E
Eastern Roman Empire
See Byzantine Empire.
Economics
Economics
is the systematic study of the production, distribution, and consumption of
goods and services. The term may also refer to the activity itself, apart from
the study of it. Non-procreative sexual behavior has generally been assigned
to the sphere of leisure activity - and therefore excluded from economics
proper. But there are economic aspects of homosexuality, both as overt sexual
activity and as a mode of sociosexual expression.
Assets and Liabilities of
Homosexuality with Respect to the Employee. Although it is usually
thought of as a disadvantage, there are professions in which homosexuality can
be an asset. It is an asset when it responds to a covert norm (as in interior
decorating, dance,
etc.), or
provides a password to the fraternity. In the past there were professions in
which celibacy was the rule, so that they
offered the homosexual an escape from the heterosexual marriage into which he
would otherwise have been forced by family pressures and social convention. In
other situations it is a liability that must be hidden throughout life, as
disclosure would result in dismissal or disqualification, or else block
promotion beyond the entry level. Of course such dangers may be exaggerated by
misperception, and many who have "come out" on the job have experienced
no repercussions. Nonetheless, there are professions in which an upwardly
mobile individual is virtually obliged to be married, and the spouse has a
prescribed set of auxiliary functions that cannot easily be performed by an
associate of the same sex, even if the two are living in a quasi-marital
relationship. In these settings the homosexual is pressured to find an
accommodation, contracting a marriage of convenience, sometimes even a
"front" marriage with a lesbian.
In some jobs, discreet homosexuality can be helpful by fostering an inclination
to travel unfettered by familial bonds. The absence of a wife and children
(whose place of residence and schooling must be arranged while the husband
serves a tour of duty abroad or in a hardship post) favors a flexibility that
the heterosexual may not be able to match.
The mentor-protégé
relationship
can be the locus of a homosexual liaison which is all the more advantageous for
the younger party, who instead of "marrying the boss's daughter"
takes on the boss himself as lover and protector. In this way working-class
youths may achieve upward mobility by learning not only the elements of a
business that might otherwise be closed to them, but also middle-class
etiquette and speech patterns.
Homosexuality can be an obstacle to advance in bureaucracies such as the
government or the corporate hierarchy where the lifestyle of the lower ranks is
carefully scrutinized and even subjected to secret surveillance. This situation
places the homosexual at a disadvantage in state socialist regimes that allow
little or no opportunity for private enterprise. In capitalist countries the
freedom always exists to create one's own firm where no obligation to conceal
one's sexual proclivities from one's superiors can arise. This capacity
explains the profusion of small businesses with homosexual proprietors -
antique dealers, florist shops, men's clothing boutiques, restaurants,
bookstores - where the owner can be free to express his sexual orientation
without fear of retaliation. Also, in such small firms a protege-lover can
benefit from a mentor relationship in which he learns the tricks of the trade
and the other skills required for branching out on his own. In small businesses
where profit margins are low, the monetary advantage to the owner of not having
a spouse and children who represent a fixed and even mounting responsibility
as the years pass is likewise considerable.
In recent decades, with the relaxation of gender role stereotypes in fields
traditionally reserved to men, lesbians have been able to move ahead in such
fields as business and law where a certain aggressiveness can be enhanced by
freedom from the demands of a husband or the duties associated with
child-rearing. On the other hand, the absence of a wife as auxiliary may impose
a handicap on the woman who undertakes a career in a profession where such a
"support system" has both social and psychological value.
Hustling. Male prostitution is an
economic activity in and of itself, though mainly limited to those between the
ages of 15 and 30. It can be practiced as a supplement to modeling or acting,
or can be a way of earning money while in college or graduate school, when
other opportunities of making a living would require too much time and be less
remunerative as well. Finally, it can be a way of making contact with men in
the upper echelons of the business and professional world and moving into a
mentor-protege relationship that will serve as a springboard for a later
career. Unlike the female prostitute, the hustler is not automatically disqualified
from a long-term relationship.
Economic Theory. In the field of economics
as a social science, it is noteworthy that both Adam Smith and John Maynard
Keynes were childless. It may be that their separation from the world of
procreation and inheritance gave them the detachment they required to view the
economic process dispassionately and analytically, as someone enmeshed in the
human reproductive cycle could not have done. Keynes himself was a member of
the Bloomsbury circle in which overt homosexuality was accepted along with
other unconventional tastes and lifestyles.
The problem of the reproduction of human capital - from the genetic, not the
educational standpoint - has been neglected by investigators preoccupied with
the issues of capital formation at the macro- and micro-economic levels. The
model of ancient Greek society suggests that while heterosexual relationships
produce the raw human capital in the form of new age-cohorts, homosexual
liaisons may assume the function of refining that human capital by providing
the educational and initiatory experience which readies it for adult life.
Businesses Directed to the
Gay Community. The advent of the gay liberation movement fostered the emergence
of a whole range of enterprises catering primarily or exclusively to the homosexual
or lesbian client. These take the form of bars, restaurants, bookshops, and
bathhouses that served as social gathering places and areas of recreation. In
addition, travel agencies and guest houses have taken advantage of the greater
discretionary income of the childless adult and also of the wanderlust that
leads many homosexuals to distant places and exotic lands in search of new
partners. There are also services that provide escorts or computer dating in a
manner that parallels similar enterprises with a heterosexual clientele. A
press aimed at the homosexual or lesbian reader has taken root, with news
features and personal columns oriented specifically to the needs and interests
of a readership that could find nothing comparable in the establishment media.
Through their advertising - without which they could not survive - these
newspapers have established a symbiotic relationship with gay businesses, in
whose premises the papers are often distributed free. Clinics and counseling
services have sprung up that address themselves specifically to the needs of
gay and lesbian clients.
While gay radicals decry many of these commercial activities as mere mimicry of
the capitalist norms of the larger society, the strength of the gay community
may well lie more in the economic activities that it is able to support than in
the political power which it is largely unable to wield because its members are
so thinly dispersed over the territory of most self-governing political units.
The Gayellow Pages for the USA and Canada and
the Spartacus Guide now published in West
Berlin furnish a fairly reliable annual index to this growing network of enterprises
and services in many countries. Organizations of gay businessmen have been
formed in a number of cities as well.
This web of commercial activity also explains the failure of a gay movement to
arise in countries where state socialism precludes the creation of an economic
power base, and where in turn there are no independent media in which group
identity and solidarity could be cultivated. In the past enterprises catering
to a gay clientele often fell under the control of the underworld because
respectable businessmen wanted nothing to do with them and because of the need
for protection from police harassment. With the lessening of the stigma, the
economic development of the gay community is only a matter of time and of the
prosperity of the nation in whose midst it resides. Moreover, the ability to
convert economic power into political power may well be the key to the ultimate
success of the movement for homosexual emancipation.
Warren Johansson
Education
Recent
perspectives have focused on the place in our educational system of students
and teachers who happen to be homosexual. Respondingto the emergence of a
broad-based gay and lesbian movement, some of these individuals have joined
organizations for mutual support and defense against discrimination. There is,
however, an older tradition that holds that homoerotic attraction itself has a
significant place in the educational experience: the pedagogic eros.
Rationale. To understand the
continuing role of same-sex patterns in education, it is useful to suspend, at
least for the sake of argument, initial objections. In this light the
rationale for a homoerotic component in education may be set forth in the
following terms. The adolescent often has a homosexual phase of development that
precedes the heterosexual one - a kind of "dry run" for the
sexuality of adulthood that permits him or her to experience erotic stimulation
and pleasure without incurring the danger of pregnancy. This homosexual phase
may have as its object an adult who is not just the lover of the adolescent,
but also a role model - appropriately of the same sex. A heterosexual liaison,
apart from the unwanted reproductive aspect, would be discordant because the
male youth can only mature into an adult man, the female into an adult woman.
If this reasoning is valid, the homosexual character of the initiatory process
thus flows from biological and social constraints quite as logically as does
the heterosexual character of the reproductive process. Every society has an
objective need for the biological reproduction of its members - its
demographic base - that far transcends the ephemeral attraction of a man and a
woman for one another. In the same way it has an objective need for the
reproduction of its traditions and values - its cultural base - that far
transcends the ephemeral attraction of an adult and an adolescent of the same
sex for each other. The shorter time-span of the pederastic attachment -
conditioned as it is by biological stimuli - as compared with the heterosexual
one is justified by its role in the service of the eros paidagogikos (the child-educating
eros), which if successful must end in the maturing of the younger party and
his or her emancipation from the transitory homoerotic and educational phase
to enter the world of adulthood as a full-fledged member of society; while the
heterosexual attachment serves the eros paidopoios
(the
child-begetting eros), which is followed by responsibility for rearing the
children from infancy to adulthood. The two expressions of the sexual drive
are thus complementary and non-antagonistic in character; they represent the
evolutionary underpinning of the social relationships obligatory for the
twofold continuity of the human community, the biological and the cultural.
That the Judeo-Christian tradition has defamed the homoerotic urge and driven
it underground does not alter the evolutionary legacy which is intimately
linked with man's survival as a time-binding animal - one that does not simply
reproduce its kind as the consequence of an irrational compulsion to procreate,
but also must in each generation recapitulate the acquisition of the cultural
heritage which must be learned,
as much
by the genius as by the mediocre or even talentless student.
The effort to suppress the homosexual component of education is unlikely ever
completely to succeed, no matter what the means employed or the amount of pain
and sorrow inflicted on those who violate the taboo. If the above reasoning be
true, an educational program cognizant of the findings of modem psychology
would do well to accept this phenomenon as a potentially serviceable part of
the process of learning. Yet even if modern opinion were able to discard its
prejudices, rehabilitation of the pedagogic eros would still face obstacles.
To be sure, many would concede that the teacher requires some special
appreciation of his or her pupils to muster - year in, year out - the instructional
fervor needed to overcome their natural recalcitrance to learning. Yet, with the
best will in the world, introduction of erotic bonds may conclude by retarding
the process of maturation that for the student is the essential dynamic of the
educational endeavor. While over the years the teacher has become accustomed to
transfering his interest from one pupil cohort to another, the student - as a
"first-timer" - may become fixated in the pattern of a relationship,
which by its own character can only be transitory. It is also said that the
pedagogic eros is asymmetrical, since the teacher is more powerful than the
student. Yet many, perhaps most, human relationships are asymmetrical. This is
true of education itself, whether one views it as a process of introjection -
that is, the teacher helping the student progress by inspiration - or of
elucidation, the Socratic midwifery whereby the teacher encourages the student
to bring forth knowledge from inner resources.
Antiquity. The ancient Greeks were
the first to practice and explore the full range of relations between
homophilia and education. Although the origins of the institution of pederasty
are lost in the mists of early Hellenic society, when it first emerges into
view it is essentially initiatory, the paradigm being that of the older man who
takes an adolescent under his wing to train him in military and manly virtues.
In the course of time, and depending on the locality, this relationship became
simplified into a merely erotic one. Sappho's school on the island of Lesbos
shows that in some communities of ancient Greece a parallel pedagogic-erotic
tradition existed for women and girls.
In Athens in the fifth century, however, with its high regard for education in
the modern sense, the initiatory process was retained and reshaped so as to
focus no longer on purely military virtues but on education in the modem sense,
including - for the most gifted - philosophy. It is this conception that is
recorded in Plato's dialogues. These writings also idealize a chaste kind of
pederastic guidance in which the beauty of the boy is cherished, but physical expression of the admiration is
resisted. Nonetheless, it seems clear that many pédérastie teachers did not resist.
The direction of Plato's Academy was itself conducted for several generations
according to a succession from erastes to eromenos - lover to beloved - and
these relationships do not seem all to have been without sexual expression. The
heritage was taken up by the Stoic thinkers who recommended not so much total
abstinence as moderation.
Eclipse of the Pedagogic
Eros. The
link between pedagogy and pederasty, which had become almost second nature to
the Greeks, was not indigenous to the Romans; where it emerged among them it
was thanks to philhellenism. It was Christianity, however, that finally
severed the connection - or so it would seem. For by developing monasticism, by
definition a same-sex community consisting of individuals of different ages,
Christianity created a new set of temptations. The texts of the various Rules
and penitentials contain instructions on how to avoid temptations. Nonetheless,
it seems clear that in monasteries and nunneries there developed deeply rooted
traditions of "particular friendships" that were passed on, in due
course, to the same-sex elite schools of modern Europe.
The Italian Renaissance restored classical culture to a place of honor, and
some thinkers, such as the Florentine Marsilio Ficino, began to advance cautious
arguments in favor of restoring the link between pedagogy and eros. In the
sixteenth century Camillo Scroffa wrote his Cantici di Pidenzio about the unrequited love
of a Paduan pedant for his student, while in the Alcibiade fanciulio
a scola (ca. 1652) Antonio Rocco
set forth a bold plea for sexual enjoyment as the culmination of the
student-teacher relationship.
Educational reformers of the eighteenth century recognized that segregating
adolescents in same-sex schools created a hot-house climate for homosexual
sentiments and actions, and in time these were replaced by the "healthier
environment" of today's coeducational schools. The nineteenth-century
English public school remained sex-segregated and, in conjunction with the
reading of the Greek classics, led to the "higher homoeroticism" as
found, for example, among the Cambridge Apostles.
The Twentieth Century. In the two decades
preceding World War I, Central Europe was the scene of several important
trends for social and sexual change. The youth movement known as the
Wandervogelbewegung generated, as a byproduct, the book of Hans Blüher, Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als
erotisches Phänomen (1912), a work that forthrightly defended erotic
relationships between men and boys as a positive contribution to the
consolidation of social bonds. More elitist was the contemporary Stefan George
circle, which sought to recruit a small group of highly gifted young men, who
were also notable for their good looks. Educational in the more narrow institutional
sense was the Free School Community founded at Wickersdorf near Weimar in 1906
by Gustav Wyneken (1875-1964). Wyneken advocated a new version of Greek paiderasteia as an educational
procedure for the initiation of privileged youth into art and culture.
Unfortunately, Wyneken's experiment was shattered by a series of charges and
countercharges in 1920.
It is significant that the free-school movement of the Anglo-Saxon world - as
seen, for example, at the famous Summerhill in England - never dared permit any
sexual component. And in the United States, the "life adjustment"
trend, which was not to peak until the 1940s, was strictly an adjustment to the
heterosexual norm. In the 1940s and 1950s American teachers and college
professors whose homosexuality was exposed were subject to instant dismissal
in mid-semester, even if there had been no overt sexuality with students.
Academic freedom or no, any academic who dared to write about homosexuality had
to assume a posture of stem disapproval, or else conceal his identity behind an
impermeable pseudonym.
The Ferment of Change. Change was not to come
until the 1960s when demographic and social trends, catalyzed by the growth of
the Counterculture and opposition to the
Vietnam War, caused a loosening of traditional attitudes. The new educational
theories seemed to bring life into the placid - sometimes almost comatose -
purlieus of educational theory. Yet this shakeup was less novel than it was
assumed, going back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's eighteenth-century critique of
authoritarianism in education. A number of the 1960s reformers were themselves
gay. The most notable of these was Paul Goodman
(1911-1972)
who, largely self-educated, sought to bring an anarchist perspective to the theory
of education.
In 1966 Stephen Donaldson founded the first gay student organization on the campus
of Columbia University in New York City. Despite much opposition on the part of
administrations, similar organizations sprang up in hundreds of North American
college campuses. Shortly therefter, but more cautiously, gay and lesbian
teachers' associations, usually comprising those in the primary and secondary
schools rather than college teachers, appeared in a number of localities.
In 1973 the Gay Academic Union (GAU) was formed in New York City to bring
institutional change and foster the development of gay studies programs in
academia. In keeping with the liberationist ideas of the time, GAU expected
that many faculty members would "come out" by acknowledging their
homosexuality, and that some of these would offer courses in gay and lesbian
studies. Yet by the end of the eighties there were probably fewer than fifty
openly gay and lesbian tenured professors in an American university system
that boasted more than 2000 campuses. Moreover, these faculty members tend to
be concentrated in schools of second rank rather than in the Ivy League and
the great state universities. The caution of many established teachers,
combined with a covert "tracking system" that tended to shunt overtly
gay faculty to the sidelines, served to reduce the number of "out"
teachers. The situation with gay studies has been even more discouraging. No
coordinated programs, such as those for women's studies and black studies,
took root, and there was even a dearth of individual courses. Much research and
teaching has had to be organized in parallel, private institutions, such as Los
Angeles's ONE, Inc. Finally, in the 1980s the emergence of a more conservative
social climate and the aids
crisis
have caused gay and lesbian students, especially in secondary schools, to
assume a lower profile.
In short, the bottle is half empty, but it is also half full. It is unlikely
that there will be a return to the atmosphere of clandestinity and open
contempt with which gay members of the college community had to contend in the
1950s. Many university administrations acknowledge the need to support gay and
lesbian student organizations, and few are willing to tolerate antigay
violence on campus. Gay studies courses may be scarce, but special campus
events in what is often termed "gay pride week" offer informative lectures.
Although faculty still find little encouragement in their efforts to expand
teaching and research in this realm, an increasing number of serious scholars
are writing and publishing on homosexuality in their own disciplines.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Wayne R. Dynes, Homosexuality: A Research Guide, New York: Garland, 1987,
J. Lee Lehman, ed., Gays on Campus, Washington, DC: National Students Association, 1975;
Henri-Irenee Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, New York: New American
Library, 1956.
Ward Houser
Edward II (1284-1327)
Plantagenet
king of England. Bom at Caernarvon, Edward was the first English Prince of
Wales. Said by one fourteenth-century chronicler to have "particularly
delighted in the vice of sodomy," Edward's open homosexuality was a contributing
factor in his overall lack of success as king.
Following in the footsteps of Edward I, the "Hammer of the Scots,"
was no easy task, and it was one for which Edward II seems to have been
singularly unfitted. From his youth he showed himself to be rather
irresponsible; he was an habitual and extravagant gambler, and on one occasion
he precipitated his own exile from his father's court by recklessly breaking
into a park belonging to the bishop of Chester.
In order to provide the prince with a role model of courteous martial behavior,
Edward I introduced a young Gascon, Piers Gaveston, into his son's court in
1300. Ironically, Gaveston was to become Edward IPs lover and a focal point of
the baronial discontent that was to last throughout his reign, culminating in
the king's deposition and murder in 1327.
In the spring of 1307 Edward I exiled Gaveston in an effort to restrain his
son's behavior, but within a few months the aged monarch was dead, and Edward
of Caernarvon had ascended to the throne. Gaveston was immediately recalled and
elevated to the peerage as Earl of Cornwall. Soon thereafter he married the
king's niece, Margaret de Clare, sister of the Earl of Gloucester. This sort of
lavish display of patronage was ultimately to be the undoing of both Gaveston
and Edward.
Dissatisfaction with the king's rule - and Gaveston's influence - surfaced as
early as January 1308 in a statement of baronial grievances known as the Boulogne
Agreement, drafted at the wedding of Edward II to Isabella of France, daughter
of Philip IV ("the Fair"). But this warning went largely unheeded.
Indeed, upon his return to England from his marriage in France, Edward his
reported to have ignored the other magnates and run to Gaveston, hugging him
repeatedly while smothering him with kisses. A similar, and even more public,
scene was played by the two at the banquet following the coronation of Edward
and Isabella. Gaveston, resplendent in royal purple trimmed with pearls -
looking like the god Mars according to one contemporary - was the center of
attention. Indeed, the fact that Edward spent more time on the favorite's couch
than on that of the queen was taken as an insult not only to the English
nobility, but to the French royal house, represented at the banquet by the
queen's uncles Charles d'Orléans and Louis d'Evreux and her brother, the future Charles IV.
The ultimate result of the banquet was Gaveston's second exile in as many
years and Edward's assent to the appointment of a body of reformers, the Lords
Ordainers. Gaveston spent the year between June 1308 and June 1309 as king's
lieutenant in Ireland, and Edward spent the year working to restore his
favorite. He achieved this, perhaps at the expense of more urgent concerns such
as Robert the Bruce's rising power in Scotland, but learned little in the
process.
Within months baronial discontent had resurfaced yet again, perhaps hastened
by Gaveston's scurrilous nicknames for his fellow earls. A third exile for
Gaveston ensued, followed by another swift but ill-conceived return. This time
the favorite was hunted down and executed by the barons. A particularly vivid
image of Edward's attachment to his favorite is presented by the ruby found on
Gaveston's person when he was taken by the barons; "la Cerise" was valued at the
phenomenal sum of one thousand pounds in 1312!
Edward's relations with the barons did not improve after Gaveston's death, but
the king was not linked with another individual favorite until the emergence of
Hugh le
Despenser the younger in around 1320. There is less evidence of a
sexual relationship between them, yet one has generally been presumed. If we
are to believe the chronicler Jean Froissart, following her successful coup in
1326, Isabella ordered that Despenser's genitals be cut off and burned before
his eyes prior to his hanging.
As for Edward himself, the red-hot poker which is said to have ended his life
has virtually become a symbol of his unfortunate reign. However, regardless of
the exact nature of his death, it is incorrect, as has sometimes been
suggested, to claim that Edward was deposed and murdered because of his homosexuality. His
sexual behavior was used as a means of justification for events after his
death, as part of what can only be called a propaganda campaign on behalf of
Isabella and her paramour Roger Mortimer. Nevertheless, Edward II's example
was subsequently held up as a pointed warning to later kings - homosexual
and/or ineffective - and their favorites, not only in England, but in France as
well.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Natalie Fryde, The
Tyranny and Pall of Edward 11,
1321-26, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; J. S.
Hamilton, Piers
Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall. 1307-1312, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988; Hilda
Johnstone, Edward
of Carnarvon, 1284-1307, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1946.
/. S. Hamilton
Effeminacy
Effeminacy
is any of various forms of feminine or female-like behavior in a man. It tends
to be disliked if not condemned in virtually every society - though, like other
anxiety-arousing behavior, it can be the focus of wit and humor. In a few
tribal societies where it is associated with shamanism it has been respected or
feared.
By a kind of "opposites attract" reasoning, the effeminate man is
generally assumed to want male partners in sex, and thus to be homosexual - a
double error since effeminate men are sometimes notably heterosexual while, as
the Kinsey research found, most homosexuality is not marked by effeminacy; in
fact, a very considerable amount of same-sex behavior "is found among
ranchmen, cattlemen, prospectors, lumbermen, . . . groups that are virile,
physically active." (Kinsey et al., p. 457).
Similar and worse confusions have arisen in various descriptions of what
effeminate behavior actually is. The psychoanalysts, noting certain
exaggerations in effeminacy, have interpreted its gestures as take-offs or as
caricatures of women or of femininity (Bieber). Less abusive interpretations
have simply noted the similarities between effeminacy and femininity, usually
concluding that femalelike mannerisms in a man must originate from
"identity" problems, such as a profound uncertainty about his
maleness, or an overt identification with women, or with his
"overdose" mother. The appeal of such insufficiency theories is
remarkable. They are in line with popular notions of a homosexual's
"impairment" and "inadequacy" but fly in the face of important
contradictions - not only from Kinsey but from a few perceptive clinicians:
almost forty years ago Karen Machover demonstrated that, far from being
"sexually confused," effeminate males frequently have a
sharper-than-average awareness of male/ female differences, even when they
identify more with women than with men.
But if effeminacy is not impaired maleness, if it does not spell male insufficiency,
and is not necessarily homosexual, if it is not a fixation on one's mother, nor
a caricature of women, then what is
it and
where does it come from? Exactly
where it comes from is too hard a question. (Like trying to say precisely why
one person is more aggressive, or fussy, or good-natured than another, the
answer is invariably multifaceted - too scattered among a maze of social,
genetic and physiologic biases to permit confident answers.) But accurate and
useful descriptions can be given.
No matter which effeminacy is involved - nelly, swish, blase, or camp - it is a
set of mannerisms quite like equivalent movements and gestures seen in women.
Nelly and blase movements are similar enough to be virtually identical in
femininity and effeminacy. But the gestures of swish and camp are clearly more
forceful in effeminacy, probably due to the higher muscularity of males, thus
inviting interpretations of their being "caricatures" of femininity.
Similar gestures and high-animation movements seen in both women and effeminate
men have been shown to come about in the same way, that is, they reflect
particular attitudes toward just how, and how directly, to engage the environment.
Just as a relatively aggressive, straight-line mode of affronting and engaging
the environment is a hallmark of male movement, the rounded, relatively curvaceous
movements of femininity pull away from so directly or aggressively engaging the
environment.
For instance, when a man walks with a quick step but slightly pulls back from
fully extending each stride, the result is a mincing gait - a set of movements
that is decidedly softer, faster, and less brusk than is typical of men. Or, in
various arm movements seen in swish and camp, a fast-moving outgoing gesture
may at the last moment suddenly be pulled back or stopped from completing its
path by the twist of a bent wrist, thus producing one of the high-speed,
high-animation curves of swish, or one of the exaggerated stack-ups of emphasis
seen in camp. The roundness of such moves is typical of femininity, while their
energy and sharpness is decidedly male - the very combination that most
characterizes the difference between femininity and effeminacy.
Thus it is not that effeminate movements copy or caricature feminine ones, but
that both styles arrive at their curves and their relatively high animation
from the same source: that is, the mental set of both femininity and effeminacy
share the kinds of attitudes and the particular kinds of aggressive-readiness
that cause them to select very similar styles of engaging the environment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Irving Bieber, et al., Homosexuality: a Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, New York: Basic Books,
1962; Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Philadelphia: Saunders,
1948; Karen Machover, Personality Projection in the Drawing of the Human Figure, Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1949;
C. A. Tripp, The Homosexual Matrix, second ed., New York: New
American Library, 1987.
C. A. Tripp
Effeminacy, Historical Semantics of
Containing
as its core the Latin word femina
("woman"),
the adjective effeminate
has been
used to mean womanish, unmanly - and by extension enervated, self-indulgent,
narcissistic, voluptuous, delicate, and over-refined. Applied to sexual
orientation it has had two opposed senses: ( 1 ) seeking the company of women
and participating in their lifeways (heterosexual) and (2) adopting the
woman's role (homosexual). In reading older texts it is important to bear these
differences in mind, for the term effeminate can be used slightingly of a
womanizer as well as of a "womanish" man.
Classical Antiquity. The ancient Greeks and
Romans sharply differentiated the active male homosexual, thepaiderastes (in the New Testament arsenokoites, literally
"man-layer"), from the passive partner, the cinaedus or pathicus (New Testament Greek malakos; Hebrew, rakha). The Greeks also sometimes
used the term androgynos,
"man-woman,"
to stigmatize the passive homosexual. Beginning with the Old Attic comedies of
Aristophanes, the passive is a stock figure of derision and contempt, the
active partner far less so. Because of the military ideals on which ancient
societies were founded, passivity and softness in the male were equated with
cowardice and want of virility. A seeming exception is the god Dionysus - whose
effeminate characteristics are, however, probably an import from the non-Greek
East.
In ancient Rome the terms mollis
("soft")
and effeminatus acquired special
connotations of decadence and enervating luxury. By contrast the word virtus meant manliness. The Roman
satirists took sardonic delight in flagellating the vices of luxury that were
rampant among the upper classes of a nation that, once rude and warlike, had
succumbed to the temptations that followed its successful conquest and plunder
of the entire ancient world. The classical notion of effeminacy as the result
of luxury, idleness, and pampered self-indulgence is thus far removed from the
claim of some gay liberationists today to kinship with the exploited and
downtrodden. Juvenal's Second Satire (ca. a.d. 100) ridicules several types of effeminate homosexuals:
the judge attired in a filmy gown who hypocritically upbraids a female prostitute,
the male transvestites who infiltrate a female secret society, and the
degenerate scion of a venerable family who marries a horn-player in a lavish
travesty of a wedding.
The Middle Ages. The old Icelandic
literature stemming from medieval Scandinavia documents the condemnation of the
argr, the cowardly, unwarlike effeminate
(compare Modem German arg,
"bad").
The Latin term mollities
("softness")
entered early Christian and medieval writings, but often with reference to
masturbation. It may be that the eighteenth-century English term molly for an effeminate homosexual is a reminiscence of Latin mollis.
Ordericus
Vitalis, a historian chronicling the England of William Rufus (1087-1100),
denounced "foul catamites" who "grew long and luxuriant locks
like women, and loved to deck themselves in long, over-tight shirts and
tunics." Writing about 1120, William of Malmesbury recalled these
courtiers with their "flowing hair and extravagant dress.... [TJhen the
model for young men was to rival women in delicacy of person, to mince their
gate, to walk with loose gestures and half naked. Enervated and effeminate,
they remained unwillingly what nature had made them; the assailers of others'
chastity, prodigal of their own."
Modem Times. In the sixteenth century
the French monarch Henri III assembled an entourage of favorites whose name mignon connotes effeminacy and
delicacy. In French also the original meaning of bardache was the passive partner of
the active bougre. English writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth century
frequently denounced foppery, sometimes homosexual but more often
heterosexual. Particular objects of scorn were the "Macaronis" of the
1770s, with their bright coats decked out with big bunches of ribbon, huge
wigs, and betasseled walking sticks. In the view of Susan Shapiro such elegants
attracted scorn because they were believed to threaten the very foundations of
civilization. "They negate[d] the assumption that sex and gender identity
are immutable, for their androgynous dress [was] constantly blurring,
overlapping, and tampering with the supposedly fixed poles of masculinity and
femininity."
Restoration times also witnessed the popularity of the self-referencing habit
of male homosexuals adopting women's names: Mary, Mary-Anne, Molly, Nance or
Nancy, and Nelly. The habit occurs in other languages as well - Janet in
Flemish; Checca (from Francesca) in Italian; Maricón (from Maria) in Spanish;
and Adelaida
in
Portuguese.
Nineteenth-century English witnessed a semantic shift of a number of terms
originally applied to women to provide opprobrious designations of male
homosexuals. Thus gay had the meaning of a loose woman, prostitute; faggot, a
slatternly woman,- and queen (or quean),
a
trollop. Even today the popular mind tends to the view that gay men seek to
imitate women, or even become women,- the considerable number of
unstereotypical,
masculine homosexuals are not taken into account.
The term "mannish woman" had some currency for lesbians in the 1920s.
In general, however, such terms redolent of sex-role reversal do not have the
same significance for men as for women. Termagant
and virago, though pejorative, do not
suggest variance of sexual orientation. The girl who is a tomboy has always
been treated more indulgently than the boy who is a sissy. This difference
between "womanly men" and "manly women" probably reflects
the fact that our society clings to the notion that it is degrading for a man
to be reduced to the status of a woman, while it is a step up for a women to be
credited with the qualities of a man. In fact some studies of the
"androgynous personality" suggest that even in today's changing
social situation there is more practical advantage (in the business world and
in politics) for a woman who "gets in touch with the other side of her
personality" than a man who does so. Nonetheless, the men's movement has
helped to break down some taboos, and men now feel less reluctance to cry or
show strong affection.
Men who cross-dress as women are of two kinds. Some go to great lengths to make
the simulation credible, an effort that may be a prelude to transsexualism. In
other instances the simulation is imperfect, a kind of send-up. Although some
feminists have interpreted such cross-dressing exercises as mockery of women, it
is more likely that they signify a questioning of gender categories. In any
event, transvestism is not normally held to lie within the province of
effeminacy, which is thought to be the adjunction of feminine traits in a
person otherwise fully recognizable as masculine.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Hans Herter, "Effeminatus," Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum, 4 (1959), cols. 620-50;
Susan Shapiro, '"Yon Plumed Dandeprat': Male 'Effeminacy' in English
Satire and Criticism," Review of English Studies, new series, 39 (1988),
400-12.
Wayne R. Dynes
Ego-Dystonic Homosexuality
This
neologism for a purported disorder was officially adopted by the American
Psychiatric Association in the third edition of its widely respected Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (Washington, D.C., 1980). "The essential features are
a desire to acquire or increase heterosexual arousal, so that heterosexual
relationships can be initiated or maintained, and a sustained pattern of
overt homosexual arousal that the individual explicitly states has been unwanted
and a persistent source of stress." The Manual assures that the disorder
does not refer to all homosexuals and lesbians: "This category is reserved
for those homosexuals for whom changing sexual orientation is a persistent
concern. " (302.00).
Even though it has some history of previous use in psychiatry, the term
"dystonic" seems inappropriate to denote a psychic state, as it can
only meaningfully refer to the impaired tonicity of tissues or muscle.
Following a custom that goes back to Freud himself, psychiatry has borrowed
medical-physical terminology in order to simulate a precision that is not
warranted. Another point that is made in the definition is that the condition
must be self-certified to warrant treatment. In true mental illness one could
scarcely say that the need for treatment does not exist simply because the
patient denies it.
As these observations suggest, the quoted definition was the outcome of a
compromise. It brought to a temporary end a struggle that had begun several
years before, when homosexuals had invaded psychiatric meetings charging the
practitioners with making the situation of homosexuals worse, rather than
better, because their pronouncements gave a spurious rationalization to official
and popular homophobia. These confrontations triggered a period of professional
self-examination, leading to a 1973 Association vote against defining
homosexuality as an illness, which seemed to clear the way for banishing the
suspect category from the Manual
altogether.
Yet bitter reactions suggested that a majority of psychiatrists remained
opposed to "normalizing" homosexual behavior. Their critics in turn
alleged that client fees played a part in the opposition: if a whole category
were to be deleted, a significant cohort of patients would disappear. However,
this observation probably underestimates the deeply rooted character of
American psychiatrists' opposition to homosexuality. A committee was formed
under Robert Spitzer to decide the practical management of the problem. To the
disgust of gay psychiatrists, the definition excerpted above found its way
into the third edition of the Manual.
Although
the following years seemed to effect little change in the attitudes of many
psychiatrists, gay professionals both within and without the organization
continued to lobby for deletion of 302.00. Somewhat to their own surprise,
this was achieved during the first half of 1986, again through the work of a
committee headed by Robert Spitzer. (Another section of the new version of the
manual says, with seeming neutrality, that some may wish to change sexual
orientation, so that this type of client need not entirely disappear.) While
pleased at the outcome, those critical of psychiatry as currently established
held that the protracted maneuverings had shown unmistakably the political
and value-ridden character of the discipline. Nonetheless, the American
Psychiatric Association is now far ahead of the World Health Organization,
which retains the classification of homosexuality as an illness.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality
and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis, new ed., Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987.
Ward Houser
Egypt, Ancient
Egyptians
of dynastic times were inclined to regard with equanimity a wide variety of
sexual practices. Traditionally the pharaohs married their half-sisters, a
custom that other peoples considered curious. Self-confident in their cherished
habits and customs, the Egyptians nonetheless cherished a distinct sense of
privacy, which restrictred discussion of erotic themes in the documents that
have come down to modern times. Most of our evidence stems from temples and
tombs, where a full record of everyday life could scarcely be expected.
Unfortunately, Egypt had no law codes comparable to those known from ancient
Mesopotamia.
The realm of mythology provides several instances of homosexual behavior. In
order to subordinate him, the god Seth attempted to sodomize his brother Horus,
but the latter foiled him, and tricked Seth into ingesting some of his
(Horus's) own semen. Seth then became pregnant. In another myth the ithyphallic
god Min anally assaulted an enemy, who later gave birth to the god Thoth. Both
these stories present involuntary receptive homosexuality as a humiliation,
but the act itself is not condemned; in the latter incident the god of wisdom
is born as a result. (In another myth the high god engenders offspring
parthenogenetically by masturbation.) While it is sometimes claimed that the
ancient Egyptians were accustomed to sodomize enemies after their defeat on the
battlefield, the evidence is equivocal.
The "negative confessions" of the Book of the Dead contain a sentence
that may be translated as "I have not had sexual relations with a
boy." This precept should not be generalized, and may be a reference to a
need for maintaining ritual purity in the temple precincts in which it is
found.
In what is surely history's first homosexual short story, King Pepy II
Neferkare (Phiops U, 2355-2261) makes nocturnal
visits to have sex with his general Sisinne. This episode is significant as an
instance of androphilia - sex between two adult men - rather than the pederasty
that was dominant in the ancient world. From a slightly earlier period comes
the Tomb of the Two Brothers at Thebes, which the excavators have explained as
the joint sepulcher of two men, Niankhnum and Khnumhotep, who were lovers. Bas
reliefs on the tomb walls show the owners embracing affectionately.
A dream book from a later period attests to the presence of male prostitutes of
the ordinary kind; yet the institution of male temple prostitution, well
established in Western Asia, seems to have been lacking. A woman's dream book
contains two casual mentions of lesbian relations, which may have been common,
though the evidence is scanty. Wall paintings frequently show women in
"homosocial" postures of touching, grooming, and other nongenital
expressions of affection. Queen Hatshepsut (reigned 1503-1482 b.c. ) adopted male dress and even wore a false beard; these
male attributes probably stem from her decision to reign alone, rather than
from lesbianism.
A figure of particular interest is the pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV; reigned
ca. 1372-1354 b.c), who was a religious and
artistic reformer. Although this king begat several daughters with his wife,
the famous Nefertiti, in art he is often shown as eunuch-like, with swollen
hips and feminine breasts. According to some interpreters these somatic
features reflect a glandular disorder. Other scholars believe that they are a
deliberate artistic stylization, so that the appearance of androgyny may
convey a universal concept of the office of kingship, uniting the male and the
female so as to constitute an appropriate counterpart of the universal god
Aten he introduced. Scenes of Akhenaten caressing his son-in-law Smenkhkare
have been interpreted, doubtfully, as indicating a homosexual relation between
the two.
Later Greek observers stressed the sexual exceptionalism of the Egyptians,
especially the custom of brother-and-sistermarriage. Some Egyptian figurines
show a grotesque emphasis on the phallus, which was circumcised, while texts
reveal an unusual inventiveness in devising hedonistic and medical enemas. In
the area of homosexual behavior, however, our evidence does not suggest any
radical departure from the broad Near Eastern pattern that homosexual
relations might incur disapproval under certain conditions, but were not globally
condemned. Most frequently they seem to have been simply aspects of daily
life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Terence J. Deakin, "Evidence for Homosexuality in Ancient Egypt," International Journal of
Greek Love, 1:1 (1961), 31-38; Lise Manniche, Sexual life in Ancient
Egypt, London: Kegan Paul International, 1987.
Wayne R. Dynes
Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965)
Anglo-American
poet and critic. Helped at first by his friend Ezra Pound, Eliot surpassed him
in public esteem; during the last decades of his Ufe, Eliot attained the
position of a kind of aesthetic dictator of English and American literary
standards. After his death his reputation fell somewhat, but he remains a formidable
figure in the annals of literary modernism.
Raised in a St. Louis family of New England origin, Eliot received his major
formation at Harvard and in postgraduate study in France, Germany, and Oxford,
originally intending to become a teacher of philosophy. In 1910 in a rooming
house in Paris he met a medical student, Jean Verdenal, who was to be his
closest friend during his continental wanderings. A number of letters survive
from Verdenal, though none of Eliot's to him; in one the Frenchman speaks of
the "undefinable influence and emotional power" that two close people
have over one another. Their mutual friend, the aesthete Matthew Stuart
Prichard, was almost certainly homosexual. Although several Verdenal transcripts were
published in the 1988 edition of the Letters
by
Eliot's widow, there are said to be others, which are perhaps franker. Eliot's
first masterpiece, The
Waste Land (1922), is dedicated to Verdenal, who was killed on
military service not long after the start of World War I. For a long time
critics viewed the poem as an impersonal commentary on the sorry state of Western
civilization, but it is now known to derive from personal experience, especially
Eliot's unhappy relations with his unstable first wife, Vivien. In view of this
personal emphasis, the dedication to his deceased male friend may have been
more telling than has usually been thought. In any event, the poem contains a
homosexual reference, when a levantine merchant invites the narrator to a
"weekend at the Metropole," that is, to a homosexual encounter.
Vehemently opposed in principle to any biography of him, Eliot succeeded in
wrapping his inner self in a cloud of enigma. Ostensibly this reticence is
grounded in his espousal of the doctrine of poetic impersonality. It may,
however, have more personal roots. Eliot's first marriage with Vivien
Haigh-Wood was undertaken quite suddenly in 1915, ostensibly on the rebound
from an unrequited love for an American woman. There were no children, and
Vivien spent much of the remainder of her life in mental homes. For many years
Eliot shared bachelor quarters with another literary man, John Hayward. The
"secret" of Eliot's personality, if such there be, may reside chiefly
in his fear
of being
taken as homosexual, since he was not given to manly pursuits such as athletic
sports and hunting and the profession of poetry itself tends to be regarded
with suspicion in the English-speaking world. Time will tell whether this is
the case, or whether there is something more that has been held back by the
official guardians of Eliot's reputation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
James E. Miller, Jr., T.S. Eliot's Personal Wasteland, University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977; John Peters, "A New
Interpretation of The Waste Land," Essays in Criticism, 19 (1969), 140-75.
Ward Houser
Ellis, Havelock (1859-1939)
Pioneering
British writer on sexual psychology. Descended from a family with many
generations of seafarers, Henry Havelock Ellis was named after a distinguished
soldier who was the hero of the Indian Mutiny. Early in life he sailed twice
around the world and spent some years in Australia. In boarding school he had
some unpleasant experiences suggesting a passive element in his character, and
his attachments to women were often more friendships than erotic liaisons. At
the age of 32 he married Edith Lees, a lesbian; after the first year of their
marriage all sexual relations ceased, and both went on to a series of affairs
with women. By nature an autodidact, Ellis obtained in 1889 only a licentiate
in Medicine, Surgery, and Midwifery from the Society of Apothecaries - a
somewhat inferior degree that always embarrassed him. More interested in his
literary studies than in the practice of medicine, he nevertheless collected
case histories mainly by correspondence, as his autobiography makes no mention
of clinical practice.
One of his early correspondents was John Addington Symonds, who discussed with
him the possibility of a book on sexual inversion, in which the case histories
were the core and empirical foundation. Ellis recognized two conditions:
"complete inversion" (= exclusive homosexuality) and
"psychosexual hermaphroditism" (= bisexuality). In the midst of the
writing Symonds died suddenly, and the book first appeared in German under the
title Das kontrare
Geschlechtsgefuhl ("Contrary Sexual Feeling"; 1896) with both names
on the title page. In the atmosphere that prevailed after the disgrace of
Oscar Wilde (May 1895), publication in England was problematic, but under doubtful auspices the English
edition was released in November 1897.
Sexual Inversion was the first book in
English to treat homosexuality as neither disease nor crime, and if he dismissed
the current notion that it was a species of "degeneracy" (in the
biological sense), he also maintained that it was inborn and unmodifiable - a
view that he never renounced. His book, couched in simple language, urged
public toleration for what was then regarded as unnatural and criminal to the
highest degree. To a readership conditioned from childhood to regard homosexual
behavior with disgust and abhorrence, the book was beyond the limits of
comprehension, and a radical publisher and bookseller named George Bedborough
was duly prosecuted for issuing "a certain lewd wicked bawdy scandalous
and obscene libel" - Sexual
Inversion. In his defense Ellis maintained that the work aimed at
"remedial treatment" - a hypocritical line that was to be followed
for many decades thereafter by defenders of the homosexual. The trial caused
Ellis and his wife much anxiety, though it ended without a prison sentence for
Bedborough.
The book was to appear in two later editions as the second volume of Ellis' Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which in its final format
extended to seven volumes covering the whole of sexual science as it existed in
the first three decades of the twentieth century. The most iconoclastic stance
in the entire work remained the calm acceptance of homosexuality. Ellis never
endorsed the explanations offered by Freud and the psychoanalytic school, so
that the third edition of Sexual
Inversion (1915), which was supplemented by material drawn from
Magnus Hirschfeld's Die
Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, published a year earlier,
presented essentially the standpoint of 1904. The next in radical character
was the measured discussion of masturbation, which Victorian society had been
taught to regard with virtual paranoia as the cause of numberless ills. The message
of all his writings was that sex was a joy and a boon to mankind that should be
embraced with ardor but also with knowledge. If many of the views expressed in
his work are dated, the frame of mind in which the author approached his
subject, tolerant and condoning rather than vindictive and condemnatory,
served to move educated opinion in the English-speaking world in the direction
of the reforms that were to be realized only in the wake of the Wolfenden
Report of 1957.
Parallel with Magnus Hirschf eld in Germany, Ellis further distinguished
transvestism from the homosexuality with which it had been confounded since
Westphal's paper of 1869, except that he proposed the name "eonism,"
from the Chevalier d'Eon, a French nobleman of the eighteenth century who
habitually dressed as a woman. Man
and Woman, first published in 1894, continued to be revised down to
1927; it was a study of "secondary sexual characters," in
contemporary terms the problems of gender, of women's rights, and of woman's
place in modern society, again in a spirit of sympathy and toleration that has
not lost its relevance to the issues debated at the close of the twentieth century.
In addition to his own insights and research, Havelock Ellis helped to diffuse
the findings of continental scholars, making accessible to a broad audience -
one that hitherto had been subjected to a literature meant to inspire shame
and fear - a comprehensive body of knowledge of human sexuality. His
enlightened approach to homosexuality marked the first step toward overcoming
the Victorian morality that had shrouded the subject in ignorance and
opprobrium.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock
Ellis: A Biography, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.
Warren Johansson
Employment
See Discrimination; Economics.
ENCYCLOPEDIAS
See Dictionaries and Encyclopedias.
England
The
history of homosexual behavior in England between the eleventh and the
twentieth centuries can be divided into two periods, the traditional and the
modem, with the break occurring around 1700. The evidence for the earlier
period is slender until the seventeenth century, but the evidence after
1700eventually becomes overwhelming. The two periods are distinguishable by
differences in the dominant mode of homosexual behavior. The behavior of men
is always more easily documented than that of women, but roughly the same
patterns can be found in both genders, even if the changes after 1700 were
differently timed for men than for women.
Basic Features of the First
Paradigm. Between 1100 and 1700 sexual relations between males were
usually between an active man and a passive boy. The man was usually attracted
to women as well, and it is an error to suppose that such men were really interested only in boys.
The boys were valued for their feminine characteristics: slight bodies and
smooth skin. They were often encouraged to dress in a way that was seen as
effeminate.
Effeminacy could also be a characteristic of two kinds of adult males. There
were, first, men who liked to take the passive role and were thought to be
peculiarly corrupt for surrendering male dominance. They were consequently
sometimes seen as hermaphrodites and confused with actual physical hermaphrodites.
Some of the latter did go back and forth between genders, but they were held
guilty of sodomy for doing so. There was, however, a second category of men accused
of effeminacy: namely those who liked the sexual company of women so much that
they were thought to have come under their power. Sodomy had a similar range of
meaning: anal sex with women and with males, and genital sex with animals. And
references to Sodom could be made simply to describe a general situation of
rampant sexual irregularity.
This sexual behavior has to be seen as part of a general cultural system that
emerged in the twelfth century and lasted until the seventeenth; there were
only minor adjustments in the system after 1500 as a result of the Renaissance
and the Protestant Reformation. This new western European culture produced its
own pattern of family structures, sexual behavior, and gender roles.
Aristocratic families adopted a patrilineal ideology. Marriage for men was
late. Monogamy was enforced and divorce forbidden. Many in the general
population never married, and priestly celibacy was promoted. Sexual relations
outside of marriage were forbidden. But a regulated prostitution was tolerated
for fear, as Thomas Aquinas said, that the world would otherwise be overrun
with sodomy. Sodomy and all sexual acts which were not procreative were
peculiarly sinful. But sexual acts between males nonetheless occurred. They
can be documented in the royal court, in monasteries and colleges, and in the
large cities like London, which were a part of this new world. But it is not
until the seventeenth century that one can show the male peasant who had a wife
and seduced the local boys.
The Medieval Development. At the end of the eleventh
century the king, William Rufus, was accused of sexual irregularity, but only
one writer claimed that his vices included relations with youths. Two years
into the reign of his successor (1102), a church council did condemn sodomy.
Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sought, however, to limit the effects of
the condemnation, because many would not have known that sodomy was a grave
crime. Henry's son, Prince William, was drowned in a shipwreck in 1120. This
was blamed on the effeminacy and sodomy of his companions, but it is not clear
what the relationship was between these two characteristics. Henry's
great-grandson, Richard I (the Lion-Hearted), was of course a most brave and
chivalrous knight, who was also observed to be passionately fond of the king of
France, and who was frequently rebuked for his fondness for males. Archbishop
Anselm promoted friendships between monks. Aelred of Rievaulx, another saintly
abbot, also did so. It is clearer that his friendships were based on physical
attraction, but he presumed that such relations would not be carnal, except
perhaps among adolescents. The libertine Latin poems of the time which
circulated in England and elsewhere always stated that the authors desired both
boys and females and spoke of boy prostitutes in the towns. Richard of Devizes
described these boys in late twelfth-century London - smooth-skinned, pretty
and passive - and placed them among the rest of the city's low life: dancing
girls, actors, beggars and magicians.
By the end of the thirteenth century the new culture of the twelfth had become
a fully organized system of a kind in which most sexual activity was viewed as
dangerous. The law codes now reflected this. In Edward I's reign a law was
promulgated punishing with death sexual relations with Jews and with beasts,
as well as between sodomites. Edward's successor, Edward II, was hounded by his
enemies, in part because of bis lovers. He was killed by having a red-hot poker
thrust up his anus. But it is unclear whether many men were actually tried for
sodomy, as they were in the contemporary Italian cities. At the end of the
fifteenth century there was sodomy in London: one man publicly boasted that he
had committed sodomy with another; and a married man was called "a
woman" because he grabbed priests between their legs. But both of these
involved sex between two adults. It may have been that relations of men with
boys were not much noticed.
The Reformation and After. In the sixteenth and the
seventeenth centuries England went through the upheavals associated with the
Reformation, but these do not seem to have made much difference for sodomy,
except that a statute in Henry VHI's reign took jurisdiction over sodomy with
"mankind or beast" away from the ecclesiastical courts. The common
law courts interpreted the statute as condemning anal intercourse and
bestiality, but not sexual relations between women.
In the seventeenth century, when the evidence grows more detailed, one can
observe patterns of behavior rather similar to those of the twelfth century.
The royal court had a bad reputation under James I and William III who had
their male favorites, as well as wives, and in William's case, a mistress too.
London had more sodomy cases than anywhere else in the country. There were boy
prostitutes who, like the female ones, clustered around the theatres. A male
libertine culture flourished in which men pursued women and youths.
Shakespeare wrote his sonnets in part for a youth and in part for a woman.
Marlowe said St. John was Jesus' boy. Lord Castlehaven watched his male
servants have sex with his wife, and then had sex with them. Lord Rochester had
wife, mistress, and page, all as sexual companions. And Captain Rigby and the
other London beau took to boys as safer when too many of the whores were infected.
But it could all be dangerous: Castlehaven was executed and Rigby stood in the
pillory.
In the colleges and the schools, there were fellows and masters who seduced
their students. In the countryside, there were ordinary poor men who had a
taste for sodomy. They were usually married. They might also be as interested
in buggering the horse, or the cow, as the boy. If caught they might suffer
death or public mockery. But the mockery was never on the ground that they were
effeminate. They were wicked but manly. Only in the few cases of adult males
who took the passive role with another man, was sodomy seen as leading to the
upset of behavior proper to the two genders.
The Shift to a New Paradigm.
This
system of some six hundred years standing began to unravel in the 1690s and in
the first decade of the eighteenth century, as the culture of modern Western
society began to crystalize all over northwestern Europe, in the Netherlands,
in France, and in England. Like the previous culture of the twelfth century, it
produced a distinctive familial, sexual, and gender system. Marriage became
romantic, companionate and universal, and divorce grew more commonplace. Women
and children were in theory held equal to adult males, but in practice the two
genders were presumed to exist in separate spheres. Most individuals were
thought to desire only the opposite gender. Adult males who desired males were
socialized to be sexually passive and effeminate, and were given a status
equivalent to those women who became prostitutes. This new role for men was
established by 1750, but a comparable change did not occur for women until just
before 1900.
The adult effeminate sodomite or molly, as he was popularly called, can be
documented from the London sodomy trials of the first thirty years of the eighteenth
century. Such men met each other in the parks, latrines, and streets, much as
prostitutes met their customers. They consummated their acts either there or in
a public house or tavern. In these molly-houses most men adopted feminine characteristics
in speech and gesture, and took women's names. Sometimes ther.e were balls when
they dressed as women. A few men seem to have spent most of their time in
female dress, and to have been referred to entirely as she and her. There were
raids by the constables, and those found guilty were either pilloried, fined
and imprisoned, or executed if anal penetration could be proven.
It now became much more dangerous for an adult man to make a pass at an
adolescent boy than it had been under the previous system. Boys could now tolerate
only with difficulty any suggestion that they passed through a period of sexual
passivity. Some boys ran for the constable if they were simply touched; others
would allow themselves to be treated and perhaps fellated but would resist a
continued relationship that might compromise them with their peers. A few boys
were identified as future sodomites by their effeminacy and their
affectionate ways toward males. These boys were sometimes sexually abused by men
who would themselves have denied that they were sodomites; and sometimes they
were seduced by a fellow sodomite. But physical affection between most men,
such as kissing in greeting, was given up as potentially compromising. Male
clothes were increasingly differentiated from women's in sobriety of color and
cut. Some trades like making women's clothes were avoided because sodomites
practiced them. A thriving trade in the blackmail of seemingly effeminate men
grew up. They paid under the threat that the blackmailer would swear sodomy
against them. In some cases they were actually sodomites.
The old bisexual libertine did not entirely disappear. But it was now said that
they simply used marriage to screen themselves from notoriety. In some cases
this was probably true. But seafaring men who were isolated on ships at sea
still seduced the cabin-boys in the old way. And when prisons at the end of the
century became segregated by gender, something similar occurred. Consequently
separate wings for boys, adult men, and sodomites were established in the
London house of correction.
In the countryside, however, and perhaps also in parts of working-class life,
the old and the new systems coexisted into the early twentieth century. The
upper classes accepted the new system. Aristocrats who were discovered to have
transgressed against it were separated from their wives and sometimes had to
go live abroad, especially in Italy where the old system still prevailed. Lord
Byron's life in the early nineteenth century when contrasted with Lord
Rochester's in the late seventeenth perfectly shows the difference between
the two systems of homosexual behavior: Rochester with wife, mistress, and boy,
and his social position intact; Byron ostracized, separated from his wife, and guiltily
indulging his taste for males only in Italy and Greece.
The Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries. In early nineteenth-century England, more men were hanged
for sodomy than in any other period, apparently. The new system was being
enforced with a brutal relish. But after 1830 the hangings ceased, and in 1861
the death penalty was repealed. Throughout the century a thriving underground
of male prostitution can be documented in London. There were as well mutual
acts between persons of the same social class who had met in parks, latrines
and pubs; many of these were effeminate to some degree, and a few of them were
transvestite. Middle-class boys in public schools often had considerable
homosexual experience, and there were networks of friends among adult men, the
most famous of which was revealed when Oscar Wilde was accused by the father of
his younger, effeminate lover. London's Anglo-Catholic churches also became
noted as meeting places for homosexual men, confirming every stout-hearted
Englishman's worst suspicions of the connections between popery and sodomy.
At the end of the nineteenth century two important changes occurred. A lesbian
role for women began to emerge which paralleled the male role of the early
eighteenth century. And there appeared a new way of talking about same-gender
sexuality which did not use the language of the streets but the language of
psychological deviance. Both trends can be placed in a line of development
which led to the repeal of the laws against consensual homosexual acts in 1967,
as well as to the development of a gay rights movement in the two decades after
1969.
Women, like men, had before 1700 been presumed to be as capable of desiring
women, as of desiring men, though it was sinful to do so. They damaged their gender
standing only if they dressed as males, married women, and used an artificial
penis, as a few did. This was still the case in the 1750s. By the early
nineteenth century, affectionate friendships between women were allowed and
protected by the presumption of female asexuality. But in the late nineteenth
century there appeared female couples, one of whom was masculine in dress and
manner, and neither of whom desired men. It is still unclear, however, why this
should not have occurred until that point.
At the same time, men like J. A. Symonds who were sodomites, and others like
Havelock Ellis who were sympathetic, set out to explain what came to be called
homosexuality. They treated it as a psychological condition that could be explained
either biologically or by the dynamics of individual experience. They did not
see it as a social role. By the 1950s, liberal opinion had learned to speak
easily enough of the phenomenon that the Wolf enden Committee could be
appointed and the law changed in 1967. But two generations of increasing
self-consciousness on the part of gay men and lesbian women led them in the
following decade to openly declare their sexual orientation and to demand a
fuller social acceptability. In the 1980s the reaction to the appearance of the
AIDS virus among gay men showed the continued existence of homophobia in the
general population, and was partly used to justify repressive measures by the
government and in the churches.
See also Anglo-Saxons; London;
Social Construction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, London: Longmans, Green,
1955; John Boswell, Christianity, Social Intolerance and Homosexuahty, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980; Alan Bray, Homosexuahty in Renaissance England, London: Gay Men's Press,
1982; Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-century England, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of
Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the
Present, New York: William Morrow, 1981; H. Montgomery Hyde, The Love that Dared Not
Speak Its Name: A Candid History of Homosexuality in Britain, Boston: Little, Brown,
1970; Randolph Trumbach, "London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and
Western Culture in the Eigtheenth Century," Journal of Social History,
11
(1977), 1-33; idem, "Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and Sexual
Development in 18th-Century London," Pursuit of Sodomy, K. Gerard and G. Hekma,
eds., New York: Haworth Press, 1988; idem, "Gender and the Homosexual
Role: the 18th and the 19th Centuries Compared," Homosexuality, Which
Homosexuality, T. van der Meer, et al., eds. (in press); idem, "The
Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modem
Culture," Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Cay and Lesbian Past, M. Duberman, M. Vicinus,
G. Chauncey, Jr., eds. (in press); Martha Vicinus, '"They Wonder to Which
Sex I Belong': The Historical Roots of the Modem Lesbian Identity," Homosexuality, Which
Homosexuality, T. van der Meer, et al., eds. (in press); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society:
The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800, London: Longman, 1981; idem, Coming Out: Homosexual
Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, London: Quartet Books,
1977.
Randolph Trumbach
Enlightenment
The
Enlightenment thinkers - the philosophes - who flourished in the
eighteenth century sought to give practical effect to the era's fundamental advances
in knowledge. The trend represented both a prolongation and a departure from
the Age of Reason of the previous century. Continuing to rely on the application
of rationality as the solution to problems, the Enlightenment shifted
attention away from pure thought and natural science to ethics and human
happiness. Firm believers in progress and the value of education, the
philosophes were strongly secularist, viewing established religion as a major
source of continuing human ills. The movement's two heroes were Confucius and
Socrates, the humanistic philosophers of East and West. Because of its
commitment to human betterment, the Enlightenment has been called the
"Party of Humanity."
Basic Problems. For many today the word
"Enlightenment" retains a halo owing to the underlying metaphor of illumination
and also to its social optimism and humanism. Moreover, films and other modem
popular presentations have spread the idea that the eighteenth century was an
era of joyous and unrestrained sexual hedonism. Before endorsing this view, it
should be remembered that this was the period in which the great masturbation
scare began - the claim that physical weaknesses of all kinds, leading to insanity
and death, were the inevitable result of this harmless practice. The hysteria
began with an anomymous English publication, Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution,
and all its Frightful Consequences in both Sexes, Considered (1707-08), continued in
the Swiss Dr. Tissot's L'Onanisme;
ou dissertation physique
sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (1760), and was even
enshrined in the great French Encyclopédie,
the
pantheon of the Enlightenment, under the article "Sodomie. "
Rather than taking it at its own evaluation and that of its latter-day admirers,
one should examine the Enlightenment critically and historically, and distinguish
the contingent and personal views of individual thinkers from overarching
principles. Diderot and Voltaire harbored some conventional anti-Jewish
prejudices, yet the overall thrust of their rhetoric promoted the emancipation
of European Jewry. Also, Voltaire praised enlightened despots, but furthered
the recognition of individual rights and of political democracy.
Individual Thinkers. In a brief, but suggestive
passage Baron Montesquieu (1689-1755), hereditary judge of the parlement of Bordeaux, puzzled:
"It is curious that we recognize three crimes, magic, heresy, and the
crime against nature [homosexuality], of which one can prove that the first
does not exist, that the second lends itself to an infinite nurhber of
distinctions, interpretations, and limitations, and that the third is
frequently obscure; all three are punished by burning." Same-sex conduct,
of which Montesquieu disapproved, he saw as being fostered by social
conditions [The
Spirit of the Laws, XH, 6; 1748). Elsewhere he
charged that Christian asceticism was Malthusian in its consequences, robbing
the Roman Empire of manpower for its wars and causing its decline - thus implying
that sexual activity should be procreative.
Famous for his comparison of the human body to a machine, the materialist
philosopher Julien Geoffroy de La Mettrie (1709-1751) advocated
hedonistic ethics with an emphasis on satisfaction, including sexual
gratification.
Anticipating twentieth-century media, Voltaire (1694-1778) made clever use of
the press to mobilize public opinion against injustices. In the Calas case of 1762, for example,
he showed how a Protestant had been wrongly executed out of religious bigotry.
Tireless in his indictments of the cruelty, arbitrariness, and irrationality
of the French legal system of his day, Voltaire's voice was unfortunately
raised only slightly in defense of sodomites, who were still being put to
death. In the article on "Socratic Love" in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764), he makes it clear
that although he personally found homosexuality repellent, it should be regarded
as an aberrant taste, rather than a crime. He also gives historical instances
of famous homosexuals, anticipating a device that homophile apologists were to
use abundantly during the twentieth century.
The prolific Denis Diderot (1713-1784), co-editor of the great Encyclopédie, wrote on virtually every
topic in human affairs. In a guarded, though for its time unusually frank,
discussion of the limits of sexual expression, "The Conclusion of the
Conversation between D'Alembert andDiderot" (1769), he states:
"Nothing that exists can be either against nature or outside nature. I
don't except even voluntary chastity and continence, which would be chief
crimes against nature if one could sin against nature." Diderot
anticipated twentieth-century sexologists in holding to the hydraulic metaphor
of sexual energies, which demand an outlet. His animus against chastity is
also linked to his hostility to the ascetic morality of Christianity, to which
he gives full sway in his novel, La
ReBgieuse (1760; not published until 1796). In this melodramatic
work he presents a catalogue of anguish and horrors, not excluding lesbianism,
which he deems the result of involuntary collective seclusion of women in
convents. To berate Europe for its unnatural restrictions, Diderot's
"Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage"
(1772)
uses the device of a South Sea island paradise of heterosexual satisfactions
that combined, quoting Horace, the pleasurable with the useful, so that women
who had passed the childbearing age were supposed to refuse coitus. In keeping
with general eighteenth-century opinion, he disliked masturbation. His
reasoning on sexual morality is Janus- like: while criticizingits asceticism,
he retained the procreative bias of Christian thought in fostering a
naturalistic sexual morality that set definite limits on nonconformity, and so
created a secular rationalization of the religious argument that homosexuahty
is unnatural. In this way Diderot anticipated the "social materialist"
homophobia of Communist nations today.
The Italian Marquis Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) sought to apply a kind of
Occam's razor to laws. In his view, draconian punishments, including those
against sodomy, were not achieving their aim. He also proposed a sociogenic
explanation of homosexuality, which he held was fostered by the one-sex
populations of total institutions, such as boarding schools and prisons. The
corollary was that undesirable behavior could be lessened by altering the
design of human institutions. As this example shows, the Enlightenment was
concerned not only with lifting the burden of inherited irrationality, but with
proposing new devices of social control, ones which, by virtue of their good
intentions, might be all the more oppressive. Thus the Enlightenment is the
ancestor not only of modern liberalism but also of state socialism.
Evaluation. The philosophes forged powerful arguments
to discomfit tyrants everywhere. Yet the passage of time has revealed some
weakness in their thought: an overemphasis on reason itself, to the neglect of
feelings and sentiments, which have often swayed humanity. To a large extent
this onesidedness was corrected and superseded by the ensuing romantic
approach begun by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. There was a vital survival, however,
in the work of Jeremy Bentham, whose carefully considered theories of
homosexual emancipation were regrettably not published in his lifetime.
In political philosophy rationalism has tended to yield to the seductions of constructivism, as F. A. Hayek has termed
it. This is the tendency to assume that one can sweep away existing habits and
preferences, and then create a new society by fiat according to a deductive
idea of how humanity should be. In this heady vision, the old divinities depart
- but society becomes the god. In this outcome, the tyranny of the majority is
scarcely avoidable. Or contrariwise, in keeping with the doctrine of
self-interest, the wishes of the individual become the only criterion. The
farthest reaches of this second avenue were trodden by the most radical of the
Enlightenment thinkers, the Marquis de Sade. Without fear of punishment in an
afterlife and the restraining bonds of tradition, how can we be certain that
human beings will not simply abandon themselves to a maelstrom of
self-indulgence? This question, which might be tiresome in a conventional
moralist, gains force in Sade's novels, with their detailed visions of
cruelty. Sade was the first great creator of a dystopia, a negative vision of
society in which the trends of his day found their utmost logical extension.
The mainstream, or positive Utopian aspect, of the Enlightenment held that human nature
is, or ideally should be, uniform. Thus present diversities will yield to a new
universalist ideal of humanity and of uniformly applicable principles of law.
And the Enlightenment thinkers, while deists, did not deny the need for institutions
as arbiters of morality - which in practice meant the ascetic morality which
was to blight Victorian society with its exaltation of "the sacred
marriage bond" and the social-purity movements which relegated homosexuals
to the underworld of vice that was to be eradicated. Even if Frederick II the
Great, Joseph II, and other enlightened despots abolished the death penalty for
sodomy in the eighteenth century, the Code Napoleon did not keep the Paris
police under the Third Republic from establishing a vice squad.
No organized movement for homosexual rights emerged during the Enlightenment;
only at the end of the nineteenth century did the earlier trend toward freeing
disadvantaged groups and empowering them finally reach the despised and
outlawed homosexual community. Still, to the extent that its supporters can
draw on the intellectual capital of the earlier trend, the struggle for gay
rights counts as part of the "unfinished business of the
Enlightenment." The appeal to knowledge as the ground of human freedom has
deep resonance. Yet the empirical study of homosexuality owes little or nothing
to the Enlightenment; it stems from nineteenth-century innovations in the
fields of biology and psychiatry. This research is often of intrinsic value,
but in and of itself it clearly has not accomplished the emancipation of
homosexuals.
Human beings are only in part rational creatures, and lingering myths and fabrications
have proved hard to eradicate from the popular mind. Sober reflection indicates
that Enlightenment in the sense of education and the spread of knowledge must
be fused with an effective political program that can secure recognition of the
innate diversity of human beings as the bulwark of fundamental rights.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Jacob Stockinger, "Homosexuality and the French Enlightenment," in G.
Stambolian and E. Marks, eds., Homosexualities and French Literarature, Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1979, pp. 161-85.
Wayne R. Dynes
Enrique IV
See Juan II.
EPHEBOPHILIA
The word
"ephebophilia" refers to an erotic attraction to maturing male youth,
and as such stands in contrast to terms such as androphilia (love of one adult
male for another), gerontophilia (love of the old), pedophilia (whether this
term is restricted to love of prepubescent children or includes adolescents as
well), and "puberphilia" (love of pubescents).
Terminology. The term ephebophilia
seems to have been coined by Magnus Hirschfeld in his Wesen der Liebe (1906), where he applied
it to sexually mature youths from puberty up to the age of 20; in his 1914
magnum opus, Die
Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Hirschfeld specified the
range of love objects as from "the beginning to the completion of
maturity, so approximately ages 14-21." The German researcher estimated that
45 percent of all homosexuals were ephebophiles. For women, he used the term
"parthenophiles."
The GreekwordwhichHirschfeld borrowed for his compound, ephebos, is of various meanings,
used for one arrived at adolescence or manhood (at 16 to 18, depending on
locality) or at the prime strength and vigor of youth. It seems, however, to
have referred to the older youths, those with bearded faces who had outgrown
the stage at which they were appropriate as the younger partners in pederasty,
but not yet old enough to marry: the prime age for military service. The
ancient Greek age of puberty was likely in the mid-teens rather than the
younger ages typical of contemporary Western society.
In current usage, the term seems to have dropped the youngest segment of
Hirschfeld's definition, those adolescents just emerging from puberty, and
focused on the later years, 17-20. In many societies, this age group is
treated as adults for consent purposes, drawing a strong legal and practical
boundary between ephebophilia as currently used and the sexual attractions to
younger ages. In other societies, ephebes are legally on a par with younger
children, but in practice sexual activities with them are not as harshly
repressed as with the younger group.
According to Hirschfeld, two ephebes in love with each other are both
ephebophiles, but as attraction of same-aged persons is not of special
intrinsic interest, this article will focus on adult ephebophilia.
Popularity of Ephebophilia. Most male prostitutes and
models for homosexual pornography seem to be drawn from the ranks of ephebes,
supporting Hirschfeld's observation that ephebophilia is a major component of
adult homosexuality (in modern Western cultures).
Aesthetic considerations (which may well have biological roots related to the
best ages for childbearing) under which in most cultures males prize
youthfulness in their sexual partners, whether male or female, play a role in
this attraction, but other factors are also significant.
Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey's 1948 finding that the statistically average
white American male reaches his peak sexual activity (measured in orgasms per
week) at the age of 17 points to the widely held belief that ephebes are the
most sexually energetic male population group.
Seventeen also appears to be the age at which the average male attains his
fully mature erect penile length. This fact, together with other observations,
suggests that ephebophiles may be more interested in the late teenager's fully
developed and highly energetic maleness,
in
contrast to pedophiles (here understood as those attracted to younger boys)
who seem to be interested in more androgynous or even feminine features
(hairlessness, smaller stature, lack of muscular development) and for many if
not most of whom the greater sexual interest is in the boy's passive/receptive
capabilities. In the classical Greek model of pederasty, the boy's penis played
no role.
The combination of heightened sexual energy with a lack of heterosexual outlets
(owing to marriage ages in the twenties and restrictions on pre-marital
opportunities) and low incomes (characteristic of males still in school,
military service, or just beginning to acquire work experience) has in many
societies made heterosexual ephebes more available for trade (one-sided)
relationships with homosexuals than any other group of heterosexual males.
For many ephebophiles, the naïveté of ephebes is a source of attraction, their enthusiasm for
new experiences (including sexual and romantic involvements) contrasted with
what is perceived to be the more jaded and sceptical attitudes of other
adults.
Psychology of Ephebophilia. Almost nothing of an
academic nature has been written about ephebophilia from a psychological
perspective. Dr. John Money, who distinguishes the ephebophile from the
pedophile, claimed, in his introduction to Theo Sandfort's Boys on Their Contacts with Men (New York, 1987), that
"the true ephebophile has an adolescent erotosexual status and is
attracted toward, and attractive to teenagers." This idea seems to harken
back to the Freudian
concepts of arrested development which at one time were supposed to
explain adult homosexuality. Certainly, there are ephebophiles who feel most
comfortable in the company of ephebes and share many if not most of their
tastes, attitudes, and interests. Yet many adults who are sexually attracted
to ephebes, and would chose them as prostitutes, pornographic models, or
occasional companions, nevertheless do not feel drawn to the social,
psychological, or cultural aspects of late adolescence; they do not identify
with the adolescent nor with adolescent characteristics in themselves, and
hence display no interest in deep personal relationships with ephebes.
Presumably, Money would not consider these men "true" ephebophiles.
Ephebophilia is quite striking in prisons
and jails, but there the ephebes, being the youngest people present,
are prized by heterosexuals as being less "masculine" than adults,
and the psychological dynamics of it are quite different from homosexual
ephebophilia.
History. The historical development
of ephebophilia has yet to be written. The ancient Greeks acknowledged this
trait with the term philephebos
(fond of
young men) and philoboupais
(one who
is fond of over-matured boys, "bull-boys" or "husky young
men"), but generally slighted it in favor of the pederastic preference.
Nevertheless, the athletic games of which the Greeks were so fond featured nude
ephebes, the size of whose members received public acclaim, and the victors
basked in adulation; Pindar
wrote
odes to them. (Contemporary athletics,
especially
at the high school and college levels, still display widespread, if sublimated,
ephebophilia on the part of their adult male fans.)
The ancient Romans seem to have drawn a distinction between ephebic prostitutes,
who were sexually passive, and those in their twenties [cinaedi], who were sexually active.
By the time of the Renaissance, the ephebic ideal as seen in Michelangelo's classic statue of David
(1503-4) had gained wide currency. In contrast, there seems to be little
evidence of ephebophilia in the literary tradition of the Islamic countries.
By the mid-nineteenth century, in America Walt Whitman was composing erotic
poems of clearly ephebophilic nature, followed by John Addington Symonds with
his attraction to strapping young Swiss peasants and robust gondoliers, while
in England the ephebic soldiers of the Guards were prized sexual partners.
Examples of ephebophilia in literature include Herman Melville's Billy Budd and Christopher Isherwood's
autobiographical works, in politics the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, in
art Marsden Hartley, in film Maurice,
in
popular music Pete Townsend of The Who ("Rough Boys"), in photography
Bruce Weber.
Conclusion. In the twentieth century,
the dominance of the androphile model of male homosexuality has tended to
subsume, appropriate, and obscure the ephebophile current, and to consider it
as a mode of adult-adult relationships rather than as a distinctive type of
preference. As it becomes clearer to the research community, however, that the
umbrella of homosexuality (and indeed, of sexuality itself) covers a wide
variety of behaviors rather than a unitary phenomenon, it can be hoped that
further investigation of ephebophilia will result.
Stephen Donaldson
Epicureanism
Knowledge
of Epicureanism, the classical rival of Stoicism, is fragmentary because
Christians, disliking its atheistic materialism, belief in the accidental existence
of the cosmos, and ethical libertarianism, either failed to copy or actually
destroyed the detested works. Of all the numerous works composed in antiquity,
only Lucretius' philosophical poem De rerum
natura survives intact. Diogenes Laertius reported that Epicurus
wrote more than anyone else, including 37 books On Nature. A typical maxim: "We
see that pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily."
Epicurus (341-270 b.c.),
the
founder of the school, served as an ephebe in Athens at 18 and then studied at
the Academy, a fellow classmate of Menander, when Aristotle was absent in
Chalcis. Having taught abroad, where he combatted the atomist philosophy of
Democritus, he returned to Athens and bought his house with a garden in 307/6.
There he taught until his death, allowing women and slaves to participate in his
lessons - to the shock of traditionalists. Only a few lines of his works
survive. Apparently he likened sexual object choice, whether of women or boys,
to food preferences - a parallel that often recurred in later times. His
beloved Metrodorus predeceased him.
The Epicurean school, consisting of scholars who secluded themselves from
society in Epicurus' garden, lived modestly or even austerely. Stoics,
however, libeled the secretive Epicureans because of their professed hedonism,
accusing them of profligacy of every kind despite the fact that Epicurus felt
that pleasure could be attained only in restraint of some pursuits that in the
long run bring more pain than the temporary pleasure they seem to offer.
Natural pleasures are easily satisfied, others being unnecessary. The ideal was
freedom from destiny by satisfying desire and avoiding the pain of desires too
difficult or impossible to satisfy. By freeing man from fear of gods and an
afterlife and by teaching him to avoid competition in politics and business it
liberates him from emotional turmoil. Friendship was extremely important to
Epicureans.
Like its rival Stoicism, Epicureanism along with many other Greek tastes
became popular in the late Roman Republic. Lucretius (ca. 94-55 b.c.) seems not to have added any ideas to those taught by
Epicurus himself. But others, like the fabulously rich general Lucullus, whose
banquets became proverbial, excused their gross sensuality by references to
Epicurus'
maxims. Julius Caesar proclaimed
himself an Epicurean.
Under the Empire Stoicism vanquished its rival
and vied with Christianity, which when triumphant
anathematized Epicureanism.
The text of Lucretius survived into the Renaissance and
was disseminated in printed editions that naturally provoked intense
controversy, since the author's materialism and polemics against religion
called forth unmeasured attacks and subtle defenses. The author became the
favorite of a small coterie of materialists, of the libertines in the
seventeenth century, then of the Enlightenment thinkers,
and finally of the Soviet Communists, who naturally ranked Epicurus above Plato
as the greatest philosopher of antiquity. The rehabilitation of Epicurus was
the achievement of Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), a priest of unimpeachable
orthodoxy. Acquainted with most of the leading intellectuals of his time,
though not himself a great scientist or a great philosopher, Gassendi exerted
enormous influence on both Newton and Leibniz.
For others Epicureanism was a respectable philosophical cloak for mocking
impiety or lighthearted sensuality. The intelligent courtesan and leader of
fashion Ninon de l'Enclos was of this stamp, while Moliere and Cyrano de
Bergerac admired Epicurus and Lucretius for their candor, their courage, and
their sensible view of life. The Epicurean outlook, accepting sensual pleasure
as a good and not as the necessary evil which an ascetic morality would barely
allow, opened the way to a more tolerant attitude toward the forbidden forms
of sexual expression that is implicit in the work of such philosophes as La
Mettrie and of legal reformers such as Beccaria, not
to speak of the Marquis de Sade. So
Epicurus contributed to the Enlightenment trend
toward abolition of the repressive attitudes and laws with which Christianity
had burdened all forms of nonprocreative gratification.
See also Libertinism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Philip Mitsis, Epicurus' Ethical Theory: The Pleasures of InvulnerabiHty, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1989.
William A. Percy
Episcopalianism
See Anglicanism;
Protestantism.
Espionage
In our society the role of
espionage operative is one that has certain affinities with homosexuality.
Because the homosexual is forced from his mid-teens - from the moment of
self-discovery - to lead a double life, the normal boundaries between candor
and deception, between loyalty and disloyalty, between self-concealment and
self-revelation may be effaced so that a morally ambiguous existence becomes
second nature. Unless he has "come out of the closet," the homosexual is compelled to deceive
others as to his real intents and motives in the most private sphere of his
life, and he can with relative ease transfer this art of duplicity to his
professional activity. The self-discipline that comes from learning not to
reveal a secret but to live with it for years on end is also an asset of
homosexual character that lends itself to a career in espionage. Then, too, the
homosexual, typically unmarried, is free of the usual family ties - the
"hostages to fortune" - that make the heterosexual loath to leave his
home for prolonged service "in the field," often under the assumed
identity that is crucial to his intelligence-gathering role. That is why the
successful homosexual is sometimes also the best actor, diplomat, undercover
agent, and spy; indeed this very skill in maintaining a facade that convinces
the outside world of his "normality" was cited by psychiatric authors
of the 1890s as a proof that homosexuality could not be a disease, since the
mentally ill are totally unable to orient their behavior with such constant
finesse.
Moreover,
the homosexual may also harbor a grudge against the society that oppresses him
and in rare cases feel justified in harming it as an act of retribution, so
that betrayal becomes revenge for past wrongs. John Costello has argued that
this motive was important for Anthony Blunt. That he is in certain respects an
eternal outsider can deprive him- of the final motive for identifying with the
governing forces of the society in which he lives. And his involvement in a
clandestine network that flourishes in spite of society's prohibitions and
sanctions makes him part of a counterculture that can create its own loyalties
and direct its own channels of information and influence.
A further consideration is that the sexual activity of the homosexual exposes
him to pressure and blackmail if it becomes known to interested third parties.
Magnus Hirschfeld and his supporters made this a prime argument for repealing
Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code of Germany, but the echo of their propaganda
boomeranged when, during the 1950s McCarthyism, homosexuals were branded as
security risks by the United States Government and dismissed from positions
even in areas that had nothing to do with military or diplomatic functions.
The earliest instance of a homosexual's using his contacts for espionage
purposes that became publicly known was that of the First Secretary of the
French Legation in Berlin, Raymond Lecomte, who infiltrated the circle around
Prince Philipp von Eulenburg and revealed to the Quai d'Orsay that Germany was
bluffing in the first Morocco crisis [January-April 1906). This episode
provoked open charges against Eulenburg on the part of the journalist
Maximilian Harden, leading to the trial and disgrace of the Kaiser's intimate
friend. Then in 1913 the Austrian authorities discovered that Alfred Redi, the homosexual head of
the military intelligence service of the Dual Monarchy, had been acting as a
double agent on behalf of Russian officials who had taken advantage of his need
for money. A contrasting case is that of the celebrated [T. E.] Lawrence of Arabia,
who functioned on his own country's behalf in reconnaissance and subversion in
the Ottoman Empire before and during World War I.
More recently, in the era of the cold war the case of two British diplomats,
Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, was paraded before the public to demonstrate
that homosexuality was tantamount to sympathy for communism and proclivity for
treason. The art historian Anthony Blunt was also implicated, but his part in
the affair did not come to light until many years later, when he was stripped
of his knighthood. It was subsequently claimed that Blunt was the ringleader,
using his knowledge of the sexual proclivities of the British establishment for
blackmail to advance his work for the Soviet cause.
In February 1950, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin made "sex
perverts in government" an issue with which to attack the Truman
Administration, and a Senate subcommittee of 4 Democrats and 3 Republicans
upheld his charges - even though the only case which it could cite was that of
Redl in 1913 - after another investigation had accused him of perpetrating a
"fraud and a hoax" on the Senate by using unimportant and public
information as the basis for groundless assertions, mainly that some Federal
employees had been members of the Communist Party. [See McCarthyism.)
For two decades a policy of excluding hpmosexuals from "sensitive"
positions prevailed in official circles in the United States and its allies,
and it is only recently that the public position of the State Department and
other administrative agencies has begun to change. Behind the scenes, however,
the reality was probably little different from what it has been in the past,
simply because the heterosexual cannot always acquire the art of duplicity
which the homosexual must often master as a condition of survival in an unyieldingly
hostile environment. The politically compromising nature of successful espionage
- and the fact that records of such operations belong to a nation's most secret
and inaccessible files - will keep the full truth from being known for decades
if not generations. Only the breakdown of society's taboos could genuinely
alter the situation - and perhaps deprive a few homosexuals of the motive for
mastering an exceedingly dangerous but sometimes psychologically and
financially rewarding profession.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
John Costello, Mask of Treachery, New York: William Morrow, 1988; Georg Markus, Der Fall Redl, Vienna: Amalthea, 1984;
Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman, Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt, New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1987.
Warren Johansson
Ethics
Ethics
may be defined as a body of moral principles which are capable of application
to human conduct. The term also designates the branch of philosophy that
studies such principles.
In recent times the general ethical upheaval in Western civilization occasioned
by the decline of Christianity and the rise of relativism has substantially
eroded the earlier consensus on ethical norms. The resulting pluralism and openness
has had a leveling effect, making it possible for such formerly marginalized
groups as homosexuals to have their concerns addressed on the same plane of
seriousness as the mainstream. Nonetheless, the lingering sense of guilt that
afflicts some gay men and lesbians may foster a gnawing sense that they are
somehow deficient in ethical responsibility.
It is a notable fact that homosexuals, a stigmatized minority, nonetheless
remain basically law abiding and respectful of the rights of others. They
scarcely live in the profligate state of "unconditional self-surrender to
the immoral" that is the caricature of the hostile ignoramus.
Ethical Dilemmas
of Homosexuals.
Few
ethical questions are pertinent to homosexuals alone, but several need to be
considered as they are of frequent occurrence in daily Ufe.
Older
analyses of the matter contain discussions about whether it is right to engage
in homosexual activity at all. Those who take this position almost invariably
base their arguments on some particular tradition of religious rigorism or
asceticism. In the sense that human sex organs make the behavior possible, homosexuality
is not unnatural; nor is it per se injurious. It is a reasonable assumption, in
view of the collapse of the earlier consensus rooted in Tudeo-Christian
precepts, that the censorious view that homosexual acts are in and of
themselves unethical will continue to recede in prominence and plausibility.
But once this negative and antihumanistic approach is discarded, other concerns
arise. For the practicing homosexual or lesbian, maintenance of the closet -
the age-old habit of hiding heterodox sexual preferences - poses a challenge.
Should one refrain from coming out to one's parents in order to spare them
stress, or will they benefit from the disclosure in the long run? Should an
individual refuse to take his lover on a holiday visit to his parents in order
to save them emotional turmoil? Is the obligation to live a truthful Ufe higher than the duty to
avoid causing others distress? Should one reveal one's sexual identity to
blatant homophobes, or to personal enemies who may use the fact to one's patent
disadvantage? To what extent is it ethical to "pass" at all? In the
heyday of gay liberation in the 1970s it was often maintained that every gay
person's obligation is to come out. However, there is general agreement that
coming out remains in the last analysis a personal decision; it is wrong to
reveal someone else's homosexuality Without his or her consent (this
reservation is sometimes termed "closet rights").
Then there are issues of fairness to sexual partners. Some commentators
grounded in conservative religious traditions hold that sexual conduct is only
permissible with a partner to whom one has pledged lifelong fidelity. Such a
conclusion is for the most part binding only within the context of a larger
commitment to a religious tradition. Setting this restriction aside, other questions
crowd in. Given the sexual pluralism to which many gay men are accustomed, are
they not especially prone to sexual objectification? Is such objectification
necessarily immoral in and of itself? What about "cheating" on
partners? If one has been engaging in "extramarital" sex, what precautions
must one take to protect one's regular partner from possible exposure to
venereal disease? In practice questions of this kind can often be resolved by
frank discussion with the partner, or in some settings by an implicit mutual
agreement. Thus if two men meet at a gay bathhouse each can assume that the
other has no reservations about sexual objectification.
It is difficult to say whether one should attempt to formulate a broader code
of morality for homosexuals. Even this structure would probably be best
accommodated in the larger framework of the values of the society. For example,
in traditional China it was believed that each individual has a duty to his
ancestors to produce offspring. The toleration of homosexuality that existed
there reflected the fact that this precept was generally honored. Thus in
China a homosexual ethic might include a concession to spending at least part
of one's life in heterosexual marriage, a concession that Western homosexuals
feel no obligation to make.
University courses in ethics rarely consider homosexuals and their distinctive
problems, and extrapolations may be difficult. Further, homosexual writers and
organizations - apart from religious groups - tend to neglect this realm. Even
psychological questionnaire studies on truthfulness and honesty pose queries
that make virtually every homosexual seem to be living in a world of duplicity
and moral unreliability. Fusing with existing prejudice, this outcome has lead
some hostile observers of the gay lifestyle to the mistaken conclusion that
the homosexual is trapped in a maze of concealment and deception that makes him
a dubious confidant or employee.
This neglect of ethics on the part of gay organizations is in part a legacy of
the ignorance of earlier decades followed by the "anything goes"
mentality of the 1960s, but it may reflect a deeper sense that morality is a
matter of personal privacy and judgment, or of justifiable diplomacy in
private life. Admirable as such restraint may be in principle, it tends to
leave the young person in search of guidance with only slender resources. In
practice one may obtain some help from a sympathetic counselor, but the value
of such advice depends on the competence and insight of the giver.
Research Problems. A different set of
problems arises in connection with social-science research conducted on
homosexual subjects. In order to obtain optimal samples, modem techniques require
random selection of the members of the survey "universe," with
replies from all or almost all of those queried. In speaking to those who are
planning to vote in an election for president this goal is not difficult to
achieve, but with a private (even for some persons still taboo) realm such as
sexuality the obstacles are almost unsurmountable. In the course of his
research for a monograph on toilet sex, Tea
Room Trade (Chicago, 1970), Laud Humphreys noted the licence plate
numbers of the patrons (who had come by car) and, after tracing them,
interviewed the participants in their homes. Although the names were not
disclosed, some other scholars felt that an invasion of privacy had occurred.
In the 1980s concerns were raised about the ethics of testing new drugs for
AIDS. With increasing sensitivity among researchers to ethical practices with
human subjects, inappropriate procedures are likely to be subjected to vigorous
criticism and subsequent corrective action - at least in democratic
societies.
Wayne R. Dynes
Ethnology
See Anthropology.
Ethnophaulism
This rare
term (coined by Abraham Roback) serves as a useful designation for the
chauvinistic practice of human groups to attribute the origin - or at least
prevalence - of social failings to neighboring groups or peoples. Thus we
speak of German measles, of taking French'leave, and of going Dutch. In former
times Italians blithely dubbed syphilis the mal fláncese (or morbus gallicus), while Frenchmen returned
the compliment with their mal
florentin (or mal de Naples).
In the
case of homosexual behavior, ethnophaulism is not only a type of group
slander, but it also reflects a curiosity to trace the custom to its purported
source, in keeping with "popular diffusionism," which overlooks the
possibility that such behavior patterns are human universals. Thus, in
eighteenth-century England, when native homosexual behavior had been
documented for centuries and when important innovations seem to have been
occurring in the conceptualization of homosexual acts, the fashion continued to
ascribe the custom to Italy.
Divided as they were into many competing city states, the Greeks were given to
ascribing unusual sexual predilections to neighboring, but distinct Hellenic
groups, as well as to foreigners. Ostensibly special proficiency in fellatio
obtained among the inhabitants of the island of Lesbos (its association with
female homosexuality became commonplace only in comparatively recent times)
and the alien Phoenicians. At various times unusual fondness for pederasty was
remarked in Crete (Plato and others held that the institution began there), at
Sparta, Chalcis, and the island of Siphnos. To become blatantly homosexual was
sometimes called "taking ship for Messalia," after the ancient Greek
colony on the site of modern Marseille, which perhaps acquired its renown
through propinquity with the notoriously homosexual Celts. The Scythians,
northern neighbors of the Greeks, were associated with a particular type of
effeminacy. Among a basically tolerant people such as the Greeks, these
ethno-phaulic appellations have more the character of a bemused chiding than
harsh reproof, much as we would say today "X is German and likes to work
hard," or "Y's Scottish background makes him thrifty."
In the first century b.c. the Roman writer
Cornelius Nepos seems to have been the first to describe pederasty simply as
"Greek love." The Romans themselves were often charged with special
devotion to the "posterior Venus" with various wordplays on the
palindrome Roma -Amor.
In later times in Europe there were various expressions associating sodomy with
Italy. In 1422 the Zurich Rat-
und Rechtbuch, a legal text, designated the practice by the verb floienzen, suggesting that the city
of Florence had developed a particular reputation in this regard. Pierre deBrantóme (ca. 1540-1614) described
the fashion for lesbian liaisons in sixteenth-century France with the Italian
phrase "donna con donna" (lady with lady). At the courts of Louis XII
and XIV male homosexual proclivities were traced to Italy, as in the Sun
King's sarcastic comment "La France devenue italienne!" In England
Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) thought that Lombard bankers had introduced sodomy
in the late Middle Ages, while in the eighteenth century Italian opera was
held to be a source of new infection. Ironically, Mussolini was later to reject
a proposal to criminalize homosexuality in his country on the grounds that its
practice was limited to rich foreign tourists. The rural inhabitants of
Albania, who until recently boasted a rich indigenous tradition of pederasty,
nonetheless sometimes designated their custom as madzupi, derived from madzup, "Gypsy,"
implying that pederasty had been brought in from the outside by this wandering
people.
Some French writers localized the customs in other zones of the Mediteranean
littoral. French trade with Arab countries and the occupation of North Africa
(beginning in 1830) are probably responsible for the popularity of such
expressions as moeuis
levantines and moeurs
arabes. Just after the turn of the century, the Krupp and Eulenburg-von
Moltke scandals contributed greatly to the popularity in a hostile France of
the expression vice
allemand, apparently reviving a notion current there in the time of
Frederick II the Great in the second half of the eighteenth century. The temptation
to hurl such charges becomes particularly great in wartime as seen in an absurd
volume by Samuel Igra, Germany's
National Vice (London, 1945), which even alleges that Hitler had been a
male prostitute. A more general type of ethnophaulism, found both in Communist
and some Third World countries, claims that the Western industrial nations
collectively are declining because of their tolerance of "unnatural
vice." As a kind of silver lining, if only that, we may be grateful that
the appearance of AIDS, whose spread has been connected both to Africa and the
United States, has not led to any general international label of origin. While
such hopes must be proffered with diffidence, perhaps some degree of reason is
beginning to prevail in these matters.
See also Fascist Perversion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Irving Lewis Allen, The Language of Ethnic Conflict, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983; Abraham Roback, A Dictionary of International Slurs, Cambridge, MA: Sci-Art
Publishers, 1944, repr. Waukesha, WI: Maledicta, 1979.
Wayne R. Dynes
Etiology
Etiology
is the study of the factors that contribute to the occurrence of a disease or
abnormal condition. As such the term has been employed in inquiries and
speculations regarding the causes of homosexual behavior. In medicine the
significance of etiology is that it is the necessary starting point for
therapy and even more for prophylaxis, to which modern public health programs
owe their chief successes in the eradication of disease.
Historical Perspectives. The application of the
idea of etiology to same-sex behavior stems from several judgmental
perspectives. The broad outlines of their reasoning are as follows. (1) If
homosexuality is mere depravity - moral failure rooted in individual caprice
and self -indulgence - then society is justified in ostracizing and punishing
those who engage in it. Such measures would serve as a warning to others to
amend their conduct, which they can do through an exercise of free will. (2)
If, however, homosexuality is a psychological condition that has arisen
independent of the conscious will of the individual, then therapeutic measures
of one kind or another are called for. These must be imposed for the good of
the individual and that of society. (3) Yet again, the homosexual may be
simply manifesting an inborn and unmodifiable condition determined by
hereditary or genetic factors; then society is well advised to leave him alone
as neither punishment nor therapy will change his orientation.
The Pathological
Explanation. For many centuries the first interpretation - the abuse of
free will - was virtually the only one admitted in Christian Europe, and
accordingly habitual sodomites were seen as criminals and outcasts for whom no
punishment could be too severe. The matter fell in the realm of the criminal
law and the role of the forensic physician was ancillary. Only in the
nineteenth century, when the early homophile apologists had drawn the
attention of psychiatrists such as Karl Westphal and Richard von Kraf ft-Ebing
to the existence of exclusively homosexual individuals, did the notion of
sexual inversion as a pathological state raise the question of etiology,
properly speaking. The psychiatrists of the late nineteenth century were
inclined to organic explanations that made homosexuality a consequence of
hereditary degeneration of the central nervous system - and some people even
now thoughtlessly brand homosexuals as "degenerates." Little do they
suspect that with the acceptance of the findings of Mendel and Weismann that
acquired characteristics cannot be inherited - for good or for ill - the notion
of hereditary degeneration ceased to exist for medical science.
A variant was that homosexuality resulted from the psychological vicissitudes
of early childhood. This idea had a few adherents in the nineteenth century,
but found much broader support in the twentieth, thanks to such psychiatrists
as Albert von Schrenck-Notzing and psychoanalysts of whom Isidor Sadger and
Alfred Adler are the most outstanding. In the view of such writers,
homosexuality was a fixation in a stage of psychological development which
normal individuals left behind on their way to adult heterosexuality. An
assortment of fears and attachments in childhood left an indelible impression
on the psyche of the individual, and this complex of factors triggered a
homosexual orientation. This thinking offered a rationale for the compulsory
psychotherapy imposed upon some young homosexuals by their parents and upon
others by judges in lieu of a prison sentence.
The Shift to a More Positive
View. During
the same period a very different view emerged. As early as 1896 such defenders
of homosexual rights as Magnus Hirschfeld, Marc-André Raffalovich, and Albert
Aletrino held that homosexuality was a non-pathological variation within the
human species, inborn and unmodifiable, occurring in all races in all epochs of
history in approximately the same degree and with roughly the same range of
constitutional types. And in fact more than a century of medical and
biological research has failed to discover any common denominator in
exclusively homosexual subjects other than their sexual orientation. If a
specific cause underlies the sexual orientation of such individuals, genetic
science has thus far been unable to identify it.
Other Etiologies. Other explanations have
been defended from time to time. One is that hormonal imbalance or some
glandular abnormality causes homosexuality, but therapies grounded in these
assumptions have had little result. The attempt of biologists such as Richard
Goldschmidt to prove that all homosexuals were constitutional intersexes
("disguised" members of the opposite sex) has also found no
confirmation. Moralizing psychiatrists such as Edmund Bergler have argued that
homosexuality is the outcome of the seduction by older homosexuals of
adolescents who are then trapped in an orientation into which they initiate
younger males in their own adulthood - a view paralleling the interpretation offered
by the second edition of the Great
Soviet Encyclopedia published at the end of Stalin's lifetime. And
simple-minded fundamentalists believe that homosexuality is the result of
demonic possession or some equally malign spell cast by the evil powers of
another world.
Edward O. Wilson and other advocates of sociobiology have offered several
explanations based on the concept of "inclusive fitness." In this
view homosexuals and lesbians who have no offspring of their own assure the
transmission of their genes by helping siblings and their children. This factor
would account for the transmission of a trait that otherwise cannot be
accounted for in modern Darwinism.
A fifteen-year longitudinal study by Richard Green defined sissy boys as
cross-dressing, role playing as girls, frequently playing with dolls, and
avoiding rough-and-tumble
sports. Such boys were found to be much more likely to become homosexual than a
control group. This finding, though it has been supported by several other
scholars, probably cannot be generalized, since a large proportion of adult
homosexuals report no effeminacy in childhood, while others were without
excessive difficulty able to suppress the traits, becoming masculine in
appearance while still homosexual.
Correlations and Ulterior Motives.
Whatever the etiology
proposed by a given author, the political correlation has been fairly clear.
With a bare handful of exceptions, those who believed in the genetic or
constitutional determination of homosexuality have been supporters of gay
rights, Conversely, many who upheld the theory of the neurotic or environmental
origin of the condition (which they tended to regard as a "disease")
have, historically, been antagonistic to the homophile movement. More
recently, however, many anthropologists and sociologists, even if they profess
that human behavior is by and large culturally rather than biologically
conditioned, have expressed toleration for a plurality of lifestyles. The old
school racked its brains to discover rationalizations for refusing to abolish
the medieval laws, to recognize gay organizations, or to grant plaintiffs in
court cases the rights which they sought. In not a few instances a kind of
ideological shadow boxing occurs; those who insist upon the neurotic causes of
homosexuality in reality think of it as depravity, while those who champion the
genetic origin are obliquely dismissing the moral condemnation that derives
from Christian theology with its absolute rejection of all
"non-procreative" sexual activity.
Future Directions. A valid account of the causes of homosexual
behavior must take account of the dialectic of sexual dimorphism. In so doing
it must attempt a unified-field theory of sexual development that will account
for the whole spectrum of orientation, including shifts within a single
individual's lifetime. Thus heterosexual behavior demands an explanation as
much as homosexual conduct. Also, a distinction must be drawn between the
macroevolutionary causes of homosexuality (Why do homosexual behavior and
response occur in homo
sapiens? Why
does exclusive homosexuality occur?) and the microevolutionary causes (Why do
homosexual response and behavior occur in a particular individual? Why is a
given individual exclusively homosexual?). Not only must teleological conceptions
of the "purpose" of sexuality be discarded in order to reach a
scientific answer to the above questions, but the perspectives of different
disciplines must be brought to bear to separate the phylogenetic from the
ontogenetic (the species-wide phenomenon from the individual case history).
A solution to the question of causes will involve a rethinking and revision of
the confusions introduced by the older concepts of etiology, fraught as they
are with the insinuation that homosexual behavior is tainted with pathology. No
progress can be made as long as research is hobbled with such an a priori
judgment. The answer will also require integration of new scientific
perspectives and findings which are still unfolding.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Richard Green, The "Sissy Boy Syndrome" and the Development of
Homosexuality, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987; Noretta Koertge,
ed., Philosophy
and Homosexuality, New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985; Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1978.
Warren Johansson
Etruscans
The Etruscans were the
dominant people in central and northern Italy from the ninth to the second
centuries b.c.
Their civilization stood at
its prime from the sixth to the third century b.c., but
the language has not for the most part been interpreted, so that our
knowledge of them must rest at present on an examination of their art.
Most of what has been discovered is the contents and decorations of tombs. As
the goods found in them show, the Etruscans had close cultural and commercial
ties with the ancient Greeks. Indeed, Otto Brendel states that "Etruscan
is a branch of the civilization which we call classical," going on to say
that "it constitutes the only known case of a contemporary classical art
apart from the Greek." The achievement of the Etruscans has been obscured
by their conquerors, the Romans, whom they greatly influenced.
Etruscan civilization incorporated an unmistakeable male homosexual element,
readily seen in tomb frescoes, bronze sculptures, utensils, urns [cistae], and mirrors. This is not
to say that Etruscan art does not celebrate heterosexuality (which it does);
but rather that homosexual components are strongly present, as with both the
Greeks and the Romans.
The earliest homosexual image appears on the fresco of the rear wall of the
so-called Tomb of the Bulls at Tarquinia (one of the earliest tombs excavated
to date, from ca. 540 b.c.),
showing
what is almost certainly one man anally penetrating another who has horns and
who is, in turn, being charged by a bull. The iconography of this tomb has not
been satisfactorily interpreted but it may have religious connotations.
Symposium scenes were popular in the fifth century; they frequently featured
naked and semi-naked male dancers and musicians in an all-male setting and
bring to mind similar contemporary scenes on Greek vases, which have been found
massively in Etruscan graves.
Bronze sculptures celebrating the nude male body inaugurated an Italian
sculptural tradition which continues to the present day. These statues show
close links with Etruscan terracotta sculptures and with Greek sculpture. Naked
males frequently appear on Etruscan candelabras and incense burners in the form
of satyrs or sportsmen. They become an elaborate motif on the handles of the
lids of cistae dating from the early fourth century b.c.; these were apparently toilet boxes and were buried with the
owner. Some of the earliest examples feature two clothed warriors carrying a
dead warrior (also wearing clothes); but later all three figures are naked. By
the late third century they become even more openly homoerotic - as on a cista
in the Museo Archeologico, Palestrina, which shows Dionysus and a satyr.
The sides of cistae were frequently engraved with scenes from Greek mythology.
The Chrysippos cista (ca. 350 b.c.;
Villa
Giulia, Rome) features the homosexual abduction of Chrysippos by Laios. The
largest and finest cista, the so-called Ficorini Cista (ca. 400 b.c.; Villa Giulia), signed Novios Plautus in Latin, is virtually
a symphony to the nude male body showing it in seventeen separate poses (two
other figures are clothed). One naked figure, with his back to us and one arm
tantalizingly covering his anus, puts his arm around the neck of another unconcealed
male, who wears only a helmet and gazes longingly at him. Another, by contrast,
offers his backside to the viewer: a pose which was to be repeated in frescoes
in Pompeii and later in oil paintings from the Renaissance on and was to become a
classic motif suggesting homosexuality. The eroticism of this cista suggests
that the artist was homosexual.
Engravings behind Etruscan bronze mirrors also celebrate the male body in
homoerotic terms. Some, such as a mirror displaying Hercules and Atlas (ca. 460
b.c.), are little more than an
excuse for depicting the naked male body. In another mirror, a naked youth
reaches up to kiss a rather mannish woman while another gazes longingly at the
youth's body (ca. 450 b.c.);
while
such a mirror may have been used by a woman, its underlying male homoeroticism
is undeniable. Some bronze mirrors were cast in relief: one late-fifth-century
example depicts the homosexual abduction of Cephalos by Eos; another, one of
the most tantalizing objects in Etruscan art, depicts two naked winged males,
one of whom holds what is apparently a dildo, flanking a naked frontal youth.
The largest collection of Etruscan art adorns the Villa Giulia in Rome, a
museum entirely devoted to artefacts of this ancient people. The monograph of
Otto G. Brendel discusses the major surviving objects.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Otto G. Brendel, Etruscan
Art, New
York: Penguin Books, 1978.
Paul Knobel
ETYMOLOGY
The
discipline of etymology seeks to explain the origin of words, whether they are
inherited from a reconstructed parent language, borrowed from a known foreign
tongue, or simply invented in historic time. The etymologist examines the
earliest attestations of a word, variations in its form, explanatory glosses or
comments in early texts, parallels in other languages, and terms derived from
the same root or related in meaning to ascertain what was the source of the
word. A secondary matter is the history of a word or word family, the changes
in meaning or frequency of use over centuries or even millennia, and the role
which a particular term may play in the political or cultural life of the
speech community to which it belongs, or in the case of international terms,
even of the entire World.
The word lesbian, for example, serves in all
the modern languages of Europe to designate a woman erotically attracted to
her own sex,- it is derived from the Greek island of Lesbos, where the poetess
Sappho lived in the sixth century before our era. Sodomite, the term used in medieval
Europe for the sinner guilty of unnatural vice, comes from the city of Sodom,
which according to Genesis 19 was destroyed by a rain of brimstone and fire on
account of the depravity of its inhabitants. Bugger, a word attested in English
beginning with the law of Henry VHI in 1533, stems from the Old French bougre,
"heretic", then "sodomite" and even "usurer,"
which in turn came from Medieval Latin Bulgarus - the name of the Slavic
people who called themselves bulgarinu - because their land was
a center of the Bogomil heresy akin to the Catharism of Southern France. Tribade, the older word for
"lesbian" in European languages, came from the Classical Greek tribein "to rub," hence
tribades were women who obtained erotic satisfaction by friction against each
other's bodies. Homosexual,
by
contrast, is a modern term invented by the German-Hungarian translator and
bibliographer Karoly Maria Kertbeny in 1869 from the Greek homo,
"same," and Medieval Latin sexuaZis/'sexual," on the model of
French unisexuel and bisexuel
which had
been introduced as terms of botany in the 1790s. Pederast, a word whose meaning
differs from language to language in modern times, is the Classical Greek paiderastes which unambiguously
denoted "boy-lover."
An ancient doctrine, now discarded, maintained that similarities in the form
of words are not accidental, but offer a key to understanding. Thus Isidore of
Seville (ca. 560-636) referred the Latin name of the kite, milvus, to mollis, "soft,
effeminate," attesting to the supposed homosexual proclivities of the bird. The search for such links
probably stems from a quasi-magical world view, in which knowledge of the true
meanings of words gives the privileged knower control over things.
Such associative techniques, resting on foundations as old as Plato's dialogue
Cratylus, are not unlike folk
etymologies, which stem from the effort of naive and uneducated speakers to
explain unfamiliar terms by relating them to the lexical core of a language.
At times these folk etymologies can lead to the deformation of a word in
popular speech which ultimately finds its way into the literary language. A
good example of this in Modem English is faggot for "effeminate male
homosexual." The folk etymology of this word is that it derives from the
male sodomites who were used as faggots (bundles of firewood) when witches were
burned at the stake. Little does it matter to the folk mind that the word is
attested in its homosexual meaning only in American English in 1914, that it
comes from the dialectal use of faggot
(and fadge) in the sense of "fat,
slovenly woman," and that the penalty for buggery in English law was
hanging, not burning at the stake, which was the punishment of heretics until
the homosexual monarch James i put an end to the
practice. The speaker who knows faggot
only in
its primary meaning (and does not consult such a source as Wright's English Dialect Dictionary) can accept such an
explanation because it matches his imperfect command of the range of senses of
the word with his hazy recollection that "in the Middle Ages people were
burned at the stake for various crimes that offended the church."
The origin of dyke in the sense of "lesbian" (with the variant bulldyke) has inspired several folk
etymologies, because the exact source of the term is unknown. One of the more
fanciful interpretations is that the word is a deformation of Boadicca, the
name of the British queen who fought against the Roman invaders. A more recent
interpretation of the second syllable of bulldyke is that it comes from the
American slang expression "to be diked out," presumably in male
attire. A possible etymology is that the second element is the word tyke in the meaning "bitch," attested in English and
other Germanic languages; a bulldyke
would
then be "a bitch who behaves like a bull" (the male animal par
excellence). In American English tyke
has gone
its own way to become an endearing expression for a child, hence the
organization of lesbian mothers Dykes 'n Tykes.
The English language may lend itself to etymological curiosity and speculation
more than others because so much of its vocabulary is foreign, hence the
perennial question "What does it mean?," while the native vocabulary
is often opaque to the specialist because its origins are lost in the obscure
centuries of Middle and Old English. Also, in the sexual realm there has been a
long battle between the vulgar terms banned from literature and public life and
the learned euphemisms that were created or borrowed so that certain topics
could be discussed at all. It is commonly believed that the little
"four-letter words" that cannot be used in polite conversation are of
Anglo-Saxon origin, when in fact most of them are not attested in the Old
English period, and Anglo-Saxon had its own sexual vocabulary, now lost even in
the British dialects.
The etymon of a word was supposedly its "true" meaning, but to the
professional linguist it is only an earlier meaning or form. In the case of the
modern languages most words can be traced to sources attested in medieval and
ancient writing, and recent coinages can often be assigned to a particular
author who first used them in speech or print. For the general public,
literature on "word origins" can be an entertaining set of anecdotes,
while for the specialist the discipline of etymology is a clue to problems in
cultural history, as words can preserve customs and beliefs of bygone eras even
when their primary meaning is lost in the mists of time.
See also Language and Linguistics.
Warren Johansson
Eugene, Prince of Savoy (1663-1736)
Austrian
general and statesman. Bom the son of Eugene Maurice count of Soissons and
Olympia Mancini, a niece of Cardinal Mazarin, Eugene was destined for the
clerical profession by Louis xiv,
but in
1683 fled from Paris to the court of the Holy Roman (Austrian) emperor, as he
was denied entry into the French army. In 1697 he was entrusted with the high
command in the Turkish war (1683-99), and at Centa on September 11, 1697, he
won a decisive victory against the sultan's forces. In the War of the Spanish
Succession his victories over the French at Carpi and Chiari (1701)
contributed to the conclusion of the Grand Alliance at The Hague. The victory
over France and Bavaria at Hochstadt on the Danube on August 13, 1704 was the
outcome of his strategic planning and collaboration with the British under the
duke of Marlborough. After the death of margrave Ludwig Wilhelm of Baden,
Eugene was named imperial field marshal by the Diet. Fighting alongside
Marlborough once more, he won victories at Oudenaarde (1708) and Malplaquet
(1709). He was commissioned by the emperor to conduct the preliminary peace
negotiations at The Hague in 1709, and to represent Austria at the peace
conference at Rastatt and Baden in 1714. In the Turkish War of 1714-18, after
victories at Petrovaradin and Temesvár he besieged the fortress of Belgrade, Where on August 16,
1717, he defeated an enormous Turkish relief force and by capturing Belgrade decided
the outcome of the struggle. Court intrigues and a subsequent crisis in which
Eugene was involved ended with his complete vindication, but led him in 1725 to
renounce the governor generalship of the Austrian Netherlands which he had
occupied since the War of the Spanish Succession.
Eugene of Savoy was the most talented general of his day and a far-sighted
politician as well, one who replaced the dynastic outlook of the seventeenth
century with the concept of raison d'état. A generous patron of the arts and sciences, he entertained
relations with Montesquieu, Voltaire, Leibniz, and the historian Muratori; in
Vienna he had the Belvedere Palace built by Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt. In
nationality and character he was Italian;
although he understood German, he never wrote a sentence in that language. As a
general and a statesman he served the multi-national Habsburg monarchy and the
Holy Roman empire; his political horizon was still that of the feudal order
based on a harmony of the estates, not the democratic outlook of the later
eighteenth century. In the twentieth century German National Socialism and
Italian fascism claimed him as one of their predecessors in the struggle for a
"new order" in Europe - rather anachronistically, although he did
acquire Hungary and the South Slavic lands for the Habsburg crown.
Eugene lived at a time when his lack of interest in the opposite sex could be
lauded by naive panegyrists as meaning that he was "chaste and pure as a
seraph." His long association with countess Eleonora Batthyany led to no
greater intimacy than card playing, never to marriage. His enemies, however,
whispered that he "does not bother with women, a couple of handsome pages
are his metier." He even received the nickname "Mars without Venus."
His best friend at the court of Louis XTV was also homosexual, the Prince de
Turenne, who accompanied him on his flight to Austria. But while the prince
repented and returned home, Eugene vowed that he would set foot on French soil
again only at the head of a hostile army - and kept his word. Only a few
anecdotes surfaced in regard to his sexual life, but these tell enough. One is
a soldier's song in kitchen Latin that alludes to his voyage on the Rhone River
with his friend, the marquis de la Moussaye. When a storm broke out, the general
dreaded the worst, but the Marquis consoled him with the words: Securae sunt nostrae vitael Sumus enim
sodomitae/ Igne tantum periturí/Landeiiii, "Our lives are safe/
For we are sodomites/ Destined to perish only by fire/ We shall land." A
comment made by Schulenberg in 1709 should probably read that the prince
enjoyed "la petite débauche et la p[ine] au dela de tout," which means that he
derived his sexual gratification from the virile member - of others. So Eugene
of Savoy was one of those military figures whose homosexuality freed them to devote
their lives to a dangerous career without the distractions of a wife and
family, and he is remembered as one of the ablest generals in Austrian history.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Derek McKay, Prince Eugene of Savoy, London: Thames and Hudson,
1977¡
Curt
Riess, Auch Du, Cäsar...
Homosexualität
als Schicksal, Munich:
Universitas, 1981.
Warren Johansson
Eulenburg und Hertefeld, Philipp Fürst zu (1847-1921)
German
poÜtician and diplomat, an intimate of Kaiser Wilhelm II. A former guards officer,
jurist, and owner of a vast estate, he entered the German diplomatic corps in
1877. Eulenburg formed a close personal relationship with the future Kaiser in
1886 thanks to which he was able to play a key role in German politics that far
exceeded his official position as Ambassador to Austria-Hungary ¡1894-1903).
He both reinforced the megalomania of the Kaiser and judged him critically, but
also acted as intermediary between Wilhelm II and the Foreign Office.
Eulenburg was the center of a homosexual clique that was effectively penetrated
by the first secretary of the French legation and later ambassador to Berlin,
Raymond Lecomte (1857-1921), who used his position to reveal to the Quai
d'Orsay that Germany was bluffing in the Morocco crisis of January-April 1906,
which ended in a French diplomatic victory at the Algeciras Conference. This
reverse for Germany inspired a bitter attack on Eulenburg and his circle in November
1906 by Maximilian Harden, the jingoist editor of Die Zukunft, an influential political
weekly. In the series of trials that followed, Harden was victorious and
Eulenburg was exposed as a homosexual and socially ruined, spending the remaining
years of his life in isolation on his country estate, though he was spared the
final disgrace of imprisonment. The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the
homosexual rights organization headed by Magnus Hirschfeld, who testified as
an expert witness, suffered a severe setback and loss of support, and the
monarchy itself was exposed to such humiliation that the whole subject has been
a "bund
spot"
for German historians ever since. Although this episode was the Watergate of
the Second Reich, references to it in standard works are laconic and
uninformative. In all likelihood, the missingpiece in the picture was Wilhelm
II's own homosexuality - hence the peculiar attachment that gave Eulenburg
such influence over his sovereign in the shaping of German foreign policy,
which Lecomte in turn intercepted to his country's advantage. Ironically
enough, it was the journalistic use of the term homosexual in the vast contemporary
coverage of this scandalous affair that confirmed it as the usual word for the
subject in German and the other modem languages.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Isabel V. Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888-1918, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982; Marc-André Raffalovich, "Chronique de l'unisexualité," Archives d'anthropologic
criminelle, 24 (1909), 357-81.
Warren Johansson
Eunuchs
Eunuchs
are men or boys whose testes or external genitals have been removed. This
condition differs from other physical defects such as amputation of the hand or
foot or removal of the eye in that, at various historical epochs it was intentionally
created, so that the eunuch had not merely a physical or medical but also a
social definition.
Antiquity. The practice of castrating
slaves or prisoners of war began in the Ancient Near East and reached Greece as
a cultural influence from the Orient. The Greeks themselves anachronistically
ascribed the invention of the eunuch to the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis.
In Babylonia and Assyria (Mesopotamia) eunuchs played a major role both as officials
of the royal court and as members of the priestly castes in the temples. Eunuchs
held the highest offices as chamberlains of the sovereign and as provincial
governors. The heterosexual employ of the eunuch, then and later in the Islamic
Middle Ages, was as guardian of the harem. In religion the assinnu and kurgaru had both erotic and mantic
functions, serving as hierodules and as practitioners of incantation and magic,
particularly in connection with the cult of Ishtar, who had supposedly
consecrated their status. The Akkadian texts describe the eunuch as sinnisanu, "effeminate,"
and even as a "half-man," anticipating the Latin semivir. The courtier served his
ruler sexually much as the hierodule served the worshipper - in the passive
role.
In Greece the keeping of eunuchs as slaves began gradually toward the end of
the fifth century b.c., increased during the
Hellenistic period, and reached Rome in the second century, becoming more frequent
under the principate and then the empire. Eunuchs as costly slaves serving
their masters in highly personalized functions were part of the economic
stratification of Greco-Roman society: they were acquired by the wealthiest
classes to perform the functions of housekeeper, valet, guard, and tutor. The
political role of the eunuch was a function of the Orientalization of the
Hellenistic and Roman administrations; where the Greek presence was strongest,
eunuchs only exceptionally acquired power and influence at court; but where the
layer of Hellenization was thin and superficial, eunuchs were able to assert
their age-old position in the political hierarchy. The eunuchs' interests,
while coinciding with those of the ruler, often collided with those of the
upper strata of the aristocracy, so that they excellently served a centralizing
monarchical power.
Castration was most often inflicted on slaves without their consent to enhance
their value as merchandise. The operation was usually performed on boys in
childhood; but if the object was to market the boy as a catamite, castration
was effected at the onset of puberty so that sexual response would be
present. While Roman law forbade castration, it never sought to restrict the
trade in eunuchs imported from foreign lands. The wealthiest members of the
Roman upper class did not shrink from paying enormous sums for particularly
handsome eunuchs.
The outstanding characteristic of the eunuch in the ancient mind was his
effeminacy, equated with physical weakness and unfitness for military service.
In the sexual sphere the eunuch was supposed to behave "like a
woman," that is, to take the passive-effeminate role in a relationship
with a man. In this role the eunuch was deemed neither male nor female, but
as a kind of third sex, tertium
genus hominum. The effeminacy and sterility of the eunuch were a stigma
even in the pagan world, and more so in Christian times. On the other hand, the
social isolation of the eunuch made him ever more dependent upon his master
for advancement, and this assured his loyalty - a quality praised by ancient
writers.
The mentality of the eunuchs and of those who kept them must be seen against
the background of the markedly transsexualizing tendencies of Hellenistic and
then Roman society. The Greeks in particular were aware that the practice of
keeping eunuchs as catamites differed enormously from the pederastic relationship
in which the emphasis lay in developing the virile qualities of the younger
partner to ready him for his duties as warrior and as citizen. It was an
aspect of Eastern sensuality and servility that contradicted and undermined the
social values of paideiasteia.
But when
the conquests of Alexander the Gteat broke down the barriers between Hellenic
and Near Eastern cultures, the sexual customs of the Orient gained ground in
the Hellenistic monarchies. Alexander himself loved the Persian eunuch Bagoas.
As Hellenistic culture spread to Rome, so did the role of eunuchs as
effeminized passive partners for Roman men. The general Fabius Valens (about
69) had a retinue of" concubines and eunuchs." Titus, Domitian,
Trajan, Hadrian, Cornmodus, Caracalla, Heliogabalus, and others were
accompanied by such exoleti,
and some
emperors and other magnates even celebrated marriages with their favorite
eunuchs. Nero went so far as to confer upon the eunuch Sporus the honors of an
empress. Roman moralists criticized the practice of castrating slaves as a
violation of their human dignity and as an act of cruelty, even while Roman
society tacitly acknowledged the right of the owner to use the slave as he
desired.
The Judaeo-Chiistian
Tradition. Judaism, possibly abreacting to the role that eunuchs
played in the Ishtar-Tammuz cult, formally excluded them from its sacral
community (Deuteronomy 23:1). For that reason one of the most enigmatic
utterances ascribed to Jesus is Matthew 19:12: "For there are some
eunuchs, which were so bom from their mother's womb: and there are some
eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made
themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to
receive it, let him receive it." For Christian theologians and commentators
this verse has been a source of endless embarrassment; one can only surmise
that it found its way into the text of Matthew from an ascetic circle on the
periphery of the early Church where castration was recommended if not rigorously
practiced as the ultimate denial of the sexual urge, and that the otherwise
Judaizing author of the Gospel was unaware of the Old Testament strictures on
the matter. The usual evasion has been to interpret all three parts of the
verse as meaning "like eunuchs," and William Tyndale even translated
the verse: "There are chaste, which were so born out of their mother's
belly ...," but the reputation of the eunuch in antiquity was hardly for
chastity, rather for passive-effeminate homosexuality - which would leave the
Church in an even greater quandary, since the plain meaning of the verse makes
the eunuch an ideal of asexuality. Some modem homophile apologists have even
construed the first part of the triptych as an allusion to innate
homosexuality, but such an interpretation ill fits the tenor of the passage.
The verse well exemplifies the extra-Judaic sources of Christian sexual
morality whose ascetic tendency directly contravened the established norms of
Judaism itself.
But otherwise faithful to the Judaic tradition that rejected the eunuch, the
Christian Church in its canon law nowhere prescribed castration as a penalty
for any offense, so that castration as a punishment for sodomy in the royal and
municipal law of the late Middle Ages cannot be ascribed to ecclesiastical
influence or precept. The Church did not, however, forbid the secular
authorities to inflict such penalties, nor did it prevent the making of
castrati for singing in church choirs. In principle, however, since it opposed
the practice of castration as a violation of the dignity of the human subject,
the policy of the Church deprived the eunuch of his political and erotic functions,
and ultimately made him disappear as a social category from the Western world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Peter Browe, Zur Geschichte
der Entmannung: Eine religions- und rechtsgeschichtliche Studie, Breslau: Verlag Müller & Seiffert,
1936; Peter Guyot, Eunuchen als Sklaven und Freigelassene in der
griechisch-römischen Antike, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980; Georg Luck, "Trygonions
Grabschrift," Philologus, 100 (1956), 271-86; Ernst Maass, "Eunuchos und
Verwandtes," Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, new series, 74 (1925), 432-76.
Warren Johansson
Exiles and Emigres
Over the
course of the centuries, political vicissitudes and, after the rise of
Christianity and Islam, religious bigotry have forced gay people to leave their
own countries and seek refuge abroad. The ingrained adaptability and propensity
for disguise and camouflage of homosexuals has often facilitated this process,
but the coercive nature of the change has tended to induce a cautious temper in
those upon whom it has been forced.
Historical Examples. The earliest known
homosexual refugee fled the Greek island of Samos in the late sixth century b.c. The philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras escaped
the tyranny of Polycrates, himself a pederast, who had made the island a great
maritime power and cultural center. Later, in 521, when the Persians crucified
him and suppressed pederasty there, the pederastic poets he had attracted to
his court, Ibycus and Anacreon, fled.
There are no known instances of ostracism (banishment by popular vote) in
ancient Greece for pederasty. The Romans knew a form of voluntary
self-banishment called exsilium.
Magistrates
would allow those guilty of a capital crime to escape, but they could never
return to Roman territory.
In later centuries, when Christianity had influenced the Roman emperors to
impose the death penalty for homosexual activity, the extreme penalty was
sometimes commuted to banishment. Expelling the sodomite from its territory was
sufficient to placate or at least deflect the divine wrath that would otherwise
have spelled immeasurable woe for the state. In the great prosecution inspired
by Protestantism of homosexuals in the Netherlands in 1730, 57 of the 250 men
and boys who were convicted were put to death, while the majority were simply
banished from the country. At other times culprits took to flight as a way of
escaping burning at the stake, inflicted when the Inquisition "relaxed"
sodomites to the secular authorities, or in England (which never allowed the
Inquisition to enter) the hangman's noose - or in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, when English homophobia reached an apex, exposure in the
pillory.
Some sodomites fled persecution to the Italian Renaissance cities even before the
religious and other disputes of the sixteenth century in Europe caused much
displacement of individuals who, for one reason or another, could not accept
the new state of affairs in their native land - or the continuation of the old
one. Among these was the French philologist and professor Marc-Antoine Muret (1526-1585), who had to escape to Italy to elude punishment
for sodomy. Many by flight avoided prison and perpetual imprisonment or the
galleys - the penalties meted out by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions more often than burning at
the stake.
Conversely, the abolition of the sodomy laws in France in 1791 and subsequently
in other countries, including all the Latin ones (except Romania) and their
colonies overseas, that adopted the Code Napoleon made these lands an
appealing haven for northern European and Anglo-Saxon homosexuals. Even before
the French Revolution the very wealthy eccentric William Beckford had found it prudent to
leave England for Portugal. In the Napoleonic period three clergymen, the Rev.
John Fenwick, the Rev. V. P. Littlehales, and the Bishop of Clogher were
obliged to flee England. The case of the last-named individual, a member of an
aristocratic Anglo-Irish family, was so notorious that in French his name
became a sobriquet for a British sodomite. Two other Hibernian figures were
more fortunate. Lady Eleanor Butler (1739-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1831)
fled Ireland together in 1778; in the following year they settled in a rustic
cottage near Llangollen,
Wales,
where they resided unmolested - and in fact increasingly admired - for the
rest of their lives.
Two great poets of romanticism, George Gordon, Lord Byron, who was bisexual,
and the exclusively homosexual Count August von Platen resided much of their
lives in Mediterranean countries. The inspirational homeland of ancient Greek
pederasty, Greece, not under the Napoleonic Code but under Ottoman Turkish
influence, tolerated homosexuality as did all Moslem countries. Improvements in
the ease and convenience of travel made expatriation an option for an
increasing number, including John Addington Symonds, Frederick Rolfe
("Baron Corvo"), and the nonsense writer and artist Edward Lear. Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs, the lonely German pioneer of homosexual rights, who began to
protest even before in 1866 Prussian prohibitions were imposed on his native
Hanover, formerly under the Code Napoleon, passed his last y ears in L'Aquila in
Abruzzi, where he died in misery in 1895, though not before Symonds had visited
him. After his release from prison in 1897 Oscar Wilde departed from England
for France, where he died three years afterwards. A few years later the French
aesthete Count Jacques d'Adelsward Fersen, after a scandal involving some
photographs of boys, found it wise to withdraw for a time to the island of
Capri (where the emperor Tiberius had long before established a retreat replete
with a swimming pool filled with boys and girls to service him). Capri was then
entering its modern apogee as a place of residence of foreign homosexuals. In
the last Byzantine capital in Sicily, Taormina, whose views of Etna vie with
Capri's of Vesuvius, the German Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden produced his
celebrated photographs of Sicilian boys and attracted other foreign pederasts.
On the eve of World War I actual colonies of English and German homosexuals
lived in Italy, where they had taken up residence after being compromised
socially or legally in their own countries, scenic Venice, where Winckelmann
was murdered, being a favorite, along with Florence and Rome, both beautified
by Michelangelo.
Lesbians, even if less likely to be menaced by the law, still had to fear intolerant
public opinion, particularly in Protestant lands. The Americans Natalie Barney,
Sylvia Beach, Romaine Brooks, Gertrude Stein, and Alice B. Toklas preferred to
reside in Paris. So too didRadcly f f e Hall, after her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) was banned in
England. Vernon Lee, the lesbian writer on aesthetics, chose to live in
Florence.
Refugees from
Totalitarianism. The best known and most numerous examples of exile and
emigration occurred as a result of the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes
of right and left in the twentieth century. In the 1920s many talented figures
fled Communist Russia and Fascist Italy, to be joined in the early thirties by
refugees from Nazi Germany and at the end of the decade from the annexed or
occupied countries of Europe and from Franco Spain. After 1945 a new wave of
refugees from an Eastern Europe that fell under Communist domination was followed
by still others from Cuba and Vietnam when these countries shared the same
fate. In the 1980s the Mariel refugees from Cuba and the Sino-Vietnamese boat
people are melancholy reminders of the intolerance of Communist states. It was
a well-known if not well-publicized fact that many of the Mariel emigres were
homosexuals fleeing the repressive policies of the Castro regime in Cuba,
which while proclaiming equality for women and attempting to overcome the
inveterate machismo of Latin American culture made the lot of the homosexuals
on the island far worse than it had been under the deposed Fulgencio Batista.
Gay bars and synagogues have disappeared from Havana as from Berlin under the
Nazis.
Unlike many earlier refugees who vegetated on the margin of the intellectual
and cultural life of their host countries, the trans-Atlantic migrants of the
1930s bonded with American society (and English to a lesser extent) and
inspired its higher culture. Before their arrival America was a provincial
backwater whose third-rate academic institutions contrasted sadly with the
European universities, but had in some places, richly endowed, begun to rise
with the introduction of the German model of graduate study in the late
nineteenth century and to catch up as Europe squandered its youth in World War
I. With their help, it became a dominant force in the intellectual life of the
mid-twentieth century and an exporter of the software - the ideas,
innovations, trade secrets, and patents - consumed by other nations. Significantly,
with the retirement of the emigres and their immediate pupils, American
supremacy began to fade.
During the 1930s and early 1940s, because the thirty or so major American
universities could not absorb the influx of new talent, many went to smaller or
less elite schools. This enrichment contributed to today's polycentrism of
American colleges - the fact that many campuses undistinguished before 1940
have become significant centers of learning. There were, inevitably,
significant concentrations. With its cosmopolitan tradition, New York drew
social scientists to the New School for Social Research and painters and sculptors
to Greenwich Village, where Hans Hofmann's school provided the nucleus for
abstract expressionism. The gay painter Pavel Tchelitschew, earlier a refugee
from Bolshevik Russia, represented surrealism, with a notable influence on film
and writing as well as the visual arts. At New York University's Institute of
Fine Arts Alfred Salmony, formerly of Cologne, made many converts to Oriental
art, his specialty.
Near New York City was the lodestone of the highly gifted, Princeton's
Institute for Advanced Study, with Albert Einstein as its presiding spirit. In
Germany Einstein, though himself heterosexual, had signed Magnus Hirschfeld's
petition against Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code. At Princeton he was later to
be joined by the distinguished medievalist, Ernst Kantorowicz, more or less
openly gay and a former member of the Stefan George circle. At Berkeley
Kantorowicz, along with Robert Oppenheimer who became director of the
Princeton Institute, had stood out as one of a small number of faculty to lose
their jobs because they had refused to sign the loyalty oath which was part of
the anti-Communist furor of the late 1940s. As a homosexual Kantorowicz could
have been deported for this act of defiance. Another medieval historian - the
field seems to have an affinity with homosexuality - Theodor Mommsen, was
affiliated with Princeton University and very attracted to the art historian
A. M. Friend for a time. Princeton was also the home of the great Austrian
novelist Hermann Broch, who there completed The Death of Veigil (1945).
Southern California was the destination of many artistically creative individuals.
After a short stay in Princeton, the bisexual Thomas Mann settled in the Los
Angeles area. His gay son Klaus also made his way to America. The Southern
California scene was further enlivened by English gay exiles, including the
novelist Christopher Isherwood, compelled to leave the Berlin he loved, and the
actor Charles Laughton. The eccentric Anglo-Irish thinker Gerald Heard helped
to lay the philosophical foundations for the gay movement. Also active in
Southern California was the gay fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, who became
the lover of Henry Hay, the founder of the American homophile movement.
Hollywood gave refuge to many lesser figures in the entertainment world who
found employment behind the scenes in the studios and were sometimes hunted by
adherents of Mc-Carthyism.
Not all gay emigres went to North America. Outstanding exceptions were the
Spanish poet Luis Cernuda, who settled in Mexico, and his compatriot the
composer Manuel de Falla, who preferred Argentina. However, Latin American
countries were generally too underdeveloped economically and intellectually
for such figures to make a permanent impress. In fact some refugees whose first
haven was Latin America resettled in the United States.
Still others went to England. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who remained
in the closet, had settled there before the rise of Hitler. Kurt Hiller, the
leftist writer and gay activist, lived in Prague until the Munich accords made
it necessary for him to flee to England, where he proved unable to adapt and
returned to West Germany in 1955. Anna Freud, who had conducted a closeted
lesbian lifestyle for a time in Vienna, accompanied her famous father to his
exile in England, then lived and practiced psychotherapy there until her death.
Amnesty International still refuses to protest the persecution and
imprisonment for reasons of sexual orientation of homosexuals in any country,
despite the appalling treatment meted out to them by such diverse authorities
as those of Islamic countries, notorious among them the late Ayatollah
Khomeini, or secular governments such as Turkey's on the one hand and Communist
regimes on the other. In Argentina under the military junta in the 1970s the
situation of the homophile movement deteriorated so badly that its leaders had
to go into exile in monarchist Spain.
Conclusion. English and American
prejudices and laws against homosexuality obliged homosexual refugees to hide
their proclivities in order to gain entry visas and then get and retain
citizenship papers. Hence it is often difficult to obtain accurate information
on persons dead or alive. It may be inferred that homosexuals succeeded less
often than their heterosexual colleagues in escaping from Europe and getting
into the Anglo-Saxon democracies. Even when they succeeded, they faced
discrimination in academia, where even now there are barely fifty tenured
professors who are openly gay on all the more than 2000 American college and
university campuses, and not five in the Ivy League.
The history of oppression and totalitarianism is far from ended, and America
may in the future open its doors to still other émigrés from foreign lands. Three
main categories may be discerned in the ranks of gay émigrés and exiles through the
ages: (1) those who had to flee their native lands to escape severe legal and
social penalties; (2) those who judged it prudent to emigrate to lessen the
burden of social ostracism and potential conflict with the law; and (3) those
who preferred life abroad, with the sexual privileges accorded the foreigner,
particularly one with independent means, to a confined existence at home. The
study of émigré
colonies
in exotic parts of the globe may shed additional light on the lives and
fortunes of the gay exiles.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual
Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1969.
William A. Percy