel The Man Who Folded Himself (1973). Yet it is es­sential to recognize that the quest for the double usually operates in tandem with a simultaneous search for difference - for complementation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Nicholas Howe, "Further Thoughts on Clone," Ameri­can Speech, 57 (1983), 61-68.
Wayne R. Dynes

Closet
Until the late 1970s the term closet was restricted to gay jargon, where it meant a state of concealment in which one immured one's homosexuality. Some individuals were said to be remaining "in the closet," and thus passing for hetero­sexual - or so they hoped. Some were chastised for their illusions by being la­beled "closet queens," the idea being that they remained what they were no matter how elaborate and seemingly successful their impersonation of heterosexuality might seem. Others emerged from the closet, or were urged to do so, by coming out. Then mainstream journalists appro­priated and extended the usage so that they could speak of "closet conservatives" and "closet gourmets" with no sexual connotation.
Sem an tics of the Closet. All these connotations of closet depend on an under­lying metaphor. In American usage, the architectural space designated in the pri­mary meaning is typically small and con­fined, essentially an alcove secured by a door for the storage of clothing. Older English usage treats a closet as any private room or chamber. Through a combination of these meanings, the verb "to closet oneself" came to merge the idea of privacy and remoteness, on the one hand, with narrow confinement, on the other. For the element of secrecy occasioned by the sus­pect character of what is being hidden, compare the proverbial expression: a skele­ton in the closet. Historians of literature also speak of a "closet drama," that is one never intended for public performance. An ecclesiastical writer of the reign of James I of England penned the expression "closet sins," so that the adjectival use of the word has a long history. Sometimes gay writers and speakers reactivate the metaphor, so that the expression is taken in a literal, architectural sense, as in "stifling closet" or "his closet is nailed shut." Assisting in the process of coming out has been dubbed, by Philadelphia activist Barbara Cittings, as "oiling the hinges of the closet door." It is also possible to speak of "returning to the closet" with respect to those who have come to feel uncomfortable with their homosexuality out in the open or to sense that it is imprudent to advertise their sexual orientation.
Sociology of the Closet. Sociolo­gists, preeminently Erving Coffman, have written of seemingly analogous tenden­cies among other groups, as ex-prisoners and former mental patients, to "manage spoiled identity" by editing their presenta­tion of self. It is doubtful, however, that closeted gay people think of themselves in quite the same way. Unencumbered as most of them are by stigmatizing docu­mentation of official origin and convinced that their cover has not been blown, they rarely give consideration to their own self-concealment. When pressed, they appeal to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the separa­tion of public business from private lives. Many heterosexuals would agree that sexuality is a private matter.
In the view of gay activists, clos­eted persons can have a negative impact on the welfare of other homosexuals. "[A] truism to people active in the gay move­ment [is] that the greatest impediments to homosexuals' progress often [are] not heterosexuals, but closeted homosexuals. ... By definition, the homosexual in the closet [has] surrendered his integrity. This makes closeted people very useful to the establishment: once empowered, such people are guaranteed to support the most subtle nuances of anti-gay prejudice. A closeted homosexual has the keenest understanding of these nuances, having chosen to live under the subjugation of prejudice. The closeted homosexual is far less likely to demand fair or just treatment for his kind, because to do so would call attention to himself." (Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On, New York, 1987, p. 406).
Ethical and Methodological As­pects . For a variety of reasons - which may not even be clearly known to themselves - a vast number of homosexuals and lesbi­ans in our society can and do remain "in the closet." This is so despite frequent and fervent exhortations on the part of the leadership of the gay/lesbian movement to "come out." Their reluctance makes it hard to organize gay men and lesbians politically, to estimate their true num­bers, and to collect valid samples for social science research. There has been some discussion of the ethics of "forced decloseting." For example, liberal gays asserted that the late conservative politician Terry Dolan was benefiting from "playing both sides of the street": participating in fund raising for causes that included antigay planks, while personally enjoying a gay life though closeted to the general public. As it happened, Dolan died in 1987, mak­ing the issue in this particular instance moot - though the general question abides. Even in obituary notices, many newspa­pers refuse to mention that a lover has survived, or other aspects of gayness, pre­sumably in order to protect the privacy of relatives. This reticence would seem to go too far. Of course the restriction on infor­mation has made it difficult to make cer­tain of the homosexuality or lesbianism of past figures who very likely were gay. Although in the present Encyclopedia efforts have been made to determine this status - historical decloseting, if you will - for many individuals, editorial policy has established that no living individuals should receive biographical entries of their own. This restriction has been taken not only to avoid invidious distinctions of the "X is more important than Y" sort, but also to protect "closet rights."
The task of the biographer who is called upon to study the evidence of the sexual proclivities of a figure of the past is a challenging one. The individuals them­selves may have taken great precautions to destroy or have destroyed any "incrimi­nating" evidence. Then there is the prob­lem of individuals, such as the painter Theodore Gericault and Eleanor Roosev­elt, for whom we have good reason to believe that there were strong elements of a homoerotic sensibility, but the interpre­tation cannot be fixed to everyone's satis­faction. Such twentieth-century figures as New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover continue to resist any final pigeonholing. Assuredly, knowledge of the subject will advance, but it will also need to recognize many histori­cal question marks.
Wayne R. Dynes

Clothing
Beyond its obvious functions of protecting and supporting the body, cloth­ing (along with jewelry, cosmetics, tattoo­ing, and cosmetic scarring) has been used from prehistoric times to alter bodily appearance. This has taken on two over­lapping forms: to indicate social group and status, and to enhance the body's sexual appeal. Clothes are used to make the body appear more youthful, firm, and slim, or to enhance sexual characteristics. Men have used clothing to call attention to their muscles, buttocks, or "basket" (genitals; formerly the codpiece served this func­tion); women the breasts, buttocks, and legs, formerly the abdomen, and very re­cently their muscles. Clothing also serves the function of retaining bodily odors, the sexual importance of which has yet to be thoroughly understood.
Gay men have often used cloth­ing to indicate that they were potential sexual partners for other males. Of course any type of clothing associated with the opposite gender can be so used, but more subtle signals are often desired. The Roman poet Martial, for example (I.96; HI.82), points out galbinus (greenish-yellow) as an effeminate color in clothing; Aulus Gellius (VI. 12) similarly mentions the tunic (covering the arms) as an unmasculine style of clothing, used by men seeking the recipient role in male-male sex. Havelock Ellis, in Sexual Inversion (1915), reports that a red tie was "almost a synonym" for homosexuality in large American cities. Greek, Roman, or Arabic clothing was formerly used in photography to suggest homosexual identification. Styles of cloth­ing can also be used as signals: the "dandy" of the late nineteenth century was a gay style of dress, and more recently cowboy clothing - work shirt, Levi jeans, and boots - has served the same purpose. Espe­cially favored by and associated with American gay men in the 1970's and 1980's were Levis style 501, with a button fly, making for comfortable access to or dis­play of the penis. An elaborate system of colored rear-pocket bandannas emerged in the 1970s to signal the desired type of gay sexual activity. It was derived from the use as signal of a visible key ring, whose pres­ence indicated interest in leather or S/M sex, and whose position (left or right) indi­cated the role preferred.
In affluent times it has been pos­sible to have special clothes for sexual purposes, clothes which are not normally worn at one's daily work. The dandy is the embodiment of the aristocratic male who is obsessed with his costume and even strives to be a leader of fashion. Within the gay male subculture leather garments are used to project an image of sexual power and nonconformity; nylon lingerie to sug­gest weakness, tenderness, or interest in seduction. Police or military uniforms are used in sex play to indicate authority; athletic clothing, including the quintessentially gay male jockstrap, to create an imaginary locker room; white cotton briefs to suggest innocence and youth. The vari­ety of clothes used in sex play is large.
During the 1920s lesbians were stereotyped as affecting a severe version of male formal dress, and indeed some promi­nent figures such as Radclyffe Hall did adopt this mode, while Marlene Dietrich offered a subtle variant of it in the movies. More recently lesbians have been perceived as preferring somewhat shapeless garments and no makeup. While this look does cor­respond to the type sometimes known as the "granola dyke," other gay women prefer more elegant dress, of which there are several versions.
Nudism began in Europe in the early twentieth century, and is still more widespread there than in the United States. It is often thought of as being sexually provocative, but in practice nudism is ascetic. The removal of clothes, as in strip­tease, suggests sexual activity to follow; without clothes one lacks an important means of communication, enticement, and bodily enhancement.
See also Dandyism; Transves­tism.
Daniel Eisenberg

Cocteau, Jean (1889-1963)
French playwright, poet, novel­ist, filmmaker, actor, and artist. Cocteau was one of the most famous, controversial, and perplexing of twentieth-century cul­tural figures.
By 1908 Jean Cocteau was corre­sponding with Marcel Proust and well on his way to self-promotion in the art world. He became an important contributor to Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Cocteau lived openly with male companions at many times in his life. Grief at the death of the young novelist Raymond Radiguet in 1923 was one cause of his famous turn to opium in the 1920s. During the period 1937-50 his creativity was spurred by his relationship with the actor Jean Marais. Later he adopted the painter Edouard Dermit. Throughout his life, Cocteau was surrounded by a coterie of gay male artists and celebrities. His homosexuality kept him at a distance from Andre Breton's Surrealists, who championed heterosexuality.
Cocteau tended not to deal di­rectly with homosexuality in his public work, generally choosing either indirect, displaced, or universal approaches to sexu­ality. Yet one of his first dramatic works was an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. In his three earli­est collections of poems Cocteau treated narcissism and the "love that dare not speak its name." In 1928 he published without signing his name to it The White Paper, a story which begins with an open declaration of homosexuality. His first film, The Blood of a Poet (1930), has an overall homoerotic and autoerotic ambi­ance. Throughout his career, he made many drawings, including some for Jean Genet's novel Querelle of Brest (1947). The fre­quent themes of doubling, monstrosity, and punishment for love in his work can be linked to his experiences as a sexual out­sider, but more rigorous scholarship is needed to go beyond the old cliches.
Cocteau created one of the most extraordinary private mythologies of the twentieth century. Of his voluminous works, some of the best include the films Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1950), the novel The Terrible Children (1929), the plays The Infernal Machine (1934), The Knights of the Round Table (1937), The Eagle with Two Heads (1947), and Bacchus (1951), the poetry collections Opera (1927) and Requiem (1962), and the essay "Opium" (1930). Publication of Cocteau's multivolume diary (1951-63) is now in progress. In 1987 his letters to Jean Marais were published, as earlier his po­etry for him had been appended to Marais' Stories of My Life. Marais continues to direct Cocteau's plays and preserve the legacy of his friend.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. LAlbum Masques: fean Cocteau, Paris: Persona, 1983; Lydia Crowson, The Aesthetic of fean Cocteau, Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 1978; Arthur King Peters, éd., Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, New York: Abbeville, 1984; Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography, Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.
Peter G. Christensen

Colette (1873-1954)
French novelist. Born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in a small Burgundian village, she was the daughter of an army captain who had fought in the Crimea and lost a leg in the Italian campaign. Her whole literary career was to be marked by memories of her rural childhood, in which "Claudine's household" was a disorderly but sensual ambiance, with a somewhat eccentric mother, an assortment of pets, a large garden, and all the sensations of the provincial countryside. But the lost para­dise of her early years caused regrets later on, when she said: "A happy childhood is a bad preparation for contact with human beings." In 1893 she married Henry Gau­thier- Villars, who under the name of Willy was a celebrity of the Paris boulevards, but the marriage was ill-fated, as Willy soon reverted to the ways of a free-roving bache­lor. This failure in her first marriage im­pressed upon the young woman the dis­tance between love and happiness.
Some notebooks that Colette had filled with her childhood memories at Willy's behest were the starting point for her first novel, Claudine à l'école ¡1900), followed by a whole series with the same heroine which found its way to the stage. The sequel was Colette's slow conquest of her marital and literary independence. In 1906 she obtained a divorce and began to live alone in a modest apartment in Paris, soon "protected" by a strange creature, Missy, the youngest daughter of the Due de Morny, who possessed money and a passion for the theatre. The two women appeared on the stage in daring panto­mimes, a period of her life in which Co­lette struggled to earn her livelihood and which she recorded in La Vagabonde (1911) and L'Envers du music-hall (1913). Her second marriage in 1912, this time to Henry de Jouvenel, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Le Ma tin, to which she contrib­uted an article a week, was no happier than the first. For a time she abandoned both the stage and her writing career and gave birth to a daughter. World War I revived her journalistic bent, and she was sent as a reporter to the Italian front. She also composed a work entitled La Paix chez les bêtes (1916), which depicts her withdrawal from the world of human relations into the intimate sphere of household pets. In 1920 Colette published her masterpiece Cheri, whose male hero confronts Léa, a woman of fifty who has not "abandoned her search for happiness."
In 1923 she divorced her second husband, and also published Le Blé en herbe, whose serialization by Le Matin was halted so as not to offend the readers. By now a successful writer, in possession of a villa at Saint-Tropez, "la Treille muscate," she issued one novel after an­other on the theme of the eternal combat between the sexes. In 1935 Colette mar­ried Maurice Goudeket, her faithful ad­mirer, and settled permanently at the Palais-Royal in Paris. In her last years she composed a few more important works, among them Gigi (1945), while basking in her reminiscences and her literary fame.
Colette's work was more auto­biographical than anyone could have admitted when it first appeared. The Claudine series features a tomboyish girl who at fifteen develops an intense crush on a pretty assistant mistress, Aimée, who tutors her in English at home, but the affair is interrupted when the domineering head­mistress herself turns fond of the assis­tant. Aimée abandons Claudine to become the pampered favorite of her superior. Claudine even eavesdrops one day upon an intimate moment enjoyed by the two women in their dormitory quarters while their classes are runningwild in the school­rooms. Later, the headmistress implies to Claudine that she might have replaced the junior mistress as her favorite. The second volume of the series finds Claudine in her seventeenth year in Paris, where a long illness causes her hair to be cropped and her contacts limited to her father's older sister and the latter's grandson, Marcel, a pretty and effeminate youth who is ab­sorbed in his own affair with a male school­mate, which has already made trouble for them at the lycée and provoked the wrath­ful contempt of Marcel's father. The series continues in the same vein with homoerotic as well as heterosexual interac­tion among the characters.
Stella Browne, in a psychological study of women authors with lesbian tendencies, mentions Colette as having been involved with two women, the film star Marguerite Moreno and an unnamed foreign noblewoman, of whom character sketches drawn with great discretion fig­ure in Ces Plaisirs (1932). The entire set­ting of Colette's life work is the amoral, sensual world of a coterie of Parisian lite­rati and rentiers in the years before World War I - an ambiance in which homosexu­ality was a subdued, but certainly not a major element. Colette herself enjoyed the company of male homosexuals, espe­cially Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais, in her literary set during the years of her renown as one of the great living French authors.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jeannette Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature, Balti­more: Diana Press, 1975; Michèle Sarde, Colette, Libre et entravée, Paris: Stock, 1978.
Evelyn Cettone

Color Symbolism
In addition to their aesthetic aspect, colors acquire symbolic values, which are culturally variable. In Western civilization black is the color of mourning, while in some Asian societies white is. Many men today will avoid wearing laven­der or pink because of their "fruity" asso­ciations. Yet over the centuries so many hues have been linked to homosexuality that it would be almost impossible to eschew them all.
According the poet Martial, sev­eral colors were associated with effemi­nate homosexuality in imperial Rome. He limns an exquisite "who thinks that men in scarlet are not men at all, and styles violet mantles the vesture of women; al­though he praises native colors and always affects somber hues, grass-green [galbinus] are his morals" (I, 96). While scarlet and violet were the traditional colors of ef­feminacy, an off-green seems to have been the new, "in" color of the day. Martial even uses the galbinus shade metaphori­cally to represent the lifestyle as a whole. In late Victorian England, Robert Hichens' novel The Green Carnation (1894) helped to revive the association. In 1929 an American physician, John F. W. Meagher, stated flatly, "Their favorite color is green." Whether it was or not, this assertion took hold in the popular mind, and in the 1950s American high school students avoided green on Thursday, reputed to be "Na­tional Fairy Day." Another color associ­ated with the "decadent" 1890s was yel­low, because of the London periodical that was almost synonymous with the aes­thetic sophistication of that era, The Yel­low Book. A current Russian term for a gay man is golubchik, from goluboy, "blue," evidently through association with the "blue blood" of the aristocracy of the Old Regime.
Probably the most enduringly significant sector of the color wheel is, however, the red to purple range (as Mar­tial duly noted two thousand years ago). According to Havelock Ellis, one could not safely walk down the streets of late-nine­teenth-century New York wearing a red tie without being accosted, since this gar­ment was then the universal mark of the male prostitute. In gay slang this fashion was referred to as "wearing one's badge." Because of the "scarlet woman," the great Whore of Babylon of the Book of Revela­tion, that color has acquired a strong asso­ciation with prostitution and adultery (cf.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter). During the Nazi holocaust homo­sexual inmates were made to wear a pink triangle, and subsequently gay activists have taken up this symbol as a kind of armorial badge. In Europe the words rosa and rose (= pink) are widely used. The popularity of this color seems to reflect the contrast boys/blue vs. girls/pink, suggest­ing gender-role reversal. In American cul­ture the word lavender - a blend of red and blue (as in "lavender lover," The Lavender Lexicon, etc.) - almost speaks for itself. Gershon Legman (in his 1941 glossary published as an appendix to George Henry's Sex Variants) claimed to relay popular lore when he wrote of seven stages of homo­sexuality, "from gaga to the 'deeper tones' of lavender." This shade has a secondary association with scented powder and aro­matic flowers, producing an unconscious synaesthetic effect. Beginning with the Romans, it has been customary to refer to florid passages of writing as "purple patches." Reflecting at the end of his life on his many bitter sweet encounters with male prostitutes, Oscar Wilde saluted them as "purple hours" illuminating life's grayness.
In the 1970s some elements of gay-male society observed a back-pocket handkerchief code with colors correlating with one's specific preference. Thus yel­low signified an interest in "water sports" (urolagnia), black s/m, and brown scatophilia. The mid-1980s saw public display at rallies and marches of a rainbow "Gay Pride Flag," consisting of six parallel stripes ranging from bright red to deep purple. The juxtaposition of colors stands for the diver­sity of the gay/lesbian community with regard to ethnicity, gender, and class - perhaps also connoting, in the minds of some, the coalition politics of the Rain­bow Alliance headed by Jesse Jackson.
Although the color preferences ascribed to gay people are various, two features, not altogether compatible, stand out. First there is a fondness for mixed hues and off-shades, generally from the red-to-blue gamut. In keeping with the notion of the "third sex" as an intermedi­ate entity, these hues may be associated with a particular time of day, the transi­tion between daylight and night that is the province of "twilight men." Second, fol­lowing the stereotype of homosexuals as "screaming" self-dramatizers who flaunt their identity, they are held to be irresisti­bly attracted to such bright colors as red and purple. These attributed motivations reveal the degree of prejudice that is in­volved, but over the course of time many gay people have adopted such colors, in part as a signal that can be easily under­stood by their peers.
See also Flower Words.
Wayne R. Dynes

Comedy
See Theatre and Drama.

Comics
The ultimate origins of this fa­miliar aspect of modern popular culture lie in the illustrated European broadsheets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which were, however, directed toward adults. Among these are a few stray items depicting the execution of contemporary sodomites, as well as lurid images of the conflagration that destroyed the city of Sodom itself.
The nineteenth century saw the appearance of children's books which approximate real comics, but these were not accessible to a mass audience. The first true comic strips were introduced in 1897 as a circulation-building device in the Sunday supplements of the Hearst newspapers. The now-familiar pulp comic book was a creation of the Depression: the first commercial example is Famous Fun­nies of 1934. Although these strips gener­ally affirmed middle-class values, and certainly contained not the slightest overt indication of sex, they were regularly denounced by pundits as a pernicious in­fluence on the young (cf. Fredric Wertham,
Seduction of the Innocent, New York, 1953).
Batman, appearing in 1939, fea­tured the adventures of a playboy detec­tive and his teenage ward, Robin. Although the relationship is portrayed as a simple mentor-protege one, some teenage male readers were able to project something stronger into it. This aspect was certainly flirted with in the campy television off­shoot beginning in 1966, though this se­ries reflects a much changed cultural cli­mate. In 1941 there appeared Wonder-woman, featuring an Amazon with special powers living on an all-woman island. This strip - contrary to the expressed wishes of its creators - served as a focus for lesbian aspirations. In the 1970s it was rediscovered by the women's movement as a proto-feminist statement.
In the late 1940s "Blade" drew several illustrated stories, including "The Barn" and "Truck Hiker," that can be considered predecessors of the gay comics. Circulated underground, they have been officially published only in recent years. Somewhat later the wordless strips of supermacho types created by Tom of Fin­land began to circulate in Europe.
It was the American countercul­ture of the 1960s, however, which first made possible the exploration of taboo subjects in a context of crumbling censor­ship restrictions. In 1964 a Philadelphia gay monthly, Drum, began serializing Harry Chess by Al Shapiro ("A. Jay"). Modeled on a popular television series, Harry Chess was both macho and campy, though explicit sex scenes were veiled. In the 1970s no-holds-barred examples ap­peared drawn by such artists as Bill Ward, Sean, and Stephen {Meatman).
Following the practice of main­stream magazines, the Los Angeles Advo­cate had a regular one-panel series by Joe Johnson named Miss Thing. The hero of this popular classic was an outrageous queen of a type that gay liberation was trying to make obsolete. Subsequently Christopher Street published a series of New Yorker-style cartoons that capture, perhaps all too well, the sophistication of Manhattan's upper East Side.
In 1980 Howard Cruse, together with his publisher Dennis Kitchen, started a series of pulp books called Gay Comix that included work by both men and women. Out of this work evolved Cruse's gay-male couple, Wendell and Ollie, with whose more-or-less real-life problems many Advocate readers could identify.
European artists also developed strips. France's Hippolyte Romain's Les Chéries provides an acid portrait of older Parisian queens. In Spain Nazario's Anarcoma, featuring a macho transvestite, played fast-and-loose with gender catego­ries. Probably Europe's most original con­tribution, however, is the work of Düssel­dorf-based Ralf König. The often ludicrous situations of his homely characters high­light banal, yet touching aspects of every­day gay male life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Winston Leyland and Jerry Mills, eds., Meatman, San Francisco: G. S. Press, 1986; Robert Triptow, Gay Comics, New York: New American Library, 1989.
Wayne R. Dynes

Coming Out
The cultural and psychological process by which persons relate to a par­ticular model of homosexuality by inter­nalizing a sense of identity as "homosex­ual" or "lesbian" in accordance with that model is called "coming out." As there are different (if any) identity models of homo­sexuality in different cultures, the coming out process also shows wide variation.
Conceptual Problems. In the industrialized countries of Northern Eu­rope and North America, the process can be applied to anyone with a substantial erotic interest in others of the same gen­der, and its end result is identification as a "homosexual" or "lesbian." In much of the rest of the world, the process concerns primarily the sexually receptive male, not the active-insertive one, and the end result may be identification as a quasi-female; it remains unclear to what extent a corre­sponding process exists for females. In other cultures and at other times, and in particular in areas where pederasty has been popular, the identity model is lack­ing and the question of "coming out" does not arise.
Research into "coming out" has generally been limited to areas where the northern-industrial model of homosexu­ality is dominant, and this must be kept in mind in evaluating any claims to univer­sally valid findings. Another flaw in much of the research is its assumption that a homosexual identity is somehow innate and intrinsically valuable and needs only to be uncovered or unsuppressed in order to blossom,- an alternative which posits the sense of homosexual identity as some­thing learned from the (sub- and domi­nant) culture, and hence views "coming out" as a socialization process, has not been sufficiently explored. Most of the research assumes that "coming out" is a necessary and in the long run beneficial (if at times difficult) process leading to an identity which is assumed to be an objec­tive good. Both of these assumptions are culture-bound and subject to question.
Even in the northern-industrial­ized societies, there is considerable dis­pute over the question of where "coming out" ends, with minimalists holding it to be a state of internal acceptance of a homosexual self-identity (which could be completely private), gay liberationists taking it to be a state in which one's homosexuality is made known to virtu­ally anyone with whom one has signifi­cant contact, and various writers taking intermediate positions. The latter group seems to have divided "coming out" into a multifold process in which one "comes out" to oneself, one's family, one's friends, to people in a gay social setting, to one's boss, colleagues, and others in many combinations and sequences.
Age at Coming Out. In contem­porary northern-industrial countries, with their wide media exposure of homosexual­ity and its subculture, coming out is pri­marily a matter for youth from puberty through the mid-20s. Before the taboos on public exposure of homosexuality were broken, however, the process was not uncommon at much older stages of life, prompted by a chance encounter.
The best time (psychologically and sociologically) to come out is an issue few have systematically addressed. Many in the gay community simply take the view that the earlier, the better: "Out of the closets and into the streets!" This position, however, needs to assess care­fully the liabilities accompanying early identification as homosexual, when an early or even pre-teenager has few resources to help him cope with social homophobia, little chance of meaningful assistance from older homosexuals, and may prematurely be closing off routes of self-exploration which would otherwise lead to bisexuality or heterosexuality. Against these disad­vantages may be placed the ability to dis­cover earlier adult role-models with which the young homosexual may feel more comfortable, and the opportunities which youth affords for an active and enjoyable sexuality.
Another perspective suggests that one might benefit by delaying the revela­tion of homosexual identity, if this has been internally adopted, until the environ­ment is more positive and supportive (usually after secondary schooling is completed), or limiting it to a few "safe" persons who can give necessary social and psychological support while the teenager is learning crisis competence, self-respect and ego integrity and in various ways pre­paring to eventually face the reality of a homophobic society.
Some argue in favor of delaying "coming out" to a later stage, when eco­nomic independence and social status have already been secured and are not so easily jeopardized, or even later when family obligations have been met through mar­riage and procreation, and when middle-aged ennui can be replaced with the adven­ture of exploring a whole new sexual ter­rain.
Going Back In! The argument might also be advanced that, in view of the lesser intensity of ageism in heterosexual society, the midlife period would be a good time for homosexuals to "come out" into heterosexuality. Very little is known about such "reverse coming out," however, since few if any researchers have gathered study groups of former homosexuals. Despite this absence, there are indications that such a reversal can take place, especially during the teenage years, and a study of the Kinsey data would also suggest a substan­tial "drop-out" population waiting to be studied.
Coming Out as a Developmental Process. A few gays and lesbians report no memory of a coming out process; they always considered themselves homosex­ual and were never "in the closet." Others have reported a sudden revelation of their own homosexuality which does not fit into any theory of stages but has brought them from apparently heterosexual to comfortably homosexual virtually over­night.
Theorists of the coming out proc­ess, however, have generally characterized it as a series of milestone events whereby a person moves from a point of almost complete concealment of homosexuality to one of self-recognition or external proc­lamation of a homosexual identity. Per­haps the most comprehensive statement of this process is by Gary J. McDonald: "As a developmental process through which gay persons become aware of their affectional and sexual preferences and choose to integrate this knowledge into their personal and social lives, coming out in­volves adopting a nontraditional identity, restructuring one's self-concept, reorgan­izing one's personal sense of history, and altering one's relations with others and with society ... all of which reflects a complex series of cognitive and affective transformations as well as changes in behavior."
Most coming out models propose a linear series of developmental stages based on a particular theoretical perspec­tive (e.g., Erikson, Piaget, Goffman). Ex­amples of such sequences include: pre-coming out, coming out, exploration, first relationships, integration (Coleman); sen­sitization, signification-disorientation/ dissociation, coming out, commitment (Plummer, Troiden); identity confusion, identity comparison, identity tolerance, identity acceptance, identity pride, iden­tity synthesis (Cass).
Unresolved issues include the linearity of the process within the life of an individual (including backsliding and changes in the sequence of stages) and individual differences in the timing of the process, including absolute time in terms of age at reaching various set points and relative time in terms of how long the process takes.
There is some evidence that coming out is occurring earlier and that the process is becoming more compact with each new cohort of gays and lesbians, especially in urban, collegiate, and media-saturated communities. It is no longer rare for the coming out process to begin shortly after puberty and be essentially completed byjhe end of adolescence. This is attribut­able in large part to the recent visibility of gay and lesbian topics in many parts of the world.
Significant Milestones. The coming out milestones often have great significance to the individual. Many re­member, and even celebrate, the anniver­sary of their coming out. Books devoted primarily to coming out stories document and highlight the pain, the indecision, and sometimes the violence, isolation and alienation that often accompany the coming out process. For many, however, the process is not particularly noteworthy or painful. Education, supportive friends and family, youth, gender atypicality, and a history of some homosexual but no heterosexual experiences have been cited as "facilitating factors," but few if any of these have been systematically investi­gated.
The self-help literature for gay and lesbian youth is quite explicit in des­ignating parents as the crucial factor in the youth's coming out process. Those who do not come out to their family, according to G. B. MacDonald, become "half-members of the family unit: afraid and alienated, unable ever to be totally open and sponta­neous, to trust or be trusted.... This sad stunting of human potential breeds stress for gay people and their families alike - stress characterized by secrecy, ignorance, helplessness, and distance." The scientific literature, however, has largely ignored the role of parents, having centered on gay and lesbian adults.
Obstacles and Difficulties. Many defenses are used by individuals to check the seemingly inevitable process, includ­ing rationalization ("I was drunk"), relega­tion to insignificance ("I only did it as a favor for a friend"), compartmentalization ("I get turned on by boys but that doesn't make me a queer"), withdrawal to celibacy or asexuality ("I'm saving myself until I get married"), and denial ("I can't be les­bian because I date boys"). Repression of same-sex desires may lead to future feel­ings of panic or major disruptions of estab­lished coping strategies. It may be difficult for a person going through early phases to request assistance in coping with inner turmoil because consciously there is no problem, and the issues are so nebulous and intensely personal that they consti­tute an existential crisis. It is not easy to recognize that social standards of behav­ior, attitudes, and expectations for the future that normally accompany a hetero­sexual identity are not relevant to one's own life. Passing as heterosexual has its own costs: loss of personal authenticity, feelings of hypocrisy, constant fear of being discovered, and generalized anxiety.
A positive outcome may provide identity integration, a lessening of feelings of guilt and loneliness, a fusing of sexual­ity and emotionality (such as taking a lover), and a sense of support from the surrounding gay or lesbian community.
The existence of a coming out process is usually attributed to a homo­phobic environment in which one must take a stance against the perceived social consensus in order to assert one's own preferences, attractions, feelings and incli­nations. In this view, full social accep­tance of homosexuality as a natural and common variation on a sexual theme would end most of the emotional difficulties as well as the sense of fateful significance of what is otherwise described as coming out.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Vivienne C. Cass, "Homosexual Identity Formation: A Theoretical Model," Journal of Homo­sexuality, 4 (1979), 219-35; Eli Coleman, "Developmental States of the Coming Out Process," Journal of Homosexual­ity, 7 (1982), 31^*3, G. B. MacDonald, "Exploring Sexual Identity: Gay People and Their Families," Sex Education Coalition News, 5 (1983); Gary J. McDonald, "Individual Differences in the Coming Out Process for Gay Men: Implications for Theoretical Models," Journal of Homosexuality 8 (1982), 47-60; Julia P. Stanley and Susan J. Wolfe, eds., The Coming Out Stories, New York: Persephone, 1980; Richard R. Troiden, "Becoming Homosexual: A Model of Gay Identity Acquisition," Psychiatry, 42 (1979), 362-73. Ritch Savin-Williams (with additional matetial by Stephen Donaldson)

Common Law
Common law is the designation for a system of law that relies on long-established custom and the evolving pat­tern of precedent established by court decisions. The law common to the whole realm - so termed originally to distinguish it from local custom - began in medieval England, and spread overseas with British colonization. Today, with various national modifications, the common law tradition characterizes most English-speaking na­tions, including the United States, and sets them apart from the so-called civil law countries (including Scotland), which derive their legal tradition from the Ro­man law codified by Justinian, then fur­ther refined by medieval jurists and com­mentators. A maj or feature of the common law is the role of jurisprudence, that is to say, of decisions rendered by the courts that enlarge or reduce the scope of existing laws or prior decisions and are then fol­lowed by other courts, so that they enter the body of law quite apart from the action of any executive or legislative authority. In other legal systems the courts either do not exercise this role or are formally de­nied the right to contravene the will of the legislature by altering an existing law or finding it unconstitutional.
The Medieval Background. The first mention of criminal punishment for homosexual behavior in the English com­mon law tradition occurs in a somewhat eccentric treatise known as Fleta (ca. 1290), composed by an anonymous jurist at the court of Edward I. This text prescribes that sodomites (along with those who have sexual commerce with Jews and those guilty of bestiality) are to be buried alive. This mode of execution, which does not seem to have been adopted, is probably a reminiscence of a passage in Tacitus, which states that among the ancient Germans effeminate cowards were drowned in bogs. As this example suggests, early thinking was a mixture of learned and folkloric elements, grounded in Christian fear of otherness. The treatise known as Britton (perhaps by John Le Breton), which is only a few years later than Fleta, seems to have had more authority. Here sodomites are to be burned. Although there is little indica­tion of enforcement of this punishment in England from this period, executions are known to have been carried out on the continent, where their sanction derived from an enactment of Justinian and served to link sodomites to heretics, who were also burned. As in the case of heretics, church officials and courts were charged with finding sodomites, who were then handed over to the secular arm for punish­ment. However, the king's court had the power of acting independently, and thus sodomy was a crime which partook of both canon (ecclesiastical) and common law.
From the Renaissance through the Eighteenth Century. In 1533, in keep­ing with a wave of antisodomy legislation on the European continent, Parliament enacted a felony statute against the "de­testable and abominable vice of buggery," providing for the penalty of death (25 Henry Vm c. 6). Reenacted under Elizabeth I and made perpetual, this act, which became the charter for all subsequent criminaliza­tion in the English-speaking world, secu­larized the crime, removing it from church jurisdiction and even denying benefit of clergy to the culprits. The language re­curred somewhat later in statutes from the southern colonies in North America, though the more northerly ones, many of them under dissenter auspices, preferred to reinforce the wording with biblical language. In England only a few execu­tions, and these by hanging, not burning at the stake, are known from the following two centuries, and Englishmen seemed content to discuss the matter as little as possible, a position taken as late as the Commentaries (1765-69) of William Blackstone, which says that the crime is "not to be named among Christians." However, a series of polemical pamphlets, snt-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-weight: normal;" lang="EN-US">seems to have had more authority. Here sodomites are to be burned. Although there is little indica­tion of enforcement of this punishment in England from this period, executions are known to have been carried out on the continent, where their sanction derived from an enactment of Justinian and served to link sodomites to heretics, who were also burned. As in the case of heretics, church officials and courts were charged with finding sodomites, who were then handed over to the secular arm for punish­ment. However, the king's court had the power of acting independently, and thus sodomy was a crime which partook of both canon (ecclesiastical) and common law.
From the Renaissance through the Eighteenth Century. In 1533, in keep­ing with a wave of antisodomy legislation on the European continent, Parliament enacted a felony statute against the "de­testable and abominable vice of buggery," providing for the penalty of death (25 Henry Vm c. 6). Reenacted under Elizabeth I and made perpetual, this act, which became the charter for all subsequent criminaliza­tion in the English-speaking world, secu­larized the crime, removing it from church jurisdiction and even denying benefit of clergy to the culprits. The language re­curred somewhat later in statutes from the southern colonies in North America, though the more northerly ones, many of them under dissenter auspices, preferred to reinforce the wording with biblical language. In England only a few execu­tions, and these by hanging, not burning at the stake, are known from the following two centuries, and Englishmen seemed content to discuss the matter as little as possible, a position taken as late as the Commentaries (1765-69) of William Blackstone, which says that the crime is "not to be named among Christians." However, a series of polemical pamphlets, such as John Dunton's The He-Strumpets (1707) and the anonymous Satan's Harvest Home (1749), began to stir up public opinion against the homosexual subculture that flourished in the British metropolis.
Modem Times. At the end of the eighteenth century, and into the second decade of the nineteenth, a number of executions took place, probably linked to the national malaise caused by the uncer­tain fortunes of the Napoleonic wars. By 1828 a series of decisions had limited the definition of the offense and imposed a greater burden of proof on the prosecution, but was offset by a new version of the statute enacted as part of the reform of the criminal law by Sir Robert Peel, prescrib­ing that penetration alone (without emis­sion of seed) sufficed to establish the crime. The death penalty for buggery (-anal inter­course) was not formally abolished until 1861 in England and Wales.
The reception of the common law in the newly independent United States meant that British precedent could be fol­lowed by American courts in their inter­pretation of existing laws, but did not bind them. Hence the individual states came to have their own definitions of the crime and penalties for it. Some ratified a British decision of 1817 that removed oral-genital sexuality from the definition of buggery, but others rejected it.
Then in 1885, in response to a wave of sensationalism in the press con­cerning the prostitution of teen-aged girls, Parliament adopted the Criminal Law Amendment Act. This contained an amendment devised by Henry Labouchere that prescribed a penalty of two years for "gross indecency" between male persons. Oscar Wilde was punished under this act, and the notoriety of the case, and the general hostility to homosexuals, blocked legal reform for decades throughout the English-speaking world. Further, many American states enacted their own ver­sions of the amendment that made homo­sexual acts between males, and sometimes between females, criminal in a loosely defined manner, although the courts could later give more precision to the statute. By and large, courts in the common law tradi­tion did not go beyond holding that "any penetration, however slight" was "suffi­cient to constitute the offense." This dif­fered from the ruling of German courts that any "beischlafsahnliche Handlung" (act similar to coitus, such as full contact between two male bodies) was criminal under Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code of the German Empire.
In 1957, however, the Wolfenden Report urged decriminalization, which was accomplished, for England and Wales, ten years later, although the age of consent was set at 21, far above the one prescribed by tradition for heterosexual intercourse. In Scotland, Northern Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand legal reform occurred subsequently. The United States and Australia are a legal checkerboard, with some states reformed and others retaining the archaic legislation.
See also Canon Law,- Capital Crime, Homosexuality as; Law: United States; Sixteenth-Century Legislation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. H. Montgomery Hyde, The Love That Dared Mot Speak Its Name, Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.
William A. Percy

Communications
In the broadest sense communi­cation refers to all acts and processes of signaling from one sentient being to an­other. In the narrower sense, with which this article is concerned, communications embraces all aspects of human technologi­cal enhancement of information convey­ance - beyond speaking, gesture, and writ­ing. Inherent in these enhancements is the potential to reach mass audiences, far bigger than the hundreds, say, that a Demosthenes or Cicero was able to reach.
Print Media. It is generally agreed that the first step in this momentous development was the spread of printing from Germany in the middle years of the fifteenth century. This invention made it possible for written texts to come out of the monasteries and universities and reach middle-class audiences. Early on the au­thorities recognized the potential for cir­culation of heretical or seditious material; hence the apparatus of censorship set up throughout Europe. These restrictions could never be absolutely effective, and various stratagems of clandestine publica­tion appeared. These methods were devel­oped in the first instance by religious dissenters who smuggled their wares across hostile frontiers. In due course publishers appeared who were prepared to print and distribute erotic materials, but always with precautions to avoid detection. For ex­ample, the Alcibiade fancivllo a scola (1652?), an anonymous defense of ped­erasty now attributed to Antonio Rocco, was ostensibly printed by one "Iuann Wart" at "Oranges." Actually, it seems to have been printed at Venice where, despite the famous tolerance of that city, the pub-lisher (whose name remains unknown) judged it wise to be cautious. The device of using false imprints became common; many books claim to be printed in Holland or by "Pierre Marteau" (and in fact some were, since that country was more liberal than most). In any event, these practices eventually gave rise to the existence of private presses, such as those of Carrington and the Olympia Press, based in Paris at the turn of the century and after World War II respectively. In the 1970s new methods of typesetting and printing per­mitted the emergence of a proliferation of small presses, some of which are gay and lesbian. The emergence of "desktop" publishing means that no author with a little money to spare need forgo the chance to publish a book.
Newer Technologies. Books, newspapers, and other printed matter still belong to the "Gutenberg galaxy" that emerged in the fifteenth century. Yet a whole series of new ways of communi­cations appeared in the wake of the industrial revolution. Because of speed in transmission, the telegraph transformed journalism and international relations, but because the material transmitted was strictly controlled at each end, there was virtually no opportunity for clandestine use. After its appearance in the early twen­tieth century, radio quickly fell under the control of the state, with many countries reserving all rights of transmission to the government. In the 1970s, however, a se­ries of constitutional decisions in Belgium, France, and Italy, struck down the state monopoly and opened the airways in those countries to a free-for-all. The opportunity was seized by many groups, including those conventionally regarded as "socially margi­nalized." Many of the new counterculture stations took on gay programming, and in Paris 24-hour broadcasting began on Fréquence Gaie. In North America some gay and lesbian programming has occurred, especially on the stations of the Pacifica network, but its status is precarious. Undoubtedly some "ham operators" have ventured cautiously into the gay realm, but the extent of such excursions is almost impossible to monitor. In the 1970s con­siderable attention was given to the color­ful CB radio transmissions of long-dis­tance truckers, where the presence of homosexuals ("three-legged beavers") on the road was apparently mentioned fairly often. Although commercial and public radio has survived, it has come to be re­stricted to an increasingly smaller share of the total communications pie, and this seems to be a sector that does not lend itself to a major gay presence. In fact in the United States the Federal Communica­tions Commission has intervened more than once to warn stations about material deemed to be sexually explicit.
Films underwent a trajectory that is well known. First regarded as indecent, they came to acquire middle-class respecta­bility in the 1920s - though only at the cost of self-regulation. During the period of Hollywood self-censorship, male homo­sexuals were shown only in veiled terms, as in the "sissy" stereotype. Homosexual and lesbian performers had to keep their inclinations strictly in the closet, as audi­ences expected to empathize with them as red-blooded heterosexual lovers. With the spread of gay liberation in the 1970s, homosexual interest groups were able to exercise leverage to reduce the prevalence of sexual stereotyping; even a few major films presenting favorable views of gay relationships were made. For much of its short life, television has been even more restrictive, though here, too, gay leaders and pressure groups have been able to combat stereotypes. In a few American cities cable television has permitted gay programming, in part as a response to public access legislation.
Special-Audience Applications. In communications, a general rule is that the larger the audience, the greater the filtration of the content. The other side of this principle is seen in works intended for small audiences - as the private-press book trade, with its expensive, under-the-counter editions, undoubtedly was. Al­most as old as the cinema itself are porno movies, which were generally shown clan­destinely until the 1960s, when Andy Warhol and others achieved a breakthrough to public acceptance. By the 1980s, when a repertoire of hundreds of gay-male ex­amples had been built up, these films became widely available on VCR, where they are enjoyed by adults in the home. Such taped films are sold by mail, in porno bookstores, and also sometimes in special sections of general video stores.
The availability of mail-order items is noted in the advertisements in the gay press. Arising out of the "underground press" of the hippie 1960s, there are now hundreds of gay and lesbian papers world­wide. In North America these papers are, in many instances, given away free in bars so that they reach a wide segment of the socially active gay population. Most of the papers contain "personal" columns, with advertisements in which readers can learn of others who share their sexual tastes.
To some extent this function of meeting has been taken over by personal computers linked by modems. A number of services make available gay lines which, however, are more commonly used for chatting than for making sexual assigna­tions. As such they are a great boon for those living in remote areas or who are otherwise social isolates. In France com­puter dating is even facilitated by a gov­ernment-sponsored service, the Minitel. Activists have also found that the word-processing functions of computers facilitate letter-writing campaigns to pro­test bigoted or demeaning treatment in the major media.
The 1980s saw a fashion for re­ceiving recorded sexual messages by tele­phone, which was partly fostered by fears of actual sexual contact engendered by the AIDS crisis. In the United States the phone sex user dials a 976-prefix number and listens to a brief "canned" message. Pre­cisely because it is not communication in the sense of one person talking to others, the future of this custom would appear to be limited. The telephone had been, of course, the one electronic channel open during the times of oppression, when it served as a "grapevine." Today it is used by some activist groups to form a telephone tree allowing the group to mobilize its members quickly for a demonstration.
As indicated, the tendency to­ward "massification," with its pressures toward conformity and potential for cen­tralized censorship, is inimical to minor­ity expression in communications. The microchip age, however, has seen major countertrends toward diversification and fragmentation, witness cable TV, satellite transmissions, VCRs, and desktop pub­lishing (typically of books, but also of tapes). These changes would seem to bode well for richer andmore varied communication to serve the special needs of gay men and lesbians.
Wayne R. Dynes

Community
Debate over the existence of "gay community" stems in part from the lack of consensus about what a "community" is, and in part from a separate standard for "gay community" in contrast to other kinds of urban communities. North American gay (male) communities fit all the criteria suggested by sociologists to define "community" as well as or better than urban ethnic communities do, and lesbian communities exhibit the same features, albeit to a lesser extent.
Territory. The first, common-sense component of "community" is terri­tory. The mythical "traditional" rural village is supposed to have been geographi­cally distinct, internally homogeneous and harmonious, and without important ex­ternal influences. Yet nowhere are rural villages entirely isolated from each other. Demands for taxes, soldiers, and labor are levied from outside, and even in extremely mountainous regions, there are usually some persons oriented beyond the imme­diate locale to larger entities. Internai variability and conflict are more common than anthropologists once supposed.
To make communities out of geographical aggregates, people must ex­perience spatial boundaries as important, and differences which occur as dividing kinds of people. That is, geography must be supplemented by endogamy, restric­tion of trade, local cults, and other such social creations to make socially salient boundaries. Isolation and propinquity alone do not automatically produce solidarity, while seemingly trivial commonalities (such as living in a gray housing project rather than a green one) may come to symbolize distinction salient to collective action.
There are no walled-in ghettoes in North American cities, nor checkpoints to prevent the flow of persons between perfectly segregated areas. Thus, one can travel from a predominantly Italian terri­tory to a predominantly Chinese one to a predominantly gay one to a predominantly black one in San Francisco. None of these areas is inhabited exclusively by Italians, Chinese, gays, or blacks; yet residents of a city are able to report where such commu­nities are - at least to report where the centers are, the boundaries often being fuzzily conceived.
Community Institutions. There may be several neighborhoods with les­bian and/or gay residential concentrations in a large city. Clustering of recreational facilities, particularly nocturnal ones, such as bars, foster in-group perception of a gay or lesbian territory. The existence of dis­tinctive institutions is more salient to identification of a community - both for insiders and outsiders - than residential segregation or concentration. Over the course of the 1970s, gay men in European and North American cities developed a fairly complete set of basic social services beyond gay bars. These included book­stores, churches, travel agencies, periodi­cals, political clubs, charities, a savings and loan, and whole Gay Yellow Pages directories listing gay businesses and serv­ices.
Gay Endogamy. In contrast to relatively impoverished immigrants speak­ing an alien language, whom sociologists expect to form distinct (ethnic) institu­tions, gay men were relatively integrated into a full range of occupations, and mostly had native command of the official lan­guage before the gay institutional elabora­tion began. Most gay persons could and did "pass." They chose to interact with their "own kind," rather than being restricted to those who spoke the same language. Given a previous homosexual exogamy (a preference for straight "trade" rather than for "sisters," or for boys rather than adults, as sexual partners), sexual endogamy (self-identified gay men coupling with other self-identified gay men) was crucial to the formation of gay pride, consciousness, and collective action. Lesbians may be rela­tively less affluent than gay men, but, like gay men, lesbians of all strata patronize distinctively lesbian/gay facilities, are likely to be in lesbian networks, and tend to endogamy in choosing sexual partners and to homosociality in choosing friends.
The Role of Stigma. Not every­one engaged in recurrent homosexual behavior chooses to recognize a sexual orientation as defining their identity or as providing a criterion for friendship and non-sexual interaction. Gay consciousness is no more automatic than class conscious­ness or ethnic consciousness. Some indi­viduals fight the expectation to be part of any such "us," while others eagerly seek a sense of community. Consciousness of kind is not innate, but emerges. This is true of ethnic consciousness as much as of gay consciousness. Stigmas inhibit identi­fication, but when a critical mass develops to challenge the stigma, either by pro­claiming "We are not like that," or "The ways we are different are fine, or even valuable," societal stigmas become badges of honor and stimuli to collective organi­zation and action challenging discrimina­tion and affirming the value of the group's stigmatized characteristics. For lesbians and for gay men, challenging societal valu­ations may be more difficult than it is for some ethnic communities to affirm the value of their lifeways. However, there is also considerable ambivalence to the lifeways of previous generations within ethnic communities. In a pluralistic soci­ety, ethnic identification is an achieved status, not automatically and irrevocably established at birth or in primary sociali­zation.
Expectations of others "that you are like us" and should therefore behave in certain ways, and societal definitions used by opportunistic politicians either to ad­vance minorities or to organize against them, help to crystallize identification with a group, so that people defined categori­cally come to see themselves as having a common history and destiny distinct from others. Advocates and adversaries both foster collective identification, which is a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite to collective action. Gay leaders have pressed economic boycotts, political coor­dination, and mass demonstrations. Anti-gay leaders have promoted legal discrimi­nation and harassment, as well as crimi­nalization of homosexual behavior. In response to police raids and the legal ac­ceptance of assassinating one gay leader (Harvey Milk), there have also been gay riots. Nonetheless, it bears stressing that even those who have the feeling of being part of a group may still not join in collec­tive action. Collective action is rarely - if ever - characteristic of any population.
Sporadic action by a self-selected vanguard is more common for class-based or ethnic-based groups, as well as for lesbians or gays.
See also Geography, Social; Sub­culture, Gay.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Joseph R. Gusfield, Community, Oxford: Blackwell, 1975; Stephen O. Murray, "The Institutional Elaboration of a Quasi-Ethnic Community," International Review of Modem Sociology, 9 (1979), 165-77.
Stephen O. Murray

Consciousness Raising
This expression gained wide cir­culation in the 1970s to designate the practice of forming small groups of per­sons (usually from five to ten) to work collectively to increase their members' awareness of the political and ideological significance of their actions. The con­sciousness-raising (CR) trend, often ac­companied by the slogan "The personal is the political," seems to have first emerged in the Women's Movement in the late 1960s, whence it migrated (with much else) to gay liberation circles.
The expression, which has been traced to Chinese Communist (Maoist) usage in the 1930s, reflects the Marxist contrast between true consciousness of one's situation and powers versus "false consciousness," a set of obfuscatory be­liefs fostered among oppressed groups in order to preserve ruling-class interests. Only when the oppressed discard the blink­ers of false consciousness, the theory goes, will they be in a position to wage a success­ful struggle for their rights. This discard­ing, and the complementary advance to higher levels of group awareness, consti­tute the "work" of consciousness raising.
In the gay movement, the forma­tion of consciousness-raising groups was often promoted as a means to an end: a phase of strengthening and toughening in a supportive atmosphere of comradeship in preparation for more active interven­tion in the struggle. Yet under the influ­ence of pop-psychology trends, such as "sensitivity training," gay groups of this kind often became an end in themselves, to all intents and purposes serving as har­bingers of the self-absorption of the "me generation." In the self-improving middle classes, the period saw a shift in fashion from individual therapy to group therapy, a model which the consciousness raising groups all too easily adopted - the diffi­culty being that the new psychotherapy (like the old) fostered adjustment to the prevailing mores of society, while the gay/ lesbian groups fitted their members for participation in a heterodox, dissident movement. By the end of the 1970s the CR vogue, part of the period's general enthusi­asm for "doing things collectively," was effectively spent.
Whatever the weaknesses of consciousness raising in practice, it did address a pervasive problem in modern society, that of social atomization which frustrates the aspiration for solidarity with like-minded others. Modern consumer society engenders social isolation, and this can only be combatted by forming inter­mediate structures of group affinity. More­over, homosexuals tend to meet only for sexual purposes: the consciousness-rais­ing groups, together with coffee houses and community centers, were a laudable attempt to create an alternative. The con­sciousness-raising process served to spread the new ideology of the insurgent gay movement to broad circles of individuals who until then had been exposed only to the hostile indoctrination of the mass media; it initiated them into the beliefs and mores of the political community they were joining, following the original model of consciousness raising which in its homeland had functioned to incorporate the peasant masses into the fighting force whose victory founded the People's Re­public of China. Historical hindsight, of course, reveals pitilessly the romantic il­lusions of such attempts at replaying a revolution, and once this incongruity was perceived, consciousness raising as such was doomed.

Consent
Consent is broadly defined as "voluntary agreement to or acquiescence in what another proposes or desires." For the purpose of this article, however, it will to be taken to mean "willingness to engage in sexual activity with a partner of the same sex." Consent to a course of action does not imply a mature understanding of the consequences of that course of action, but merely a willingness that it should take place. Homosexual offenses are clas­sified as consensual or non-consensual. The legal application of this distinction is not as clearcut as it would at first seem. The law is not obliged to recognize con­sent as a defense (for example, in incest cases); moreover, when it does, the per­sons must be over a certain age.
Homosexual behavior is criminal when it occurs without the consent of the other party. Rape is by definition non­consensual and so always satisfies this condition, as does indecent assault except in some cases involving minors; buggery (anal intercourse) may fall under this head­ing.
Homosexual behavior is criminal with a person under the age of consent, a demarcation which varies considerably from one jurisdiction to another, and may be higher than the age of consent for heterosexual intercourse. Likewise homosexual behavior is criminal if included in a cate­gory of sexual behavior that is globally prohibited, such as incest or intercourse with a mental defective. Finally, homo­sexual acts committed in public or in a place of public resort are criminal even with the consent of both partners.
That no one, even a hustler or a prostitute, should be compelled to engage in sexual activity against his or her will is a sound and unchallenged principle of law. The borderline cases are those is which consent was given grudgingly or promises or enticements were utilized to secure the consent at first withheld. The legislator has directed the concern of the law mainly to adolescents thought to be in need of protection ("corrupting the morals of a minor"). In some jurisdictions the adult who engages a minor for homosexual pros­titution is subject to prosecution, even if the consensual act was not in and of itself a crime.
In some jurisdictions (approxi­mately half of the United States, and sev­eral Australian states) all male homosex­ual acts are illegal; in these areas consent is no defense, since the behavior is crimi­nal under all circumstances, whether committed in public or in private.
The issue of consent arose when the first proposals were made to abolish the laws criminalizing sodomy and other homosexual offenses. One of the argu­ments for repeal was that when the part­ners to a sexual act consent to its perform­ance, no wrong is committed which the state would have an interest in redressing. Only intrusive enforcement practices - prying and entrapment - can hope to ferret out such offenses. The opponents of re­form argued that society has an interest in enforcing its moral code, even if the au­thorities seldom learn of consensual sex­ual activity. A further argument was that there is such a thing as public consent, which differs from the consent of private individuals to relationships between them. In this view consent cannot legitimate behavior which public opinion regards as morally wrong and injurious to the best interests of society. On the other hand, a pluralistic society that recognizes the moral autonomy of the individual as a cardinal principle does not have the right to impose the moral standards of one part of the community upon another which flatly rejects them.
In all legal systems rape, that is, sexual gratification obtained with the use of force or of threats against the non-con­senting party, is a criminal offense. (At present, however, some states do not rec­ognize male rape as a statutory offense.) The issue of the age at which an individual can give valid consent to a sexual act is a disputed one, and in the course of decrimi­nalizing homosexual behavior between adults some jurisdictions set a higher age of consent for homosexual activity than for heterosexual. Equal justice would re­quire that the age of consent, and the other conditions establishing consent, be the same for both classes of acts.
Warren Johansson

Conservatism
Setting aside significant national differences and viewing the phenomenon as a whole, the political philosophy known as conservatism has several main features. First, there is a belief in the natural hierar­chy of society which must be defended against the onslaughts of egalitarianism and demagogic populism. Then conserva­tives display a strong attachment to the time-honored, traditional elements of civilization, together with an abhorrence of sudden revolutionary change and social "experimentation." This reverence for tradition marks the sexual sphere in par­ticular, where the norm is lifelong mo­nogamous heterosexual marriage - the antithesis of the "gay lifestyle" with its tolerance of casual unions that can be terminated at the wish of either party. Many conservatives, though not all, look to organized religion and its moral codes as a bulwark against unwanted social shifts. The final hallmark of the conservative mentality is an idealization of the past as contrasted to the "decadent" and "cor­rupt" present, with the recurrent, even obsessive notion that homosexuality is increasing and that "something has to be done" to stop the spread of the vice before it leads to the moral ruin of society, if not to outright race suicide. This attitude is documented over so many centuries and in so many countries that it is a virtual cliche of conservative lament over the loss of the righteousness and innocence of for­mer times.
Homosexuality and conservatism would therefore seem totally antithetical. Stereotypically, conservatives are viewed as the chief reservoir of antihomosexual bigotry and the most determined oppo­nents of gay rights. However, antihomo­sexual attitudes have been common - and even fostered by the regime - in such Marx­ist, state-socialist societies as the USSR, the People's Republic of China, and Cuba. Moreover, as a result of centuries of virtu­ally unchecked virulence, antigay views are widely diffused in many industrial countries; they have been documented, for example, among liberal writers in North America. Nor are antihomosexual motifs necessarily to be traced ultimately to conservative ideologies; the religious circles in ancient Iran and Israel that de­veloped the most potent early forms of homophobia might justly have been re­garded as progressive in their day.
Historically, conservatism has even favored some forms of homosexual expression. In ancient Greece the institu­tion of initiatory pederasty was an instru­ment of the aristocracy in training neo­phytes to uphold its values. Adolf Brand's German gay periodical Dei Eigene (1896-1930) printed articles with an ideal­ized vision of the erotic relationship be­tween knight and page in medieval Euro­pean society. Tokugawa Japan shows a similar phenomenon among the samurai - the feudal warrior class. And in some tra­ditional Third World countries, like Af­ghanistan, tribal leaders have clung to pédérastie customs, while fiercely resist­ing the incursions of Western liberalism and Soviet Communism alike.
In the United States and similar countries conservatives tend to fall into two main groups. The first is a traditional command conservatism which favors the deployment of state power, including the military establishment, to achieve policy aims. The second adheres to laissez-faire or libertarian ideas, and proposes a reduc­tion in the role of government and greater reliance on the working of private initia­tive and the free market. Conservative parties are aware of the tension that di­vides the traditionalists and the libertari­ans in their ranks. It is the second group, which has shown some receptivity to the idea of excluding the state from the bed­room, that has had some affinity for homosexuals. Gay Republicans are gener­ally of this second stripe.
In Britain the Conservative Group for Gay Equality argues that legislation is needed to end the second-class citizenship of homosexuals. As ordinary citizens and taxpayers - the group's chair Peter Campbell notes - "they contribute to society by work and voluntary efforts in the same ways as heterosexuals, and are no more likely than heterosexuals to commit crimes against persons, property, and the public interest."
The far right has had little attrac­tion for homosexuals. In France a few gay men have indicated qualified support for the neo-fascist party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front. Other French homo­sexuals have formed a conservative group of their own, Gaie France, which favors the cultivation of "Indo-European" val­ues. Such ideas seem to enjoy little inter­national currency.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert Bauman, The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative, New York: Arbor House, 1986.
Wayne R. Dynes

Constitutional Homosexuality
The question of whether homo­sexual conduct is the result of inborn or constitutional factors, on the one hand, or is the product of environmental influences, on the other, is part of the larger nature-nurture debate. While animal behavior is essentially the result of genetic and hereditary mechanisms, human beings are subject to a vast amount of cultural conditioning, representing a layer, stand­ing over and above the biological substra­tum, though not necessarily in conflict with it. Regardless of which solution one chooses, the constitutional-biological or the environmental, the etiology of homo­sexual behavior remains a conundrum. Adopting the first perspective (the consti­tutional), one has to explain how nature would continue to replicate, generation after generation, a trait that does not con­tribute to procreative fitness and, to the extent that an individual is exclusively homosexual, is not genetically transmit­ted at all. Yet if environment, through cultural conditioning, is king, one may still ask why homosexuals exist, since the glorification of heterosexuality and love of offspring is an ever present drumbeat in all societies. To be sure, human psychosexual development is probably the result of the interaction of innate and environmental factors, but the problem of explaining their deployment, separately and conjointly, remains.
The prestige of Darwinian evolu­tion in the later nineteenth century, to­gether with growing understanding of the actual mechanisms of heredity, gave con­stitutional ("congenital") theories great appeal during this period. Magnus Hirschf eld, whose conclusions were based on the study of thousands of individuals, was a firm believer in the idea that sexual orientation is innate. In support of this view he pointed out that many individuals manifest marked homosexual tendencies before puberty (when they are unaware of any peers), that they maintain them with the greatest tenacity against all internal and external pressures for change, and that they insist that their sexual interests bond with the inmost core of their being. He also held that homosexuals are found in families in greater numbers than chance would suggest, and that same-sex behav­ior occurs in an astonishing range of human societies, past and present. Nonetheless, Hirschfeld and his colleagues were unable to suggest any transcendent biological reason for the recurrence of this trait in one generation after another. The belief that homosexuality is in some sense in­nate nonetheless provided a political argu­ment for toleration and decriminalization: individuals whose behavior is not the re­sult of choice should not be subjected to coercive procedures aimed at changing that which cannot be changed.
Sigmund Freud's theory of psychodynamic development postulates a common origin for both sexual orienta­tions in the polymorphous perverse stage, though heterosexual development repre­sents the outcome of full maturity, homo­sexuality being an arrested or retarded pattern. This theory, which was widely diffused after World War I, has sometimes been misunderstood as one of "universal bisexuality." While it has the seeming advantage of combining constitutional and environmental factors, it still leaves unex­plained why there should be a homosexual component at any stage, or why homosex­ual subjects exhibit such a range of adult personality types.
The rise of Nazism, which preached racial determinism in theory and embraced a coercive form of population control in practice, served to discredit all theories of constitutional-biological con­ditioning. In the case of homosexuality, the dominance of environmentalism lead to a search for all sorts of putative factors, from the "close-binding mother" to a notion that society itself is somehow an­tiheterosexual. A study produced by the Kinsey Institute of Indiana University (Sexual Preference, Bloomington, 1971) examined the various environmental theo­ries and found them all wanting, opting for an (unspecified) biological solution through a process of elimination.
In the 1950s evidence became available that identical twins raised apart showed a remarkable correlation for sex­ual orientation, though these data have been largely ignored. Only the controver­sial discipline of sociobiology has produced a tentative reconstruction of a biological rationale for homosexuality. The sociobiologists hypothesize that homosexuality contributes to the "inclusive fitness" of a gene pool, by permitting a childless, but energetic individual to devote efforts to the advancement of his or her nieces and nephews. While sociobiology has achieved considerable success in animal studies, its applicability to human beings is hotly contested, and the future of such explana­tions remains in doubt.
As a final element of caution, it should be recognized that the possible isolation of a body of individuals whose homosexual behavior, exclusive or not, is essentially conditioned by biological-con­stitutional factors, does not preclude the existence of another body of individuals capable of homosexual response whose modalities are not so determined. That is to say, the range of behavior and character types among individuals of a predomi­nantly homosexual orientation is ex­tremely varied, and one of the elements of variation may be the fact that the larger pool subsumed under the rubric of homo­sexual represents a confluence of "innate" and environmentally produced streams.
Ward Houser

Contagion
The notion of contagion as ap­plied to disease originated only in the Middle Ages, when it was associated with plague and leprosy - both objects of in­tense dread. Almost from the beginning, however, the notion of moral contamina­tion became attached to the word in the modern languages, so that it could be applied to deviant practices or heretical beliefs that threatened to "infect" society.
Hence the emergence of the medi­cal concept of sexual inversion or homo­sexuality led to the belief that same-sex conduct could manifest an "infectious disease" and that the "innate homosex­ual" was a source of contagion who could "spread his perversion" to previously healthy heterosexuals. The term "moral leprosy" (from medieval Latin lepra moralis) applied to homosexuality appears at the beginning of the twentieth century, signaling the rise in homophobic circles of a new mythology that to some extent counteracted the pleas then beginning to be heard for toleration of the "born in­vert."
Underlying the notion of the contagiousness of homosexuality is the macroevolutionary capacity of human beings for sexual response to members of their own sex - as distinct from an exclu­sive homosexual orientation which oc­curs in a small minority at most. Hence the peculiar fear that homosexual activity can "spread like wildfire" if the criminal and social sanctions against it are relaxed "for even a moment." This apprehension figures in much of the twentieth-century polemic (such as that in Nazi Germany) which calls for increased penalties for homosexual conduct in order to forestall so rapid a spread of non-procreative sexu­ality as to raise the specter of race suicide. The widespread if transient homosexual­ity of adolescence also contributes to this delusion, usually fortified by the claim that unsuspecting adolescents are seduced by the adult homosexual and then "fixated in a lifelong pattern" of exclusive orienta­tion to their own sex. There is also the accusation that homosexuals, since they cannot reproduce, must ceaselessly prose­lytize for their aberrant lifestyle.
Obviously there is no virus or germ that can account for homosexual response, and a pattern of exclusive homo­sexual activity that is inborn or acquired in early childhood could hardly be spread to other adults by mere contact, yet the belief that homosexuality is a contagious disease serves to reinforce patterns of legal discrimination and ostracism, all the more as it cannot be proven that the average member of the population is incapable of homosexual activity, even if the prefer­ence for such gratification remains con­fined to a demonstrable minority. The alliance of moral condemnation with the late-nineteenth-century notion of homo­sexuality as disease has given the ambigu­ous notion of contagion a new lease on life and contributed to the persistence of homophobic attitudes which the gay movement has had to work patiently to dispel - thus far not with entire success. The recent association of homosexual activity with the spread of a pathological and usually fatal condition such as Ac­quired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) has the side-effect of reviving the paranoid aspect of this belief system in the unconscious depths of the mass mind.
Warren Johansson

Contest Literature
In Greek literature a subgenre - sometimes known under the rhetorical term syncrisis - developed in which two characters debate opposing points of view. Thus in Aristophanes' Frogs the charac­ters Aeschylus and Euripides argue the merits of their poetry, while his Clouds verbally pits Just Reasoning against Un­just Reasoning. In later Greek writing several pieces of contest literature appeared debating the relative merits of boys and women as love objects. Such a debate is featured in the novel Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius (perhaps second century a.d.). An anonymous specimen is the so-called Affairs of the Heart by pseudo-Lucian.
Together with much else in the Greek heritage, this tradition of arguing the merits of pederasty vs. the love of women passed to Islam, where the first known example seems to be by al-Jahiz of the ninth century. A more accessible in­stance occurs in the Arabian Nights (419th night arid following in the Burton transla­tion). In the mid-seventeenth century a specimen appeared in Japan, the Dembu monogatari (Story of a Boor), perhaps de­rived ultimately from an Islamic source.
In the medieval literature of Western Europe the boy-woman contest flourished, the most salient instance being the twelfth-century "Ganymede and He­len." In this medieval Latin poem, Helen offers herself to Ganymede only to find that he would rather assume the passive role with another man. A violent quarrel breaks out, to settle which they appoint Nature and Reason as arbiters. Traveling to "the world's eastern edge, the house of Nature," they argue their respective posi­tions before their judges, who are not exactly impartial. Ganymede praises love between man and boy, Helen champions the passion of man and woman. Although Ganymede makes several telling points, in the end he is vanquished by the argu­ment that intercourse between males is sterile, that it wastes potential human Uves. "The old heresy is abandoned by the gods," and the teaching of the church is vindicated. Parallels to this literary genre of debate were the public controversies between Jewish and Christian theologians that typically ended in a decision in favor of the church, and often in woe for the Jewish communities in the cities where the debates were staged.
After the church had imposed obligatory heterosexuality upon the popu­lation of Western Europe, all debate on the issue ceased, and it became impossible to defend male love publicly. But in cultures where a significant part of the male popu­lation is actively bisexual and intercourse with a boy is a viable social option, the choice is posed in life quite as much as in literature - and not always to Ganymede's disadvantage. With the gradual rehabilita­tion of the homosexual option in today's pluralistic world, the notion of victory in such a contest has become moot.
Wayne R. Dynes

Contrary Sexual Feeling
This expression is the English rendering of the overarching term adopted by the German physician Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833-1890) for the condi­tion that he had abstracted from two case histories under his observation, one of a lesbian, the other of a male transvestite. A colleague in classical philology suggested to him the expression die contiaize Sexualempfindung, which he then used in the title of an article published in Archiv fur Psychiatxie und Nervenkrankheiten in 1869 that is regarded as the first medical paper in modern times on what came to be designated as homosexuality. Westphal himself judged the condition inborn, a symptom of a neuropathic or psychopathic state, as an alienation from the feeling proper to the anatomical sex of the subject. He drew the forensic distinction between exclusive and occasional homosexuality, but his failure to separate the two psycho­logical entities that he had encountered was not corrected until fifty years later, when Havelock Ellis formulated the dif­ferential concept of eonism and Magnus Hirschfeld that of transvestism, the latter on the basis of 17 cases of heterosexual transvestism that he had isolated from the 7,000 homosexual case histories he had taken until that time.
The English abstractors and trans­lators of psychiatric literature from the Continent were never able to decide upon a uniform equivalent for the awkward German expression (in which the adjec­tive is, strictly speaking, a French word), but "contrary sexual feeling" or "contrary sexual instinct" does figure in the writing of some British and American alienists at the close of the nineteenth century. To the English-speaking lay public, of course, the word "contrary," like "perverse" conveyed a notion of the rebellious, refractory, and antithetical, though such connotations were not overtly recognized by specialists. In any event the expression was not des­tined to survive. As early as 1870 an American psychiatrist preparing an ab­stract of Westphal's article had used "inverted sexual feeling," and eight years later the Italian Arrigo Tamassia invented the far more satisfactory inversione dell'istintosessualein an article published in Rivista sperimentale di freniatria e medicina legale. With appropriate modifi­cations this term, simplified to sexual in­version, was adopted in all the Romance languages and in English as the medical designation for what journalistic style was later to dub homosexuality, a term in­vented by the apologist Karoly Maria Kertbeny in 1869 and taken up by Gustav Jaeger in the book Entdeckung der Seele in 1880. Since the last of these fitted per­fectly into the international nomencla­ture of Greek-Latin expressions and al­lowed for a triptych with bisexual and heterosexual, it drove the clumsy and eccentric coinages that had been proposed in earlier decades out of use. So "contrary sexual feeling" is the linguistic remnant of the first, uncertain psychiatric attempt to grapple with the problem of homosex­uality.
Warren Johansson

Counseling
The concept of counseling, as it was introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century, referred to the way students were helped to deal with prob­lems in the areas of study and choice of a professional career. The counselor gave information and advice, expecting the student to act accordingly.
Since then the meaning of the word "counseling" has changed consid­erably. It is now widely used in the sense of a more or less professional way of help­ing people with relatively uncomplicated emotional or social problems, by way of conversation (listening and talking). More complicated psycho-social problems, ne­cessitating an intrapsychic personality change or complex and difficult behav­ioral changes, are the realm of psycho­therapy.
Over the years counseling tech­niques have changed considerably as well, especially as a result of the work of Carl R. Rogers. In his view, people can, under the right circumstances, find the answers to their problems themselves. Instead of panied by aggressive feelings toward self and others (especially other homosexuals). Here the anti-homosexual attitude of the environment is reflected in what might be called an internalized homophobia.
In the second stage, the feelings are given a name, "Imust be gay," but they remain a secret. Characteristic of this period are feelings of anxiety and depres­sion. The following stage is one of experi­mentation and testing. The company of other homosexuals is sought, first sexual contacts are made, and the person involved "comes out" to one or more significant figures in his or her environment. At this stage, fear of rejection may play an impor­tant role. If all goes well, the fourth stage is reached in which homosexual feelings become an integral part of the personality, and a fitting and affirmative lifestyle evolves. The coming out is as complete as the circumstances permit.
Homosexual Identity. In Westem society a distinction is made between homosexual acts and homosexuality. Since exclusive erotic interest in the same or opposite sex prevails only for a minority of people, committing homosexual acts ap­parently does not always lead to a self-identification as a homosexual. This is particularly true in a number of non-western cultures. For the counselor, it is impor­tant to take into account that the category or "construction" of homosexuality is in fact a fluid one, taking different forms in different cultures. At the same time, the formation of a strong homosexual identity adds, in many cases, to the individual's sense of belonging and security.
Socialization. Homosexual men and women are usually socialized as hetero­sexuals. For them there are very few posi­tive role-models with whom to identify. This standard socialization as traditional men and women can cause problems in later life. In Western society, men are expected to be strong, competitive, active and unemotional, while women are trained to be submissive, passive, caring and ex­pressive. Homosexual women are, there­fore, faced with different issues from those of homosexual men. Cultural norms and values can become especially problematic in the relationships between men and between women. Homosexual men, for example, may find it difficult to deal with intimacy in their affectional and sexual relationships, while lesbians may have trouble maintaining a fair amount of au­tonomy in contacts with other women.
Discrimination. Most homosex­ual men and women sooner or later have to deal with discriminatory remarks, anti-homosexual violence, rejection by family, friends or colleagues and, in some coun­tries or states, legal prohibitions. Taking these facts into account, it is quite as­tounding that many seem to manage by themselves, without any form of profes­sional help. Counselors should be aware of this oppression, for it is the only way to gain insight into the defense mechanisms homosexuals have had to develop in order to survive psychologically.
Health. AIDS has become an important factor in the lives of homosex­ual men. Changes in sexual behavior, adoption of "safe sex," has become a matter of life and death. Many have been con­fronted with the loss of close friends and lovers, or may have been infected with HIV themselves. For seropositive men, uncertainty about their future health and fear of death and dying may cause a num­ber of serious problems. Men with AIDS or ARC (AIDS Related Complex) are con­fronted with a host of medical, psychologi­cal, social, and material difficulties.
Conclusion. Changing attitudes toward homosexuality have transformed the practice of counseling gay men and lesbian women. Gay-affirmative counsel­ing methods have been developed; many of them by the homosexual community it­self. Most larger cities in Europe and the United States now have counseling serv­ices that cater exclusively to the needs of homosexual men and women. Apart from individual and relationship counseling, these services usually offer opportunities to participate in various groups, such as coming out groups, consciousness-raising groups, groups for people with AIDS-related problems, and so forth. Sometimes workshops are organized covering topics such as self-defense, intimacy and auton­omy, or (homo)social skills.
Most homosexuals manage to lead positive and fulfilling lives without the intervention of counselors. Some, how­ever, do need help. It is clear that such help must be given by counselors who have acquired a positive attitude toward homo­sexuality. Familiarity with the literature on homosexual psychology and with the (local) gay community, its activities and establishments, is also a prerequisite.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. A. Elfin Moses and Robert O. Hawkins, Counseling Lesbian Women and Gay Men, St. Louis: C. V. Mosby Co., 1982¡ W. S. Sahakian, ed., Psychotherapy and Counseling, Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970; Natalie Jane Woodman and Harry R. Lenna, Counseling with Gay Men and Women, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980.
Jan Schippers

Counterculture
The term counterculture came into wide use in North America in the late 1960s to designate a lifestyle then popular among young people and characterized by open rejection of mainstream values - materialism, sexual conformity, and the pursuit of career success, in short what was widely known as the "Protestant ethic." The abandonment of these "square" values was blatantly announced by such markers as experimentation with drugs, rock music, astrology and other aspects of the occult, as well as flamboyant styles of dress and coiffure. Opposed to atomistic individualism, many counterculturists attempted collective living arrangements in communes, urban at first and then in­creasingly rural.
Apparently the term countercul­ture is an adaptation of the slightly earlier "adversary culture," an expression coined by the literary critic Lionel Trilling (1905-1975). In many respects the counter­culture constituted a mass diffusion - fostered by diligent media exploitation - of the prefigurative beat/hippie phenome­non. As American involvement in the Vietnam War increased, in the wake of opposition to it the counterculture shifted from the gentle "flower-child" phase to a more aggressive posture, making common cause with the New Left, which was not, like the radicalism of the thirties, forced by economic crisis to focus on issues of unemployment and poverty. Of course radical political leaders were accustomed to decry the self-indulgence of the hippies, but their followers, as often as not, readily succumbed to the lure of psychedelic drugs and the happy times of group togetherness accompanied by ever present rock music. The watchword in all these interactions was liberation, a term usually left unde­fined as it served a multitude of interests. All too soon, however, the violence en­demic to the times seeped in, and the 1967 "summer of love" yielded, two years later, to the Altamont tragedy and the revelation of the Manson killings.
Apart from the revulsion against violence, why did the decline set in so quickly? The counterculture shamelessly embraced ageism: "Don't trust anyone over thirty." Observing this precept cut young people off from the accumulated experi­ence and wisdom of sympathetic elders. Moreover, it meant that the adherents of the movement themselves quickly became back numbers as they crossed over the thirty-year line. In regard to gay adherents, the distrust of older people tended to rein­force the ageism already present in their own subculture. To be sure, the full force of such problematic effects has become evident only in retrospect. Although out­siders, and some insiders as well, exagger­ated the fusion of the counterculture and the New Left, still the convergence of massive cultural innovation with hopes for fundamental political change gave the young generation a heady sense of immi­nent revolution.
Discarding (or so they believed) the judgmental hangups of their elders, many counterculture recruits became sexually experimental, willing to try homosexual activity a time or two "for kicks," even if they were predominantly heterosexual. Massive arrests for marijuana possession created a new understanding for the plight of others - sexual noncon­formists - who were being persecuted by victimless crime laws. The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz and others correctly per­ceived the link between the campaign to decriminalize marijuana and the efforts to reform sex laws.
Because the gay movement be­came visible only in 1969 after the Stone­wall Rebellion - at the crest of the counter­culture wave, many assumed that homo­sexuals were essentially counterculturist, leftist, and opposed root and branch to the established order. Subsequent observation has shown, not surprisingly perhaps, that a majority of gay men and lesbians were (and are) liberal-reformist and even con­servative, rather than revolutionary in then-overall political and social outlook. None­theless, the counterculture fostered a mood of defiant unconventionality that made possible a quantum leap from a score of timid, semi-clandestine organizations to a national movement that openly challenged one of the most deep-seated taboos in Western civilization. It left its mark on the gay lifestyle in terms of dress and music, use of hippie expressions and street talk, the diffusion of at least a nominal commu­nitarian ideal, an eagerness to question the shibboleths of the establishment, a lessen­ing of guilt, and (for gay men at least) a more open acknowledgment of the legiti­macy of "promiscuity" or sexual plural­ism. Significantly, while the AIDS crisis of the 1980s has caused a reexamination of some precepts of sexual freedom, other counterculture lifestyle traits have per­sisted, albeit overlaid by new trends to­ward elite consumerism and career professionalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
Wayne R. Dynes

Couperus, Louis (1863-1923)
Dutch novelist. Couperus was bom in The Hague to a family of leading colonial administrators. For a decade of his youth he lived in the capital of the Dutch East Indies, Batavia (now Jakarta). It made a strong impression on the boy, who was to become famous because of his novels about society life in Indonesia and The Hague. Young Couperus was not the manly young­ster destined for the administration of the Dutch colonies his parents would have preferred, but was frail and feminine. In the circle of the women of his family he was beloved, and later he married one of his cousins.
He started writing poetry in a delicate style which was not very success­ful. By contrast his first novel, Eline Veie (1889), stood out. It was naturalist with a decadent theme: the sensuous woman. In his semi-autobiography, Metamozfoze (1897), he stated that Eline was a self-portrait. His second novel, Noodlot (1891, Destiny), resembles Oscar Wilde's Dozian Gzay of the same year (translated into Dutch by Couperus' wife). Bertie, a weak­ling, and Frank, a straight man, are friends, but to Bertie the friendship is love. When Frankgets acquainted with a young woman and is on the verge of marriage, Bertie sabotages the arrangement with a forged letter. When he admits this many years later, Frank kills him. After his release from prison, Frank meets his fiancee again; they wed, but their marriage is doomed to unhappiness, and they commit a double suicide. The third novel, Extaze ¡1893), has a homoerotic undertone which con­tinued in subsequent works.
From 1900 onwards, Couperas wrote classical novels such as Dionyzos (1904) and his most gay De berg van licht [Mountain of Light] (1905-06), on the androgynous, bisexual Roman emperor Heliogabalus. Eastern decadence is shown to corrupt western morals. In the struggle of east and west, of female sensuousness and male rigidity, Couperus favors the sensual perspective. For his interpretation of Heliogabalus, Couperus made use of L.S.A.M. von Rômer's work on homosexuality and androgyny. Critics came down hard on this book. For many years Couperus wrote no further novels; he considered writing a pamphlet on the critics' attitudes toward homosexuality, but did not do so. His later novels De komedianten (1917), on two Roman boy actors, and Iskander ( 1920), on Alexander the Great, also had strong homoerotic undertones.
Before World War I, Couperus lived mostly in Nice and Italy because of his dislike of the northern European cli­mate. Returning to The Hague in 1914, he became a successful lecturer, although the press considered him too much the dandy. Most of his books sold well, with the exception of De berg van licht, which today is considered one of his best.
When Couperus died in 1923, he was probably a virgin, as his decadent successor Gerard Reve maintains.
Couperus was the foremost Dutch novelist of the turn of the century. In 1987, a new critical edition of his complete works began to appear.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Frédéric Bastet, Louis Couperus, een biografie, Amsterdam: Querido, 1987.
Cert Hekma

Couples
The familiar term "couple" here denotes two persons, not closely related by blood, usually but not always living to­gether, forming an ongoing sexual partner­ship, whether married or unmarried, heterosexual or homosexual. It serves to efface the older sharp distinction between fornication and matrimony, thereby fos­tering a more objective scrutiny of human relationships. Because this conceptual change is recent, serious research in the field is not far advanced; unfounded stereotypes linger, and generalizations based on present knowledge may in time be superseded.
Role Models. Intensely devoted same-sex couples who have been taken as inspirational models include Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Damon and Pythias, Achilles and Patroklos, David and Jonathan, Jesus and the Beloved Disciple, Han Aiti and Dong Xian, Hadrian and Antinous, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Christopher Isherwood and Donald Bachardy. The sexuality in several of these relationships remains controversial, though those for whom these couples are models assume there were genital rela­tions. In the legendary and ancient-world cases, the intensity of the loves was not challenged by the stresses of a long life together. The modern role models exem­plify durability as well as intensity of same-sex love. Such models reassure lesbians and gay men that long-term relationships are possible, despite the obstacles posed by social arrangements and by social concep­tions of homosexual relationships as nec­essarily transitory due to an essential promiscuity. Less widely known role models are influential in small communi­ties or social circles among more recently formed couples, who look to them for advice and factors which promote durabil­ity and amicability. As such they frequently find themselves in leadership positions in the social clique to which they belong.
Pressures Against Coupling. Homophobes and the Roman Catholic Church have regarded homosexual rela­tionships as more serious (sinful, neurotic) than fleeting anonymous sexual encoun­ters, because a relationship entails greater acceptance of homosexuality - "living in sin" rather than distinct "sinful acts." As John De Cecco observed, "That two men who have sex together can also love each other symbolizes the ultimate detoxifica­tion of homosexuality" in homophobic societies.
Because commitment to homo­sexuality is a greater affront to homopho­bic opinion than is homosexual behavior (where the transitoriness of individual acts offers reassurance that such liaisons are "unstable"), the kind of social pressure on married couples which urges them to stay together is exerted on gay and lesbian couples to break up. Both institutions (church and state) and social groupings (the natal family) provide positive sano tions for heterosexual relationships while denying legitimation and rewards to same-sex couples. Thus, traditionally religious and socially conservative families may mourn and punish divorces of heterosexually married children, but celebrate and reward the dissolution of lesbian or gay offspring as marking a return to normalcy, or as at least opening the possibility of "growing out of a homosexual phase." Although there are commonalities among all kinds of relationships, gay and lesbian couples must routinely cope with obstacles not generally encountered by those in heterosexual relationships.
Role-Playing. Given the impor­tance of gender as an organizing principle, the assumption in many cultures that a relationship requires replication of dis­tinct gender roles, so that one partner must play the part of the wife (fem) and the other the part of the husband (butch), is rife even among "professional experts" on individual differences, psychiatrists. Al­though there are instances of such replica­tion, most Western industrialized-World contemporary gay relationships do not conform strictly to traditional "mascu­line" and "feminine" roles; instead, role flexibility and turn-taking are more com­mon patterns. Only a minority of homo­sexual couples in this part of the world engage in clearcut butch-fem role-play­ing. In this sense, traditional heterosexual marriage is not the predominant model or script for current homosexual couples (Peplau, in De Ceceo). Indeed, with a his­torical change in the functions of the family from economic production to companion­ship and with feminist challenges to tradi­tional female roles, heterosexual relation­ships increasingly have come to resemble the companionate dyad of gay relation­ships, even including experimentation with sexually "open" relationships during the 1970s in North America.
The increased visibility of gay enclaves provided a larger pool of potential passive partners than in earlier eras in which only cross-gender appearance or behavior publicly signalled homosexual availability of a partner willing to be pas­sive. The chances of finding an approxima­tion to one's conception of a desirable partner are better in a larger pool, and, specifically, a preference for butch-butch relationships was increasingly realized for North American urban gay men. Joseph Harry found that North American gay men who value masculinity in themselves also tend to seek masculine-appearing partners. It is debatable, however, whether the rela­tive size of the potential partner pool is larger today than it was and is in pederás tic cultures, non-homophobic cultures, or cultures featuring a heavily skewed genderratio. He also found that those living in cities with gay communities were more likely to cohabit with their partners and were more interested in emotional inti­macy than those living in suburbs and small towns, where the chances of meet­ing a partner and being able to live together with the approval of neighbors were also less.
Formation of Gay Couples. Al­though there are reports of enduring same-sex pairs from many locales, there is a dearth of systematic data on homosexual couples even in North American cities, so that it is not possible to estimate whether the age and status disparities of the ex­amples listed above are typical of relation­ships. Many gay writers assert that homo­sexual relationships cross racial, class, and age discrepancies more often than do heterosexual relationships. "Opposites attract" is the predominant folk wisdom - except when "birds of a feather flock to­gether." How often lesbian and gay rela­tionships cross social discrepancies is a question deserving of systematic research.
Currently, what little empirical evidence exists finds choice of long-term partners in homosexual relationships to be based on similarity of social character­istics (homophily) and opportunities for contact (propinquity), just as the choice of heterosexual marriage partners typically but not always is (Laner in De Ceceo; Harry). Undoubtedly, racial and cultural differences often enhance sexual attrac tion. The same differences that initially intrigue and attract may become problem­atic when an affair becomes a marriage. Long-term gay and lesbian relationships in which there is not the friction between male expectations and female expectations may thrive relatively better than hetero­sexual relationships with conflicting cul­tural expectations, but there remains the tendency observed in heterosexuals to marry their "own kind" despite being at­tracted to and even sexually involved with persons of other classes, races, and/or ethnicities. The attributes of those with whom one wants to have sex and those with whom one would consider settling down (marrying) are often quite distinct for homosexual as for heterosexual men and women. Similarly, the kinds of rela­tionships someone wants and seeks are not necessarily the kinds he or she has.
Statistics on Couple Formation. Most self-identified lesbians and gay men have some experience of being in a rela­tionship. In their survey of black and white male and female homosexuals in San Fran­cisco during the late 1960s, Bell and Wein­berg found 51 percent of white homosex­ual men, 58 percent of black homosexual men, 72 percent of white homosexual females and 70 percent of black homosex­ual females saying they were currently in a relationship. As in most surveys, most of the rest reported having at some time in their Uves been in a relationship of some duration.
There were no significant age discrepancies in 5,10,10, and 3 percent of the couples, respectively, and differences of more than five years in 51,40,35, and 47 percent of the couples. Sixty-four percent of white gay male respondents judged their social position to be the same as their partner's, compared to 39 percent of black males, 56 percent of black lesbians, and 72 percent of white lesbians. Equal income was reported for 3 percent of black homo­sexual couples, 17 and 18 percent of white female and male couples, although nega­tive effects of income disparity were re­ported by only two percent of the gay white men, four percent of black gay men and women, and six percent of white lesbi­ans. Blacks in the sample were substan­tially younger than whites when they began their relationship.
Power in Relationships. In a large-scale survey of contemporary American couples, Blumstein and Schwartz found that couples in which both people felt they were genuine partners with equal control over economic assets were more tranquil. Peplau and Cochran (1982), and De Ceceo and Shively (1978) also found decision­making equality the central concern; Harry (1982) found age to predict power in deci­sion-making within gay male relationships, especially among those couples living together, but also suggested that "in gay relationships it is more likely that part­ners will be more similar to each other in the possession of bases of power than in heterosexual relationships."
Other studies with smaller samples of lesbians and gay men also found perceived equality in making important decisions central to relationships judged successful by those in them. Perceived equality in decision-making is not neces­sarily lacking in couples who differ sub­stantially in age, status, or income; but the older and/or more affluent partner tends to dominate such relationships. Greater sex­ual marketability may also be a factor. That is, if one partner is more desirable by conventional standards of beauty, he or she may be able to use this " capital" within relationship decision-making. Yet another complication in predicting power within relationships is "the power of the least interest": the partner least concerned about preserving the relationship can deter op­position to his or her choices by being more willing than the other partner to leave the relationship.
These same factors operate in heterosexual relationships. The person who brings into a relationship the most resources valued by the other partner tends to make decisions when the two disagree. In heterosexual relationships the man typically has the power of higher status and economic resources and often that of the least interest as well. Moreover, in many cultures, including North America, women are raised to support relationships and to be defined by them, while men are socialized to and defined by what they do outside the domestic sphere. Despite re­cent social changes, North American women continue to defer to partners' ca­reer contingencies while men pursue their careers, either ignoring a partner's prefer­ences or jettisoning partners unwilling to go along with their choices. Some of the differences in duration of lesbian and gay male relationships result from such differ­ences in primary socialization.
Stages in Relationships. McWhirter and Mattson (in De Cecco) outlined a natural history of predictable stages of (gay) relationships: blending, nesting, maintaining, collaborating, trust­ing, and renewal. The stages are labels for recurrent patterns, not causal models of what every relationship must pass through and in what order. Moreover, their model does not take any account of different kinds of love (contrast Lee in the same volume). Despite its limitations, a model of stages does draw attention to the changes with time that affect relationships. In particular, the initial romance and mutual discovery tend to give way to everyday coexistence and reduced frequency of sex in relationships that endure.
Financial Disparities. The gay white southern California males McWhirter and Mattson studied did not merge money and possessions until the trusting stage, which they estimate as ten or more years into the relationship, after some resolution of questions about indi­vidual autonomy have been resolved to both partners' satisfaction. Whether or not it usually takes so long, as relationships endure, lesbian couples and gay male couples (even more so) tend to pool assets. Such pooling reinforces decision-making equality among those making differing economic contributions to the relation­ship and maintains the stability of the relationship. Very few same-sex couples (five percent) believe that one partner should routinely support the other. Fewer still (Harry reported one percent) do so. Yet, even unequal income in couples both of whose members work is a major source of stress in same-sex couples (but not in male-female ones in which the man has greater income). Male socialization to competitiveness and a tendency to meas­ure success in monetary terms make eco­nomic inequality particularly problematic in male-male couples. Blumstein and Schwartz suggest that the egalitarian ide­ology of two strong women holding their own against each other may become an unconscious solvent of relationships be­tween women of unequal income, propel­ling the more economically successful partner out of the relationship. Their study reaffirmed the truism that it is difficult to be poor and happy in a consumer society.
Whether or not one can buy hap­piness, relative wealth generally estab­lishes a balance of power within relation­ships for gay male couples, as for hetero­sexual couples (married or not). Monetary comparisons are less predictive of relative power in lesbian couples (in part because large income differences between women are less common). The more affluent part­ner has more control over the couple's recreational activities for lesbian and gay male couples (this differs from the pattern found in married heterosexual couples, where this is often the domain where the wife makes choices). Because same-sex couples share more activities outside work than do heterosexual couples, this aspect is probably more important to satisfaction within the couple for lesbian and gay men in relationships than for men and women in heterosexual relationships. (Most social life of heterosexual men and women is homosocial in most cultures. To the ex­tent that primary socialization shapes interests differentially dependingupon the sex of the child, same sex couples are likely to have more compatible interests than mixed-sex couples.)
Cohabitation. Various studies have found lesbian couples more likely to live together than gay male couples. The extent to which this is a result of tempera­ment, differing levels of social acceptabil­ity for unmarried same-sex roommates, or a difference of economic resources is not clear from the available data. Partners who have gay and/or lesbian friends are also more likely to cohabitate. Probably inte­gration into gay/lesbian circles cannot be separated from self-acceptance as gay or lesbian, and both individual and social acceptance of homosexuality make living together more conceivable for those who are sexually involved with someone of their own sex.
Sex. Blumstein and Schwartz found that relationships with at least one partner more concerned with the relation­ship than with his or her career are more likely to endure. They also reported that the relationship-centered partner usually initiated sex, and the more powerful one, who was more likely to be career-oriented and to have relative power due to greater economic success, was more likely to refuse sexual intercourse. The frequency of sex decreased with the duration of all types of relationships, but especially with homosexual ones. Forty-five percent of married heterosexual couples had sex three times a week or more often, compared to 67 percent of gay male couples, and 33 percent of lesbian couples. For couples who had been together ten or more years the percentages fell to 18 for married couples, 11 for gay male couples, and one percent for lesbian couples.
At least prior to the devastation of AIDS, men in gay couples were rela­tively casual about extra-marital sex, out­side sex often replacing sex between part­ners without being conceived as a threat to the relationship (also see Kurdeck and Smith in Di Cecco). In contrast, non-monogamous sex was associated with dissatisfaction and lack of commitment to their relationship by lesbian lovers. Given female socialization against casual sex (socialization based on sex-specific dan­gers, notably pregnancy), women, includ­ing lesbians, tend to have affairs more than the one-time "tricks" with little emotional investment sought by men (gay or not). Affairs represent a greater threat to a rela­tionship than casual encounters, so that lesbian non-monogamy is more serious than male sexual encounters outside rela­tionships. Of course, gay men sometimes had affairs as well as or instead of tricks, and possessiveness is not a monopoly of women. All these differences are statisti­cal, not absolute.
In regard to sexual acts, lesbians, in common with gay men and straight men, are happier both with their sex lives and with their relationships the more they engage in oral sex. Roles in both oral and anal sex raise sensitive issues of domi­nance and reciprocity in gay couples. Tra­ditionally, anxieties were settled and sex­ual incompatibilities compensated for outside the relationship. Reciprocity also mutes anxieties about seeming to be "submissive." Blumstein and Schwartz found that "the partner who performs anal sex is no more 'masculine' or powerful than the partner who receives it," but that "for both partners, anal intercourse is associated with being masculine: in couples where both partners are forceful, outgoing, and aggressive, there is more anal sex."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg, Homosexualities, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978; Betty Berzon, Permanent Partners: Building Gay and Lesbian Relationships That Last, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988; Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, American Couples, New York: Morrow, 1983; John De Ceceo and Michael C. Shively, "A Study of Perceptions of Rights and Needs in Interpersonal Conflicts in Homosexual Relationships," Journal of Homosexual­ity, 3 (1978), 205-16; John De Ceceo, ed., Gay Relationships, New York: Harring­ton Press, 1988; Haydn Curry and Dennis Clifford, A Legal Guide for Lesbian and Gay Couples, San Fran­cisco: Nolo Press, 1988; Joseph Harry, Gay Couples, New York: Praeger, 1984; Lawrence A. Kurdek, "Relationship Quality of Gay and Lesbian Cohabiting Couples," Journal of Homosexuality, 15:3/4 (1988), 93-118; Letitia Peplau and Susan D. Cochran, "Value Orientations in the Intimate Relationships of Gay Men," Journal of Homosexuality, 8 (1982), 1-8; Rolf Pringel and Wolfgang Trautvetter, Homosexuelle Partner­schaften: Eine empirische Unter­suchung, Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel, 1987; Donna Tanner, The Lesbian Couple, Lexington, MA: Lexington, 1978.
Stephen O. Murray

Corvo, Baron
See Rolfe, Frederick.

Coward, Noel, Sir (1899-1973)
British playwright, songwriter, and entertainer. Bom at Teddington near London in 1899, Noel Coward made his debut on the stage as Prince Mussel in Lila Field's The Goldfish in January 1911. For several years a highly popular boy actor, he began his own career with his first comedy, I'll Leave It to You (1920). His succeeding plays were marked by a frivolity and a gift for exploiting the moment to the fullest that catered to the disenchantment, the lack of concern with meanings and es­sences, of the interwar generation. Fallen Angels and Easy Virtue (1925) exploited the public's fascination with sex, scandal, and pseudo-sophistication. His reputation as a playwright rests on Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1933), Hands Across the Sea (1936), Bhthe Spirit (1941), and Present Laughter (1943). In all these comedies the characters are adults living in the male adolescent's fan­tasy world where there is no family life to speak of, no children to care for, no com­mitment except to pleasure. The charac­ters do no real work; and money - in a decade of depression, hunger marches, and then war - is simply taken for granted. Incarnations of vanity and selfishness, they appeal to the audience because their frivol­ity has a kind of stoic dignity. Written in a few days each, his best plays exhibit the aggressive edge of a performer on the stage of life who as a homosexual had mastered the disguise crucial for survival.
Two less remembered plays, Cav­alcade (1931) and This Happy Breed (1942), appealed to the political chauvinism of the day and were even considered serious patriotic statements about England and her fighting spirit. Many of his plays were subsequently filmed, from The Queen Was in the Parlour (1927) to Tonight at 8:30 (1952).
When, in the 1950s, his plays had lost public favor, he took his message of frivolity to the audience in person as a cabaret performer, mocking the conven­tions of the theatre with such impish songs as "Why must the show go on?" and "There are bad times just around the comer." Once, when asked how he would be re­membered by future generations, Coward shrewdly replied "By my charm."
Coward was homosexual, but his private life was unsensational. Rebecca West wrote of him: "There was impec­cable dignity in his sexual life, which was reticent but untainted by pretence." He enjoyed sex as much as anyone, and made no secret of the fact, but a list of his sexual partners would be uninteresting. When he fell in love, he was in the state of agitation which the ancient Greeks had called aphrosyne, a total loss of self-control that left him unable to write, obsessively jealous, and driven to verbal cruelty at the expense of the loved one.
Noel Coward is the classic ex­ample of the British "man of the theatre" of the twentieth century. His plays do not make pleasurable reading: they need to be seen and heard. Rich in wit and feeling, they reveal the author's talent above all in the design of the scenes and the scintillat­ing dialogue. They are always more enter­taining than profound, appealing to the element in the Anglo-Saxon character that rejects anything intellectual and wants only to spend an evening in the theatre to be relieved of the cares of the day. Unlike such authors as Wilde and Firbank, he rarely attempted the epigram or toyed directly with ideas in his plays. He shared the homosexual sense of living for the moment and not for the posterity that would never be. His comedies are master­ful less for the situations in which the characters find themselves than for the dialogue by which they extricate them­selves from them. But however wanting in ideas his comedies may have been, they captivated audiences for a generation, and made the author a phenomenon, a beloved theatrical personality. While Coward could not openly reveal his homosexuality to an Anglo-American public that had not reached the level of sophistication needed to accept it, his sexuality tinted the image of life that his plays projected onto the stage and screen.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Lahr, Cowazd the Playwright, New York: Avon Books, 1982; Cole Lesley, Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
Warren Johansson

Crane, Hart (1899-1932)
American poet. Born in Ohio, Crane lived mainly with the family of his mother after his parents' separation when he was three. From his mother's Christian Science beliefs (which he formally aban­doned) he distilled a kind of "home-brew" neo-Platonism in which true reality was remote, and when glimpsed, evanescent. His poetry tends to recall epiphanic moments of ecstasy, which have occurred fleetingly in the past or can be hoped for, rather than exhibit the fruits of any steady vision. Because of syntactic and other uncertainties, the poems are often hard to interpret. Undoubtedly these difficulties of resolution were linked to his double sense of alienation as a homosexual and an artist coming to maturity in an America that prized "normalcy."
After failing to find satisfactory employment in his father's businesses, Crane moved to New York City where he worked as a copy writer in an advertising agency. The intensity of life in the me­tropolis was both a creative goad and an intolerable strain. In 1923 he fell in love with the heterosexual Slater Brown; since Brown only wanted friendship, Crane sought sexual satisfaction in the speakeas­ies and with sailors, who then ranked as major homosexual icons. For most of his life Crane was troubled by the fact that his intellectual friends did not sympathize with his sexual nature. In 1924, however, Crane fell in love with a Danish publisher, Emil Opffer, and his feelings were recipro­cated. The wonder of this event gave him the energy to envision his ambitious cycle The Bridge, which he was never able to carry out as he had intended.
Crane's poetry was influenced by the Elizabethan writers and the French symbolists, as well as living modernists, such as T. S. Eliot. By the time he began The Bridge, however, Whitman had emerged as the dominant influence; the older Brooklyn poet was important to Crane both for his sense that America itself was an epic subject and because of his sexual orientation. Employing a kind of musical structure as a unifying element, The Bridge (1930) took the arc of the Brooklyn Bridge, which the poet could see from his room in Brooklyn Heights, as a symbol of the dynamism of America. The successive sections of the poem recount major ele­ments of the American experience, in­cluding Columbus, Pocahontas, Rip Van Winkle, Melville, Poe, Whitman, and even the subway.
Crane was granted only about eight years of full maturity as a poet. Troub­led by alcoholism and difficulty in achiev­ing self-esteem, he traveled restlessly. Returning from Mexico, where he had gone to write a poem on Montezuma, Crane threw himself overboard from a ship and was drowned.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.
Wayne R. Dynes

Crete
Lying almost halfway between Greece and Egypt, Crete like Cyprus, the other large island in the Eastern Mediter­ranean, received writing, urban culture, and other elements of civilization from Egypt/ Syria, and Palestine.
Minoan and Mycenean Society. Minoan civilization takes its name from the legendary Minos, king of the city of Cnossus, in whose labyrinth the Mino­taur, son of a bull and Minos' wife Pasiphae, lurked to devour human sacrificial victims sent as tribute from Greece until it was killed by the legendary Athenian hero Theseus. On his return trip to Athens Theseus abandoned Ariadne, Minos' daughter who had helped him find his way through the labyrinth to the Minotaur, and took a boy as his eromenos. Modem archeologists divide Minoan civilization into three stages: early (ca. 3000-2200 B. C), middle (ca. 2200-1500), and late (ca.
1500-1000), decline setting in about 1200 b.c. owing to earthquakes, fires, and inva­sions by sea peoples including Greeks. Artistic depictions suggest that Minoan religion included the worship of snakes, leaping bulls, and other sensual symbols and practices. Nudity was the exception in their art, and no unusual evidence of pederastic activity occurs in it. Because of the bare-breasted female figurines, including the so-called "snake goddesses," some feminists have hailed Minoan civilization as matriarchic, but this claim has no real support.
Although the tablets written in Minoan script (Linear A) remain undeciphered, in 1956 Michael Ventris published his decipherment of those in Linear B (an early form of Greek), many of which were also found on the mainland, particularly the Peloponnesus, to which their script had been imported by Achaean Greek invaders from there who conquered the island ca. 1400 b.c. Linear B tablets also show no evidence of pederasty, although they mention almost all the major Greek gods and goddesses, with the gods domi­nating the goddesses, being mainly tribute lists, inventories, and other financial records. Mycenean art was less sensuous than Minoan, perhaps because unprotected by the sea, Myceneans, having unlike Minoans to wall their cities and stand on the alert, could less enjoy leisure and sensuality.
The Question of Pederastic Ori­gins. The absence of any indication of pederasty in Minoan and Mycenean rec­ords and remains indicates that pederasty had not yet been institutionalized in Greece, despite myths written later as­signing pederasty to Minos and to Zeus. Beginning in the Archaic period (800-500 b.c.), when the first evidence becomes available (just before 600) with the intro­duction of writing among Greeks, this time in an adaptation of the Phoenician script after a 400-year illiterate "dark age" from 1200 to 800, during which barbarous Dorian Greeks seized the island, most Greeks and Romans associated the insti­tutionalization of pederasty with Crete. Bom in the cave of Harpagos in Crete, Zeus supposedly stole Ganymede, son of Tros, king of Troy, to replace the lame girl Hebe as his cupbearer (and bedmate) on Olympus. Minos and his brother Rhadamanthus, heroes in Homer's Iliad, had had, accord­ing to later my thmakers, squires who acted as their charioteers, to be described in later times as their beloveds. By the end of the classical period (500-s$23 b.c.) almost ev­ery god had his boy or boys, Apollo more than twenty.
Did these pederastic myths form an older core written down and depicted only after 600, or did the Greeks thereafter project back relationships among the gods in order to explain their institutionaliza­tion of them? Certainly in the fifth century Pindar took great pride in ascribing ped­erasty to Zeus' brother Poseidon.
Although other locales were sometimes said to be the birthplace of pederasty (Thebes, withLaius, and Thrace, with Orpheus, being the commonest), Crete generally held pride of place, with such figures as Zeus, Minos, and Rhad­amanthus.
From the destruction of Mycenean civilization on Crete and on the mainland by catastrophes about 1200, a dark age ensued until the rebirth of writing in Greece with the importation of a new alphabetical script from Phoenicia ca. 725. This inven­tion came, along with other Semitic influ­ences by way of Cyprus, a source which may have led the Cretans first among the Greeks to seclude women. While the Homeric epics took shape, art remained primitive, often geometric, with the result that it gives no clue to sexual practices. In such times of insecurity, warriors banded together in the closest bonds of intimacy, and many hold that pederasty became institutionalized then, but the writings and art of the period 800-600 b.c. do not document pederasty.
Cretan Pederasty in Reality. After 600 b.c, however, it became customary for Greek hoplites, the upper-class warri­ors who fought in the phalanx, each to take a twelve-year-old boy as a beloved to train until he could hunt and fight, i.e., until at about the age of eighteen he sprouted a beard. In Crete the relationship had a dis­tinctive feature: a ritual kidnapping [harpagmos] consecrated the pairing. After two months of living together in the wild, the mentor returned his protege to his family laden with rich gifts, symbolizing his coming of age: armor, a drinking cup, and a bull.
The overwhelming majority of later Greeks believed that the Cretans had institutionalized pederasty in order to curb the population explosion which had begun in the tenth century, leading to the coloni­zation of southern Italy, Sicily, and other western outposts as far as the Iberian peninsula, and in the east of most of Ana­tolia, the southern shores of the Aegean, and much of the Black Sea coast with emporia in Syria and Egypt between the eighth and the sixth centuries. By 550 most desirable colonial sites had been occupied, and Persians and Carthaginians began pushing the Greeks back from east and west. Another means of controlling population growth (for Plato the usual one) was female infanticide, which caused an imbalance in the sex ratio that effectively denied wives or even women to slaves and many lower-class free males.
Crete was the first Greek area to stop sending out colonists. According to such late sources such as Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Strabo, Diogenes Laertius, and Athenaeus, the Cretan "musicians" or statesmen Onomacritus and Thaletas, after about 650 developed a system to limit the expansion of the upper classes by postponing the marriage of males until thirty, giving the young warrior in his early twenties a boy of twelve to train and love. The males after the age of seven lived and messed together, the boys roam­ing in "herds" until they entered the bar­racks [andreia] at about 18. Men in this society began to exercise nude, in sharp contrast to Homeric practice. High-born women were segregated. Thus the estates of the nobles would not be overly subdi­vided, resulting in their impoverishment. When Sparta entered a crisis, "Lyc'urgus" visited Crete and imported along with the adviser Thaletas most of its institutions: a concatenation of interlocking institu­tions - segregation of women, institutional pederasty, athletic nudity, messes for males, late marriages, and herd member­ship for boys. Thereafter the Spartans became invincible in battle and athletics. Soon other lawgivers imitated the system in a less rigorous fashion. Solon imported a modified version of it to Athens with the aid of the Cretan Epimenides. Then, it seems, poets and artists began to ascribe pederasty to the gods and heroes. Perhaps under Solon's beloved and successor Peisistratus and his pederastic sons the Iliad was emended to include its two brief refer­ences to Ganymede, for those tyrants cer­tainly had the text altered to stress the early importance of Athens, since they had Homer recited at the annual Panathenaic festival. Plato set his last major dialogue The Laws on Crete, where ironically an Athenian instructed a Cretan and a Spar­tan on how to make a good constitution which would bar pederasty as unnatural.
The brief revival that Crete en­joyed in the archaic period ended before the beginning of the classical era, perhaps in part because the Persian Empire's sei­zure of the eastern coast of the Mediterra­nean, cutting off Greek trade with Egypt and the Levant, which had made Crete central, rendered it instead peripheral.
No Cretan works are extant be­fore the third century b.c., so that the scholar must rely on mainlanders for in­formation, but they are virtually unani­mous that pederasty was first institution­alized in Crete, either in the Minoan pe­riod by gods and legendary heroes, or in the archaic period as a device against over­population. A nineteenth-century German hypothesis that Dorian warriors .on the steppes of Central Asia institutionalized pederasty and introduced it, iron, crema­tion, and other institutions when they overran and settled the peninsula ca. 1200, a theory now discredited, rests on the observation that most Greeks thought that their ancestors borrowed the institution from Crete and Sparta, but proponents of the "Dorian" origin cannot show that it also existed from the time of their first settlements in other Dorian areas. Early Spartan poets such as Tyrtaeus (b. ca. 650 B.c.) show no trace of it; rather Tyrtaeus ridicules "an effeminate." In fact all the earliest pederastic writing that survives is non-Dorian.
After being under Rome, the Byzantine Empire, Venice and Ottoman Turkey, Crete gained independence and joined Greece as a consequence of the First Balkan War in 1912. The strong survival of pederasty and other forms of homosexual­ity in modem Crete, subject of novels such as Nikos Kazantzakis', may perhaps best be traced to the long Turkish occupation.
William A. Percy

Crevel, René (1900-1935)
French novelist and essayist. His mother encouraged him in his education after his father's suicide in 1914. While writing a Sorbonne doctoral dissertation onDiderot, Crevelrejected the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and embraced Paris of the twenties.
In 1921, Crevel founded the short­lived literary review, L'Aventure (chance, surprise, adventure, or love affair), which was followed by D4s (Dice). In 1924 he joined the surrealists after they disrupted a Dada play in which he was acting. Crevel introduced automatic writing, interpreta­tion of dreams, hypnotism, and other novelties into the surrealist circle. He pursued chance, spontaneity, luck, the unconscious, dreams, sex, revolution, love, unintended consequences, and other ruses in order to transcend common sense and definition.
Crevel put great hopes in the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers. The Stalinist iron of socialist realism, however, shattered the effort to reconcile revolutionary art and politics. At the Congress meeting in Paris in 1935, a Russian poet denounced the surrealists as pederasts; Andre Breton, the pope of surrealism, expelled Crevel from his circle for being a homosexual; Crevel put his head in a Paris oven and expired in the arms of Salvador Dali.
In his sexual life, Rene faced equally great contradictions. He had a passionate love affair with Eugene Mac-Cown, an expatriate American painter, of whom Crevel wrote, "He was sent to punish me by the people I have hurt." Crevel celebrated the promiscuous homo­sexuality of working class bars, parks, quays, and the back alleys of Paris - what he called an "anonymous continent." At the same time he was jealous when his lover turned from him to a tattooed hus­tler. He nonetheless believed that every erotic activity was subversive which re­belled against "thereproductive instincts."
An example of the political sex­ual contradictions Crevel faced can be seen in the matter of Louis Aragón (him­self a closet pedophile), arrested after he published a revolutionary poem, "Front Rouge" (Red Front) ¡1931), celebrating communism. Confronted by Crevel, Andre Gide refused to sigh a petition against Aragon's arrest. Gide responded, "When I published Corydón, I was prepared to go to prison. Ideas are no less threatening than actions. We are dangerous people. To be convicted under this government would be an honor. However, if Aragón were convicted, he would deserve prison no less than Maurras" (a fascist). Gide talked of working behind the scenes; Crevel called for public protest against great infarhy.
Rene Crevel's obscurity in the English-speaking world arises from mul­tiple causes. Because he was a Trotskyist, the communists have suspected him; because he was an outspoken homosex­ual, the surrealists have avoided him,-because he was a communist, academics have red-listed him,- because he celebrated promiscuity, gay liberationists have ne­glected him. His works have recently been reprinted; two of his sex novels have been translated into English, and gay liberation publications [Masques, Christopher Street, and Boston's GayCommunityNews) have devoted critical attention to his work. What his closest friend Salvador Dali wrote in 1954 remains true: "Rene Crevel offers a new bombshell in the genre of confronta­tion."
Charley Shively

Criminal Law Amendment Act
This was an act of the British Parliament [48 & 49 Victoria c. 69) which in its eleventh clause provided a term of imprisonment not exceeding two years, with or without hard labor, for any male person guilty of an act of gross indecency with another male person in public or in private. This clause had been introduced into a bill directed against prostitution and white slavery by Henry Labouchere late on the night of August 6, 1885. Accepted without debate, the clause became part of a bill that was rushed through the third reading the following night, August 7, and passed.
Under the existing Offenses against the Person Act of 1861 (24 &. 25 Victoria cap. 100) only buggery = anal intercourse was punishable in English law, though in 1828 Sir Robert Peel in his reform measures had made "any penetra­tion, however slight",sufficient for con­viction, contrary to the earlier holding of the courts that proof of penetration and emission was required. The effect of the new statute was that any and every form of male homosexual expression, if only "filthy and disgusting" enough to offend the feel­ings of a jury, became criminal. It was under this law that Oscar Wilde was con­victed in May 1895, spending a full two years in Reading Prison and being socially disgraced and ruined as well. Not until 1957 did the Wolfenden Committee rec­ommend repeal of this statute, which had inspired many similar innovations in the penal codes of other jurisdictions in the English-speaking world. Even at the time, when the first articles on homosexuality were appearing in the psychiatric press in the wake of appeals by homosexual apolo­gists for toleration, the law was a retro­grade measure. But it was part of the "moral purity" trend of the time in which Victo­rian humanitarianism interacted with Victorian prudery to put a new set of stat­utes on the lawbooks to enable the police to combat "vice and immorality" in which women and children were often the ex­ploited victims. The law, dubbed the "blackmailer's charter," cast the shadow of criminality over British homosexual life until its repeal in 1967 - 82 years after its enactment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. F. B. Smith, "Labouchere's Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill," Historical Studies, 17 (1976), 165-175.

Cross-Dressing
See Transvestism.

Crowley, Aleister (1875-1947)
English writer and occultist. By his own account, as an adolescent he was initiated into homosexual practices by a clergyman. As a wealthy undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, Crowley - who had changed his given name(s) from Edward Alexander to Aleister in order to have the metrical value of a dactyl fol­lowed by a spondee - had his first book published at his own expense [Aceldema, or a Place to Bury Strangers in: A Philo­sophical Poem, London, 1898). In another book of the same year, White Stains, he extolled the joys of pederasty in verse. During this period he announced that "he wished to get into contact with the devil." Crowley's occult interests took a quan­tum leap with his participation in 1898-1900 in the Order of the Golden Dawn, an offshoot of Theosophy. Under the tutelage of several members of the order he became adept in "Ceremonial Magick." In London he established him­self in a flat in Chancery Lane, styling himself Count Vladimir Svareff. Two rooms of the apartment became temples dedicated respectively to the twin pillars of Light and Dark.
After the turn of the century Crowley's public career began, and he was regularly attacked in the press as "The Great Beast" and "The Wickedest Man in the World." In 1904 Crowley was visited - so he claimed - by his Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass, who dictated to him The Book of the Law, which became the char­ter for his later activities. Among its pre­cepts are "The word of Sin is Restriction" and "There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt." In a 1910 memoir he proclaimed, "I shall fight openly for that which no Eng­lishman dare defend, even in secret - sod­omy! At school I was taught to admire Plato and Aristotle/ who recommend sod­omy to youths-1 am no,t so rebellious as to oppose their dictum; and in truth there seems to be no better way to avoid the contamination of woman and the morose pleasures of solitary vice."
In the United States during World War I he experimented with the mind-altering properties of mescaline. He then established a kind of commune or Abbey at Cefalu in Sicily, where (in 1921) he advanced beyond the grade of Magus to the supreme status of Ipsissimus. His earlier misogyny notwithstanding, the abbey also sheltered two mistresses and their chil­dren, placing a severe strain on Crowley's finances. He also had a male lover, the poet Victor Neuburg, whom he dominated ruthlessly. With the dissolution of the Abbey in 1929, he began to publish the volumes of his "autohagiography," the final text of which was not issued until Gay male cruising was tradition­ally a more systematic activity than hetero­sexual "flirting" because the gay searcher was taking serious risks - assault by a heterosexual who resented sexual ap­proach, entrapment by undercover police, "queer bashing" by teenagers looking for "thrills," and the like. Gay cruisers who survive take precautions and master cruis­ing skills. These include well-informed choice of locale, safety of entry and exit, subtle use of glances, and well-informed use of signs and code words to establish sexual understanding. Most urban centers have "cruisy" gay places - favored streets, parks, beaches, and the like - where the searcher is most likely to find a partner. Those not wanting to take an active search­ing role, but willing to be "cruised" or "picked up," could hang around these places.
Traditional gay male skill in covert cruising led to a myth that total strangers who were homosexual had some sixth sense to recognize each other. In recent years, as public knowledge and tolerance have increased, gay cruising has become less covert, and many cruising techniques are now used by heterosexual men and women. However, the threat of AIDS has increasingly inhibited cruising for casual sex partners by both sexes and sexual orientations. Potential partners are now more likely to want a "proper intro­duction" and background information.
Cruising today ranges from the most blatant - staring, openly following a desired partner for blocks, making com­ments ostensibly to a third party but in­tended to be overheard by a desired stranger - to the most covert, where third parties present do not even suspect a sex­ual liaison is being negotiated. Overt cruis­ing uses imagination to find any excuse for introducing oneself to a stranger, and many of its techniques are similar to those of the male or female prostitute seeking clients. In covert cruising, skilled use of the eyes is critical. Eye contact must be less than a stare, but more than a casual glance, and is 1969 as The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. In 1945 Crowley went to live in a shabby room in a boarding house near Hastings, where he died two years later. Scarcely known today outside occult circles, Crowley is an extravagant instance of the concern with heterodox religion that has flourished among some male homosexuals who could find no peace within established Christianity, and more recently among female adherents of "the craft." Through his voluminous writings Crowley foreshadowed the emergence of the "Age of Aquarius."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Israel Regardie, The Eye in the Triangle: An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley, St. Paul: Llewellen Publications, 1970.
Wayne R. Dynes

Cruising
Cruising is the deliberate, active, and usually mobile search for sexual partner(s) in a social setting. One may cruise on foot, by bike, car, even by boat. The searcher watches for potential part­ners, and for signs of interest from others, while displaying a choice of signs (body language, gesture, clothing, even system­atic color and key codes that may be re­garded as social semiotics) to indicate that the search is on. Cruising is a way of avoiding the social inhibition that requires "proper introduction" or other mediation by third parties when seeking intimate encounter with a stranger.
Searching for sexual partners in social settings is not original with modern gay men,- earliest published advice on cruising came from the poet of ancient Rome, Publius Ovid (Art of Love, ca. a.d. 1). His favorite cruising places were the market, temple, and race track. No sexist, he cruised both genders, and his poem includes advice for women seeking male partners. English gay men refer to cruising as "trolling." A quasi-equivalent among heterosexuals is "picking up."
especially effective when each simultane­ously "catches the other offguard" (e.g., turning around after passing), and ex­changes a knowing smile.
If the time is opportune (both partners are searching, the situation does not compromise other commitments, and so forth), cruising can lead promptly to impersonal sex. If not, skilled searchers will find a means, even without alerting others present, to exchange information for future contact. Cruising is most often a brief search for a one-time, unpaid sex partner (trick), but it may also be a lengthy search for a candidate long-term lover.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Nicole Ariana, How to Pick up Men, New York: Bantam, 1972; Mark Freedman and Harvey Mayes, Loving Man, New York: Hark, 1976, chapter 2; J. A. Lee, Getting Sex, Toronto: General, 1978.
John A. Lee

Cuba
The largest island of the Antilles chain, home to ten million Spanish-speaking people, Cuba separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean Sea. At its closest point, it is 90 miles south of Florida.
The Colonial Period. Cuba was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and colonized by Spain beginning in 1511. Overwork and disease brought from the Old World caused the death of most of the native Caribs, who were replaced by Africans imported as slaves beginning in 1518. The Spanish peninsulares normally intended to return to Europe and rarely brought women with them.
During the seventeenth century pirates and privateers roamed boldly throughout the Caribbean. The British, French, and Dutch seized islands from the Spanish or colonized vacant ones as naval bases or sugar plantations; like the pirates they seldom brought women along. All three European powers were involved in the notorious triangular trade, shipping molasses or rum to Europe, guns and trin­kets from there to Africa, and slaves back to the West Indies. Many maintain that the common economies and social sys­tems thus evolved rendered Caribbean islands and indeed parts of the adjoining mainland, including New Orleans, Vera Cruz, and Caracas, and their hinterlands more alike than different. Slavery and exploitation promoted a low regard for life and labor and set up situations for institu­tional and situational homosexuality, with males outnumbering females by a great margin. The varieties of language, politics, topography, size, and history, however, created differences, some islands having received great numbers of East Indian (Trinidad, for example) or Chinese immi­grants (Cuba).
Cuba began to excel in sugar production after 1762. Havana became a glittering metropolis, rivaling New York and Rio de Janeiro, by 1800. The slave population, including huge numbers of males imported for work in the cane fields or molasses manufacturing, grew from fewer than 40,000 in 1770 to over 430,000 seventy years later. The census of 1841 reported that more than half the popula­tion was non-white (black and mixed blood) and that 43 percent were slaves. Males outnumbered females by 2 to 1 in the center and west and were just equal in the east. Other islands in the Caribbean had even greater sexual imbalances. Documen­tation for the homosexuality that must have abounded is scarce but the earlier prevalence can be assumed from attitudes and customs that still survive.
When most of Spain's colonies in the Americas gained independence in the early nineteenth century, Cuba remained Spanish. By the 1840s, however, the slave trade became more difficult as the British energetically pursued smugglers and after 1850 the Spanish authorities cooperated more earnestly. With Spain's adoption of the Napoleonic Code in 1889, homosexu­ality was decriminalized three years after the abolition of slavery.
Independence. Cuba gained its independence from Spain in 1898 as a consequence of the Spanish-American War, but became a virtual American pro­tectorate until the Piatt Amendment (1902) was repealed in 1934, by which time Americans had come to own over one third of the sugar mills, producing over half of Cuba's sugar.
During World War I, Europe was closed to North Americans and Cuba, especially Havana, became a resort for the more adventurous. Prosperity increased with a rise in commodity prices. Also, Prohibition in the United States after 1920 left Cuba as an oasis where liquor still flowed freely. Casino gambling and prosti­tution were also legal. A favorite port of call of cruise ships, Havana flourished as a mecca for pleasure-seekers.
Havana was also a center for Spanish-speaking culture, as Federico García Lo rea discovered to his delight when he visited the city in 1930. In the late 1930s, José Lezama Lima, who was to become one of Latin America's greatest novelists, began his literary career there.
The postwar collapse of commod­ity prices was to some extent offset by tourism. Everything was for sale in Ha­vana under the dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose 1952 coup ousted an outwardly democratic but venal and nepotistic prede­cessor.
Old Havana had gay bars. Moral laxity, characteristic of the slave-rooted Caribbean economy, the Napoleonic Code, and the weakness of the Catholic Church (which was mainly Spanish, urban and upper class) produced an environment where gays were only mildly persecuted and could buy protection from corrupt officials. Drugs, especially marijuana, which flourished throughout the Carib­bean, were available in Cuba long before they won popularity in the United States.
The Castro Regime. Exploiting popular revulsion against continuing po­litical corruption as well as resentment of the diminishing but still important Ameri­can domination, Fidel Castro led an ill-assorted group of liberals, patriots, and Marxists, including some gays, to victory over Batista in 1959. Only after he came to power did the United States realize that Castro was an avowed Communist. The American Central Intelligence Agency then tried and failed to assassinate him. Hatred of the Colossus of the North and of the upper classes, some of whom had by corruption shared the spoils of foreign exploitation, as well as implacable Ameri­can opposition to his regime, drove Castro to ally with the Soviet Union. His triumph was sealed by the missile crisis of 1962 when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in return for Kennedy's promise never to try to invade Cuba. Since then the situation has been a stalemate.
Castro closed all gambling casi­nos, houses of prostitution, and gay bars. Not only are all the male brothels and bars where boys could be bought gone, but so also are all other gay establishments. Two million people have fled, including almost all of Havana's 15,000 Jews.
Soviet hostility toward homo­sexuality since 1934, when Stalin restored the penal laws against male homosexuals, combined with traditional Latin Ameri­can machismo and Catholic homophobia, to make the existence of Cuban homo­sexuals wretched and oppressive. To pre­vent their "contamination" of youth, thousands of gays in the 1960s were placed in work camps known as Military Units to Increase Production (UMAP). Although the camps were abolished by the end of the decade, other forms of discrimination continued. Article 359 of the Cuban penal code prohibits public homosexuality. Violations are punished with a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 20 years. Parents must discourage their children from homosexuality or report their failure to officials as Articles 355-58 mandate. Ar­ticles 76-94 punish with 4 years imprison­ment sexual deviation regarded by the government as contrary to the spirit of Socialism. Cuban gays are left undisturbed only if they abstain from practicing, but even then they are not permitted to hold jobs which involve contact with foreign­ers or to attend university.
The gifted playwright and fiction writer Virgilio Pinera (1912-1967) returned from Argentina in 1957 and after Castro's triumph worked for several of the newspa­pers of the regime. On October 11,1961, he was arrested and jailed for homosexuality. Che Guevara personally denounced him. The novelist Reinaldo Arenas, an authen­tic son of the proletariat, was subjected to constant restriction by the Castro govern­ment. An early exile, the gay satirical writer Severo Sarduy has chosen to live and work in Europe.
Between 10,000 and 20,000 gay men and lesbians were among the 125,000, which included an indeterminate number of criminals and insane people, who chose to leave (or were forced to leave) in the boatlift from Mariel in 1980. Among the refugees was Reinaldo Arenas, who re­sumed a productive career in New York City.
Cuba is the only country that imposes AIDS tests on all its people, and the only one that confines for life anyone carrying the HTV virus. In a 1989 report, the independent human rights group Americas Watch described Cuba as a tightly controlled society in which people are restrained from speaking freely and hold­ing meetings and most are forbidden to leave the country. According to the report, the regime has perfected a system of monitoring "almost every aspect" of pri­vate life, beginning with neighborhood committees that collect information, opin­ions, and gossip and determine who is admitted to day-care centers and universi­ties, who may purchase consumer goods, and whether a job change is appropriate. People's lives "are shaped by judgments about how their conduct and their views conform to officially prescribed doctrines." The report concluded that "Cuba's prac­tices on human rights are sharply at odds with international standards." Despite intensive persecution, closeted gays still serve in political and cultural institutions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Allen Young, Gays under the Cuban Revolution, San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1982.
Pedro f. Sudrez

Cult Prostitution
See Kadesh.

cunnilingus
 See Oral Sex.