D


Damian, Peter, Saint (ca. 1007-1072)
Italian prelate and ecclesiastical writer. Originally of Ravenna, by dint of rigorous austerity and solitary prayer he reluctantly became superior of the hermit­age of Fonte Avellana (1043) and corre­sponded with emperor Henry HI. As a trusted counselor of three popes, he be­came cardinal bishop of Ostia in 1057, and then papal legate to France, to Florence, and finally to Germany, where in 1072 he persuaded Henry IV not to divorce his wife Bertha. (Henry IV was perhaps bisexual and has been analyzed as unstable because of a troubled childhood during which an archbishop kidnapped him from his mother.)
Alongwith thefanaticHumbert - soon to be made a cardinal - whose mis­sion to Constantinople in 1054 resulted in permanent schism between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, Peter Damian was an ally of Hildebrand, the leader of the papal reform movement. Hildebrand, as pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), challenged lay control of the Church, particularly the domination by the German emperors, which initiated a two-hundred-year-long struggle that weakened both. Gregory VII claimed supremacy in Western Christen­dom, denying the old Gelasian doctrine that emperors were of equal power and dignity with popes. In his Dictatus Papae (1076), the uncompromising Gregory in­sisted that popes could make and unmake kings and emperors, judge everyone but be judged by no one, and that anyone who defied them could not gain entrance to Heaven.
Although he is often described as less fanatic than Humbert and Gregory, Damian, an informal member of the papal circle, was actually more fierce than they about several matters. He was vigorous in denouncing Nicolaism, the sin of clerical marriage, for he believed that wives and children would distract priests from serv­ing the church with all their heart and also might incline them to skim church funds for their families and to pass on their offices to their sons. It was largely owing to his influence that the higher secular clergy - priests and bishops - had to give up their wives and concubines. Until then most of them, like those in lower orders, deacons, exorcists, acolytes, and so forth, often had female "house­keepers" or even wives, as priests in the Orthodox church still today may marry. Once the papal reformers demanded and began to enforce chastity for secular clergy, as popes did from the mid-elev­enth century (just when they also began to insist that kings not divorce or aban­don their wives), homosexuality became as great a problem for the secular clergy in the outside world as it had been for monks from their earliest days. This happened when monks fled the company of women to the Egyptian desert and were later cloistered in monasteries, that is, walled into areas from which women and often other outsiders were excluded. The elev­enth-century reform movements, under the banner of a return to the selfless vita apostolica of the first Christians, at­tempted to restore the full rigor of monas­tic life after it had fallen into desuetude as a result of unsettled political conditions. The monks henceforth lived only with one another, under strict rules designed to discourage sexual contact and under the watchful eye of the abbot who was empowered to flog them when other coer­cive measures failed.
Secular clerics were far harder to control than monks. They mingled freely with the laity, heard their confessions, and often visited them or received them alone. Their opportunity for homosexual as well as for heterosexual contact was far greater than that of monks, and bishops' supervi­sion was more distant and generally much laxer than that of abbots. Many seculars attained their posts as the younger sons or brothers of nobles or, in the case of poor priests, through less exalted family con­nections. Not a few bought their offices - the sin of simony, named for Simon Ma­gus, who tried to buy his way into heaven, a sin Peter Damián denounced bitterly. But homosexual sodomy became a greater problem once celibacy was demanded of the secular clergy. Although some always cohabited with women (which the Protes­tant reformers in the sixteenth century were to allow again if they married), secu­lar clerics after the eleventh century in­creasingly had to live apart from women, and as they did, sodomy among them probably increased, though Protestant propaganda exaggerated its frequency among the Catholic clergy.
The whole issue of clerical celi­bacy raises psychological, biological, and philosophical issues which the apologists for Roman Catholicism have never fully faced. Can an instinct exist in human beings only to be denied and suppressed? If procreation is the sole legitimate end of sexual activity, why should any part of the population be forbidden to procreate, all the more as the church condemned castra­tion on the ground that the reproductive powers of a human being should never be abolished? It has been maintained that administrative convenience underlay the whole policy: a celibate clergy would have no wives and children to maintain, could be moved from one locale to another with a minimum of burdens, and so forth. It is probably also true that a sexually inhibited and frustrated clergy would be more prone to implement the antisexual policies of the church out of envy and resentment for those who sought - in defiance of the Church's teaching - to obtain illicit sex­ual gratification. On the other hand, the eccentric Russian social critic Vasilii Vasil'evich Rozanov maintained that homosexuals instigated the church to adopt ascetic policies as a way of separating men from women, and also to provide them­selves with a cozy haven in which they would not be encumbered with the obliga­tions of heterosexual marriage and family life. However, in an age when the clergy hada virtual monopoly on higher learning, such policies, with the intelligentsia as a class doomed not to reproduce itself, might in the long run result in the genetic impov­erishment of the population.
In 1059 in his almost hysterical Liber Gomorrhianus, addressed to Pope Leo IX, Peter Damián denounced clerical sodomites. Although the Pope refused the extreme punishments Damián recom­mended, and expressly and firmly pro­claimed that there was no need to depose sodomitical clerics, persecution increased with the growing organization of the church. In 1045 a local synod excommuni­cated sodomites along with heretics. In 1104 Guibert de Nogent noted that here­tics near Soissons were accused of homo­sexual acts. At the same time the scholas­tic Anselm of Laon condemned heresy and sodomy as forms of sacrilege and deserving of death. The council of Nablus in 1120 enacted into law the death penalty for heresy and sodomy which it saw as two aspects of the same offense.
PeterDamian thus ushered in the period of intensified condemnation and repression of sodomy that culminated in the total outlawry of homosexual expres­sion in the late thirteenth century.
See also Christianity; Clergy, Gay; Monasticism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Peter Damián, Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise Against Clerical Homosexual Practices, ed. Pierre J. Payer, Waterloo,
Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982; Michael Goodich, The Unmen­tionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period, Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1979.
William A. Percy

Dance
The impulse to execute patterned rhythmic movements that are different from simply walking or running lies deep in the human constitution. Dancelike forms are employed by some animal spe­cies for courtship and communication. As it has evolved, human dancing may be divided into social, ritual, folk, and art dance.
Early Forms. In ancient Greece dance events were associated with the sexually ambivalent god Dionysus. In many cases dance festivals that began as religious were transformed into opportu­nities for lasciviousness. In Athens at the Cotyttia festival dance performances took place by men in women's clothes in which the ceremonies, which at first had referred only symbolically to sex, gradually passed into homosexual orgies. During Roman times the castrated priests of Cybele were alleged to use religious dances as a prelude to the seduction of young men. In Islam, with its rigid segregation of the sexes, a long tradition has existed of boy dancers for the entertainment of adult men. The popularity of masked balls in eighteenth-century Europe permitted some revelers to dress as members of the opposite sex and to engage in amorous dalliance with members of their own.
Modern Social Dancing. In a remarkable description in Sodome et Gomorrhe - the encounter of Charlus and Jupien - Marcel Proust analyzed the sepa­rate segments of a male-male cruising episode in terms of dance. From the end of the nineteenth century homosexual balls have been given in which some male at­tendees dress up in glamorous women's attire. These events, frequently held on Hallowe'en, were tolerated as social oddi­ties. Generally speaking, however, the law banned homosexuals and lesbians from ballroom dancing in which the couples hold one another. Changes in legal climate in most Western countries eliminated this barrier, and gay bars began holding "tea dances," sometimes to raise money for charities. The phenomenon of disco, which began in the early 1970s, was particularly associated with male-homosexual patron­age. Opposed to disco is the punk rock trend, which has its own dance forms, most notably the "slam dance," which features turbulent mass body contact in a usually all-male context; the participants, however, are generally unaware of the im­plicit homosexuality involved.
Modem Art Dance. Familiarity with the world of classical ballet and modern dance reveals a disproportionate number of male homosexuals among the performers. Anton Dolin, who had his own company in England, and John Cranko, former director of the Stuttgart Ballet, stand out among dance figures who were straight­forward about their sexuality. Despite great advances in the standing of dance in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the notion lingers among the general public that, in contradistinction to athletics, dance is not a truly masculine activity.
The explanation for these facts lies in part in the history of dancing. Before the French Revolution men dominated the dance, usually also assuming women's roles since respectable women were gener­ally barred from the medium. Even kings such as Louis XIV performed in ballets. After 1800 the status of dancing declined, while at the same time women began to dominate, even dancing men's roles on occasion. The ballet girl as the plaything of the libertines became almost a stereotype in Victorian times. It is difficult to recover the biographical details of male ballet dancers during this period; many married women, but no small number of them were probably gay.
In the early twentieth century a remarkable upgrading of the status of bal­let occurred. A remarkable group of inno­vative women, including Loie Fuller, Ruth Duncan, Mary Wigman, Ruth St. Denis, and Martha Graham, created modern dance. The homosexual impresario Sergei Diaghilev introduced the Russian ballet to the West. Inspired by his love, Diaghilev repeatedly shaped his erotic proteges into world-class dancers: Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Anton Dolin (born Pat­rick Healey Kay), and Serge Lifar. Ironi­cally, in Russia, perhaps because boys were sent to ballet schools for economic rea­sons, most dancers remained heterosex­ual. It is perhaps of interest that of the two great male dancers to have left the Soviet Union after World War II, one is gay, the other heterosexual.
Several homosexual composers achieved notable success in writing bal­lets, including Tean-Baptiste Lully, Peter Hitch Tchaikovsky, and Aaron Copland. Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty (1890) and Swan Lake (1877) are particular favorites of gay audiences.
A pivotal figure in American bal­let was Ted Shawn, who formed the Denishawn company with Ruth St. Denis. Perhaps because he himself was bisexual, Shawn went to considerable lengths to dispell dance's sissy reputation. He em­ployed athletes to provide an aggressive show of masculinity. Hollywood dancers - at least those who became famous as dis­tinct from the chorus boys - were hetero­sexual, but belonged to different genres: tapdancers and jazz dancers.
In the more liberal climate of the 1960s all-male dances began to be com­mon. The avant-garde Merce Cunning­ham, who has shared his life with the composer John Cage, was the inspirer of the unisex trend in "postmodern" dance. In Brussels Maurice Béjart innovated with shifts in sex roles in his company at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels,- in 198 7 he was succeeded there by Mark Morris, who continues the tradition, though in an entirely different way. A documentary film, Míe and Murray, tells the story of dance­world luminaries Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, treating their long-term relationship simply as a matter of fact.
Understandably, dancers are anxious to protect their reputation from imputations of homosexuality, which would make their performances in classic male-female roles less credible. One group which has no such problem is New York's transvestite Les Ballets Trockadero de Montecarlo, which spoofs not only gender roles, but art dance itself.
Conclusion. What are the reasons for the affinity of gay men and dance? In part they are economic: the poor income can be borne by a single man more easily than a married one with children (women dancers are often married to a male bread­winner). Then there is the appeal of a "chameleon" role, a successful simula­tion before a demanding audience,- the satisfaction that is gained in this way is not unlike that of the actor, the diplomat, and the spy. Professional dancing allows gay men to indulge a love of colorful cos­tume and makeup during periods of gray social conformity. It may be also that the exhibitionism inherent in the profession is sexual sublimation. The performances are suffused with eroticism and emotion in a setting of simulated and unconsummated heterosexuality. This profession may be regarded as a haven from the harsh worlds of commerce and masculine com­petition, a haven in which one may none­theless show one's excellence. Finally there is the social magnetism inherent in stereotypingitself: because dance was thought to be "faggy," impressionable young gay men were drawn to it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Judith Lynne Hanna, "Patterns of Dominance: Men, Women, and Homosexuality in Dance," The Drama Review, 31 (1987), 22^*7.
Ward Houser

Dandyism
The dandy has been since antiq­uity the man who prides himself on being the incarnation of elegance and of male fashion. The word itself stems from the Romantic period in the nineteenth cen­tury, when the character type reached its apogee; England and France were the prin­cipal countries in which it flourished. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was one of the first to perceive that the type was not limited to the age just preceding his own, but had emerged across the centuries in some celebrated historical figures. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (1808-1889) wrote an Essay on Dandyism and George Brummel (1845), dealing with Beau Brummell (1778-1840), the most famous English representative of the dandy in the London of George IV.
History of the Type. Ancient Greece saw two classical specimens of the dandy: Agathon and Alcibiades. In Plato's Symposium Agathon is a poet and trage­dian, not merely handsome, but obsessed with the most trivial details of his wardrobe. Aristophanes shows him using a razor to keep his cheeks as smooth and glistening as marble, wearing sumptuous clothing in the latest Ionian fashion. Later in the same dialogue Alcibiades also en­ters the stage, the most dazzling figure of the jeunesse doree of Athens, richer and more influential than Agathon, and never sparing any expenditure that would en­hance his renown.
In the Renaissance the aristocratic male sported colorful and ostentatious clothing that paralleled the brilliant plum­age of the peacock or the flowing mane of the male lion - as can be seen from the portraits of that era. Somewhat later, the Macaroni Club in the London of George III united members of the upper class who became proverbial for their elaborate cos­tumes - which earned them the reproach of effeminacy; it is to this assemblage that the line of "Yankee Doodle" alludes: "Stuck a feather in his cap/And called it macaroni." It was in the period when the costume of the bourgeoisie - the merchant class - was becoming ever more somber that the dandy reached full flower. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century dandyism was a characteristically English phenomenon, then with the mounting influence of the British aristocracy and gentry on the upper classes of the conti­nent it spread there as well. Outfitted by the renowned tailors of the English capi­tal, the dandy made his mark on elegant society. A Frenchman, Alfred de Grimaud, Count d'Orsay, dazzled a London struck by both his physical beauty and his stylish dress, yet a biographer of his noted that "Nature had lavished all her gifts on him but denied him the virility that enables one to conquer the fair sex." Having be­come the lover of Lady Blessington, he accompanied her to Italy where they en­countered Lord Byron at Genoa.
A later incarnation of the dandy was Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1855-1921), the "professor of beauty," as he was styled by Marcel Proust, for whom he was the model of the Baron de Charlus in A la recherche du temps perdu, as he had earlier suggested Des Esseintes to Joris-Karl Huysmans in A Rebours. He adorned and perfumed his person in a style worthy of a fin-de-siecle decadent scion of the nobility. Another aesthete of this era, Oscar Wilde, affected a particularly striking cos­tume when he made a lecture tour of the United States, capitalizing on a character featured in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Patience (1881).
In the Britain of the 1960s, newly affluent youth reacted against the drabness of the postwar years and began to experiment with dress, first recycling fancy Edwardian castoffs and then donning made-to-order Carnaby Street gear. While these trends, which migrated from "swinging London" to the United States and else­where on a crest of enthusiasm for British popular music, were largely heterosexual, leather fashions began with gay men - originally those in the S/M subculture - and penetrated all advanced Western so­cieties in the 1980s.
Rationale. The relation of the dandy to male homosexuality is complicated. As a rule the homosexual - more than the male who is attracted to women - feels the need to distinguish his person in some way, is more conscious of the world of male fashion and more likely to be narcissistically preoccupied with his im­age. Naturally not all the dandies of the past were homosexual or bisexual, and an element of leisure class self-demarcation and snobbery enters into the picture. Since it is usually the male of the species whom nature makes physically more notewor­thy, the male-female antithesis in style of dress that has prevailed in Western culture since the French Revolution reverses the immemorial state of affairs. The notion that only a woman may be preoccupied with her wardrobe and that a man should dress simply and even unobtrusively is of recent date.
The dandy is also relevant to the role of the homosexual subculture in de­termining male fashion. Not a few of the idols of stage and screen, and of course professional models, have been attracted to their own sex, whatever facade they maintained in deference to the prevailing heterosexual mores. In these individuals, and particularly in their public image, the perceptive eye can often discern a homoerotic element, a subtle blending of the masculine and feminine which the hetero­sexual cannot easily capture.
Originally a paragon of leisure-class ostentation, the dandy toward the end of the nineteenth century took on a new social identity as a type of the aes­thete, of the bearer of a culture that flaunted its scorn for the humdrum way of life of the staid middle class. The convention that a gentleman could wear only custom-made clothing, never ready-made and hence mass-produced garments, also played into the hands of the dandy who could order a costume that would be his very own, shaped to stress the elegance of his figure, and even able to determine fashion.
The dandy exemplifies the sym­bolic value of clothing in European civili­zation, the use of costume for self-defini­tion and self-affirmation, and also an ex­pression of the aesthetic in private life, where clothes merge with the personality of the wearer and confirm his status in the eyes of others. In this scheme the homoerotic element lies chiefly in the nar­cissism, the attention to one's own male beauty, the pleasure in holding a mask between one's true self and the gaze of others.
See also Theatre and Drama; Transvestism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Françoise Coblence, Le Dandysme, obligation d'inceititude, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988; Patrick Favardin and Laurent Bouexière, Le Dandysme, Paris: La Manufacture, 1988; Simone François, Le Dandysme et Marcel Proust: de Brummell au baron de Charlus, Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1956.
Warren Johansson

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Italian poet, critic, and political thinker. A Florentine patrician, Dante was an active member of the Guelph party. As a youth he had a profound spiritual experi­ence in an encounter with the young Beatrice Portinari; after her death he sub­merged himself in the study of philosophy and poetry. In 1302 Dante was banished from Florence, pursuing his literary career in various other cities of Italy. He died and was buried in Ravenna.
Dante's masterpiece, written in exile, was the Divina Commedia, divided into the three major parts, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso that relate his imaginary voyage through Hell, Purga­tory, and Heaven. The presence in both the Inferno and the Purgatorio of groups of "sodomites" has given rise to a series of debates over the centuries. These passages must be interpreted in the larger context of the great poem's situations and personnel. In his imaginary travels Dante encoun­tered many persons of note, including one whom he named as his master: Brunetto Latini (ca. 1212-1294).
The sodomites of the Inferno (cantos 15 and 16) are seen running under a rain of fire, condemned never to stop if they wish to avoid the fate of being nailed to the ground for a hundred years with no chance of shielding themselves against the flames. Having recognized Dante, Brunetto Latini called him to speak with him, voicing an important prophecy of Dante's future. In describing his fellow sufferers, Latini mentioned a number of famous intellectuals, politicians, and sol­diers.
In the Purgatorio (canto 26) the sodomites appear in a different context - together with lustful heterosexuals. The two categories travel in opposite direc­tions, yelling out the reason for their punishment.
How can one account for the strik­ing deference and sympathy that Dante shows for the sodomites ? This matter began to puzzle commentators only a few years after the poet's death.
Dante's education took place in the thirteenth century when Italy was beginning to change its attitudes toward homosexual behavior. Conduct which had been a transgression condemned by reli­gion but viewed with indulgence by every­day morality assumed increasing serious­ness in the eyes of the laity. For Dante it was still possible - as it had commonly been through the first half of the thir­teenth century - to separate human and divine judgment with respect to sodomy. As a Christian Dante placed those who were guilty of that crime in Hell, but as a man of his time he did not deem the behavior grave enough to blot out the admiration that he retained for some of those guilty of it. Hence Dante vouchsafed to the sodomite Latini, and not to others, the prophecy that has been mentioned.
This approach became simply incomprehensible only a generation after the poet's death. For Dante's commenta­tors sodomy was a sin of such gravity that it was inconceivable for them to treat with respect men seared with such "infamy."
How then could Dante's own attitude to be understood? How could one explain his placement of a man he respected and admired, Brunetto Latini, in such a circle of infamy?
There were few who, like Fran­cesco da Buti (1324 - 1406), one of the most esteemed of the older commentators of Dante, saw that for Dante "the vicious man who is guilty of some sin may have virtue in himself, for which he merits honor and respect," and that Dante, with regard to Brunetto, had "honored the vir­tue that lay within him, disregarding the vice."
Over the centuries, in an effort to reconcile what appeared to later readers irreconcilable the commentators set forth a series of very odd explanations. That Dante had spoken of Brunetto Latini and the sodomites with too much sympathy because he too shared their feelings was the conclusion of one anonymous com­mentator of the fourteenth century. An­other wild suggestion is that the shame­less Latini had made an attempt on Dante's own virtue, and that hence Dante's gentle words are in reality sarcasm that must be understood "in the opposite sense" (Guiniforto deiBargigi; 1406-after 1460?). Then, foreshadowing a thesis that would be fa­vored by medical opinion in the twentieth century, it was suggested that there were two types of sodomites, those by "choice" and those who are such by "necessity." The latter were less savage that the for­mer, having sinned only because they had no other possibility of having sex, and it is of these that Dante speaks in the Inferno. (This last is the thesis of an anonymous commentator who wrote between 1321 and 1337.)
The debate on Dante's motives has continued until our own day. In 1950 Andre Pezard devoted a whole book, Dante sous la pluie de feu, to an effort to show that the sin for which Brunetto and his companions were being punished was sodomy not in the usual sense, but in an allegorical one: sodomie spirituelle, which in Brunetto's case meant having used the French language as a medium for one of his works.
Opposed to this attempt to "cleanse" the Inferno of homosexuals was Giuseppe Aprile. His 1977 book, Dante, Infemi dentro e fuori, offers a "psychoana­lytic reading" of Dante's poem that takes up the old thesis of Dante's personal homosexuality: it was their common pre­dilection that made the poet treat the sodomites so gently.
The authoritative Encyclopedia Dantesca has sought to bring the conflict to an end, taking adequate account of Dante's indulgent judgment as the correct key for solving the supposed "enigma" of the band of sodomites. As regards the rea­son for Brunetto Latini's presence among the sodomites, Avalle D'Arco's recent confirmation of the attribution to him of a long love poem directed to a man, "S'eo son distretto inamoramente," shows that it was probably on the basis of facts that were publicly known in Dante's time that he was consigned to Hell.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Giuseppe Aprile, Dante, Infemi dentio e fuozi, Palermo: II Vespro, 1977; Silvio Avalle D'Arco, Ai luoghi di delizia pieni, Milan: Ricciardi, 1976; Giovanni Dall'Orto, "L'omosessualità nella poesia volgare italiana fino al tempo di Dante," Sodoma, 3 (1986), 13-35 (with further bibliography); Enciclopedia Dantesca, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1976, vol. 5, pp. 285-87; André Pézard, Dante sous la pluie de feu, Paris: Vrin, 1950.
Giovanni Dall'Orto

Daughters of Bilitis
See Bilitis.

David and Jonathan
The biblical story of David (ca. 1012-972 b.c.) and his loving friend Jon­athan has long been a source of inspiration for Western homoerotic art and literature, and has been construed as the one episode in the Judeo-Christian scriptures which affirms at least passionate attachment between two males, if not an outright homosexual relationship. The nature of this friendship, however, can only be glimpsed through a veil of legend.
David himself ranks as a central figure in the Judeo-Christian tradition, revered by Christians as an ancestor of Jesus Christ. Jesus is described as of the "House of David," in accordance with an Old Testament prophecy regarding the Messiah, and his title "Christ" means "the Anointed One," reflecting back on David who was anointed King of Israel. Thus Jesus is given royal ancestry in addition to his divinity. Jews admire him as Israel's greatest king and national hero, ruler of an impressive Near Eastern empire at the turn of the first millennium b.c., and (putative) author of the Psalms.
Sources. The earliest sources about David are often judged to stem ulti­mately from the reign of his successor Solomon and in any case probably predate the Babylonian Exile of the sixth century b.c. The key early material on David's life, a compilation of sometimes conflicting narratives, appears in the Old Testament books of Samuel; a later version treating only his reign is found in the books of Chronicles. Later Jewish and Christian traditions magnified his role as a cultural, political, and spiritual hero.
The youngest son of a wealthy Bethlehem landowner, David is first seen as a shepherd, a cunning musician, and valiant, if underage, warrior, who rose to the position of armor-bearer and soothing harpist for Israel's first king, Saul, who "loved him greatly" [I Samuel 16:21) at first sight. In combat with the giant Goli­ath, the boy vanquished the champion of the Israelites' arch-enemies, the Philis­tines, with a stone from a slingshot. This deed caused Saul, who in this text seems unacquainted with David, to bring the boy into the royal household, where he came to enjoy a close relationship with Saul's son, Jonathan. They forged a compact of some sort, and Jonathan doffed his clothes and gave them to David. Although Saul resented David's popularity, he rewarded further martial deeds (bringing him the foreskins of 200 Philistines) by giving him his daughter Michal in marriage. David's star continued to rise, until Saul resolved to kill him. Both Michal and Jonathan took David's side against their father, helping him escape. After various adven­tures in hiding, David learned that both Saul and Jonathan were killed in battle with the Philistines, and he became king of Israel, having numerous wives and concubines, and sons by them. His other­wise glorious reign is marred by his pas­sionate heterosexual adultery with Bathsheba, which led him to connive at the death of her husband Uriah, and a revolt by David's fratricidal son Absalom.
David's Beauty. The biblical description of David as "ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to" (I Samuel 16:12; repeated at 17:42) has made David an icon of sensuous male attractiveness not unlike Greek Apollo and Ganymede, or Roman Antinous, but within the Judeo-Christian sacred tradi­tion, and hence a more legitimate subject for European Christian artists and writers during periods when religious-based cul­tural inhibitions surrounded the theme of male beauty. "Goodly to look to," it has been suggested, signifies that he had beau­tiful eyes, a quality much prized in ancient Mesopotamia.
David often appears in medieval and Renaissance art, though usually with­out Jonathan. The teen-aged bronze David figure (ca. 1435) of Donatello, now in the Bargello at Florence, radiates homoerotic sentiment. In 1501-04, Michelangelo cre­ated his heroic marble David as a symbol of the city of Florence, but doubtless also reflecting his interest in youthful male beauty.
Jonathan. A careful review of the sources suggests that in the relationship between David and Jonathan, it was Jon­athan who was the desiring partner, sub­missive and perhaps somewhat effemi­nate, while David appears less committed (there are many references to Jonathan's love for David, but in no text is David said to "love" Jonathan) and more macho, per­haps something of a political opportunist. Establishment scholars and churchmen have insisted that there is no sign of an erotic link betwen the two men, denying that there is any evidence that would af­ford the basis for an interpretive context for such a link. The narrative of their relationship, however, is highly charged: "The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. . . . Jonathan, Saul's son, delighted much in David. . . . Then said Jonathan unto David, Whatsover thy soul desireth, I will even do it for thee. They kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded." (I Samuel 18:1, 19:1, 20:40-41). After Jonathan's death, David laments: "I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." [II Samuel 1:26). In retrospect, the great womanizer David compared Jonathan's love favorably to that bestowed by men on women.
Ward Houser
There are, in addition, two other passages that deserve close scrutiny. The first of these is I Samuel 20:30, in which the irate Saul hurls at Jonathan a series of epithets which the King James version renders: "Thou son of the perverse rebel­lious woman, do not I know that thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own con­fusion, and unto the confusion of thy mother's nakedness?" There is no indica­tion in Samuel of any reason for Saul to cast aspersions on Jonathan's royal mother, so the text in the Rabbinic Bibles may be corrupt. The first clause in the standard versions of the received Hebrew text reads essentially as rendered above, but follow­ing the Septuagint it could be read and interpreted as: ben nH'arot haniordot, "Thou son of the man-crazy harlot!" Saint Jerome, who was usually sensitive to erotic nuances of his original, translates as fill muliehs viium ultio rapientis, "son of a woman pursuing the man of her own de­sire." The second part of the quotation in Hebrew (amending haber for bdhei, in conformity with the Greek of the Septuagint), could then be rendered as: "do I not know that thou art the darling of the son of Jesse, to thine own shame and the shame of thy profligate mother? "John Chrysostom paraphrased the passage as "son of man-crazy harlots running after the effete, thou enervated and effeminate and having nothing of a man." This read­ing suggests that Saul was reproaching Jonathan for homosexuality, or at least that the virulently homophobic Chrysos­tom (a.d. 347-407) so understood it. If this interpretation is correct, what Saul is denouncing is probably not homosexual­ity as such, but rather the politically unac­ceptable subordination of the prince to his dangerous rival (in Saul's eyes) David; for Jonathan was David's "liege lord" and should have taken the masculine/domi­nant role with him, while the final words of the exclamation show that Saul sus­pected David's political ambitions on the throne.
The second passage is I Samuel 20:41, which depicts the meeting of David and Jonathan in the field, where the prince warns the soldier to flee for his life. They kissed, they wept, "until David exceeded" {'ad higdfl). The question here is the meaning of the Hebrew verb higdfl, which the King James translators rendered liter­ally, following the second-century Greek version of Aquila. Yet the analogy of a root of similar meaning in the cognate Arabic language, a type of comparison of recog­nized value among Biblical scholars, offers a much better interpretation. HigdTl is derived from the adjective gadol, "large," which has an exact parallel in Arabic akbara, "to have an erection; to ejacu­late," alongside the adjective, kabirun, "large." The variant readings of the Septuagint and of a some Hebrew manuscripts also suggest that the Hebrew originally had 'adhagdel, rendered in Greek as heos tes synteleias, "until the ejaculation." Of course, with such a rendering one is left wondering how David could weep to the point of an ejaculation, behaviors not normally associated with each other. Or perhaps they first wept, then kissed, then David ejaculated, and the compiler got the sequence wrong as well. Still another possibility is that the physical contact left David with an erection, that he "grew large," at which point the narrative drew a discreet veil over the subsequent events. In any event, there is no suggestion that Jonathan was active,- if there is an erotic element in this passage, then David was the active partner and Jonathan the pas­sive.
Warren Johansson Subsequent Interpretations. Al­though the philological points just re­viewed represent a new understanding of the text, the popular interpretation of Jonathan and David as lovers has become relatively well-established in recent times, and some would take it as a transcultural gloss on the biblical story. In previous centuries it was often used as a coded reference to homoerotic relations when the mention was socially discouraged or even punished.
Abraham Cowley's "Davideis" (1656) is an epic poem with abundant treat­ment of the friendship motif. In the world of music, George Frideric Handel's orato­rio "Saul" (1739) contains a moving set­ting of David's lament upon the death of Jonathan. The erotics of the battle be­tween David and Goliath feature in Rich­ard Howard's poem "The Giant on Giant-Killing: Homage to the Bronze David of Donatello, 1430" in his book Fellow Feel­ings (1976).
Contemporary American litera­ture shows two attempts at fictionalization of the David narrative. Gladys Schmitt's 1946 novel David the King gives only veiled and unfavorable references to homosexual attractions. However, Wal­lace Hamilton's 1979 book David at Ol­ivet not only glamorizes David's homo­sexual affairs but makes them central to the book, depicting the young harpist as soothing the king with more than music. Thus, when David becomes involved with Jonathan, the king is jealous not of his military prowess and popularity, but of his son. James Levin, in The Gay Novel (1983), criticizes Hamilton for not understanding the sexual rituals of ancient Palestinian ethnic groups, but retrofitting David with a twentieth-century sexual perspective instead.
Throughout its history the David and Jonathan legend shows a constantly changing interplay between ancient texts and modem interpretations, an interplay that will doubtless persist in the future.
Waid Housei

Day, F. Holland (1864-1933)
American photographer. With, and perhaps even before Alfred Stieglitz, F. Holland Day was America's first advocate of photography as an art form, as opposed to a mere technique for recording reality. Day was a key figure in developing the pictorialist aesthetic which is today asso­ciated with the Photo-Secession move­ment . Between 1895 and 1910Day's prints were well known and influential both in America and Europe, making him the first American photographer with an interna­tional reputation.
The only child of a wealthy Bos­ton manufacturer, Day had money to in­dulge his tastes: assembling a notable collection of Keats material; publishing fine books as a partner of Copeland and Day; providing educational expenses and personal instruction for boys from the Boston slums, such as the poet Kahlil Gibran, who was Day's most famous dis­covery and pupil; and, of course, his pho­tography. Following his meteoric rise and almost equally steep descent as the leader of the new American photography, Day retired inl917tohis bedroom on the third floor of the family mansion, spending the fifteen years before his death as a self-proclaimed invalid.
Day's homosexuality was never openly acknowledged, but may be inferred from the circumstances of his life, the circle of known homosexuals with whom he associated, and his work. A number of his finest photographs are male nudes or Greek themes involving young boys, ado­lescents or men. Unlike his contemporary Baron von Gloeden, Day's fall from photo­graphic grace was largely not because of the sexual undertones of his work. Bostonians were sufficiently cultured to accept male nudes as "art," though they were scandalized when Day had himself lashed to a cross on a local hillside and photo­graphed as the dying Christ for a "sacred series." More important causes were a 1904 fire which destroyed his studio and much of his work, his own dilettantism and willful withdrawal from the photo­graphic scene, and his quarrel with Stieg­litz, who simply wrote Day out of photo­graphic history.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. E. F. Clattenberg, The Photographic Work of F. Holland Day, Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College Museum, 1975,- J. and K. Gibran, Kahlil Gibran: His Life and Work, Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1974, chapters 3-8; Estelle Jussim, Slave to Beauty, Boston: Godine, 1981.
Donald Mader

Decadence
A historic phase of decline or deterioration of a society or nation is sometimes called decadence. The term is also used more narrowly to denote certain facets of literature and art in France and England during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when some of the creative figures of the fin-de-siecle were homosexual.
Belief in historical decline is probably rooted in the psychological fact that, as they grow older, human beings tend to recall earlier phases of their own lives in rosy terms, while deprecating the present. Projected onto peoples and socie­ties, this experience suggests that the "good old days" were better than the present, while the future is likely to be worse yet. In some conservative modes of thinking this comparison is elevated to an arche­typal pattern.
Classical Models. The Greeks and Romans had two chief models of epochal decline. According to the first, as outlined by the seventh-century poet Hesiod, human society began in an Edenic time of harmony and abundance, termed the Golden Age. In due course, however, this Utopia yielded in turn to Silver and Bronze ages of increasing barbarism - until soci­ety plunged into the final bleak Iron Age. This pessimistic historical scheme pre­sents a grim picture of successive stages of decline, the only consolation being the memory of the happiness of the Golden Age. According to some poets like Vergil and Horace in the entourage of the em­peror Augustus (ruled 27 b.c.-a.d. 14), this age of bliss could return, starting the cycle anew.
The other model of decline cher­ished by classical antiquity begins with the idealization of a primitive past in a rural setting with a low level of technol­ogy, when human society was happy pre­cisely because of scarcity. Since there was little to steal, theft was rare, and hardship caused people to work together instead of against each other. "Sweet are the uses of adversity," as Shakespeare was later to put it. This idealized picture of a stern but virtuous past held particular appeal for such Roman moralists as Cicero and Juve­nal, who evoked the early days of the Republic as a foil to denounce their own age. A variation was to locate primitive virtue not in the remote past but in con­temporary tribal societies. Tacitus lauded German uprightness, condemning in con­trast Roman decadence, luxury, covetousness, and self-indulgence. Revealingly, not until the Christian Salvian, who wrote during the collapse of the Empire in the fifth century, does homosexual conduct per se figure in the catalog of vices.
Because of the pessimism (or pessimistic realism) of the classical mind these two models - that of decline from the Golden Age and that of corruption of primitive virtue - were dominant. A few Greek thinkers, however, did adopt a more hopeful view, pointing to the triumphs of technology as evidence that humanity had progressed after all. Moreover, with the official adoption of Christianity in the fourth century, Eusebius and other Patristic writers elaborated a new concept of prog­ress, that of advancing states of moral perfection. Thus in Old Testament times, polygamy and even incest (Lot and his daughters) had under certain circumstances been permissible, but are so no longer. A great signpost on this road of human moral advance was of course the Incarnation of Christ, which will lead in due course to the Second Coming and the restoration of all things. Before the longed-for consumma­tion can be secured, however, there will be a period of frightful apocalyptic turmoil. This prospect of sudden reversal - of decline after progress - was to prove a haunting vision.
The victory of the Moderns in their quarrel with the Ancients in late seventeenth-century France, as well as the scientific revolution completed at the same time in Sir Isaac Newton, prepared the way for the Enlightenment belief in hu­man progress through science and institu­tional reform for a mankind that was basi­cally good.
Evolutionary Concepts. The publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 set the doctrine of evolu­tion on its triumphant march, seeming to demonstrate scientifically and conclu­sively that in the larger scheme of things progress was inevitable. Even here, how­ever, there were dark patches. Evolution­ists recognized a regressive potential in organisms, the so-called atavisms. Thus the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso lumped homosexuals together with criminals as throwbacks to a more primi­tive phase of human existence. Still humanity could maintain progress by blocking these anachronisms and accelerate it by eugenics.
The overall atmosphere of opti­mism and uplift notwithstanding, nine­teenth-century political considerations led to a more somber view in some quarters. The countries of southern Europe were compelled to recognize that the paceset­ters of material progress were found in northwestern Europe, and that they seemed to be falling inexorably further and further behind. Even in a British Empire "on which the sun never set" doubts began to be voiced. How secure were society's founda­tions? Were savages noble after all? Was Nietzsche right in Beyond Good and Evil? Was the Boer War humane?
Historical and Literary Permuta­tions. It was in France, however, that the theory of decadence emerged most fully and inf luentially. The word decadence had figured in the title of Montesquieu's Con­siderations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence (1747), and then of the French translation of Edward Gibbon's masterwork, and was thus redolent of the perennial problem of the reasons for Rome's decline. Gradually it came to indicate not simply a historical phase, but also a qualitative judgment on the state of civilization.
The word decadence was given a new twist by the French critic Desire Nisard in 1834 as a pejorative term for certain literary trends of his own day. Nisard, whose professional interest was Latin literature, compared the mannerism and affectation of the Silver Age with cer­tain aspects of the romanticism of his own day.
The defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war (1870) induced a profound undertaking of national self-examination, accompanied in some quar­ters by a mood of resignation. In the 1880s the label decadence was actively embraced by the bisexual poet Paul Verlaine ("Lan­gueur"), the novelist Toris-Karl Huysmans [A Rebours], and their followers. Toséphin Péladan, an advocate of androgyny, wrote a series of novels under the umbrella title "La Décadence latine," implying that the whole of the Romance world was on the downward path. Others were fascinated by the regressive history of the Byzantine Empire and the perverse figure of Salome. While the "decadent" writers and artists soon found that it was more expedient to march under the banner of Symbolism, the association of their work with hot-house sophistication and rarified excess - in short the fin-de-siècle - did not immediately vanish.
England, much influenced by nineteenth-century French cultural ex­ports, had her own decadent writers and poets. The disgrace of the most notable of them, Oscar Wilde, in the three trials of 1895, which had repercussions through­out Europe, served for many to link the literary concept of decadence with the image of a perverted lifestyle.
In due course, with the dawning of the new century and especially after the drama of World War I, much of the old thinking faded away. In the Soviet Union today, however, the official line still treats every kind of literary and artistic experi­ment as dekadentnyî, occasionally label­ing its creators as "pederasts."
Degeneration. In a parallel devel­opment, biological and pseudobiological thought spread the concept of degenera­tion. The French physician Bénédict-Auguste Morel held that the insalubrious conditions and relentless pressures of modem urban life caused the emergence of degenerate types who inevitably be­queathed their afflictions to their descen­dants [Traité des dégénérescences . . ., 1857). In his insidious L'uomodelinquente of 1889, Lombroso claimed to have iso­lated a whole cluster of physical traits characterizing congenital criminals, in­cluding male homosexuals and lesbians. The English Darwinian E. Ray Lankester linked biological degeneration with the fall of empires [Degeneration, London, 1880). It remained for the journalist Max Nordau to fuse the literary and biological trends in his widely read diatribe Entartung (Degeneration) of 1891. He held that sexual psychopaths would gain power to compel society to adapt to them, and even predicted that sexual inverts would be­come numerous enough to elect a majority in the imperial German parliament that would vote persons of the same sex the right to contract legal marriage. Even sa­dists, zoophiles, and necrophiliacs, he anticipated, would find regulated opportu­nity to gratify their cravings.
His contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche castigated the nineteenth cen­tury for its pervasive decadence, which he likened to the biological decline of an organism, but saw a possibility of renewal through the cultivation of "Dionysiac art." Hitler was later to assert that homosexual­ity had destroyed ancient Greece - in which Sparta represented for National Socialism the ideal "Aryan civilization" - and that his Reich must avoid this fate.
Modem Offshoots. A recent vari­ation on the decadence concept is the notion circulating in some quarters of Afro-American opinion that sub-Saharan Africa was originally exempt from homosexual­ity, this perversion being forced on its inhabitants and their descendants in the New World as an instrument of colonial subjugation. In this perspective, homo­sexuality figures as part of the pathology of the declining white race. However this may be, there is abundant evidence for homosexuality in Black Africa both before and after colonization. Ironically it is the fear of homosexuality as a purported ob­stacle to progress and modernity that was forced on Africans by "enlightened" western opinion, not the practice itself. The ultimate origin of the myth of the sexual exceptionalism of Black Africa is probably Chapter XLIV of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1781): "I believe, and hope, that the negroes, in their own country, were exempt from this moral pestilence."
Appraisal. Two final points re­main to be considered: the components of the decadence model, and the question of whether the sexual side of it can be aptly applied to Greece and Rome. The symp­toms of decadence frequently mentioned are economic recession and dislocation, population decline, corruption, excessive luxury, widespread neurasthenia, social alienation and unrest, moral licence, and collapse of trust and honesty. Insofar as homosexuality has been regarded as a negative factor it has been added to this list. More specifically, it has been claimed, as among National Socialists perpetrating the Holocaust, that the homosexual per­son, by withdrawing from the procreative pool, contributes to population decline, which has (as now, for example, in Westem Europe) often provoked anxiety in the pro-natalist camp. Let us try to enter somewhat further into the mindset which entertains this mode of thinking. Are the factors cited in this catalogue mere symp­toms or are they causes ? To the extent that homosexuality, say, is simply - in this view - merely a sign of an underlying malaise, would it make sense to combat it? It might seem that in this context antihomosexual measures are the equiva­lent of slaying the messenger who has brought unwelcome news. As these ques­tions show, thinking about decadence tends to be emotionally fraught, and in practice symptoms and causes are thrown together helter-skelter.
These varied aspects notwith­standing, the popular mind still seeks to inculpate homosexuality in the fate of Greece and Rome, and especially to see its indulgence as a major cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which crumbled in the face of the invading bar­barian hordes of the fifth century, and later lost what had been three-fourths of its territory to the expansionist zeal of Islam. Can this charge be sustained? The expan­sive age of Greece from the seventh through the third century was, according to our documentation, their age of idealized ped­erasty. Far from causing a decline in popu­lation, this flowering of same-sex love accompanied an almost explosive increase in population, requiring the foundation of colonies throughout much of the Mediter­ranean world and later the conquests of Alexander the Great in western Asia. Conversely, the period of Greek decline - the second and first centuries b.c. - corre­sponded to an incipient sexual puritanism and a glorification of heterosexual married life.
As for Rome, most of the homo­sexual scandals reported by such writers as Suetonius and Tacitus belong to the great age of the first and second century; accord­ing to Gibbon the latter century ranks as one of the greatest ages of human happi­ness. Only in the fourth century, under the Christian emperors, did the Roman state take legal action against consensual male same-sex conduct. Thus, if the legitimacy of this general line of macrohistorical moralism be allowed - and probably it should not be - the unwise suppression of homosexuality failed to revive the might of the Roman empire, and may even have hastened its decline. To be sure, as we have seen, Roman writers were given to rheto­ric about decadence, including denuncia­tions of homosexual behavior as early as Cato the Elder (234-139 b.c.), but histori­cal evidence provides no warrant for the truth of their assertions. The issue is in­jected into contemporary discourse solely as a tactic of homophobes, not as a causal factor debated seriously by historians.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman, eds., Degenera­tion: The Dark Side of Progress, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985; Louis Crompton, "What Do You Say to Someone Who Claims That Homosexu­ality Caused the Fall of Greece and Rome?" Christopher Street (March 1978), 49-52; Alexander Demandt, Der Pall Roms: Die Auflösung des Römi­schen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt, Munich: Beck, 1984.
Wayne R. Dynes

Decriminalization
The repeal of the sodomy laws which had been inherited from the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century came in two distinct phases. First, there was the wave of decriminalization gener­ated by Enlightenment criticism of the penal legislation and practice of the Old Regime, characterized by harsh and barba­rous penalties for trivial or purely sacral offenses, the use of torture to elicit confes­sion, and the like. The second major phase developed as a product of the social reform movement that began late in the Victorian era.
The Enlightenment Tradition. The thinkers of the eighteenth century - Montesquieu, Beccaria, Voltaire - paved the way for the law reforms that came in the period of the French Revolution. In September-October 1791 the French Constituent Assembly adopted a new criminal code which embodied the prin­ciple that offenses against religion and morality, insofar as they did not harm the interests of third persons or of society as a whole, should not be the object of prosecu­tion by the secular authorities. This law became the basis of the Penal Code which forms part of the so-called Code Napoleon, a comprehensive set of laws for the First Empire adopted in 1810.
The influence of this code was enormous, particularly in the Catholic countries of the Old and New Worlds. Thanks to the spread of the Napoleonic model, virtually all the Catholic states of Western Europe abandoned the medieval statutes against sodomy. But in the Protes­tant sphere it was only the Netherlands that benefited from decriminalization, for the simple reason that Napoleon annexed the entire country to his Empire in 1811, and when independence was regained in 1815, the new code remained.
A few other jurisdictions saw major changes in the law. The colony of Pennsylvania founded by William Penn in 1681 reduced the penalty for sodomy to the minimum that public opinion would allow, and the criminal code of Catherine the Great of Russia in 1769 did likewise. But reaction was to restore far more severe penalties in due course.
In other countries the only change during this first major phase was the abo­lition of the death penalty in favor of life imprisonment at hard labor or some other enormous sentence comparable to the punishment for the worst crimes of vio­lence. Such was the reform introduced by the Josephine Code in Austria in 1787, and the statute of 1861 in England and 1887 in Scotland.
Modern Sexual Reform. Toward the end of the nineteenth century social reformers began to take up such questions as contraception, prostitution, and women's equality. Within this framework arose a sexual reform movement that led to further decriminalization as a result of effective propaganda and lobbying for re­peal. In particular, the anthropological concept of the homosexual as an individ­ual attracted solely by members of his own sex created a justification for demanding the end of the archaic laws. The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee founded in Berlin in 1897 made repeal of Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code of the German empire its major objective, and similar goals were enunciated by the World League for Sexual Reform on a Scientific Basis in the 1920s and later, down to its dissolu­tion in 1935.
The first country to respond to the new approach was Denmark, which reformed the laws against homosexual behavior in 1930. The uniform code adopted in Poland in 1932 followed the example of the Code Napoleon, although all four of the codes (German, Austrian, Russian, Hungarian) that had been in force at the end of the country's partition still had penalties for homosexual sodomy. Switzerland chose the example of the French cantons under Napoleonic influ­ence when it adopted a penal code for the entire country in 1941, and Sweden fol­lowed Denmark in 1944.
After World War II. In the post­war period it was Great Britain that took the lead, beginning with the Report of the Wolfenden Commission in 1957, which recommended decriminalization of homo­sexual acts between consenting adults on grounds essentially deriving from classi­cal liberalism. The report provoked a de­bate between two legal authorities, Hart andDevlin, in which the latter argued that if "the man in the Clapham omnibus" considered a sexual act abominable he should not have to give a logical reason for his feelings. But some ten years later, in 1967, a Labor Parliament voted passage of a private member's bill to repeal the law against homosexual buggery and gross indecency in England and Wales.
The United States, in which each state of the Union still has its own penal code, posed a far greater challenge to the advocates of reform. In 1962 the American Law Institute, after some ten years of de­liberation over earlier versions, published an official draft of a Model Penal Code that omitted homosexual acts from the list of crimes. The state of Illinois had in 1961 already enacted a new code with these provisions, and a few other states followed its lead. Effective lobbying for reform was conducted by such groups as the National Committee for Sexual Civil Liberties, which also attempted a second route: that of appeal to the courts to strike down the survivals of pre-Enlightenment penal law as unconstitutional. Such a course was made possible by the specifically Ameri­can tradition that the appellate courts could declare acts of the legislature unconstitu­tional on the ground that they violated provisions of the fundamental law of the commonwealth. In most European coun­tries the judiciary has no such power to review acts of the legislature which sim­ply took over the prerogatives of the sover­eign. The precedent for this was, in par­ticular, the decision of the United States Supreme Court (1954) outlawing racial segregation. Successful actions were sub­sequently brought in states such as Penn­sylvania and New York where the legisla­ture, under the influence of the Catholic Church and of fundamentalist Protestant sects, had refused to act.
A similar appeal to the European Commission of Human Rights against a decision of the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe in 1957 had failed because the court accepted the view that the Federal Republic of Germany had the right to prohibit homosexual activity in the inter­est of health and morals. A Social Demo­cratic majority in the Bundestag did, some 12 y ears later, modify Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code to exclude homosexual acts in private between consenting adults. But in 1981 the European Court of Human Rights, in response to a case brought by a citizen of Northern Ireland, Jeff Dudgeon, found that the statute in that country violated the right to privacy contained in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. However, when an appeal was brought to the United States Supreme Court in 1986 to test the constitutionality of the sodomy law of the State of Georgia, a 5-4 majority upheld the law, principally on the ground that there was nothing in the Anglo-American legal tradition that extended the right of privacy to homosex­ual activity (Bowers v. Hardwick). So the option of deciding to retain or abandon the existing laws was left with the individual states. The enormous problem of confront­ing the prejudice and ignorance of legisla­tures intimidated by conservative religious denominations thus endures. A similar situation prevails in Australia, where each state also has its own criminal code in the common law tradition.
Even when the basic law making homosexual activity illegal has been stricken from the books, there is still the further task of reeducating the law en­forcement authorities and the public to the notion that homosexuals have certain rights in the exercise of which they should be protected, and of invalidating statutes such as those against solicitation which were based on the primary ones. More­over, it is necessary to remove the sundry forms of discrimination that had made their way into civil and administrative law beginning with the second decade of this century, once the psychiatric concept of homosexuality as a "disease" had filtered down to the courts and legislatures. Indi­viduals who, through prosecution under the old laws, had lost the right to pursue the profession of their choice or still lan­guished in prison needed to be rehabili­tated. Complete equalization of the laws pertaining to homosexuality and heterosexuality, including the age of consent, therefore still lies in the future. The elimi­nation of police harassment and of a multi­tude of forms of private discrimination and intolerance will be a challenge for the decades ahead.
Conclusion. A world-wide sur­vey of the situation presents a varied pic­ture. In the first world, that of the ad­vanced industrial countries of the West and the Asian rim, decriminalization has largely succeeded, with some exceptions. In a few countries, it has been followed by enactments of positive statutory protec­tions for homosexuals and lesbians. In Marxist countries of the second world de facto change has been largely secured which has halted most prosecutions, but no ac­tual rights are accorded to homosexuals, who are not permitted to form their own independent organizations and are obliged to meet clandestinely and unobtrusively. (In Poland and Hungary, where fledgling organizations have appeared, the change must be regarded as a sign of the incipient withdrawal of those countries from the Communist world.) The Third World has shown itself actually to be retrograde: not only have countries formerly under Brit­ish rule, such as India and Kenya, retained the old colonial laws, but nations that were formerly French possessions, where the Napoleonic Code tradition had been implanted, have introduced new bans. On almost the whole of the African continent homosexual activity is now illegal, though it continues to be widely practiced. This reversal has varied motives. To some ex­tent it results from the influence of funda­mentalist religion, whether Christian or Islamic. In other instances, prohibition of same-sex behavior reflects a misguided notion that modernization requires a ban on "decadence" and "perversion." Another problem is that the World Health Organi­zation continues to list homosexuality as an illness. Beginning in 1984, the Interna­tional Lesbian and Gay Association under­took to monitor the situation on a world­wide basis, and to encourage renewed momentum toward decriminalization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. International Lesbian and Gay Association, Second ILGA Pink Book 1985: A Global View of Lesbian and Gay Liberation and Oppression, Utrecht: Interfacultaire Werkgroep Homostudies, 1988.
Warren Johansson

Della Casa, Giovanni (1503-1556)
Italian prelate and author. Della Casa served as archbishop of Benevento in 1544, papal nuncio to the Venetian repub­lic (1544 - 49), and papal secretary of state under Paul IV (1555-56). He wrote a man­ual of polite conduct, II Galateo, ovvero dei costumi (1558), which enjoyed great success after its posthumous publication.
Before undertaking a clerical ca­reer in 1537, Della Casa wrote various compositions in theBernesque vein, which are typically full of double entendres. Among his juvenilia it is conventional to mention a text in Latin prose entitled In laudem pederastiae seu sodomiae or De laudibus sodomiae (in praise of buggery). In reality this work never existed, as was demonstrated by Gilles Menage (1613-1692) in his Anti-Baillet (The Ha­gue, 1682). In this study Menage traced the attestations for the supposed work, show­ing that they all go back, directly or indi­rectly, to propagandistic pieces spread by Protestants in order to discredit Delia Casa and Roman Catholicism with which he was prominently connected.
Much of the responsibility lies at the door of Pier Paolo Vergerio, a hetero­dox prelate whom Delia Casa harassed by bringing him to trial; after loudly adhering to Protestantism, Vergerio composed a harsh indictment of his persecutor. In reality the young Della Casa had written only a small satire, the Capitolo del forno, in which he pretended to praise, in a Bernesque vein, bread and the oven, while extolling the sexual act through double entendres. Although this composition was mainly heterosexual, a few lines do speak of homosexuality. From this slender foun­dation arose the legend of the pretended In laudem ... sodomiae. In his own lifetime Delia Casa defended himself of the charge in the short Latin work Ad Germanos in which he declared of himself: "We did not praise men, but clearly women." None­theless, some have held that the charge cost the learned prelate a cardinal's hat.
Other references to homosexual behavior that appear here and there in the Galateo serve, however, to confirm that, like many intellectuals formed before the Counter-Reformation, Della Casa held a detached and tolerant attitude toward same-sex love. This attitude drew Protes­tant attacks aimed at an educated class that was considered excessively lax and tolerant toward homosexual conduct.
Giovanni Dall'Orto

Demographic Factors
Demography is the study of popu­lations. Sex ratios, marriage ages, life expectancies, and prevalence of polygamy may tell us much about the relative fre­quency of homosexuality, or perhaps more strictly speaking, of bisexuality.
Theoretical Basis. Such deduc­tions follow from a theoretical framework which sees the prevalence of homosexual behavior as somewhat plastic, responsive to situational factors, rather than fixed at birth or in infancy, and particularly sensi­tive to the relative lack or abundance of opportunity for heterosexual behavior,
rather than being a phenomenon associ­ated for the most part with exclusive "homosexuals." Demographically-oriented theorists take reports of increased homosexual behavior in such contempo­rary populations as those situated in prisons, seafaring, and public schools, where access to the opposite sex is diffi­cult, and reason that when heterosexual opportunitities are relatively scarce, more and more of the general population will turn to homosexuality.
Applied historically, this method must take into account different social conceptions of homosexuality. Arguably, societies that tolerate homosexuality openly expect few social obstacles to such "surrogate" behavior, which Ancient Greece, overpopulated in the seventh century b.c., encouraged.
Until recent times, the absence of a folk model of exclusive homosexuality made it much easier for males to switch back and forth from penetrating the oppo­site sex (or desiring to) to penetrating the same sex (especially if the receptor was not perceived as equally masculine, such as was the case with boys, slaves, captives, the poor, or those of inferior social rank) without facing either an identity crisis or massive social opprobrium. At the most, such an opportunistic switcher had made himself guilty of a vice considered minor except by Abrahamic religions; his mar­riage or financial prospects remained un­impaired.
On the other hand, without avail­able passive partners, or the willingness by actives to switch roles on demand, such a possibility would be of only theoretical interest. Reciprocity was by all accounts historically rare until recent times, but an overabundance of boys, passive partners in relation to adult males, has normally ex­isted. Late ages of marriage, widespread slavery, resident non-citizens, prolonged warfare, and an overabundance of paupers favored the development of pederasty. Sufficient evidence for lesbianism in har­ems and other situations without males such as nunneries sustains demographic theorizing without further elaboration.
Prehistory. Before the break­through to agriculture - which terminated the Paleolithic Age - cave-dwellers aver­aged well under 20 years of life, primarily because of high infant mortality. Those who survived infancy, if often sick and frail by 40, had a good chance to reach 50. Active females who suffered from early pregnancies thus did not survive their peak sexual drive, which is currently estimated to occur at 27, by more than a decade or so. High death rates from pregnancy and child­birth may have reduced the number of women even more than deaths from hunt­ing and warfare reduced the numbers of adult males. Women capable of reproduc­tion were taken by men upon whom they depended for game, their major protein supply. Thus lesbianism would have been relatively infrequent. On the other hand normal males did not Uve into such old age that they became impotent, as so many do now.
The hypothesis that females dominated society by putting the young males outside the horde, as do baboons and gorillas, greatly stimulating homosexual contacts among the outcast adolescent males as it does among such primates, may have been realized occasionally in certain human groups. If so, lesbianism may have flourished among such "Ama­zons," but the surviving evidence, largely the widespread existence of "mother god­desses" on neolithic sites, is too scanty for proof.
Early Civilizations. Beginning in Mesopotamia and Egypt, about 3500-3100 b.c., the earliest writings depict a male-dominated society with a pantheon ruled by males. In most societies adolescents married shortly after puberty, and polyg­amy predominated as it has done through­out most of history - there have been hardly any polyandrous and relatively few mo­nogamous societies. One survey reports that monogamy prevails in 24 percent of societies, polyandry in 1 percent, and po­lygamy in 75 percent. Even in Egypt, where considerable evidence exists for monog­amy, the wealthy certainly kept concu­bines and sexually used slaves and prison­ers of war of both sexes. Mesopotamia and all the civilizations outside Europe prac­ticed polygamy, replete with harems such as King Solomon's. Such institutions as­sured that many slave, poor, or young men could not have women for themselves, with a consequent probability of wide­spread homosexuality among the lower classes who could rarely have afforded prostitutes.
As life expectancy increased in these archaic civilizations that developed irrigation and storage facilities along with the plough, infanticide, especially of fe­males, seems to have increased. Only Egyptians, who married relatively late, and Jews seem to have prohibited it, but even they greatly preferred male offspring. As a result of much more frequent female in­fanticide, males greatly outnumbered females in most societies. A 4:3 ratio was perhaps not uncommon, although among especially warlike nomadic societies like those of the Arabian Peninsula, men were in such short supply that Mohammed may have been recognizing actual conditions when he transmitted Allah's command that a man might have four wives and as many concubines as he can afford.
Even in monogamous societies such as those of the Indo-Europeans who settled in Europe, upper-class males mar­ried at very different ages. After about 600 b.c, copying a custom begun on Crete, Greek warriors waited until the age of 30 when they married girls from 15 to 18, getting an aristocratic boy of 12 when they were 22 to train and love until they mar­ried. Aristocratic Roman boys, on the other hand, married in their teens girls of 12 or 13 as arranged by their patres (male heads of families). Middle-class males who pre­dominate on tombstones married later, in their mid-twenties to women as old as twenty. Practically no women, who may have composed little more than one-third of society because of excess female infan­ticide, failed to find husbands, and virtu­ally all upper-class males married, at least before the times of the Roman emperors. In Greece and Rome when a baby was born, the husband would decide whether to raise the infant or expose it - as contra­ception was ineffective and abortion dan­gerous, infanticide remained the usual method of birth control. Christianity, which took over the Empire and banned other religions with the sole exception of Judaism during the fourth century, out­lawed infanticide and had the emperors decree death for sodomites.
The Medieval Period. During the Dark Ages (roughly a.d. 500-1000), after the Germans overran the depopulated Western provinces of the Roman Empire, little central control in the church or state survived. Among the barbarian laws, only those of the Visigoths condemned sod­omy. The Celtic penitentials punished it harshly, but never with death. Many Merovingians and Carolingians had sev­eral wives and most had concubines, and evidence of excessive female infanticide continues. Knights and squires bound together by the closest ties in all-male (except for the lord's women and the servingwenches) castles often loved each other. Some poor in such an underpopulated society as Europe in the early Middle Ages could earn a sufficient living at an early age to marry or rather cohabit with a woman. Life expectancies decreased from classical times but upper class males at least mar­ried in their teens.
From the end of the invasions about 1000 to the arrival of the Black Death in 1347, the population grew from thirty to seventy million as life expectan­cies improved again to 40 or 50. As it became more difficult to get a farm or a position in a guild, commoners began to marry later in life. Merchants and profes­sionals postponed marriage to accumulate capital or education. The marriage age for males went up from 20 to 30, but as they preferred women of 18 or even 16, a gap developed in the population pyramid. Lots of rowdy, lusty young bachelors must of­ten have lapsed into homosexual acts. Moreover, when the smaller age-group of 30-year-old men married 18-year olds, many unwed women became spinsters or nuns, often cloistered against their will, vastly increasing the allure of lesbianism. Catholic authorities and even canon law condoned female prostitution so that unmarried males would avoid the worse evil of sodomy.
The Black Death, wars, and fam­ines decreased the population by one-third, from seventy to fifty million. Wages rose and food prices fell. Men could establish a living for themselves earlier and their marriage age, except for merchants and professionals, dropped. As the number of young bachelors and of spinsters decreased, homosexual activity probably declined. Demographics may have been more im­portant than clerical persecution or mu­nicipal houses of prostitution and munici­pal laws or royal laws, which became quite severe, often ordering castration before hanging or burning, in reducing sodomy and lesbianism during the late Middle Ages - j ust when documentation of it (such as there is) becomes more plentiful. On the other hand, urbanization not only pro­vided anonymity and other opportunities to escape family control but produced a secular gay subculture outside monas­teries.
Early Modern Europe. The eco­nomic boom of the Renaissance and fol­lowing period could not keep up with population expansion so that real wages fell. Bullion from the New World spurred inflation. Those unmarried increased, reaching almost 20 percent of the popula­tion in Spain. Pirates, sailors, merchants, and soldiers in the longer, more distant wars and voyages lived in male societies with only occasional contact with females, often through prostitution and rape, with a resultant increase in homosexuality. In the demographic boom that began in 1740 wages fell and males delayed marriage in the lower as well as in the upwardly mobile middle classes.
In England between 1550 and 1800 the age of marriage rose to 26 for males and 23 for females. The percentage of unmar­ried males rose to 22 but fell by 1800 to about 17; that of females rose to the low 20s. Other European countries displayed similar patterns. Between 30 and 50 per­cent of peasants in preindustrial Europe never married. Sons could often not afford to marry until their father retired or died, leaving one of them land.
The Nineteenth Century. In nine­teenth-century agrarian Ireland overpopu­lation meant that many "boys" (so called until marriage), could never secure and support a wife and hence did not marry. The society became obsessed with homo­phobia, taking that fear with them wher­ever they emigrated. Sicily and Southern Italy in a similar situation, however, con­tinued the ancient Mediterranean toler­ance of homosexuality, a common Ca­tholicism notwithstanding, but the Ital­ians tended to emigrate to American and other overseas areas after the Irish and ranked beneath them in the Church in these areas. Catholicism in English-speak­ing overseas areas became more homopho­bic than Catholicism in Latin areas.
Immigration usually loosened family and church ties. Often the first generation delayed marriage so that over­seas immigrants engaged in homosexual acts as in Carolina plantations or early Virginia, and even more so in penal colo­nies like Georgia and Australia where males greatly outnumbered females. Puri­tans, however, took wives and children with them to the promised land where the unchallenged church was strengthened.
Easy access to western land and the constant labor shortages even in the eastern cities, however, lowered the mar­riage ages in comparison with Europe, where increasing numbers in both Catho­lic and Protestant countries remained life­long celibates. Upper and middle class men married in Victorian England at age 30. The American frontier, however, was populated by young males with few fe­males in the initial phase of settlement.
Among these nineteenth-century urban celibates the homosexual emerged and was named in 1869, exclusive as op­posed to the earlier sodomites who, it was assumed, would normally be married.
Reaching their sexual peak later than men, women had opportunities to become lesbian at various stages of their increasingly long lives. Most men long outlived their sexual peak (in their late teens), more and more livinginto the slack­ening of sexual potency attendant on middle and old age. No wonder one hears so much of lesbianism after the eighteenth century and so little before.
The application of demographic principles to the study of sexual patterns is still in a pioneering stage; further investi­gation may shed considerable light, not only on the periods discussed above, but also on contemporary developments in the Third World and elsewhere. In the absence of literary and other documenta­tion for sexual mores in the broad mass of the population, demographic analysis may open a window into these little-known areas.
William A. Percy

Demuth, Charles (1883-1935)
American painter. Bom into a well-to-do family in Lancaster, Pennsylva­nia, Demuth was a sickly child who was educated largely at home. After art school in Philadelphia, he made two trips to Europe, absorbingmodernism at its source in Paris. During the second of these, in 1913, he met another gay American artist, Marsden Hartley, a friendship that was to last all his life. After returning to the United States at the beginning of World War I, Demuth began to spend more and more time in New York's Greenwich Vil­lage, where new ideas of aesthetics and sexuality effervesced in equal measure. In the company of Carl Van Vechten he be­gan to frequent nightclubs in Harlem, then considered off-limits by bourgeois society. He also visited bathhouses, producing frank watercolors of scenes of sexual solicita­tion. Always strongly interested in litera­ture - a connection enhanced by his friend­ships with such figures as Eugene O'Neill and William Carlos Williams - Demuth began to illustrate works of fiction, includ­ing books by Honore de Balzac and Frank Wedekind concerned with sexual variation. Also emerging at this time was his con­tinuing predilection for flower subjects, into which sexual meanings were read in the then-prevailing Freudian mode. To the extent that Demuth himself shared these readings (a matter that is uncertain), they are not without validity.
In the later 1920s and 1930s, suf­fering from diabetes and under his mother's care in the family home in Lancaster, Demuth summoned himself to produce major works evoking the American scene, which have much in common with the precisionism of Charles Sheeler. At the same time, he produced for private view­ing a series of watercolors that are even now striking in their frankness. These show street cruising, blatant sexual dis­play, and even episodes of male group sex. These works feature military men, espe­cially sailors, and "rough trade."
Demuth worked at a time of tran­sition in American art, as it was abandon­ing the certainties of the academy and the realism of the Ashcan School, but before it fully embraced the modernist aesthetic. This historical position, and the unusual range of his subject matter, make his ulti­mate standing hard to determine. Cer­tainly the 1980s rediscovery of his sexu­ally explicit works - achieved at a time when critics are questioning the conven­tional distinctions between high and low art, between erotic painting and pornogra­phy - makes a reassessment mandatory. Significantly, as a major retrospective of his oeuvre was mounted in four American cities in 1987-88 some critics still expressed distaste for Demuth's more overt works. In an art world characterized by increasing pluralism and an attitude that "anything goes," this lasting power to shock is an achievement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Barbara Haskell, Charles Demuth, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1987.
Wayne R. Dynes

Denmark
This small country, which occu­pies the Jutland peninsula and neighbor­ing islands, is the home of a people who roamed far and wide in the medieval pe­riod. Denmark was converted to Latin Christianity just before the year 1000 and became Lutheran in the sixteenth cen­tury. Since World War II it has been both admired and excoriated for its liberal atttitudes toward sex and pornography.
The Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. Pagan Scandinavia knew no generalized taboo on homosexuality, certainly no laws against it, but there was a folk belief that the man who took the passive role with another in a sexual rela­tionship had forfeited the respect owed his sex. Christianity at first brought only moral condemnation and religious penance. On February 2,1227 pope Honorius III wrote a letter to the Danish archbishop in reply to his request for advice on how to deal with a number of individuals guilty of incest or homosexual sodomy. As they could not very well make the long trip to Rome, the pope gave the archbishop the authority to decide for himself on a penance which should be neither too hard nor too lenient.
With the influence of the Refor­mation and its revived interest in the Old Testament, the Danish Lawbook [Danske Lov) of King Christian V (1683) prescribed burning at the stake for sodomy. In point of fact, however, little is known of prosecu­tions for homosexual intercourse, and they were probably rare. An isolated case of pederasty is recorded in which a married weaver was in 1744 sentenced to two years' hard labor followed by banishment from the province of Jutland for having had sexual connection with a boy. The atti­tude of that time was expressed by a pro­fessor at the University of Copenhagen, Ludvig Holberg, in his Introduction to Natural and International Law (1716). Admitting that "we must condemn the evil vice," he went to say that "the au­thorities cannot punish vices which are practiced by so many, and which are so firmly embedded that to eradicate the evil would be to cause the disintegration of the whole state. And if they are but works of darkness and are not generally noticed and of little consequence, why trouble the authorities by calling their attention to them?"
Toward the Present. This atti­tude, however, changed after 1866 when the death penalty was rescinded and re­placed by imprisonment. After this time a considerable number of prosecutions and convictions occurred. It is likely also that the introduction of modern police meth­ods of surveillance and entrapment con­tributed to the new situation. Just as in the penal code of the German empire, the provisions of the law applied only to male homosexuality.
The first Danish author to ad­dress the plight of the homosexual from the standpoint of the literature produced by the inchoate homophile movement and by responsive psychiatrists wrote under the pseudonym "Tandem." Himself a layman, he published in the medical journal Bibliotek for Laeger (1892), an article of some fifty pages surveying everything that had been written in Western Europe and Scandinavia on the subject, concluding with a plea for toleration. This was not to come, however, until the sexual reform movement in Germany had placed the issue on the agenda. In 1928 the World League for Sexual Reform on a Scientific Basis held its second congress in Copen­hagen, at which Magnus Hirschfeld read the text of an "Appeal on Behalf of an Oppressed Variety of Human Being" composed by the activist Kurt Hiller. Two years later, in 1930, the Danish parliament did reform the law - the first country in Scandinavia to do so.
The Contemporary Situation. After World War I Denmark acquired a reputation as a country with unusually liberal attitudes toward sexuality, and Copenhagen became a mecca for the sex-starved tourist from the rest of the world. The Forbundet af 1948 was founded by Axel Axgil and Hj elmer Fogedgaard, and in 1949 it began a periodical, Vennen (Friends). The Forbundet stimulated similar organi­zations in Norway and Sweden. In Den­mark it grew into the major national gay and lesbian organization and recognized by the authorities as such. Active today on many fronts, it not only counsels homo­sexuals on their personal problems in all spheres of life, but also conducts educa­tion and propaganda meant to enlighten the general public and undo the legacy of defamation from the past, and collabo­rates with foreign homophile organiza­tions. All its activity is conducted by a staff of volunteers.
A particular notoriety accrued to the Danish capital as the venue of the male-to-female sex change operation per­formed on Christine Jorgensen (who died in 1989 after living as a woman for almost forty years). Gay tourists flocked to Copen­hagen, though the city later lost its pri­macy in this regard to Amsterdam. The effect of Denmark's liberal laws on por­nography has been disputed, some claim­ing that free availability reduced demand. Some of the pornography offered for sale in Denmark contains photographs of quite young children. In any event, Denmark and Sweden played major roles as laborato­ries for the sexual revolution of the 1970s, while the United States took the lead in the gay liberation movement.
In 1976 the legal age of consent to homosexual relations was reduced to 15; consensual sexual activity with a boy under 15 but not less than 12 years old is a misdemeanor. The sentence is usually - but not always - suspended, but a foreigner found guilty is fined and immediately deported. The burden of proof in such cases rests with the police, who do not investigate on their own initiative but only in response to a complaint.
In 1989 the Danish parliament approved a far-reaching law granting legal sanction, except the right of adoption, to same-sex unions; however, its benefits are not extended to foreigners.
See also Andersen, Hans Christian; Bang, Herman.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Axel Axgil and Hjelmer Fogedgaard, Homofile kampar: Besseler gjennom tideme, Ridkobing: Grafolio, 1985; Wilhelm von Rosen, "Sodomy in Early Modem Denmark: A Crime Without Victims," Journal of Homosexuahty, 16:1/2(1988), 177-204.
Ward Homer

Detective Stories
See Mystery and Detective Fiction­.

Deviance and Deviation
Sociologists and criminologists have adopted the term deviance to refer to behavior that is prohibited, censured, stig­matized, or penalized by the normative structures of a society. The boundaries of the concept, and its appropriateness for homosexuality, have not been settled; it originated in the wish for a neutral term that would not imply approval or disap­proval of the activity, whatever the atti­tude of the host society might be. Critics of the approach assert that it offers little more than a jumble of "nuts, sluts, and perverts." For the study of homosexuality, however, its value may lie in the fact that it does make one think of analogies (and differences) between homosexuals and other groups.
The words deviation and deviant, while designed to be neutral and statistical terms, are related to a system of concepts centered on alterations in direction which have an extensive historical background of inherited judgmentalism. The legacy of these ideas facilitated the acceptance of the terms, but at the same time under­mined the attempt to keep them value free.
Historical Semantics. Some of the background is Judeo-Christian. A rabbini­cal exegete, Bar Kapparah, glossed the term to'ebah, "abomination" - a word of im­portance because of its occurrence in the prohibitions of the Holiness Code of Lev­iticus - as meaning to'eh attah bah, "you are going astray because of it". Another scripturally rooted instance occurs in Jerome's rendering of Exodus 23:2: "Non sequeris turbam ad faciendum malum; nec in judicio, plurimorum acquiesces sententiae, ut a vero devies." ("Do not follow the mob in doing evil; nor in your thinking yield to views of the many, so that you deviate [go astray] from the truth.") This application of devio, "to turn from the straight road, to go aside," is rooted in the ancient metaphor of human life as a journey.
There is also a contrast between perversion and conversion, both from the Latin verto, "to turn (round)." Moreover, there is a Hebraic background to this idea of turning around = reform of one's life.
Until early modem times, this complex of meanings does not seem to have been brought into use in connection with homosexuality. Then there is Sir Simonds D'Ewes' usage: "He [James I] had his vices and deviations." (1625).
Another variation on the verto root, the modern term inversion, was in­troduced by Arrigo Tamassia in 1878. Unconsciously this coinage takes up the late medieval idea of "the world upside down." French medical writers (Paul Moreau, 1880; Valentin Magnan, 1885) are responsible for introducing another direc­tional term, aberration (from ab + erro, "wander off"), for certain types of sexual conduct, including same-sex relations.
Medical writers of the late nine­teenth century show some statistical use of the term deviation. The word seems to have been introduced into the social sci­ences by the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict in the 1920s. In her discussion of Samoa, Mead contrasts deviation upward, a kind of withdrawal, with deviation downward, delinquency. The locution did not become popular outside of professional circles until after World War II, when it absorbed some of the connotations of Durkheim's anomie. The term deviant hovers between a covertly pejorative meaning and a value-free use ("A character structure which is normal among us may be deviant among the Kwakiutl." Gregory Bateson, 1944). The term variant enjoyed some popularity among lesbians in the 1950s and 60s.
Slang Analogues. While deviance and deviation are terms used by scholars, colloquial speech indicates that the direc­tional metaphor was adopted by the devi­ant groups themselves. In order to under­stand this point it is useful to focus on the contrast between straight, on the one hand, and crooked or bent, on the other. The Oxford English Dictionary records a collo­quial use of straight as "honest, honorable, frank," in 1864. During the same period the word meant "chaste" (of a woman). Some contamination from the Biblical "strait is the gate" is likely.
Since at least 1914, criminal ar­got has applied bent both to individuals (thieves) and things (e.g., a bent ["hot"] car). The secondary usage of bent, "homo­sexual," has been current in British slang since the fifties. The term crooked, which parallels bent in the criminal sense, does not seem to have a sexual use. The origins of the sexual use of "straight" (as an anto­nym to "bent"?) are problematic, though it clearly was widespread in homosexual circles before it became a part of the gen­eral vocabulary as an equivalent for "heterosexual" during the 1970s. During the sixties straight had acquired a new meaning: "not using drugs" or "not under the influence of drugs at the moment" (paralleling sober). Later expansions in­cluded "not inebriated" or "teetotaler." The term is semantically greedy, and new usages are appearing; thus in reference to employment, it may mean "normal/reportable to the government/taxable." Nonetheless, there remain three main layers to the colloquial meaning of straight: ( 1 ) honest or respectable; (2) heterosexual; (3) drug-free/sober. As with many argot terms this polysemy (multiplicity of meanings) serves the purpose of the devi­ant user group in confusing eavesdropping outsiders, even though this effect fades as the term seeps into general usage. From a sociological point of view, one can also note the testimony of the word about the propinquity of populations brought to­gether by the maintenance of the victimless-crime laws. These groups are "birds of a feather" because society has made them so.
Built along lines similar to "bent" is the term "kinky," which originated as a directional term, developed a reference to criminality, and in recent times, perhaps in reaction to the growing sexual use of "straight," gained a non-pejorative sexual sense as a reference to erotic eccentricity, whether heterosexual or homosexual.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Erich Goode and Richard Troiden, Sexual Deviance and Sexual Deviants, New York: William Morrow, 1975; Edwin M. Schur, The Politics of Deviance: Stigma Contests and the Uses of Power, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980.
Wayne R. Dynes

Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich (1872-1929)
Russian cultural figure and ballet impresario. Diaghilev came from a family of provincial nobles whose fortune derived from ownership of a vodka distillery. In 1890 he went to St. Petersburg to pursue a career while living in the household of his aunt and uncle. Their sonDmitri ("Dima") integrated the young man into a preco­cious set that had formed at his gymna­sium, including the artists Alexander Benois, Konstantin Somov, and LeonBakst. The newcomer soon established a sexual relationship with his handsome cousin Dima, and they traveled on holiday to Italy together. Diaghilev, who eventually dis­covered that he lacked the talent to be­come either a singer or a composer as he intended, began to look for another area in which to make his mark. He found it in the burgeoning artistic and cultural activity of what has come to be known as Russia's Silver Age. Russian symbolist poets and artists were casting off the narrow con­strictions of aesthetic utilitarianism in favor of new trends that were both cosmo­politan and at the same time in touch with Russia's historic past.
The first great phase of Diaghilev's impact on the arts lasted from 1899 to 1909. He became the animator of Mir Iskusstva ("The World of Art"), which was both a group of intellectuals and artists and a sumptuous magazine. Although this work of editing and promotion brought Diaghilev into contact with ballet, at this time he was concerned with all the arts, for the program of cultural renovation pro­posed by Mir Iskusstva was all-embracing: painting, poetry, drama, dance, even archi­tecture and the crafts. Unfortunately for Diaghilev, Mir Iskusstva was to lead to his breakup with his cousin-lover, for Zinaida Gippius, an ambitious writer and member of the group, succeeded in taking Dima away from him in 1904.
From 1906 to 1909 Diaghilev was engaged in organizing a series of exhibi­tions of Russian art in Paris, as well as performances of Russian concerts and operas. In 1908, in the course of organizing a ballet company, he had his fateful meet­ing with Vaslav Nijinsky, a promising young dancer at the Imperial Ballet. At that time Nijinsky was being kept by a wealthy aristocrat, Prince Pavel Lvov who seemed, however, willing to part with his protege. In their five years together, Di­aghilev was able to shape Nijinsky into one of the finest dancers the world has ever seen, a figure who is inseparable from such masterpieces as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun - bal­lets that Diaghilev organized. However, on an ocean voyage to South America, Nijinsky deserted him for a Hungarian ballerina. Diaghilev replaced him with the sixteen-year-old Léonide Massine, who, though heterosexual, was willing to go along with the relationship to learn what Diaghilev could teach him.
In the meantime Diaghilev's first efforts at establishing the ballet were diffi­cult, though he did present the world with the genius of Igor Stravinsky through The Firebird. In 1911 he formed his own com­pany, which from its base in Paris reached other Western European cities. World War I caused problems, but Diaghilev was nonetheless able to keep things going from Rome. Throughout his career as an impre­sario Diaghilev had the ability - through his matchless self-confidence - to rescue triumphs from seemingly impossible situ­ations.
The last decade of his life was the time of achievement that has made his name virtually synonymous with ballet. He had not only a sure instinct for dancers, but also for conductors, composers and artists. He was able to utilize avant-garde artists such as Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and Georges Rouault in such a way as to make them accessible to a middlebrow public. In this way he made a decisive contribution to the emergence of modern­ist painting from its earlier constricted environment. During his last years Di­aghilev had non-exclusive affairs with three young men: the English dancer Patrick Healy Kay (who became known by the name that the impresario gave him, Anton Dolin); the Russian dancer Serge Lifar; and the Russian conductor Igor Markevitch. In August 1929, after completingtwentyyears of ceaseless creativity in Western Europe, Diaghilev died suddenly in Venice, his favorite city, where he was buried.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Richard Buckle, Diaghilev, New York: Athenaeum, 1984; Simon Karlinsky, "Sergei Diaghilev: Public and Private," in The Christopher Street Reader, New York: Coward-McCann, 1983, pp. 265-273.
Ward Houser

Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)
American poet. After brief peri­ods at Amherst Academy and Holyoke Female Seminary, she settled into an out­wardly uneventful life keeping house for her family. Dickinson never married. The real events in her life are her writings, which have assumed classic status in American literature.
Emily Dickinson's letters to sev­eral of her female acquaintances convince us that throughout her life she had strong emotional attachments, which may be described as love relationships, with other women. A comparison of such love letters with letters which she wrote at about the same time to women who were merely good friends indicates that her impassioned language was not simply sentimental rhetoric of the period, and that these in­volvements, while probably non-genital, were clearly homoerotic. Those letters help to explain the forty or fifty poems in the Dickinson canon which cannot be under­stood unless recognized as love poems from one woman to another.
Certainly Dickinson had hetero­sexual interests as well - the Master let­ters, those to Judge Otis Lord, and many of her poems are irrefutable proof. But it is impossible to doubt the intensity of her involvement with women when one reads letters such as those to Emily Fowler:
I cannot wait to be with you ... I was lonely without you, and wanted to write you a letter MANY times, but Kate [Hitchcock] was there too, and I was afraid you would both laugh. I should be stronger if I could see you oftener - I am very puny alone.
You make me so happy, and glad, life seems worth living for, no matter for all the trials. - early 1850 But another spring, dear friend, you must and shall be here, and nobody can take you away, for I will hide you and keep you - and who would think of taking you if I hold you tight in my arms? - spring 1854
and to Kate Anthon:
Distinctly sweet your face stands in its phanthom niche - I touch your hand - my cheek, your cheek - I stroke your vanished hair. Why did you enter, sister, since you must depart? Had not its heart been torn enough but YOU must send your shred? - summer 1860
and especially those to the woman who becameher sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert, with whom, if her letters and notes are any proof, she ostensibly had the most intense and enduring emotional relationship of her life:
Oh my darling one, how long you wander from me, how weary I grow of waiting and looking, and calling for you; sometimes I shut my eyes, and shut my heart towards you, and try hard to forget you because you grieve me so, but you'll never go away. - February 1852 To miss you, Sue, is power. The stimulus of Loss makes most possession so mean. To live lasts always, but to love is firmer than to live. - September 1871
The sentiments, and sometimes even the imagery, of such letters are occa­sionally adopted in Dickson's poems and may help in the explication of those poems. For example, the poem: "The Day she goes/ Or Day she stays/ Are equally su­preme - / Existence has a stated width/ Departed, or at Home." (Poem 1308, Johnson edition) is more easily understood in the context of a brief note to Sue: "To the faithful Absence is condensed pres­ence" (about 1878). The poem "Wild Nights - Wild Nights!" (poem 249), which caused many critics to observe a puzzling "reversal of the lover role," becomes clearer in the light of an early letter to Sue (about February 1852):
The wind blows and it rains. ... I hardly know which falls fastest, the rain without, or within - Oh Susie, I would nestle close to your warm heart, and never hear the wind blow, or the storm beat, again. Is there any room there for me, or shall I wander all homeless and alone?
While the language of the letter lacks the poetic energy and sophisticated imagery of the poem which was written nine years later, both seem to suggest the same thing: "If I were moored in you, I would not be lost or lonely or afraid of the storm." When understood as a love lyric in which the principals, both being women, have no pre-defined roles or set sexual functions, the poem no longer contains the puzzling role-reversal that has so often been observed.
Several biographers, most nota­bly Rebecca Patterson, John Cody, and Richard Sewall, have dealt with Emily Dickinson's homosexuality. Patterson, in fact, suggests as a major thesis in her book, The Riddle of Emily Dickinson, that Dick­inson had a love affair with Kate Scott Anthon which, at its conclusion in the 1860s, crushed Dickinson and accounted for her "peculiarities" during the remain­ing twenty-odd years of her life.
Cody adopts a Freudian approach and argues that while Dickinson's Puritan heritage would not have permitted her to indulge in homosexual love-making, she had no wish to fulfill a female role since she despised her weak mother and feared her tyrannical father; thus well into adult­hood she experienced "pre-pubescent" crushes on other women, particularly Sue Gilbert, who served as a mother-surrogate to Emily.
Sewall, while seeming at first to reject Cody's suggestion that Emily was in love with Sue and hurt and upset when she lost her to Austin, later refers to Emily's letters to Sue as "nothing less than love letters."
All of these writers cite ostensi­bly lesbian poems to support their bio­graphical narrative. Dickinson's homoerotic poetry seems to span the entire length of her literary career, from one of her first poems, written in 1854 ("I have a Bird in spring") to one of her very late poems, written in 1883 ("To see her is a picture" in the third variant). While the subject of these poems is sometimes iden­tifiable (it is frequently Sue), most often she is not. This is not surprising since, as several scholars have observed, we proba­bly have only about one tenth of the letters Dickinson wrote and less than a thou­sandth of those written to her. But, while we may have no idea who the persons were who evoked some of Dickinson's most moving love lyrics, of one thing we may be certain: many of them were women.
The speaker in Dickinson's homoerotic poems is usually the lover and pursuer in the relationship. Such a rela­tionship is often represented by the sym­bol of a nest in which the speaker finds (or at least expects to find) comfort and "home" with the other. But she recognizes that she cannot expect permanence in her love, not because it is an inherently flawed kind of love, but generally because the beloved other woman will eventually marry, as it was assumed most women would in the nineteenth century, being without an independent source of income or a profes­sion that would make them self-sufficient. The speaker accepts the reality of this situation, but not without difficulty. What is much more difficult for her to accept, of course, is abeloved woman's cruelty which has no basis in custom or pragmatism. In such a situation the speaker usually cries out bitterly against the other woman, but she is willing to return to her and appar­ently to be hurt again. She is frequently self-pitying. Only occasionally does she perceive herself victorious in love, and then it is a poor victory, having conquered the other woman by arousing her pity. These homoerotic poems are never joy­ous, but that is to be expected in a society where heterosexual marriage was virtu­ally believed inevitable and there was little possibility of two unrelated women estab­lishing a life together if they were not wealthy through independent inheritance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971; Rebecca Patterson, The Riddle of Emily Dickinson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1951; Vivian R. Pollak, Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984; Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, New York: Fairar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.
Lillian Fadeiman

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
Because of the knowledge explo­sion of recent decades, there has been an increasing demand for works of reference, both generalized and specialized, which will serve not only the interested lay public but also those engaged in primary research who would otherwise be unable to keep up with advances in neighboring fields.
The history of the great reference book enterprises goes back to the eight­eenth-century Enlightenment. Stimulated by several lesser British exemplars, the great French Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers began to appear in 1751. Edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert, this work strove not only to provide a store­house of factual information, but also to bring to readers the latest conceptual advances. It comes as something of a shock to find that the major article on "Sod­omie" largely concerns masturbation,
having been taken over from an earlier work by S. A. D. Tissot, a physician obses­sively concerned with that subject. Clearly the attempt to move beyond traditional religious ideas into a realm of unbiased secular information had not even begun at this point. Better informed is the article on "Socratic Love" in the more personal Dictionnaire philosophique of Voltaire ¡1764). Incidentally, this tradition of the sometimes idiosyncratic one-person dic­tionary has been revived in recent years by such scholars as Mary Daly, WayneDynes, and Monique Wittig.
The eighteenth century also saw the beginning of a more informed tradition of treatment in medical reference works, of which the first notable example is Robert James, A Medical Dictionary (1743-45). This tradition continued into the nine­teenth century, as seen in the French multivolume Dictionnaire des sciences médicales and Encyclopédie des sciences médicales.
Dictionaries of sexual informa­tion did not appear until the twentieth century. The Handwörterbuch der Sexu­alwissenschaft (1923), edited by Max Marcuse, combines articles derived from the mainstream German tradition of sex research with newer psychoanalytic view­points. The first example in English is The Encyclopedia of Sexual Knowledge (1934), edited by the Australian homophile Nor­man Haire, though this volume is largely based on German materials assembled by Arthur Koestler. In the post-World War II period, the Encyclopedia of Sexual Behav­ior (1961), of Albert Ellis and Albert Abarbanel, attempted to be truly cross-cultural with much material on non-Western cul­tures, even though the coverage may seem thin or dated today.
When not subject to censorship, slang dictionaries often contain consider­able lexicographical material on homo­sexuality, though the terms included are usually culled from the usage of hetero­sexuals, often from the argot of the urban lower classes or members of the criminal underworld. There are also erotic diction­aries of various languages; significantly, the first of these appears to be that of Pierre Pierrugues, of Latin terms and in Latin, of 1826. The classic in this genre is Alfred Delvau's Dictionnaire erotique de la lan­gue verte (1864).
Homosexuality and lesbianism have not fared well in general encyclope­dias in English, such as the Britannica and the Americana, perhaps because these are addressed in part to a secondary-school readership, for which extensive discussion of such matters is not deemed suitable. The general articles are relatively brief and suffer from outdated and incomplete in­formation. Biographical articles rarely mention that the subjects are gay or les­bian, and contributions of eminent figures to the study of homosexuality are omitted from their biographies. The general rule is, the more accessible and popular a refer­ence work is, the more uninformative it is likely to be on the topic of homosexuality.
With today's demand for more information on sexual matters, it is to be hoped that this situation will change. Yet with the increasing tempo of information build-up, it will probably be necessary to resort more and more to information stored in computer-accessed data banks.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edmund F. Santa Vicca, The Treatment of Homosexuality in Current Encyclopedias, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1977 (unpub. diss.).
Ward Houser

Dionysus
Greek god associated with wine and emotional exuberance. Although the name occurs in linear B tablets from the end of the second millennium b.c., his figure absorbed additional elements from Thrace and the East in the following cen­turies. Dionysus, called Bacchus in Latin, was the son of Zeus and a mortal Semele. When his mother unwisely besought Zeus to reveal himself in his true form, she was incinerated, but the embryo of her son escaped destruction. Zeus then inserted it into his own thigh and carried the child to term. This quality of being "twice born," once from a woman and once from a man, points to the ambiguity of the god, who though male had effeminate traits. In liter­ary and artistic representations, he some­times served as a vehicle for questioning sex roles, otherwise strongly polarized in ancient Greece.
According to the late-antique writer Nonnus, Dionysus fell in love with a Phrygian boy, Ampelos, who became his inseparable companion. When the boy was killed in a bull-riding accident, the grief-stricken Dionysus turned him into a vine. As a result, the practices of vine cultivat­ing and grape harvesting, of wine making and drinking, commemorate this deeply felt pederastic relationship: in honoring the vine [ampelos in Greek), one honors the god through his beloved.
In historic times Dionysus at­tracted a cult following consisting largely of women, the Bacchae or maenads. Dur­ing the ritual followers abandoned their houses and work, to roam about in the mountains, hair and clothing in disarray, and liberally imbibing wine, normally forbidden to women. At the height of their ecstacy they would seize upon an animal or even a child, tear it to pieces, and devour the uncooked flesh, by ingesting which they sought to incorporate the god and his powers within themselves. From a socio­logical point of view, the Bacchic cult is a "religion of the oppressed," affording an ecstatic relief to women, whose status was low. Occurring only once during the year, or once every two years, these Dionysiac rites were bracketed off from the normal life of the Greek polis, suggesting compari­son with such later European customs as the feast of fools, the carnival, the chari­vari, and mardi gras.
The maenads assume a major role in Euripides' tragedy, The Bacchae ¡406 b.c.). Accompanied by his female follow­ers, Dionysus appears in Thebes as a mis­sionary. Unwisely, King Pentheus insults and arrests the divine visitor; after he has been rendered mad and humiliated, the transgressor is dismembered by the mae­nads. Interpretations of the play differ: a warning of the consequences of emotional excess versus a reaffirmation of the endur­ing presence of humanity's irrational side. The subject probably attracted Euripides as a phenomenon of individual and group psychology in its own right, but it is un­likely that he intended it as a forecast of modern gay liberation in the "faery spiri­tuality" mode, as Arthur Evans has ar­gued. Inasmuch as the sexuality of The Bacchae was not pederastic, the Greek audience would not have seen the play as homosexual (a concept foreign to their mentality), but rather as challenging gen­der-role assumptions about men and women, whatever their sexual orientation. That the parts of the maenads were taken by men was not exceptional: women never appeared on the Greek stage.
Bacchanalian rites were intro­duced into Rome during the Republic. Men joined women in the frenzied gather­ings, and (according to the historian Livy) there was more debauchery among the men with each other than with thewomen. Apart from their orgiastic aspects, the rites caused concern because they crossed class lines, welcoming citizens, freedmen, and slaves alike. Condemned as a subversive foreign import, the Senate suppressed the Bacchanalia in 186 b.c., but they evidently were soon revived. Roman sarcophagi of the second and third century of our era show Bacchic scenes, projecting hopes for an afterlife spent in Dionysic bliss. In its last phases the cult of Dionysus emerged as an other-worldly mystery religion, showing affinities with Mithraism, the religion of Isis, and Christianity. Meeting now behind closed doors, members of the sect recognized one another by passwords and signs.
Although the early Christians regarded all pagan worship as demonic, they were not averse to purloining the Bacchic wine harvest imagery for their own sarcophagi and mosaics. Some Bac­chic reminiscences recur in drinking songs of medieval goliardic poets, notably the Carmina Buiana. As a religious phenome­non the Bacchanalia attracted discrete attention among the hermetic adepts of theltalianRenaissance, foreshadowing the latter interest of students of comparative religion. At the end of the sixteenth cen­tury the flamboyant bisexual painter Caravaggio created a notably provocative image of Bacchus-Dionysus (Florence, Uffizi Gallery).
The most influential latterday evocation of the god occurs in The Birth of Tragedy ( 1872) of Friedrich Nietzsche, who exalted the category of the Dionysiac as a antidote for excessive rationality in the interpretation of ancient Greece and, by implication, in modern life as well. Nietzsche's ideas were modernized and correlated with anthropology and psy­choanalysis by the classical scholar E. R. Dodds, who in turn influenced the poet W. H. Auden. Together with his lover, Ch­ester Kallman, Auden turned Euripides' play into an opera liberetto entitled The Bassarids. Set by the gay composer Hans Werner Henze, the work premiered at Salzburg in August 1966. While the opera has not gained a permanent place in the repertoire, Euripides' play - with Dionysus as the apostle of the "do your own thing" principle - found much favor in the ex­perimental theatre of the 1970s and 1980s, though sometimes transformed to the point of unrecognizability.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Arthur Evans, The God of Ecstasy: Sex-Roles and the Madness of Dionysos, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988; Karl Kerenyi, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Inde­structible Life, London: Routledge, 1976.
Wayne R. Dynes

Discrimination
In its social dimension, discrimi­nation refers to treatment that disadvan­tages others by virtue of their perceived membership in a group. Earlier studies of such patterns concentrated on economic discrimination - the denial to a group of earnings commensurate with ability. Inter­est focused on groups that are either ethnic or religious minorities (blacks in the United States, untouchables in India, Jews in the Soviet Union), or political or social mi­norities (blacks in South Africa, immi­grants from North Africa in Israel, women in most countries). Even this aspect was neglected in the past because economists were reluctant to interpret any significant economic phenomena in terms of the Marx­ian concept of "exploitation." The grow­ing concern of economists with this phe­nomenon has been grounded in thinking that circumvents the Marxian analysis by making an even sharper break with tradi­tional economic theory. This approach holds that a group can be the object of discrimination if others are willing to sacrifice resources or gains of their own in order to avoid employing, working beside, lending to, training, educating, or associ­ating in any manner with its members.
History. The attitude of Western Christianity toward individuals known to have engaged in homosexual activity has been one of persistent discrimination and exclusion. It was the pattern of ostracism and general intolerance that drove homo­sexual men and women to desperate measures of concealment and deception in order to avoid the economic and social penalties which a hostile environment sought to inflict upon them. This dis­crimination differed from the exclusion imposed on members of groups such as women or religious minorities who had an inferior status within the society, but still held a recognized place; these groups were not stigmatized as criminals and outcasts, even though they were until quite recent times denied access to higher education and to the exercise of certain professions.
American Developments. Until the 1940s the right of American employ­ers, landlords and the like to discriminate on the grounds of racial or ethnic origin went unchallenged; then a movement began to declare such forms of exclusion illegal that led to the enactment of many state laws forbidding such practices and ultimately to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But discrimination based upon the sexual orientation of the subject was upheld by the courts as a right to eliminate "im­moral" persons from the work force or from housing. The judiciary consistently echoed the cultural norms of the hetero­sexual majority as binding upon the whole of society. Early attempts to include homosexuals within the protections af­forded cultural, religious, and racial mi­norities met uniformly with failure. Only gradually did groups concerned with civil liberties come to believe that discrimina­tion against homosexuals violated their civil rights. The struggle to include "sex­ual orientation" (= bisexuality or homo­sexuality) in the protected list of anti­discrimination laws began in the 1970s and has led to the passage of some 50 municipal ordinances with such guaran­tees.
Federal Employment. The United States federal government has since the late 1940s maintained that homosexual conduct is immoral and that homosexual­ity in itself establishes unfitness for em­ployment. The argument is that homosex­ual conduct is scandalous and disgraceful and requires punitive policies on the part of the executive. While more recent court decisions have somewhat limited the Civil Service Commission in this area, they leave open the possibility that homosexual conduct might justify dismissal where interference with efficiency could be proved. The military establishment has almost uniformly been successful in de­feating suits brought against it by homo­sexual and lesbian members of the armed forces threatened with discharge and often loss of benefits as well.
Public Schools. The situation of school employees is entangled in a web of contradictory and inconsistent decisions. While procedural due process is accorded public employees, there is no guarantee that a teacher's classroom performance will be the basis of the decision. Homosex­ual teachers and counselors often face dismissal on the basis of substantive rules that disqualify such an employee for "moral turpitude" or "immoral or unprofessional conduct." Because popular belief identi­fies the homosexual with the child molester, public schoolteachers face a particularly invidious type of discrimina­tion. Revocation of the teaching creden­tial has been a virtual rule when a teacher is convicted of a homosexual offense, even though the party with whom the act was committed may have long since passed the school attendance age. More recently, a few courts have held that an employee's private life should not be of concern to an s since the late 1940s maintained that homosexual conduct is immoral and that homosexual­ity in itself establishes unfitness for em­ployment. The argument is that homosex­ual conduct is scandalous and disgraceful and requires punitive policies on the part of the executive. While more recent court decisions have somewhat limited the Civil Service Commission in this area, they leave open the possibility that homosexual conduct might justify dismissal where interference with efficiency could be proved. The military establishment has almost uniformly been successful in de­feating suits brought against it by homo­sexual and lesbian members of the armed forces threatened with discharge and often loss of benefits as well.
Public Schools. The situation of school employees is entangled in a web of contradictory and inconsistent decisions. While procedural due process is accorded public employees, there is no guarantee that a teacher's classroom performance will be the basis of the decision. Homosex­ual teachers and counselors often face dismissal on the basis of substantive rules that disqualify such an employee for "moral turpitude" or "immoral or unprofessional conduct." Because popular belief identi­fies the homosexual with the child molester, public schoolteachers face a particularly invidious type of discrimina­tion. Revocation of the teaching creden­tial has been a virtual rule when a teacher is convicted of a homosexual offense, even though the party with whom the act was committed may have long since passed the school attendance age. More recently, a few courts have held that an employee's private life should not be of concern to an employer unless it could be shown to af­fect the employee's ability to perform his duties. In practice, the criterion has often been the employee's visibility: if his sex­ual activity is covert and unknown to the community, the school officials can over­look it, but if it becomes publicly known, they feel obliged to "protect the reputation of the institution." Such is also the logic of court decisions that uphold the right of an employer to dismiss a gay activist whose political overtness has made him notorious.
Housing. Discrimination in hous­ing is another barrier that homosexuals face, particularly when trying to rent apart­ments. Single homosexuals who "pass" are not likely to encounter difficulty; moreover, gay people are recognized by many landlords as likely to improve prop­erty. When two prospective tenants of the same sex apply, however, they may be denied at the whim of the owner or, in the case of large corporate landlords, as the result of company policy. The argument is voiced that their presence will have a "morally corrupting influence" on the children of families living in the same building or in the general area. Homosexu­als are by definition single, even if in fact they are long-term, stable couples; they may have children, but they do not qualify for benefits offered to young married couples or families with children. If one of the partners in a relationship dies, the lease may not be transferable to the survi­vor because there is no formal marriage tie.
Public Accommodations. Restau­rants, bars, and hotels do not offer the same problems for the homosexual as they once did for ethnic or religious minorities who were explicitly denied lodging or service, though an obviously gay couple may still be the object of rudeness or hos­tility. On the whole, however, homophile activists have not raised this issue in the courts, while for the civil rights move­ment of the early 1960s it was a prime concern. Similarly, the denial of voting rights that was a major issue in the drive for racial equality did not concern the gay movement, because homosexuals have never been politically demarcated even for purposes of exclusion. Also, the develop­ment of a network of guest houses, restau­rants, bars, and similar establishments that welcome a gay clientele has filled the need for such places of recreation and leisure.
Economic Aspects. The economic dimension of discrimination against homosexuals is difficult to assess, just because it may consist in underemploy­ment, denial of promotion, or rejection for an executive position though not an entry-level one. In fields where a significant proportion of the workers are gay (e.g., librarianship, dance), it is only those with a heterosexual appearance or social facade who may be chosen for advancement to the upper levels of the occupational hierar­chy. Also, some homosexuals fearing dis­covery or dismissal may opt out of the normal career path entirely, preferring to create their own firms from which they cannot be fired at the whim of a heterosex­ual employer.
Prívate Life. Forms of discrimina­tion in private life cannot be separated from the right of an individual to choose his associates and intimates. The private citizen who wants no part of homosexuals cannot be taken to court on any ground, even if he engages in open rudeness. Also, there is a civil liberties issue: the freedom of association necessarily includes theright of non-association, which can be moti­vated by any number of idiosyncratic dis­likes and aversions. Here only patient education - and diplomacy on the part of homosexuals in their dealings with un­sympathetic heterosexuals - can erase the invisible barriers.
Affirmative Action. From the late 1960s onward, laws and guidelines were enacted that called for "affirmative ac­tion" to increase the numbers of women and ethnic minorities in fields from which they had traditionally been excluded or limited to low-level, menial positions. These have even included actual quotas that an employer needed to meet to com­ply with the law. None of these programs has contained any measure to increase the number of homosexuals in any firm or industry, indeed critics sometimes ad­vanced the very suggestion that there should be one as the reductio ad absurdum of the entire scheme. It is also a fact that homosexuals are overrepresented in many areas of employmentrelativeto their numbers in the general population, and in these fields quotas would not benefit the gay community, but rather deprive its members of their hard-earned livelihood. Then too, many homosexuals who are in noway obvious would never identify them­selves as deserving preference under a quota system.
People with AIDS. In recent years, the spread of AIDS in the gay male popu­lation has resulted in demands for anti­discrimination measures that have enjoyed some success as part of a general move­ment to protect the rights of the disabled and handicapped. Courts have interpreted such statutes as meaning that an employee with AIDS cannot be fired so long as he is capable of performing competently on the job. On the other hand, efforts by insur­ance companies to identify homosexual men and deny them protection have in some instances been tacitly approved by the courts and legislatures. Also, forms of ostracism and social isolation inspired by fear of disease have gone so far as to deny people with AIDS seats on a commercial airliner.
Prospects and Goals. The cam­paign for anti-discrimination ordinances parallel to those protecting other minori­ties will be a major part of gay movement activity in the decades ahead, as removing the negative sanctions in the law is only the first, though necessary, step. One cannot logically ask to be protected in behavior which is per se illegal. Many homosexuals choose not to advertise their sexual orientation to an unfriendly envi­ronment, and desire only respect for their privacy. The long tradition of exclusion and ostracism of homosexuals in Western civilization has only begun to recede in the face of the organized movement for gay rights, and positive guarantees of the fun­damental liberties that homosexuals need to become full-fledged members of mod­em society remain one of that movement's principal goals.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Bruce Galloway, ed., Prejudice and Pride: Discrimination Against Gay People in Modern Britain, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983; Judith M. Hedgpeth, "Employment Discrimination Law and the Rights of Gay Persons," Journal of Homosexuality, 5 (1979), 67-78; Arthur S. Leonard, "Employment Discrimination against Persons with AIDS," University of Dayton Law Review, 10 (1985), 745-65.
Warren Johansson

Disgust
Disgust is a physical reaction comparable to nausea that is provoked by exposure to something experienced as distasteful or loathsome. Nausea is a pri­mary response of the gastro-intestinal system to substances rejected and expelled by it, typically in the form of vomiting. The close relationship between the oral cavity, the sense of taste, tactile sensa­tions, and deglutition on the one hand, and the functions of the stomach, on the other, explain the existence of tastes and odors that are nauseating even to one who has never previously encountered them.
The principal reason for mention­ing disgust in this encyclopedia is that it figures so frequently as an argument for the intolerance of homosexual expression. In debates on the sodomy laws speakers often allege that "hearing of these prac­tices makes me sick to my stomach" or that "what I read there nauseated me to the foundations of my being." Further, this reaction is cited as a spontaneous expression of the voxpopuli, as the natural aversion of the common man to "this revolting filthiness" that justifies the per­petuation of the statutes by a democrati­cally elected legislature.
Psychology. Modern psychology recognizes that erotic sensations are closely associated with the arousal of certain parts of the body known as erogenous zones. Among these, the buccal cavity must be regarded not merely as primary and as one of the most important, but also as one of those which retain their function into adulthood. Early in the life of the child the feeling of disgust originates as a negative reaction deriving from external condition­ing that represses the erotic tendencies associated with the oral cavity. Just as the complete gratification of the hunger in­stinct is followed by a disgust felt for further nourishment, so the satisfaction of sexual desires can result in disdain for further activity.
A further consideration is that the sexual acts of others are capable of arousing disgust in an individual who regards his own with equanimity. This reaction is not confined to high stages of civilization, but is found among primitive peoples in an even more palpable form. It gives rise to the belief that sexual inter­course is unclean, impure, defiling, and also to the social compulsion to hide one's sexual activity from the light of day, to perform erotically only in the absence of witnesses. Hence the privacy of sexual behavior is a need recognized by virtually every human society, even if the criminal law in the Western world has only recently become aware of the contradiction be­tween this norm of the "deep structure" of social control and the century-long tradi­tion that made the law of the state coter­minous with the canon law of the Church.
History. Of all the peoples of antiquity, the Greeks had the least collec­tive sense of disgust at the sexual side of life. The nonchalance with which the classic authors discussed erotic matters sorely embarrassed later generations of scholars who had to prepare bowdlerized editions of their writings. The Persian religion, on the other hand, with its pro­nounced dualism, relegated homosexual­ity to the realm of darkness and evil, rein­forcing the Judaic tradition that associated sexuality with ritual impurity. Christian­ity reinforced this negativism with its ascetic strivings that identified the flesh and sexual pleasure with sin and defile­ment. In the high Middle Ages this belief system evolved into a virtual compulsion neurosis with ritualized defense mecha­nisms that included violently punitive measures against those found guilty of "uncleanness." Homosexual sodomy became for the Christian mind the quin­tessence of filthiness and foul honor, a pollution that excluded the offender from Christian society and turned him into a "moral leper" and "plaguebearer."
Analysis. That homosexual ac­tivity in particular should arouse disgust in the uninitiated cannot surprise anyone given that it so often entails anal-genital or oral-genital contact, and that the oppo­site ends of the gastro-intestinal tract are major loci of taboos associated with clean­liness and propriety. It is even alleged that the very word "homosexual" provokes in the minds of certain individuals the image of a subject engaged in anal intercourse, with accompanying feelings of disgust and horror. The experience of another male's semen as repugnant and defiling must also enter into the negative reaction.
It is also a fact that the homosex­ual orientation may include a feeling of disgust for the person of the opposite sex, an inversion of the attraction experienced by the heterosexual. For some, there is not just the positive magnetism experienced for one's own sex, but a negative repulsion that magnifies the distasteful sides of the person of the other sex - the specific odor of the body, the texture of the skin and hair, the perceived disharmonies of the physique.
Concluding Reflections. To what extent should disgust figure as a motive for legislation aimed at the control of sexual activity? That such activity should be confined to private places or to ones where only other consenting adults are present is tacitly assumed by all modern legislation. On the other hand, to claim that such behavior is "abominable" and "offensive" even when committed in private, and therefore within the scope of the criminal law, is to deny the significance of privacy itself; it is the state, not the sexual part­ners, that is infringing the principle of privacy by invoking the sanctions of crimi­nal law. What adults do under conditions of strict privacy for their own sexual pleas­ure offends the feelings of no one, even if it would cause profound indignation and disgust when committed in public. In fact, at the end of the eighteenth century, one of the chief motives for repealing the medie­val sodomy statutes was desire to avoid the scandal attendant upon sensational trials and executions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Eugène Carp, "Quelques remarques sur la psychologie du dégoût," L'Encéphale, 27 (1932), 107-112; Gustav Kafka, "Zur Psycholo­gie des Ekels," Zeitschrift für ange­wandte Psychologie, 34 (1929), 1-46; Emilio Majluf, "Fenomenología y clínica del asco en la neurosis compulsiva," Revista de neuropsiquiatria, 10 (1947), 257-323; C. Theodoridis, "Sexuelles Fühlen und Werten. Ein Beitrag zur Völkerpsychologie," Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, 40 (1920), 1-88; Abraham L. Wolbarst, "Sexual Perver­sions: Their Medical and Social Implications," Medical Journal and Record, 134 (1931), 5-9, 62-65.
Warren Johansson

Donatello (Donato di Niccoló di Betto Bardica. 1386-1466)
Florentine sculptor. Less well known today than some other Italian Ren­aissance artists of the fifteenth century, Donatello may have been the most origi­nal. His apprenticeship took place in the orbit of ongoing work on Florence Cathe­dral. In 1408-09 he created the marble David; the youthful, teasing grace of this delightful figure already shows the sculptor's homosexual tastes, which are documented from other sources. From 1416 to 1420, for Or San Michele, he created the moving figure of St. George, a work which later became the "boyfriend" of countless admirers of male beauty.
In 1431-33 he was in Rome with the architect Brunelleschi, studying an­cient works of art which were then ac­cepted as touchstones of quality. On his return Donatello created the bronze David now in the Bargello Museum. From 1433 to 1453 he was in Padua, where he made the high altar of the great church of St. Anthony, as well as the equestrian monu­ment to the condottiere Gattamelata, which set the pattern for countless such figures in public squares throughout Eu­rope and the Americas. On his return to Florence, Donatello explored new expres­sive dimensions of characterization, open­ing avenues which were important for the paintings of Sandro Botticelli.
Donatello's patrons, including Cosimo de' Medici, took an attitude of amused tolerance with regard to his homo­sexual escapades. On one occasion he is supposed to have chased a boy to another town with the intention of killing him, only to relent when he saw the beloved form once more. As a homosexual Donatello was fortunate to live mainly in the first half of the fifteenth century when attitudes were relatively relaxed. After his death, the authorities of Florence, alarmed at the city's reputation as a new Sodom, sought to take "corrective" action. Al­though the resulting denunciations did little to stem the overall incidence of ac­tivity, they dissolved the easy, almost carefree environment in which Donatello flourished.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. H. W. Janson, The Sculpture of Donatello, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957; Laurie Schneider, "Donatello and Caravaggio: The Iconography of Decapitation," American Imago, 33 (1976), 76-91.
Wayne R. Dynes

Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.. 1886-1961)
American poet, novelist, and translator. A Pennsylvanian, H.D. met Marianne Moore at Bryn Mawr and Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams at the University of Pennsylvania. Footloose after college, she formed her first lesbian at­tachment with Frances Gregg, a family friend. In 1911 she left America to settle in Europe. Pound introduced her to his Lon­don circle and gave her the nickname "Dryad." He also included her work in his anthology Des Imagistes (1914), and ar­ranged for her poems to be published else­where, signed (at his suggestion) "H.D. imagiste." Her lyrics, influenced by an­cient Greek poetry, were characterized by a minimalist concision and purity of lan­guage. In 1913 H.D. married the English writer Richard Aldington; while they were not officially divorced until 1938, the separation caused by his wartime service effectively ended the union.
In 1918 Annie Winifred Ellerman, daughter of one of the richest men in England, sought her out. Ellerman, better known under her pen name of "Bryher," had memorized H.D.'s volume Sea Gar­den (1918). Although she was linked to the bisexual American writer Robert McAlmon in an "unconventional" marriage, Bryher had long been aware of her lesbian­ism. She swept H.D. off her feet and the two embarked on a number of trips to­gether, including visits to Greece and Egypt, a country which left a great impression, reorienting H.D.'s subject matter. They both remained on friendly terms with McAlmon, whose Contact Editions be­came H.D.'s publisher. The two women settled more or less permanently in Swit­zerland, providing mutual support in their careers as writers. They both consulted with Sigmund Freud in Vienna and helped to spread his fame in the English-speaking world. Another passion was films, which they made and supported with a critical journal. H.D. spent the war years in Lon­don, returningto Switzerland where Bryher was watchful over her deteriorating health.
The reputation of H.D. remained for a long time linked to her participation in the imagist movement in the teens of the century, to the detriment of her later work. In the 1960s, however, she under­went a revival, influencing a number of contemporary poets, including Robert Duncan.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984.
Evelyn Gettone

Douglas, Alfred, Lord (1870-1945)
British writer and adventurer. The third son of John Sholto Douglas, the eighth marquess of Queensberry, Alfred Douglas was an exquisitely beautiful child. The boy was sent to various preparatory schools and then to Winchester, where he encoun­tered a good deal of what Douglas called "public-school nonsense," which he at first resisted but then accepted. While he was at Winchester, his father took as mistress a woman so notorious that when Lady Queensberry eventually sued for divorce the proceedings took only fifteen minutes.
This episode marked the beginning of Alfred's alienation from his father, who was later to declare, "I never believed he was my son."
In the summer of 1889 young Douglas had his first affair with a woman, a divorcee whom he encountered while staying at a hotel in the south of France, but who found herself the object of indig­nation for having seduced "an innocent boy." In the fall of 1889 he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, where despite some faults of character - he was a poor loser - he was popular, with a dashing personality and lighthearted rebellious­ness that endeared him to his fellow under­graduates. His burgeoning literary talent also won him admirers. The minor poet Lionel Johnson arranged an introduction to the celebrated litterateur Oscar Wilde at his house in Tite Street in London in the late summer of 1891.
Douglas later admitted that the friendship between them had some sexual expression (though of sodomy "there was never the slightest question"), which be­gan about six months after they met and ended forever some six months before the catastrophe that terminated Wilde's ca­reer. Wilde did not generally care for sex­ual intimacy with young men of refine­ment and preferred "rough trade" from the lower depths of society, while Douglas was aggressively masculine. At the outset, moreover, each of the friends was inordi­nately proud of the other. It was a few nights after Douglas attended the premiere of Lady Windermere's Fan (February 20, 1892) that the intimacy between them began.
During the term that followed Douglas became involved in a homosex­ual scandal at Oxford and got out of it by paying £100 to a blackmailer. He was an aristocrat in the worst sense, indifferent to bourgeois morality, and obsessed with the belief that he enjoyed the inalienable privi­lege of amusing himself as he pleased. Wilde, for his part, reveled in flirting with danger, deriving much of his pleasure from the thought that his actions were branded as vices by respectable society.
In the summer of 1894 there occurred an episode, trivial at the time, which had grave consequences for the two men. A homosexual undergraduate at Oxford named John Francis Bloxam asked Douglas for a contribution to a new peri­odical called The Chameleon. Not only did Douglas contribute two poems, but Wilde submitted some "Phrases and Phi­losophies for the Use of the Young" origi­nally destined for the Saturday Review. Bloxam published a homosexual story entitled "The Priest and the Acolyte" that was later - and falsely - attributed to Wilde.
On February 18, Queensberry began the series of events that led to Wilde's disgrace, arrest, and imprisonment by leaving a card at the Albemarle Club ad­dressed "To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite" (sic). Alfred Douglas never testified at any of the three trials, yet he maintained to the end of his life that if he had gone into the witness box he could have saved Wilde, even though the presid­ing judge in summing up the testimony said that "the whole of this lamentable inquiry has arisen through the defendant's association with Lord Alfred Douglas." After the trial Douglas wrote furious let­ters in defense of Wilde and of homosexu­ality, although his family and its friends wanted his liaison with Wilde utterly for­gotten.
In prison Oscar Wilde composed the De Profundis, originally as a letter of forty thousand words which he intended to send to Douglas. However it was nei­ther published nor delivered to its ad­dressee; it was ultimately brought out of the British Museum Library as evidence against Douglas in a civil action for libel.
The two men resumed their friendship in France, after Wilde's release from prison, despite pressure from various sources to break off the relationship. The marquess of Queensberry died half-insane in 1900, and his son received £15,000 from the estate. Of this he gave Wilde some £1000 during what was to be the writer's last year of life,- he told no one and pro­duced the evidence only years later to prove that he had not abandoned Wilde.
During the subsequent decades of his own life Douglas had an indifferent career as a writer and as the editor of several small magazines. In 1902 he mar­ried a woman named Olive Custance who deserted him in 1913. At the age of forty he converted to Catholicism and derived emotional strength from it when what he called "the years of persecution" began. In 1933 he published a book entitled The True History of Shakespeare's Sonnets, not an outstanding work of scholarship, but an exploration of the possible homoerotic attachment between the poet and a boy actor named Will Hughes (the "Mr. W.H."). Other trials and controver­sies figured in his later years, including a feud with Robert Ross, who had also been intimate with Wilde. Remembered chiefly as the companion of the ill-fated play­wright, Lord Alfred Douglas was a de­fender of homosexuality before the cause had achieved any standing in England, and also a minor author in his own right, a personality that will continue to intrigue future generations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Rupert Croft-Cooke, Bosie: Lord Alfred Douglas: His Friends and Enemies, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963; H. Montgomery Hyde, Lord Alfred Douglas, New York: Dodd Mead, 1985.
Warren Johansson

Douglas, Norman (1868-1952)
British novelist and travel writer. Bom in Falkenhorst, Austria, of mixed Scottish and German parentage, Douglas was educated at Uppingham, England, and at Karlsruhe, Germany. His cosmopolitan leanings were confirmed by a career in the British Foreign Service, which included residence in St. Petersburg from 1894 to 1896. He abandoned this calling, however,
and went to Italy to live. Though he was married at the time, Douglas' stay in Italy brought forth his pederastic bent. It is said that during his later years he would take a different boy "muse" as inspiration during the writing of each of his books. Siren Land (1911) and Old Calabria (1915) are evocative records of his travels in southern Italy that mingle chronicle, observation, historical notes, and philosophical mus­ings. During one of these trips he recalls spending months with Amitrano, an illit­erate peasant boy of the Sorrento country­side, renewing contact with "elemental and permanent things ... casting off out­worn weeds of thought with the painless ease of a serpent." Evidently the casting off was incomplete, for he could still recog­nize the outlines of classical statuary in the laboring bodies of Italian fieldhands.
Douglas wrote his popular novel South Wind (1917) to capture the expatri­ate atmosphere of the Capri colony. Set against the semi tropical ñora and fauna of "Nepenthe" (as he calls the island), the novel evokes a gentle hedonism that sof­tens the sharp edges of the northern visi­tors. The plot, such as it is, pivots on the gradual conversion of the straightlaced Anglican colonial bishop, Mr. Heard, to a kind of aesthetic paganism. Although nothing in South Wind is overtly homo­sexual, the alert reader can detect allu­sions to the fancies and foibles of the island's foreign gay residents. Continu­ously in print since its first publication, the novel owes its success to its depiction of a Mediterranean outpost of bohemia, whose denizens have learned to "go with the flow."
In the nineteen-twenties Norman Douglas settled down in Florence, where he lived in straightened circumstances, sometimes with the bookseller Pino [G. M.] Orioli. He spent the waryears 1941-46 in England. Most of Douglas' later fiction was not successful, owing to his lack of convincing characterization and plotting. As a result he sometimes required subven­tions from more fortunate authors such as W. Somerset Maugham. His efforts to earn money not infrequently had entertaining results, as in his spoof of literary scholarship, Some Limericks, Collected forthe Useof Students, andEnsplendoui'd with Introduction, Geographical Index, and with Notes Explanatory and Critical (1928). In this little book, the point is not so much the bawdy limericks themselves, but the ingenious and improbable glosses supplied by the editor.
A renowned consumer of haute cuisine and wines, Douglas had little fond­ness for avant-garde literature, which he described as "rats' feet over broken glass in a dry cellar." As he grew older his interest in people became increasingly selective, and he acquired a reputation as a misan­thrope. But his enthusiasm for young people never waned. "A child," he re­marked, "is ready to embrace the universe. And, unlike adults, he is never afraid to face his own limitations."
In retrospect Douglas represented the milieu of the select foreign colony in Italy before the age of mass tourism. His Florentine circle included other homosex­ual and lesbian residents, notably Harold Acton, Vernon Lee, and Reggie Turner. They were seduced to their venerable surroundings by a largely illusory Medi­terranean paradise of the senses. But since many of them flourished and were creative there, the illusion was a beneficial one.
Wayne R. Dynes

Drag
See Transvestism; Transvestism, Theatrical.

Drama
See Theatre and Drama.

Dreams
Since the beginning of time human beings have dreamed and have been fascinated, perplexed, and terrified by their dreams. Universal as is the experience of dreaming, the interpretation of dreams is variable and culturally conditioned. In various traditions dreams have been under­stood as religious experience (divine pos­session); predictions of future events, good or ill; a review of the previous day's hap­penings,- wish fulfillment; and communi­cations, often puzzling or disguised, from the unconscious. Their elliptical, protean character suggests that dreams are mes­sages in code. This code requires transla­tion by an interpreter, who may be the dreamer in person, a village elder, a priestly figure, an occultist, or a psychiatrist. When a dream has homosexual content, the hermeneutic process is complicated by the ethical assumptions of the dreamer and the interpreter, which reflect the attitudes of society toward same-sex experience.
To understand their dream expe­riences human beings have formulated a lore to which the ancients gave the name oneirocritical. Because the ancient world accepted homosexual interest and activity as part of human sexuality, the dream interpreters of the eastern Mediterranean cultures could calmly explain the homoerotic episodes in dreams in terms of their overall system of signs and meanings and without anxiety. Such was the work of Artemidorus of Daldis (middle of the sec­ond century), which alludes to pédérastie and homosexual dream sequences and assigns them a specific, often prophetic meaning. Not so the Christian Middle Ages; the literature of dreams became exclusively heterosexual because the ta­boo with which theology had tainted sex­ual attraction to one's own sex imposed a censorship that is only now being lifted.
The folk, the occult, and the psychoanalytic traditions offer quite var­ied approaches for the interpretation of dreams. Yet all work with a set of symbols which the interpreters claim to have vali­dated through individual experience. Some begin by questioning the client about events in his life that may have activated the dream and then try to elicit his own understanding, before they proceed to an explanation or prediction on the basis of the reported dream material. Others may simply elaborate the client's own associa­tion. An interpreter with a flair for a par­ticular set of images and symbols may tend to focus on the latent content of these, while giving only formal transla­tion-like explanations of others. In some traditions one symbol is assigned univer­sal significance, but another may have a polyvalent range of meaning that is pointed to the client's concrete life situation. If the interpreter ignores the latter, he may en­counter justified contradiction and even rejection from the client.
The homoerotic content of dreams, in a culture where homosexuality is severely tabooed, may provoke deep, fundamental conflicts. Such dreams are dangerous to the subject, charged as they are with explosive content which the client may not be ready to accept and which may therefore greatly frighten him. The inter­preter is well advised to postpone the analysis and explanation of such dreams until a time when the client is able to accept them without needless anxiety. Other dreams may be at odds with the subject's overt sexual life, and he may even wish to adapt their content to his conscious orientation. Kinsey mentions instances of such disparity in the subjects of his interviews.
According to the psychoanalytic tradition, the dream, by widening the avenues of perception and attention, can lift amnesia of past events in the life of the subject. The dream may reflect the role of homosexuality in psychic conflict, por­traying with special clarity the ways in which it complicates the analytic rela­tionship. The dream also exposes the homosexual conflicts of adolescence, a period often relegated to the Umbo of the client's memory. Broader intellectual and social acceptance of overt homosexuality may increase rather than decrease the problems raised by its unconscious dy­namics, as the subject then has to confront the possibility of having homoerotic de­sires that are within reach of gratification. Homosexuality becomes meaningful to a subject only when he can integrate it with his own living experience. Future studies of the role of homosexuality in the dream need to take account of the long repressed homoerotic component of human culture, as well as the value assigned specifically homosexual symbols in the traditional literature of dream interpretation. More­over, new research on the physiology of sleep is likely to open future perspectives on the dream.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Leon L. Altaian, The Dieam in Psychoanalysis, New York: International Universities Press, 1975; Sandor Lorand, Technique of Psychoana­lytic Therapy, New York: International Universities Press, 1946.
Warzen Johansson

Drugs
As used in this article drugs are substances introduced into the body to produce pleasure, altered states of con­sciousness, or hallucinations (short-term psychosis). Not included, because they are considered neither major social issues nor gay-related, are drugs and foods which influence brain chemistry in other ways [for example, antidepressants; tranquiliz­ers,- the amino acid tryptophan; phenylethylamine, the psychoactive ingredient in chocolate).
Drugs are of diverse origins and have sharply contrasting characteristics. Some are produced by plants (alcohol, caffeine, cannabis [marijuana], coca, mes­caline, nicotine, opium); some are concen­trated extracts (cocaine, heroin, spirits); others are manufactured (amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD, volatile nitrites). Some drugs have a high overdose potential (her­oin; PCP), others low (cannabis); some are effective in very small doses (LSD), others only at high doses (alcohol); some are highly addictive (cocaine, nicotine, opiates), oth­ers mildly so (alcohol), and others not addictive at all (cannabis, LSD). In addi­tion, drugs vary dramatically in mode of action and effects on the brain and other bodily systems. They can be divided into depressants and stimulants, with the hal­lucinogens a subcategory of the latter.
Policy. The degree to which soci­ety should or can tolerate recreational drug use, psychic exploration or artistic crea­tion through drugs, or self-destructive use of drugs, is an unresolved question. There is a partial consensus that private use, which does not impede societal function­ing or lead to gross neglect of health, is tolerable and can even be endorsed (the glass of wine with dinner). The use of drugs is so widespread in human history - it has been proposed that agriculture was born from a desire to easily produce alcoholic beverages - that their use could respond to some biological drive. There is also a consensus that society has the right to demand unimpaired capacity from those in hazardous activities with responsibility for the safety of others (surgeons, pilots, drivers of automobiles). Between those extremes there is a vast, confused area. It should be noted that there has never been a country or society in which unrestricted use of all psychoactive drugs has been permitted over any period of time.
Under ideal conditions, with controlled strengths and purities and a warm, supportive environment, there is little long-term harm to the healthy sub­ject in infrequent use of drugs. However, drug use easily becomes frequent, and the amount used may increase because the body develops tolerance for some drugs and the desired effects decrease. Frequent use can cause bodily harm, although this varies with the drug and the user, and some bodily harm (for example, sports injuries) may be considered acceptable by society. The history of drugs reveals that while benefits are immediately evident, harmful effects may not be discovered until much later. Damage from drugs can be produced so slowly that it is hard to per­ceive, and sometimes it has no early symptoms at all; addiction can make the user blind to harm. Drugs can reduce the disease-fighting capacity of the body's immune system.
Illegal drugs are seldom used under ideal conditions,- they vary widely in potency and are sometimes adulterated. Without quick medical treatment over­doses of the more hazardous substances, particularly those which depress respira­tory function or cause vomiting, can cause brain damage or death; overdoses of stimu­lants can cause death from circulatory system failure. In some users hallucino­gens cause terrifying experiences; psycho­logical problems can be exacerbated, and brain damage caused. The action of stimu­lants is often followed by a compensatory negative experience through which the body restores its equilibrium. Injection bypasses natural protection against infec­tion. Without supervision a person with drug-impaired capacity can injure him- or herself, or others. Even without harmful effects, there is a philosophical and some­times spiritual opposition to the use of chemicals to influence the brain, and controversy about their value as a means of self-improvement. Some of the effects for which drugs are taken can be achieved more safely by non-chemical means (for example, yoga, meditation, sensory depri­vation).
There is in addition the question of social motivation. Pleasure and spiri­tual enlightenment from drugs bypass social mechanisms. When these mecha­nisms misfunction, when people feel that something is wrong with their lives, the use of drugs to supply the missing gratifi­cation is all the more attractive. Society can tolerate drug use if it is encapsulated within an artistic, recreational, religious, or therapeutic context; while some are able to so control their usagé, for many that is a daunting or impossible condition, at least in our present culture. Society can also tolerate a small proportion of volun­tarily non-productive members without offending the perception of equity. How­ever, civilization above a subsistence level cannot coexist with widespread loss of productivity owing to drugs. While it might seem that the use of drugs is inherently anticapitalistic, in that they discourage both production and consumption, drugs can also undermine activism for social change. Repressive governments have used drug policy as a means of pacifying the population and circumventing challenges to their rule.
At the same time, legal restric­tions on drug use have been spectacularly unsuccessful and counterproductive. The long-term solution to the threat posed by drugs is a fairer and more meaningful society. Meanwhile, education is more effective than prohibition. Exaggeration of drugs' harmful effects reduces respect for law, overwhelms the courts and prisons, inhibits research on and therapeutic use of drugs, makes drugs of controlled strength and purity unavailable, gives drugs the glamour of the forbidden, and encourages progression to ever more dangerous yet legally equal substances. As with alcohol during America's Prohibition (1920-33), the supply of illegal drugs has become a very profitable industry, and not a passive or benign one. Foreigners who supply drugs sometimes justify their actions to them­selves and their countrymen as a means of striking back at the political and economic power of the United States. The costs of America's drug policies have not yet been fully paid.
Homosexuals and Drugs. Gay people have historically used more drugs than the population at large. The first explanation is simple hedonism. Repres­sion of sexuality causes focus on it, and a commitment to the enjoyment of pleasure naturally brings a receptivity to otherways in which pleasure might be produced or increased. Homosexuals have been privi­leged to see societies' limitations and hypocrisy over sex, and this has created a skepticism about other societal policies in conflict with individual desires. Similarly, those who are in an oppressed minority have extra motivation to try to learn about themselves; drugs have been used for that purpose.
In some cases drugs which loosen inhibitions or which stimulate new and unusual perspectives on self and behavior have helped individuals become more aware and accepting of their homosexual­ity or bisexuality. Alcohol has often served this function, but during the 1960s, there were a considerable number of reports of people becoming aware of homoeroticism for the first time while under the influence of LSD especially. Drugs have also been used by musicians, artists, and writers who claim that the substances help them create, although this claim is controver­sial, perhaps because if substantiated it would be a powerful argument for drug use. Finally, homosexuals have suffered, on the average, more emotional pain and deprivation than heterosexuals, and drugs, especially alcohol, have been used to numb that pain.
History. Throughout classical Mediterranean antiquity and into the Is­lamic period the only widely-used drug was alcohol, in the form of wine. Wine was the drink of poets and lovers, a distinction it still retains, though somewhat weak­ened. A party, such as we see in Petronius' Satyricon, would often combine wine and sexual activity, and the cup-bearer Ganymede was the mythological model for the ephebe. In the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, we find that all one needed for happiness was the beloved, a garden, po­etry, bread, and wine. Wine was valued for more than hedonism, however: wine re­leased truths ("in vino Veritas"), and thus both produced enlightenment and brought one closer to the divine.
The use of hashish (cannabis), eaten in sweets rather than smoked, is found in the Bible (Song of Songs 5.1; 1 Samuel 14.25-45), and there is evidence of psychic use of hemp (marijuana), from which hashish is made, from prehistoric times. Herodotus, for example, reports its popularity among the Scythians. However, widespread use of hashish begins in Islam in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While the Koran prohibited wine, which because of distribution costs was some­what more expensive than today, it was silent on hashish, which was also much less expensive. There was debate about whether the Koran's silence was to be taken as approval, or whether prohibition was to be inferred from the treatment of wine; still, as long as it remained a minor­ity indulgence it was tolerated, as wine usually was. Hashish users became a sub­culture; in particular it is linked to the mystical Sufis, who made a cult and ritual of its use. However, almost every Islamic poet from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries produced at least some playful poems on hashish, although wine poetry is much more abundant.
A link between hashish and homosexuality is well documented in classical Islamic literature. Hashish was thought to cause effeminacy, a preference for the passive sexual role, and a loss of interest in sex. However, it was also prized as the drug of scholars and lovers of young men, and an aid in seduction of the latter. Turkish soldiers frequently ate hashish together before going into battle.
Coffee was introduced to Europe in the seventeenth century from the Turk­ish empire. Both within Islam and in Eu­rope coffee was at first a similarly contro­versial drug, subject to occasional legal restriction or suppression. Its use in cof­feehouses, later cafes, was typical of intel­lectuals and dissidents.
The reaction to the failure of the French Revolution and the loss of faith in the powers of human reason, associated with the Romantic movement, led to a new awareness of and interest in the non-rational and unconscious. For the first time drugs were investigated as sources of self-knowledge and stimulants for creativity, as well as for recreation. The takeover of part of the Ottoman empire by France and England led to the introduction of hashish into Europe. In addition to hashish and wine, opium was used, as were nitrous nitrous oxide and ether; the recreational use of the two latter antedates their use as anesthetics. The center of drug explora­tion was France, where it remained associ­ated with poets and dissidents throughout the century.
The first half of the twentieth century was characterized by a wave of reaction against drugs and the establish­ment of legal controls throughout Westem Europe and North America. However, the tensions of the 1960s, against a back­drop of the Holocaust and the invention and use of the atomic bomb, brought on a new wave of drug use. The hedonistic use of cannabis increased greatly; its enthusi­asts promoted it as an aid to sensual and sexual enjoyment. The Beat generation, especially William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, had already turned to potent psychedelics as a means of self-improve­ment; they became part of the short-lived counterculture of the late 1960s. The dis­covery of psychedelics was in part due to progress in anthropology and archeology. The use by native peoples of mescaline (peyote), psilocybin (mushrooms), and other psychedelics became known, and the possible role of such substances in visions and oracles of the ancient Mediter­ranean world was proposed by scholars. The hallucinogenic properties of the most potent psychedelic yet known, lysergic acid diethylamine-25 (LSD), were discov­ered in 1943; until it became too contro­versial, it was manufactured by a pharma­ceutical company for research in psycho­therapeutic treatment.
Modern gay culture emerged in Germany, and perhaps for that reason was centered on bars and the use of alcohol; this pattern spread to the United States at approximately the time it was suppressed in Germany by the Nazis. The gay bar remains the only gay institution in many American communities, as it was almost everywhere until the 1970's. The visibil­ity of gay culture in the 1970s coincided with the wave of druguse referred to above. A variety of drugs were used, at least by the more visible and hedonistic parts of the gay subculture, until the early eighties: marijuana, mescaline and other hallucino­gens, the anesthetic ethyl chloride, and finally a "gay drug": poppers, so called from the sound made when opening the glass vials in which they were first sold.
Poppers are a vasodilator of tran­sitory effect, and cause a "high" from a drop in blood pressure; users say that the intensity and/or duration of orgasm is increased, that muscles (such as throat and anal sphincters) and gag reflexes are re­laxed, and that feelings of increased union or "melting" with the sex partner result. Many users report that continued use (a single inhalation produces effects only for a few minutes) inhibits erections, while other users seem unaffected. Likewise, some users say the poppers encourage passivity and complete relaxation, while others report no such effect. Headaches and dizziness are sometimes reported as side effects.
The pharmaceutical amyl nitrite, prescribed for treatment of angina, was replaced for legal reasons with butyl and other related volatile nitrites with similar effects. Under the pretense of use as a room odorizer, these were sold under such brand names as Crypt, Cum, Locker Room, Pig, Rush, and the like. "Pot and poppers" came to be in some circles a routine part of gay male sex, and poppers began to be used by heterosexual Americans, most visibly, and sexually, on disco dance floors. There has, however, been little indication of widespread sexual use of poppers by hetero­sexuals or by lesbians. In the early 1980s poppers were accused of being a cof actor in the development of AIDS, and they were made illegal in some areas, although the accusation remains unproven. The AIDS epidemic brought an increased concern with bodily and especially immune sys­tem health, and a reduction in gay drug use of all sorts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edward M. Brecher, et al., Licit and Illicit Drugs, Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Consumers Union, 1972;
William Burroughs, "Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs," British Journal of Addiction, 53 (1957), 119-31, reprinted as an appendix to Naked Lunch, New York: Grove, 1959, pp. 239-55, William Burroughs, "Points of Distinction between Sedative and Conscious-Expanding Drugs," Evergreen Review, No. 34 (December, 1964), 72-74; C. Creighton, "On Indications of the Hachish-Vice in the Old Testament," Janus, 8 (1903), 241-46 and 297-303; Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, New York: Harper, 1954; Andrew C. Kimmens, ed., Tales of Hashish, New York: William Morrow, 1977; Martin A Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebeliion, New York: Grove, 1985; Cynthia Palmer and Michael Horowitz, eds., Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady: Women's Writings on the Drug Experience, New York: Quill, 1982; Franz Rosenthal, The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Mushm Society, Leiden: Brill, 1971; Frits Stall, Exploring Mysticism, Berkeley: Univer­sity of California Press, 1975; Jay Steevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987; Andrew Weil and Winifred Rosen, Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.
Daniel Eisenberg

Duncan, Robert Edward (1919-1988)
American poet. He was born Edward Howard Duncan, January 7,1919, in Oakland, California. His natural mother died after childbirth and the boy was adopted by Edwin and Minnehaha Symmes, whose family name he used until 1942. The Symmes maintained a prosper­ous middle-class household in Bakersf ield, California. As members of the Hermetic Brotherhood (itself an offshoot from He­lena Petrovna Blavatsky's Theosophical Society), they received a prediction that their adopted boy would embody the deca­dence of a civilization to be destroyed during his lifetime.
Between 1936 and 1938, Robert was a student at the University of Califor­nia at Berkeley, where he became active in radical politics, explored sex with men, and published his first poems in campus papers. When his lover Ned Fahs gradu­ated and took a job in Maryland, Duncan left school and moved to the East Coast; the two separated in 1940, but Robert lived around with both men and women as he pursued his interest in literature. Duncan circulated within the Manhattan gay circles in the 1940s and met Pavel Tchelitchew, Lou Harrison, Parker Tyler, Sanders Russell, Charles Henri Ford, James Bald­win, Paul Goodman, W. H. Auden, and others. Duncan published his pathbreaking essay in the anarchist magazine Poli­tics (August, 1944): "The Homosexual in Society." The essay argued that, like blacks and Jews, homosexuals were an oppressed minority in a hostile society. Duncan's making a political issue of homosexuality disturbed many famous New York homo­sexuals. W. H. Auden later wrote begging Duncan not to publish an essay discussing Auden's sexuality: "I earn a good part of my livelihood by teaching and in that profession one is particularly vulnerable."
In 1945 Duncan returned to Cali­fornia and in 1946 (at the urging of a boyfriend and German exile, Werner Vordtriede) he began study under Ernst Kantorowicz, another exile and a member of the Stefan George Circle. Heavenly City Earthly City (1947), Poems, 1948-49, and Medieval Scenes (1949) attempted to link the world both of politics and of sexual intercourse (particularly that between men) with hermetic spiritual truths. In 1946 at an anarchist meeting Duncan met Jack Spicer; the two became close friends (al­though not lovers). They collaborated (and occasionally quarreled) on many political and poetry projects central to the San Fran­cisco Renaissance.
From his earliest to his latest works, Duncan incorporated gay and les­bian themes; in one early poem, he ex­claims: "I am not afraid to be a queen." Being woman-identified, he wrote a series of poems after those of Gertrude Stein and took as his lifelong work an extended commentary on H.D. His 1947 "Venice Poem," weaves the themes of love and loss with the architectural beauties of St. Mark's Square; like the Venetian empire his love was transitory, first he won the young man, Gery Ackerman, who then ran off with Paul Goodman.
Duncan's love life may be divided (like his poetry) between an earlier period of promiscuity and a later period of domes­ticity. One New Year's Day, 1951, he and Jess Collins, a painter, set up house to­gether and were only separated by the poet's death on February 3, 1988. Among the domestic volumes are Caesai's Gate (1955), The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), Bending the Bow(1968), Ground Work Before the War (1984), and Ground Work II, In the Dark (1987).
In Ground Work Before the War, the battle is " that War which rages through­out the world today, as enormous in its crimes and madness" as the ancient wars of religion, a war including gay liberation. In 1973, Duncan wrote John Wieners about the gay liberation fronts, "With the way words have of drawing us into their depths, that term 'liberation' that is so much the jargon of the day (so that while the bosses of the U.S - move in,on Asia burning and exterminating as they go it is called 'liber­ating') does draw us deeper into searching out for ourselves true liberations." And he predicted that the word/world "gay" would "be searcht out until it rings painfully true to us."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert Berthoff, Robert Duncan: A Descriptive Bibliogra­phy, Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1986; Ekbert Faas, Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as Homo­sexual in Society, Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1983.
Charley Shively

Dyke
This word is a slang term in American English designating a female homosexual, which elements of the American lesbian community have adopted as a self-designation. It was origi­nally a term of abuse, and only in the 1970s, with the reversal of values that accompanied the radical upsurge follow­ing the Vietnam War, did it obtain a posi­tive, political value.
The term may stem from an ear­lier compound expression bulldyke, which is recorded from the black American slang of the 1920s in the forms bull-diker (with the variant bull-dagger] and bull-diking woman in the sense of "mannish lesbian."
Several theories are current con­cerning the etymology of dyke or dike (both spellings are found). There are a number that do not bear serious examina­tion: the suggestion that dyke stems from the Greek word dike, fancifully identified with Athena, the "man-woman" who is the principle of total order; or from her­maphrodite, with only the last syllable retained and then mispronounced as dyke; or from Boadicca, the queen of the ancient Britons who fought against the Roman occupation of her country. The last is impossible on both historical and philol­ogical grounds.
More plausible is the derivation from the verb to dike, "to attire oneself faultlessly for social purposes," or to be diked out, which is recorded as American student slang as early as 1851. Somewhat later dike is attested in the meaning of a man so attired, or merely the set of male clothing. Since the original usage of bull-diker is a form denoting the agent of a verb, the meaning would thus be "a lesbian wearing male, particularly formal male attire."
However, this still fails to ex­plain fully the compound bulldiker, which is all the more noteworthy as bull is an English word that is quite prolific in compounds in the literary language and even more in the dialects. Two of these are bull-dog, known from the beginning of the Modern English period (with counterparts in Dutch bulhond and German Bulldogge], and bull-bitch "female bull-dog," first recorded in 1681. Now in the same seman­tic field there is also the word tyke, whose primary meaning in the Germanic lan­guages is "bitch," but which in the dialect of Yorkshire (northeastern England) came to be the usual word for dog, and in the Scottish dialects meant a dog, "generally with contemptuous force, a hulking un­couth ill-bred dog, a cur." Since the bull is the zoomorphic symbol of maleness par excellence, it is possible that the putative compound bull-tyke yielded bull-dyke with the notion of "a bitch who behaves like a bull" = a woman who behaves like a man in dress and mannerisms. The influ­ence of the verb to dike then produced the forms which later gave the monosyllable dyke through such expressions as dyking ourselves up which for members of certain lesbian subcultures meant "dressing in a most beautiful, proud, defiant masculine manner." Thus what had been a vulgar epithet with connotations of self-hatred and shame has been adopted as a badge of rebellion against the values of a heterosexist, male-dominated culture by the mili­tant lesbian of today. There is even an organization of lesbian mothers with the name Dykes 'n Tykes. Modern Dutch has borrowed the Americanism but in the spelling dijk, the same as the word mean­ing "sea-wall."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. J. R. Roberts, "In America They Call Us Dykes: Notes on the Etymology and Usage of 'Dyke,'" Sinister Wisdom, 9 (Spring 1979), 2-11.
Evelyn Gettone

Dysphoria, Gender
Gender dysphoria is the feeling reported by a few individuals (sometimes labeled "preoperative transsexuals") that they are acutely uncomfortable in their own bodies, and that their sex organs in particular "should not be there." The concept may ultimately stem from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs' formulation anima muliebris corpore virili inclusa, "a female soul trapped in a male body," although he applied the phrase to subject homoerotics, that is to say, homosexuals who identify with the opposite sex and play the corre­sponding role in relations with their own. Gender dysphoria syndrome is a broader concept that may include homosexuality and transvestism as well as( transsex­ualism.
From the early 1950s until re­cently, individuals with gender dysphoria were often guided toward transsexualizing operations in which their sex was surgi­cally "corrected." After recovery from surgery they were resocialized and legally reassigned to the desired gender. Lothstein (1982) estimated that there are 30,000 transsexuals in the entire world, of whom 10,000 are believed to reside in the United States. Male-to-female transsexuals out­number female-to-male ones by at least four and perhaps eight to one, perhaps suggesting a psychological origin of the problem. While such operations seemed to alleviate the gender dysphoria of the sub­ject, follow-up studies have shown that in many cases drastic medical intervention is not the answer, and in fact approxi­mately two-thirds of those classified as transsexuals have not undergone surgery, but are nonetheless living as members of the other gender on a full-time basis. They have assumed the role of the other gender in mannerisms and appearance in all their varied social functions and are, presuma­bly, passing in the eyes of the rest of soci­ety as apparent members of that sex.
Although the contradiction be­tween transsexualism and anatomy sug­gests to some that the condition is patho­logical, the real problem lies in society's dichotomization of masculine and femi­nine forms of behavior - in its belief that because there are only two sexes, there can be only two genders. The transsexual has commonly heard about sex reassignment before approaching the medical counselor and knows the questions and the "correct" answers even before they are formally posed. In other words, the individual seek­ing treatment has made a self-diagnosis and is simply asking the doctor as a surgi­cal technician to perform the necessary treatment. Of historical interest is the fact that the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus (218-222) offered the physicians of his time great rewards if they could effect a transsexualizing operation on his person, but the task exceeded the powers of Greco-Roman medical science.
Individuals with acute gender dysphoria exhibit a great range of person­ality types, with a resulting legal paradox: If the subject passionately craves the sur­gery, he or she may be labeled insane and denied the wish, yet if the subject moder­ately desires the surgery, he or she is pro­nounced competent and granted the wish. Transsexuals tend to fall into three major clusters: (].) individuals reporting a life­long contradiction between their core-morphologic sexual identity and their anatomy and an absence of effective so­cialization and sexual arousal in the role appropriate to their anatomy ("true trans­sexuals"); ¡2) males who have vacillated in their sexual identity or been ambivalent in their sexual identity since childhood, and who have experienced genital arousal in connection with cross-dressing ("transvestitic transsexuals"); (3) individuals experi­encing no contradiction between their core-morphologic identity and their anatomy who have had extensive sexual activity with members of their own sex ("femi­nine-male and masculine-female homo­sexual transsexuals").
Even if transsexuals depend upon the most modem surgical and biochemi­cal techniques for the realization of their hopes, it is improbable that the phenome­non of gender dysphoria exists solely be­cause of medical progress or that conflicts in gender identity and gender role lack historical and anthropological precedents and parallels. Non-Western cultures offer examples of alternate gender statuses in which the individual assumes, by personal choice or by inner compulsion, the role of the other gender; the best known of these is the berdache. Ethnographers are still to some extent perplexed by these phenom­ena and their intricate psychological rela­tionship to what modern Western society labels homosexuality. Hence the psychi­atric evaluation of gender dysphoria must take account of the motives for alternate gender statuses in other cultures - which, however, may be the specific cultural mode of resolving or at least neutralizing a patho­logical identity crisis. In other words, gender dysphoria may express a dissatis­faction with the way in which a particular culture has defined and allocated sex roles rather than a fundamental genetic dishar­mony within the subject. Transsexuals are reacting to their own interpretation of the cultural meanings inherent in the concept of gender; they are seeking to resolve the conflict between gender identity and the socially prescribed role for the appropriate gender. What is obvious to the individual with gender dysphoria is that his or her identity falls on the other side of even the most tolerant line of demarcation between the sexes. Counseling and therapy with such patients may aid them to resolve their conflicts in a manner less damaging to their biological selves, to accept the feminine or masculine component of their personality as no longer ego-alien even if they retain the genitalia of the sex into which they were bom.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. David E. Grimm, "Toward a Theory of Gender: Transsexu­alism, Gender, Sexuality, and Relationships," American Behavioral Scientist, 31 (1987), 66-85; Leslie Martin Lothstein, Female-to-Male Transsexual­ism: Historical, Clinical and Theoretical Issues, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983; John Money, Venuses Penuses, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986.
Warren Johansson