I


Ibycus (sixth century b.c.)
Greek lyric poet. Ibycus sprang from a noble family of Rhegium in Magna Grecia. His lyrical narrative poems liber­ally endowed myths with pederasty. Re­fusing to become a tyrant at home, he went to the court of the pederastic tyrant Polycrates. Wealthy from commerce and pi­racy, Polycrates raised Samos to the fore­front of Hellenic art and literature. In fear of conspiracies, he burned the palestrae (gymnasia), forcing Pythagoras into exile, where he became one of the first homosexual exiles and emigres. Soon there­after the Persians crucified him in 522 and sent Ibycus and Simonides into exile, where Ibycus sang of love in his old age - espe­cially of love for the tyrant's son.
The Alexandrian scholars col­lected his poems in seven books: choral poems and encomia, and a great many love poems, hardly any of which have survived because of the ravages of time and Chris­tian disapprobation. Cicero deemed him more amorous than Sappho's compatriot Alcaeus - perhaps the first pederastic poet, or even Anacreon - and the Greek Anthol­ogy described him as one who "culled the sweet bloom of Persuasion and of the love of lads." Because Horace, Catullus, and some poets of the Greek Anthology imi­tated him, one can derive a fair picture of his carefree, insouciant, promiscuous loves. To one of his eromenoi he wrote: "Euryalus, offshoot of charming graces, object of the fair-haired maidens' care, Cypris and mild-eyed Persuasion have reared you in the midst of rosy flowers" (fr. 6).
WilMam A. Percy

Identity
Individual identity may be de­fined as a sense of the unity and persis­tence of personality or core consciousness, an awareness of a stable framework of self, related to but separate from the surround­ing environment. One of the pitfalls of the term is that the existence of a sense of identity as so described may be considered tantamount to proof that such a unitary, persistent, stable self is an actual fact. This last assumption has sometimes been re­jected (e.g., by Buddhists). Psychologically, identity seems to be much more fluid objectively than subjectively. While the word is in common circulation, it remains an ambiguous term, and even to some psychologists a dangerously misleading one.
Basic Features. In 1690 the Eng­lish philosopher John Locke wrote of iden­tity in the psychological sense as "that sameness of rational being." By 1820 Washington Irving had posited the idea of loss of identity in the case of a character who was not sure whether he was himself or another person. In the 1960s the psycho­analyst Erik Erikson popularized the no­tion of an "identity crisis" as an "interval between youth and adulthood" when one seeks to achieve an inner and outer coher­ence following a break away from the parent-derived identity and the beginnings of a new adult sense of self.
In addition to the concept of an individual identity, there is the notion of a group-derived but individually self-applied social identity which may be lifelong (e.g., being a female or an Italian) or may change over time (e.g., being a football player or a stockbroker). Group-derived identities are seldom unitary in any sense, as each individual feels a part of more than one group. A modern phenomenon seems to be an increasing tendency to build social identi­ties around subcultures rather than local geographic units, nations, classes, and occupations.
Sexual Aspects. Today, some gay liberation spokespeople perceive the pro­cess of coming out as one of forging a gay identity which supersedes or takes prece­dence over all other group-derived iden­tity; others reject this view as reflecting an excessive separatism, regarding the homo­sexual element in personality as not radi­cally sundered from the identity-deriving elements predominant in heterosexuals. The gay-identity position has also come under attack from a neo-nominalism that insists that scientifically there is no such thing as a "homosexual" as a noun, but rather the word can only be used as an adjective describing a kind of behavior open to any human being; the advocates of this position would not, however, deny the existence of a (sub)culturally-constructed sense of identity independent of scientific standing.
Some prefer to address the ques­tion in terms of self-concept. Yet is the self unitary; or a bundle of subselves; or lack­ing in substance altogether? The second and third formulations may explain some aspects of cognitive dissonance with re­spect to homosexuality, as seen in the case of the late Roy Cohn, a protagonist in the McCarthy hearings, who seemed both to deny and to affirm his homosexuality. This phenomenon may be also be explained if one thinks of the self as a mediator be­tween public identity or persona ("nor­mal") and the private identity (in some individuals, expressed only in fantasies). There are other individuals, such as the poet John Berry man (1914-1972), whose homosexual side emerges only in alco­holic bouts, but here it may be more prop­erly said that it was his behavior which was otherwise repressed, not his identity. If Berryman had acted homosexually whether drunk or sober, but only felt himself to be gay when drunk, then one could speak of a repressed identity.
Homosexual behavior need not be related to identity at all, but may be seen as a casual or situational or revenue-producing activity only. To take a clear case, the macho prisonerwho uses another male as a substitute female until he is released never deals with any sense of homosexual identity, peripheral or cen­tral, public or private. There seems to be a requirement for a socially mediated model of "homosexual identity" which an indi­vidual can conceive of applying to himself before the question can even arise. Perhaps relevant here is the question of a "bisexual identity" which has often arisen in indi­viduals without reference to a group or subculture at all, but based on models provided by the general culture.
In the integrative process that occurs with the acknowledgement of one's homosexual identity and its management in the course of Ufe, it may have varying degrees of ccntrality. How does homo­sexuality migrate from one personality region, say from a peripheral one to a central one and then out again? How does it achieve the status of a master identity, only perhaps to become less dominant later? Perhaps such questions must await answers to more preliminary enigmas such as how sexual orientation itself can change over the course of time.
Clearly many questions remain for further research. Since the matters discussed in this article are among the thorniest addressed by the human sciences, one cannot expect that perfect clarity will be soon achieved - and perhaps it never will.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Vivienne C. Cass, "Homosexual Identity: A Concept in Need of Definition," Journal of Homo­sexuality, 9:2-3 (1983-84), 105-26; William Du Bay, Gay Identity: The Self Under Ban, Jefferson: McFarland, 1987; Jon Elster, ed., The Multiple Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Barbara Ponse, Identities in the Lesbian Wodd: The Social Construction of Self, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978,- Richard R. Troiden, Gay and Lesbian Identity: A Sociological Analysis, Dix Hills, NJ: General Hall, 1988; Thomas S. Weinberg, Gay Men, Gay Selves: The Social Construction of Homosexual Identities, New York: Irvington Press, 1983.
Stephen Donaldson

Immaturity Theory
When confronted with a teenager's homosexuality or lesbianism, parents will often exclaim, "It's just a phase. S/he will grow out of it." While this view reflects popular ideas of personality growth, it also finds a learned prop in the psychoanalytic idea that human bisexuality is a halfway house along a path that is always directed toward a final goal of heterosexual maturity. In keeping with this premise the persistence of a homosex­ual pattern in adult Ufe is ascribed to "arrested development."
The immaturity notion also ac­cords with the folkloric view that a "little experimentation" is permissible, as long as it does not "become a habit." This motif borders on the concept of deviant sex as self-indulgence, a flight from the serious responsibilities imposed by raising a fam­ily. In clinical sessions psychiatrists have had recourse to the reproach of immatur­ity as a lever to induce young clients to give up their homosexuality.
Of course there are individuals who try a few homosexual acts in youth and, having then found that this is not where their major interest Ues, come to Uve essentially heterosexual Uves. Other young people, aware of the stigma that still attaches to homosexuality, cling to the immaturity notion as a device of de­nial, refusing to accept as long as they can their homosexual orientation. In the re­cent past, some of these persons would contract a heterosexual marriage in hopes of putting the "immaturity" behind them. Such expedients have rarely been success­ful. This denial can result in unhappiness both for those who embrace it and for others who are emotionaliy and socialiy involved with them.
Conceptually, the immaturity theory makes an incongruous contrast with its opposite, satiation.

Immigration
Today's world has become con­cerned with immigration, not only be­cause millions have migrated but also because the rise of the modern state and its definition of nationality has made the matter fraught with complications. Homo­sexuals Uve in a certain degree of tension with the environing society and have fewer ties to keep them rooted in the communi­ties where they grew up. For this reason, they tend to migrate, not just to large cities with their convenient anonymity, but even across national borders. In the past, con­flict with the law often sent homosexual men in precipitous flight to escape long prison terms or even a lynch mob, while voluntary exile amounted to a commuta­tion of a severe penalty: in either case the individual whose homosexual activity was exposed ceased to be a member of society. If he was fortunate, he might settle in another part of world where his past was unknown and could not easily be discov­ered; and here, too, he could resume the series of casual liaisons that had become part of his lifestyle.
A visit of few days as part of a vacation trip is technically an act of immigration, even if the foreigner has no intention of residing permanently or be­coming a citizen of the host country; and many are the homosexuals who either prefer exotic sexual partners or, possessing discretionary income but without fami­lies to accompany them, enjoy travel abroad, even to distant lands, in search of erotic adventures or pleasures denied them in the communities where they reside.
The Evolution of American Law. Homosexuality as an issue for the authori­ties that control immigration, in the United States the Immigration and Naturaliza­tion Service (INS), did not arise until the second decade of the twentieth century, for the simple reason that in the nine­teenth century homosexuality as a psychi­atric entity was unknown to the general public. There were, however, laws that sought to bar the movement of prostitutes and particularly the white slave traffic which had assumed international dimen­sions on the eve of World War I. Inside the United States the Mann Act of 1910 made it a crime to transport a female across state lines "for immoral purposes," while the movement to restrict immigration from Europe gathered support in the hinterland which resented the growing clusters of new arrivals from eastern and southern Europe in the large cities.
The first comprehensive revision of the immigration laws came with the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1917, which denied entry to persons certi­fied by an examining physician as "men­tally defective" or afflicted with a "consti­tutional psychopathic inferiority." How­ever, because the concept of homosexual­ity as a psychological condition was still new, the Board of Immigration Appeals excluded only those aliens who confessed to committing, or had been convicted of, homosexual acts involving moral turpi­tude. In 1947 the Senate began an investi­gation into the entire immigration sys­tem, and in 1950, when Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had made "sex perverts in gov­ernment" a political issue, Senator Mc-Carran of Nevada and Representative Walter of Pennsylvania introduced a bill that added "homosexuals and other sex perverts" to the class of medically exclud­able aliens. The Senate Judiciary Commit­tee dropped the phrase from the bill pri­marily because of the objection raised by the Public Health Service that some diffi­culty would be encountered in substanti­ating the diagnosis of homosexuality and sexual perversion. Its report did, however, state that the Public Health Service had asserted that "the provision for the exclu­sion of aliens afflicted with a psychopathic or amental defect" was "sufficiently broad to provide for the exclusion of homosexu­als and sex perverts," and also specified that the "change in nomenclature" was "not to be construed in any way as modi­fying the intent to exclude all aliens who are sexual deviates." The revised bill was passed by Congress to become the Immi­gration and Nationality Act of 1952.
The new law was enacted, it should be stressed, not just because the American Psychiatric Association and a majority of the medical profession consid­ered homosexuality a mental illness, but also because they had no objection to any measure that deprived homosexuals of rights in civil and administrative law. This is a classic instance of how religious sanc­tions were in the nineteenth and twenti­eth centuries rationalized as pseudo-medi­cal or pseudo-biological norms so that a policy of discrimination and exclusion could be justified in the eyes of the public. It was only the advocacy of measures for greater toleration that provoked the ire and indignation of the psychiatric "ex­perts" of that day.
The issue of whether the expres­sion "psychopathic personality" included homosexuality was soon raised, and the courts in looking at the legislative history of the Immigration and Nationality Act reached a consensus that Congress in­tended to include homosexuals within the term "psychopathic personality" regard­less of the medical profession's understand­ing of the term. However, in a 1962 case a Federal appellate court did hold that the expression "psychopathic personality" was void on account of vagueness as it did not provide a "sufficiently definite warning that homosexuality and sexual perversion are embraced therein." It subsequently set aside a deportation order on the ground that homosexual aliens could not be ex­cluded as "persons afflicted with psycho­pathic personality."
The liberal Congress elected at the time of Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in 1964 responded to this decision by amending the law to add the term "sexual deviation" to the roster of exclud­able medical afflictions, and the Supreme Court, in Boutiliei v. Immigration é) Naturalization Service (1967) ruled that Congress intended the expression "psy­chopathic personality" to exclude homo­sexual aliens, stating that Congress had used the expression not in any clinical sense, but as a term of art designed to achieve its goal of exclusion. Case law further established that an integral part of the statutory scheme is the issuance of a "class A" certificate - a medical determi­nation of "sexual deviation," and the Supreme Court held that an order of exclu­sion could not be issued unless the alien had been labeled with the requisite Public Health Service certificate. It did not raise the procedural issue of whether the INS could simply bar homosexuals who had not been so certified.
The Legal Impasse. In the wake of the decision of the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality from its nomenclature of mental illnesses, the United States Surgeon General in 1979 notified the INS that the Public Health Service would no longer furnish the medi­cal certification required for the exclu­sionary procedure, and instructed Public Health Service medical officers that they should not certify homosexual aliens as psychopathic personalities or sexual devi­ates solely on the basis of their homosex­ual orientation. The INS, in response to legal advice from the Justice Department that it was still required by law to enforce the exclusion of homosexual aliens, adopted the practice of excluding only those aliens who are identified as homo­sexual by a third party arriving at the same time, or who offer an unsolicited, unam­biguous admission of homosexuality and repeat that admission in a second inter­view. An affirmative answer at the second hearing will result in a formal exclusion­ary hearing that may result in a denial of entry. This procedure allows for exclusion in the absence of the medical examination and certificate.
Faced with a new situation in administrative practice, the appellate courts have split over the issue of whether Congress has the power to exclude homo­sexual aliens under the new, non-medical procedure. The ultimate solution of the dilemma rests with Congress itself, but when the issue of homosexual rights be­came clouded by the problem of AIDS, support for repeal of the measure denying admission to the United States of aliens suspected of being homosexual became politically far more difficult. In practice most immigration officials and consuls attempt to avoid any direct confrontation with a law that bars any and all homosexu­als by ignoring it rather than excluding homosexual celebrities on the basis of an absurd statute.
In 1985 the Committee on Immi­gration and Naturalization Law of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York formally reported that "The United States, alone among all the nations of the world, statutorily excludes homosexual persons from admission into the country for any purpose whatsoever, from casual visitor to would-be permanent resident. It is now time to correct that anomaly by removing homosexuality as a ground for exclusion from the United States."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Peter N. Fowler and Leonard Graff, "Gay Aliens and Immi­gration: Resolving the Conflict between Hill and Longstaff," University of Dayton Law Review, 10 (1985), 621-44; "Committee Report: The Exclusion of Homosexuals Under the Immigration Law," Record of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, 40 (1985), 37-51.
Warren Johansson

Impersonal Sex and Casual Sex
"Impersonal sex" refers to inter­course between two or more human beings who, for the sexual act considered, treat each other simply as a means to the goal of sexual pleasure. What makes sex imper­sonal is not the individuals involved, nor their relationships outside the sex act. A sex act is impersonal when it omits any expression of the traditional romantic attraction and longterm commitment expected of such acts in conventional Western society. Outside the designated sexual activity, individuals involved in impersonal sex may range, in familiarity, from lifelong partners to mere acquain­tances to absolute strangers. There may be special pleasure in impersonal sex with someone who, at other times, is an inti­mate friend. A number of slave-master scenarios revolve around play-acting that an intimate partner is to be treated purely as a sexual outlet.
Impersonal sex is not the same as "casual sex." The distinctive element of casual sex, as in casual labor (for instance, temporary office help), is uncertainty about whether there will be another encounter with the same partner, and if so when. Casual sex can be quite personal in the intimacy of encounter between personali­ties as well as bodies. Impersonal sex, by contrast, avoids intimate personal ex­changes (e.g., conversation is minimal or nonexistent) and total bodily interaction (e.g., elaborate and affectionate foreplay).
Comparative Perspectives. Imper­sonal sex occurs in heterosexual relation­ships where there is no expression of en­dearment, commitment, or love, but merely the purpose of consummating marriage, conceiving children, or solidify­ing property, nobility and other social bonds. But its most frequent heterosexual occurrence is for the same purpose as among homosexuals: the attainment of sexual release. A couple married for years may no longer take any pleasure from sexual congress, yet continue it. Foreplay may be entirely absent, and intercourse resented, yet conceded as a marital duty.
The institutional facilities of both casual and impersonal heterosex range through history - from ancient Roman baths and Renaissance bordellos to the whorehouses of the American gold rush, mobile prostitution units of armies in World War I, and Plato's Retreat, operating in New York in the 1970s, where men and women could meet each other for sex. But both impersonal and casual sex occur with greater frequency, per capita, among homosexuals, for an obvious reason: there is no possibility of pregnancy. For almost all of human history, women have had few means or opportunities to prevent preg­nancy. In addition, most religions have treated sex as primarily a way of "making babies," and some have even treated en­joyment of sexual activity for its own sake as a sin. The history of sexual mores would certainly be different if men got pregnant. Males have had to bear much less of the burden of third-party consequences (child-bearing, child-raising, punishment by others for illegitimacy) arising from sex outside marriage.
Third-party consequences of sex­ual acts are significantly reduced in homo­sexual sex, so it can be enjoyed for its intrinsic pleasure, if allowed to go unpun­ished. Each participant may enter the ac­tivity with no desire for relationship be­yond that required to enjoy and complete the sex act. These facts make many moral­ists determined to punish homosexual sex even more severely than heterosexual ille­gitimacy.
Wherever in history and society homosexual activity has been condemned as wrong, it has been sought in covert encounters among networks of those who are "wise" to the activity. Fear of detec­tion has thereby discouraged long-term relationships among homosexuals. Thus, a combination of factors has in many western societies produced a type of homosexual activity in which each part­ner behaves, and expects the other to behave, in a noncommittal manner.
Lesbians, as women, are more likely to be socialized into the conven­tional morality that sex is for making babies in a lifelong, monogamous relationship.
Gay males are more likely to share the heterosexual double standard of sexual behavior, which requires male conformity to the conventional morality in marriage but tolerates (and in locker room talk, often encourages) casual and impersonal sex. Thus, more impersonal sex occurs among gay men than lesbians, and the remainder of this discussion applies largely to males.
Territorial Aspects. The develop­ment of specific gay territories in which homosexuals could locate each other also tended to facilitate both casual sex and impersonal sex, since participants would often be drawn there for sexual outlet, without expectation of meeting a partner for a longer relationship. In casual sex, anonymity is not necessary or f acilitative, but for impersonal sex, anonymity is a safety element in participation, and the anonymity of sex partners obviously con­tributes to the impersonal quality of the sexual intercourse. Prior to AIDS, some gay bars and bathhouses included "orgy rooms" where patrons engaged in sex with numerous strangers in pitch-dark and crowded rooms.
Activities and Attitudes. Imper­sonal gay sex is more likely to include a higher proportion of activity of a less physically joining kind, such as oral sex and masturbation. Participants will often remain fully clothed, and physical barriers to body contact add to the impersonal quality, the toilet "glory hole" in a parti­tion is a prime example. Danger of discov­ery often means that sexual outlet has to be reached quickly, with a minimum of foreplay and special preparation, and with postures least likely to prove compromis­ing should discovery occur.
It is entirely possible for two (or more) people to have intimate and very pleasurable sexual intercourse without revealing anything about their social iden­tities - and to repeat this pleasure again and again over time, while still remaining anonymous. Once a quality of personal encounter develops (conversation not di­rectly related to intercourse, formal ar­rangements for the sexual locale) such a sexual relationship may continue to be casual but often ceases to be impersonal.
The 1960s and 1970s were the modem "golden age" of impersonal gay male sex, since they came after penicillin and before AIDS. With the possible excep­tion of some instances of hepatitis there was no significant sexually-transmitted disease during those decades which could not be treated, and usually cured. The first scholarly study to use the term "imper­sonal sex" reflects an ethnography ob­tained in a gay bathhouse (Weinberg and Williams, 1975).
As this and subsequent studies have noted, impersonal sex requires both psychological and sociological structures. The participants must have sufficient self-direction to break free of sex-negative, sex-restricting mores. They must be capable of adopting the same attitude to the con­sumption of sexual pleasure which one would normally adopt to eating. No sane person expects to limit eating to one food source for a lifetime, to eat only in formal personal settings, and to eat only to avoid starvation. We often eat food quickly, casually and for sheer pleasure, not to reduce any real hunger. Adopting the same attitude to sex is not easy in our society.
We are conditioned to associate sex with romantic love and long-term rela­tionship. Impersonal sex requires the de­tachment of sexual excitement from per­sonal identification with others, especially if many partners are to be enjoyed and jealousy is to be avoided (it greatly spoils the fun). The pursuit of impersonal sex requires considerable knowledge about and concern for sexual health, if one is to avoid contracting and passing on sexually transmitted diseases, but conventional mo­rality has often opposed "sex education."
Even if an individual acquires the necessary psychological and health infor­mation and attitudes, impersonal sex will not be enjoyed widely in the majority of North American commuities. Its practice by one community member would be regarded as threatening and immoral by other members, unless extremely discreet and covert, and therefore restricted in fre­quency. But in the modem era, and espe­cially after the Stonewall Rebellion (1969), the gay male population of large urban centers became the base for development of a system of sexual marketplaces where impersonal sex was both welcomed and frequently facilitated.
These places offered relative safety from view and harassment by the forces of conventional morality, as well as opportunities for encounter on a basis of casual entry and exit, without the need to identify oneself or seek the permission of others (as would be required, for example, in a private heterosexual "swinger's club"). Preeminent among such social facilities were the gay bar and the gay baths, but these were soon joined by the gay disco, where dancing with strangers was a means of recruiting new partners for both casual and impersonal sex.
These and similar social institu­tions of the emerging gay community dif­fered importantly from earlier facilities for impersonal sex such as the public toilet, cruising park, movie theatre back row, and highway rest area. The gay bar, disco, and bath are businesses with an economic base and linkages, thus providing an infrastruc­ture with vested interest in the facilitation of impersonal sex, within an organized and institutionally complex gay community.
"Ideology." It was only a short step to the development of ideology argu­ing the legitimacy of such institutions, and of impersonal gay sex. But it should hardly be assumed that the voices for le­gitimation are only of modem origin. The first "handbook" for guidance of those seeking the right attitudes and favorable opportunities for casual and impersonal sex was published by Ovid in the year a.d. 1: The Art of Love.
The modern gay ideology of im­personal sex spilled over into the hetero­sexual culture, and even produced publi­cations on "how to pick up men" for women readers. But casual heterosexuality was almost always linked with nega­tive moral outcomes. Alfie and his male peers might seek sex merely for pleasure, but were condemned to the same fate as their patron saint, Don Juan. Women might pick up Mr. Goodbar, but were sure to be injured or murdered.
The social structures of imper­sonal sex have been affected dramatically by the onset of AIDS. Indeed, much of the moralistic sentiment that AIDS is a pun­ishment of homosexuals can be traced to conventional morality's outrage at the earlier sexual liberation ideology of imper­sonal sex.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Alan Lee, "The Social Organization of Sexual Risk," in Studies in the Sociology of S and M, Kamel and Weinberg, eds., New York: Prometheus, 1984, pp. 175-93; idem, Getting Sex, Toronto: General, 1977; Martin Weinberg and Colin Williams, "Gay Baths and the Organization of Im­personal Sex," Social Problems 23 (De­cember 1975), 124-36.
John Alan Lee
Incarceration Motif
This term refers not to literal incarceration or confinement but to an aspect of gender dysphoria - the idea that a human body can contain, locked within itself, a soul of the other gender. In their adhesion to this self-concept, many pre-and postoperative transsexuals unknow­ingly echo a theme that has an age old, though recondite history.
The pioneer in the struggle for homosexual rights Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1824-1895) formulated the notion that the Urning, as he called the male individ­ual attracted to his own sex, was endowed with anima muliebiis coipoie viiili in­clusa, "a female soul trapped in a male body." He took the notion from Eros: die Mannerliebe der Griechen (Glarus and St. Gall, 1836-38) by Heinrich Hoessli. This Swiss homosexual writer had in turn pur­loined it from an article in the Beilage to the Munich Allgemeine Zeitung that dis­cussed the kabbalistic belief in the trans­migration of souls [gilgul naphshot).
Foreign as this idea is to the ra­tionalistic Jew of the twentieth century, and to the Biblical and Talmu die periods of Judaism as well, it is first mentioned by Saadiah Gaon (882-942), the spiritual leader of Babylonian Jewry, who rejected it as an alien doctrine that had found its way into Judaism from the Islamic cultural milieu. However, the belief in transmigration took firm hold in the earliest center of Kabbal­istic thinking in Spain, Gerona in Catalo­nia, and the notion that a female soul might be reincarnated in a male body is first expressed by Jacob ben Sheshet Gerondi (about 1235) in a work entitled Liqqute smkhhah uphie'ah [Gleanings of the For­gotten and Unharvested], printed at Ferrara in 1556. Later, Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534-1572), the head of the kabbal­istic center at Safed in Galilee, made it an essential part of his doctrine. His oral teaching was incorporated in a book writ­ten by his disciple Hayyim Vital between 1573 and 1576 entitled Sha'arhagilguh'm (The Gate of Transmigrations).
According to the Kabbalists, the absolute destiny of the soul is - after de­veloping all those perfections the germs of which are eternally implanted in it - to return to the Infinite Source from which it first emanated. Another term of life must be vouchsafed to those souls that have not yet fulfilled their destiny in the nether world and have not been sufficiently puri­fied for the state of reunion with the Pri­mordial Cause. Hence the soul must in­habit one body after another until after repeated trials it is able to ascend to the "palace of the Heavenly King." In the second half of the thirteenth century the Zohai had declared: "All souls are subject to transmigration," and Luria further taught that in general, the souls of men transmigrate into the bodies of men, those of women into the bodies of women; but there are exceptions. The soul of the patri­arch Judah was in part that of a woman, while Tamar had the soul of a man (a fanciful interpretation of the story in Genesis 38: 12-26). Tamar's soul passed into Ruth, so that the latter could not bear children until God had imparted to her sparks from a female soul. The transmigra­tion of a man's soul into the body of a woman was considered by some Kabbal­ists a punishment for the commission of heinous sins, such as man's refusing to give alms or to communicate his own wisdom to others. The wide diffusion and reception of the Lurianic version of the Kabbala ensured that many Jews of a mystical bent would entertain the belief down to modern times.
Belief in metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, is a characteristic theme of Indian thought, from which the Jewish motif that has been discussed may ultimately derive. Some Hindus today explain male homosexuality by saying that the individual had previously lived as a woman.
Ulrichs' formulation, strictly speaking, applies only to the "subject homoerotic" - the individual who feels himself a member of the opposite sex and plays the female role in relations with members of his own sex. As a scientific theory such a notion, because of the mind-body dualism which it entails (not to mention the belief in reincarnation, which has been relegated to the realm of the occult), has no standing whatever. Yet the reiteration of Ulrichs' views in the work of later homosexual apologists kept them alive into the twentieth century, and may have contributed to the rise of the practice of transsexualism and its underly­ing belief system, which Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) never encountered even in the enormous casuistic material that he assembled in his lifetime. Pre- and postoperative transsexuals cherish the belief that some quirk of nature has con­fined them in bodies of the wrong genital sex. In the Hollywood film Dog Day After­noon (1975), which was based upon a real incident in Brooklyn a few years earlier, the character Leon asserts that "My psy­chiatrist told me I have a female soul trapped in a male body," and more re­cently even advertising has taken up the theme, as in a telephone company poster with a cartoon character declaring "I feel that I'm a 516 trapped in the body of a 212." So a doctrine of medieval Jewish mysti­cism has entered the folklore of the gay subculture, and thence passed into the mainstream of American popular culture as a metaphor for a profound state of al­ienation.
Warren Johansson

Incest
Incest means sexual intercourse between closely related individuals, espe­cially when they are related within de­grees where marriage is prohibited by law or religious custom. Until recently the sexual abuse of sons by their fathers was considered rare, but in the later decades of the twentieth century a different picture emerged. Statistics drawn from child wel­fare agencies, hospitals, police reports, and general surveys indicate that considerable numbers of boys are involved in homosex­ual activity with their own fathers. David Finkelhor's analysis of data derived from 5,809 substantiated cases of child abuse reported by agencies in thirty-one states indicated that 5 7 percent of the 757 boys in the group were abused by their fathers. It is probable that the twin taboos attaching to homosexuality and incest result in the underreporting of such cases.
Problems oj Interpretation. Clini­cal studies of father-son incest are few, and the reported case histories often lack sufficient data to develop descriptive models. Many cases significantly fail to describe the actual nature of the sexual contact, and the literature on incest equally fails to employ strict criteria. Is the mere touching of the child's genitalia a sexual act, or must the adult's contact with the child's body lead to sexual arousal and then orgasm in one or both partners? The law often demands a more stringent defi­nition of the act in order to justify convic­tion.
While sexual contact between fathers and daughters is now recognized as more frequent than most authorities had suspected, the line of demarcation between reality and fantasy remains difficult to draw. The same consideration applies to instances of alleged father-son incest. Several cases have been reported in which homosexual incest occurred in an appar­ently disorganized family situation where impulsive, phyically abusive behavior by the father was the norm. These fathers sexually exploited their children, often both sons and daughters. The age of the son at the time of the initial sexual contact was usually prepubertal.
In one reported case a father with a record of convictions for manslaughter, bootlegging, and sale of pornography pro­moted sexual relations between the two oldest children and himself and his step­daughter for pornographic ends. In another, the eldest son in a family of six children confided to his therapist the family secret that his father has sexually molested all six children over a period of ten years. When the father was in a violent temper, the oldest son or daughter would offer his or her sexual favors to protect the younger children from cruelty.
The father's alcoholism is an outstanding feature in some cases. Though often appearing homosexual in orienta­tion, these fathers often do not so define themselves. One reported case describes sexual involvements between a father and his fourteen-year-old son that ranged from genital fondling to anal penetration. The father initiated the sexual activity, each time in a state of intoxication. Both father and son denied any previous homosexual encounters or desires.
Another set of cases in the litera­ture describes the father as having some positive emotional investment in the son with whom he has sexual contact. Aggression does not accompany the sexual act. The fathers in some instances deny the homosexual character of the relationship, maintain that it was only an expression of love, and express the usual contempt for homosexual men as weak and effeminate.
On the other hand, there are also reported cases in which the son is gradu­ally drawn into the homosexual life style of the father, at times after having inde­pendent homosexual experience on his own. A remarkable account of three gen­erations of father-son incest in one family where this behavior seemed to be accepted centered upon a father who was a professor and theatre director. Another case involved an eighteen-year old who began his homo­sexual career six years earlier, welcomed his father's advances, and even described him as his "best lover."
The clinical picture of the father in cases of homosexual incest does not offer the profile of a "symbiotic" relation­ship between him and his son. In the cases that describe the triadic relationship be­tween father, mother, and son, the father's incestuous behavior appears unrelated to the quality of his marital relationship. The sexual needs of the father in sexual con­tact with his son are less those which the wife cannot fulfill than those which he is afraid to express outside the home or with strangers.
Social Response. Public welfare agencies receive far fewer reports of homo­sexual than of heterosexual incest. This disparity reflects cultural factors such as the male ethic of self-reliance joined with the child's fear that if he reveals an inci­dent his own independence and activities might be restricted. Because all studies indicate that most abuse of male children is by a partner of the same sex, a double stigma emerges in the violation of the taboo against homosexuality as well as of the prohibition of sexual contact between adults and children.
Follow-up studies of homosexual incest are rare. Studies of prostitutes of both sexes often elicit the assertion that they had been physically and sexually abused in their childhood. A recent inves­tigation has found that the predominance of psychopathology reported in cases of father-son incest was higher than in all other pairings with the exception of sister-sister incest. The association of father-son incest with serious psychopa­thology, however, appears to be the pat­tern in this type of liaison. During the period of victimization or shortly thereaf­ter the son often displays behavior reveal­ing serious emotional disorder.
The therapist dealing with father-son incest must allow his profes­sional diagnosis and treatment to be guided by an understanding of interplay between the intrapsychic and environmental fac­tors in the situation. The psychological history of the father is of paramount im­portance. Some fathers act on impulses that are pansexual, others are responding to homosexual urges. Non-judgmental professional assistance can enable males involved in homosexual incest to face their own sexual orientation and to manage in a socially less dysfunctional manner the erotic component of their interaction with other members of the family. Family ther­apy may also be needed to enable all members of the family to cope with the sequelae of the incestuous behavior. At the same time, it cannot be denied that some adults, even if they are heterosexual or bisexual, are not fit or desirable parents; they do not have the personality struc­tures that make for successful parenthood. Marriage counseling that would dissuade such individuals from ever having offspring would better serve the interests of society than belated measures to repair harm al­ready inflicted.
Czoss-Cultural Parallels. The taboo on homosexual behavior promul­gated by the Abrahamic religions has led researchers to overlook the fact that the primary core of prohibitions in Leviticus 18 included two that were specifically directed against sexual relations with one's father (18:7) and one's father's brother (18:14), and Orthodox Judaism recognizes these as two distinct commandments of the traditional 613. If Leviticus 18:22 had already existed, these provisions would have been otiose. The story of Ham and Noah in Genesis 9:20-24 is a euphemisti­cally worded account of father-son incest, of aggression by Ham, "the father of Ca­naan," who "saw the nakedness of his father." The narrator then deploys this primal violation of patriarchal morality - the first homosexual episode in the Bible - to justify the conquest and subjugation of the descendants of Ham by the invading Israelites; it is an erotic legend with a political tendency.
All human societies forbid incest, not for supposed biological reasons, but simply because the prohibition of sexual relations between kinsmen is part of the operational definition of the family. Fam­ily status includes both the right to have sexual intercourse with other members of the family and the rigorous denial of that right. The code of sexual morality in Lev­iticus 18 is a compact among the male members of the patriarchal family not to transgress one another's sexual rights and prerogatives, a code which the primitive Church ratified and made part of its own constitution (Acts 15:20, 29). Thus homo­sexual aggression and incest have been culturally defined as perennial problems for the social order.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Mark Williams, "Father-Son Incest: A Review and Analysis of Reported Incidents," Clinical Social Work Journal, 16 (1988), 165-79.
Warren Johansson

Incidence, Frequency, AND THE KlNSEY 0-6 Scale
Soon after Alfred Kinsey began tabulating the sex data he was collecting in the 1940s it became obvious that sev­eral new modes of analyzing it would be necessary, both for clarity and to avoid confusion. For instance, to show how easy and feasible homosexual contacts are for "the human animal" as Kinsey liked to say, it was necessary to determine their incidence - that is, how many people's sex histories contained at least one such expe­rience to the point of orgasm.
Likewise, an accumulative inci­dence figure was needed to indicate what percentage of the histories reflected at least one such homosexual experience by each age (a gradually rising curve since addi­tional individuals each year either "come out" or try out such activity). These group data also made it possible to draw a curve that would accurately estimate how many subjects would eventually have at least one overt homosexual experience. As Kinsey put it (1948, p. 623), "at least 37% of the male population has some homosex­ual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age.. . . This is more than one male in three of the persons that one may meet as he passes along a city street."
But of course, a single experience does not a homosexual make (even though a sizable portion of lay observers has al­ways been ready to assume so). Nor, in any case, does an incidence figure reflect when and how often homosexual experiences may be repeated - thus the need for some measure of frequency. Frequency figures were determined by ascertaining in each history how many and how often homo­sexual contacts (to the point of orgasm) were experienced by or before age fifteen, as well as during each five-year period thereafter, through age 55.
However, since homosexuality can exist as a psychological response (sometimes in the absence of any kind of overt activity of the kinds noted by inci­dence or frequency figures), Kinsey also devised his famous Heterosexual -Homo­sexual scale from 0 to 6:
0 - entirely heterosexual.
1 = largely heterosexual, but with incidental homosexual history.
2 = largely heterosexual, but with a distinct homosexual history.
3 = equally heterosexual and homosexual.
4 = largely homosexual, but with distinct heterosexual history.
5 = largely homosexual, but with incidental heterosexual history.
6 = entirely homosexual. (Kinsey, 1953, p. 470)
As indicated, this scale not only takes into account differences in the bal­ance between heterosexual and homosex­ual actions, but also allows an investigator to consider "psychologic reactions" in arriving at each rating. Thus two people might both be rated "6"-for being exclu­sively homosexual, with one of them liv­ing out his or her experiences, while the other might have as little as no overt activity of this kind - for reasons ranging from moral inhibitions to simply a lack of opportunity.
Ordinarily, it is easy to arrive at a single rating for a person's mental and physical responses. But whenever the two are in sharp discord (such as when a man has most or all of his sexual activity with women, but requires homosexual fanta­sies to actually reach orgasm), there is much to criticize in the compromises implicit in the 0-6 Scale. (To such com­plaints Kinsey simply pointed out that while rating difficulties and imperfections are, indeed, apparent in some cases, it is nevertheless useful, the best rating device so far, and that more is gained by using than by ignoring it.)
The combination of applying these measures of incidence, of frequency, and of placement on the 0-6 Scale (tabu­lated yearly or for a lifetime) not only permitted the Kinsey Research to cast out oversimplified stereotypes long used in defining heterosexual and homosexual variations, but to off er a variety of samples of its white male population, among them that:
58 percent of the males who be­long to the group that goes into high school but not beyond, 59 percent of the grade school level, and 47 percent of the college level have had homosexual experience to the point of orgasm if they remain single to the age of 35.
13 percent of males react erotically to other males without having overt homosexual contacts after the onset of adolescence. [This 13 percent, coupled with the 37 percent who do have overt homo­sexual experience, means that a full 50 percent of males have at least some sexual response to other males after adolescence - and conversely, that only the other 50 percent of the male population is entirely heterosexual throughout life.)
25 percent of the male population has more than incidental homosexual ex­perience or reactions [i.e., rates 2-6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.
18 percent of males have at least as much homosexual as heterosexual experience in their histories (i.e., rate 3-6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.
13 percent of the male population has more homosexual than heterosexual experience (i.e., rates 4 - 6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.
8 percent of males are exclusively homosexual (i.e., rate 6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.
4 percent of males are exclusively homosexual throughout their lives after the onset of adolescence. (Kinsey, 1948, pp. 650-51)
Here, as elsewhere, data concern­ing homosexuality is cited for males rather than for females, not out of "male bias" but mainly because equivalent female data often cannot be understood without ex­tensive additional explanation. Orgasm, for instance, is fundamental to virtually all overt male sexuality, while with fe­males, psychological arousal, overt sexual action, and actual orgasm are often disconcertingly apart. In fact, orgasm is reached in only about half of female homosexual contacts (and in a still smaller portion of female heterosexual contacts).
Moreover, female sexuality tends to be far more pliant, and thus more change­able, than equivalent male responses. Thus while the sexual revolution made no ap­preciable change in the male percentages cited above (Gebhard, 1969), certain changes in female responses, especially regarding homosexual try-outs, have been noted subsequent to Kinsey's 1953 find­ings (Bartell, 1971; Tripp, pp. 271, 272). The reasons for these and a host of other complex matters in both male and female sexuality continue to intrigue sex research­ers, and continue to validate the Kinsey 0-6 Scale as a much needed and appreci­ated measuring and descriptive device.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Gilbert D. Bartell, Group Sex: A Scientist's Eyewitness Report on Swinging in the Suburbs, New York: David McKay, 1971; Paul H. Gebhard, ed., Youth Study, unpublished manuscript, Bloomington, IN: Institute for Sex Research, ca. 1968; Alfred C Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948, Alfred C Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953; C. A. Tripp, The Homosexual Matrix, new ed., New York: New American Library, 1987.
C. A. Tripp

India
The Republic of India includes over 800 million people crowded onto the Indian subcontinent, an appendage of the Asian mainland which it shares with Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. Historically, the Indian cultural zone has included all of the subcontinent as well as the island of Sri Lanka, and at times large areas of Southeast Asia, though India's political boundaries have been a frequently shifting kaleidoscope.
Attitudes toward Sex. Indian history, geography, and demography all exhibit a rich diversity of traits, making generalizations hazardous. Sexual attitudes and practices also show considerable vari­ation, ranging from the classic sex-affirming Kam asu tra and the world-famous erotic sculptures of ancient temples to the extreme prudishness of ascetics who con­demned all forms of seminal emission and a modern educated elite which still de­rives its inspiration from Victorian Eng­land.
ShakuntalaDevi observed in 1977 that "any talk concerning homosexuality is altogether taboo" and that "serious investigations on this subject in India are almost nil." This taboo, which applies with somewhat less rigor to discussion of sex in general, can be traced back to at least the British colonial occupation of the eight­eenth and nineteenth centuries. Independ­ence, which came in 1947, has done noth­ing to loosen it.
The strength of this taboo is such as to lead noted Indologist Wendy O'Flaherty to describe India as "a country that has never acknowledged the exis­tence of homosexuality." While Giti Thadani was right to call this observation "factually incorrect" in an unpublished paper, as a broad generalization it is not so far from the truth; one must search far and wide to find the exceptions.
Any discussion of homosexuality in India must be placed against the back­ground of the Indian social system, which is centered on the extended family. The first obligation of any Indian is to his or her family, not to his own goals. Everyone is expected to marry (as arranged by the families) and procreate sons. Until the marriage takes place (often to a complete stranger), the modern Indian of either sex is expected to remain celibate and avoid masturbation, though some allowance is made for the involvement of males with female prostitutes. Nevertheless, there may be a significant amount of well-hidden homosexual activity among unmar­ried boys and young men.
Ancient India. The oldest surviv­ing literature is the set of scriptures called the Vedas, the first of which (the Rig- Veda) is usually dated from 1500 to 1200 b.c. These texts were composed by the Aryans who invaded India from Central Asia. A common view is that of the Czech scholar Ivo Fiser, who reviewed their references to sex and concluded that "in the Vedic pe­riod . . . homosexuality, in either of the sexes, was almost completely unknown and if there were such cases, the Vedic literature ignores them."
Later, but still ancient legal and religious texts, however, starting with Buddhist codes going back at least to the third century b.c., seem to take homo­sexuality for granted as a rather minor part of common life. The Buddhist monastic code cites various instances of homosex­ual behavior among the monks (all of which, like heterosexual behavior, was prohibited).
Vatsy ay ana, writing the Kamasutia in the fifth century of our era, included a whole chapter on the practice of fellatio as performed by eunuchs. Other erotic manuals suggested that sodomy was common in Kalinga (southern Orissa state) and Panchala (in the Panjab). In general, sex for pleasure was explicitly validated (at least for males, and often, as with Vatsy ayana, for females as well) and not necessar­ily linked to procreative function.
The Medieval Period. Indian medieval history (twelfth-eighteenth centuries) saw the North Indian cultural heartland dominated by Islamic conquer­ors, who did not succeed in converting most of the Hindu masses but did leave an indelible imprint on Indian life. Enough of their subjects became Muslims for large areas of India to become primarily Islamic in character (becoming the nations of Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1947 and 1971).
The Muslims brought with them the institution of pederasty, and forced the withdrawal of women from public life. The free and open Indian attitude toward (heterosexual) sex which had character­ized the ancient period now gave way to Islamic semiprurience.
At the same time, the Hindu (and later the Buddhist) religion saw the rise of Tantrism, with its hospitality toward sex as a means of liberation and its explicit endorsement of cross-gender role-playing.
The Colonial Period. The British, who came first as traders and stayed to conquer the subcontinent (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), were scandalized by the sexual customs of the Indians, but in keeping with their policy of minimizing interference in the local mores^ they did little about them. The educational system they established, however, eventually created a new Indian elite which enthusi­astically absorbed British ideas, including the more prurient attitudes of the Victori­ans toward sex. This elite, in turn, im­posed their new antisexuality on the In­dian middle class.
A jaundiced description of Indian Muslim sexuality was written by theDutch Admiral John Splinter Stavorinus in the 1770s. Referring to the Islamic Bengalis, Stavorinus opined that "The sin of Sodom is not only in universal practice among them, but extends to a bestial communica­tion with brutes, and in particular with sheep. Women even abandon themselves to the commission of unnatural crimes."
"I do not believe that there is any country upon the face of the globe," the Dutchman continued, "where lascivious intemperance, and every kind of unbridled lewdness, is so much indulged in, as in the lower provinces of the empire of Indostan. [This] extends likewise to the Europeans, who settle, or trade there."
According to Allen Edwardes, who based his book The Jewel in the Lotus [New York: Julian, 1959) largely on nine­teenth-century sources, pederasty was rare among the Hindu majority, though "ram­pant" among the Muslims and Sikhs of the Panjab, Deccan, and Sindh. Sir Richard oldest extant law codes, therefore, are not decrees by kings but sacred texts written by Brahmin-class priests. Often conflict­ing with each other, they were held in widely varying degrees of reverence by different communities and social groups; in many kingdoms they were not followed at all.
The earliest surviving text on Indian law is the Aithashastia, a manual on statecraft by Kautilya, a minister of the Maury an Empire of the fourth century b.c. Kautilya set out fines of 48 to 94 panas for male homosexual activity and 12 to 24 panas for lesbian acts. These fines were much lower than those for many hetero­sexual offenses.
The Code of Manu, which dates from the first to third centuries of our era and is the best known of the sacred law texts, prescribes that an upper-class man "who commits an unnatural offense with a male . . . shall bathe, dressed in his clothes." The same purification ritual is prescribed for one who has intercourse with a female in the daytime. An expiation ritual is prescribed for a man who swal­lows semen. The members of the lowest of the four great classes, as well as outcastes, were not restricted at all, as they were not expected to uphold high standards of ritual purity.
Manu laid down more severe restrictions on women, prescribing a fine of 200 panas plus double her nuptial fee as well as ten lashes with a rod for a girl "who pollutes another girl"; if a woman pollutes a girl she is to undergo the humiliation of having her head shaved or two fingers cut off and be made to ride through the village on a donkey.
Some later sacred-legal writers held that oral sex was equivalent to the killing of a Brahmin, the worst imaginable crime as far as the Brahmins [who wrote the texts) were concerned, and could not be expurgated in less than one hundred life-cycles.
When Britain took control of India, British sexual law was imported by the colonial administration. The 1861 legislation which changed the British penalty for sodomy from hanging to life imprisonment became Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code after independence. This law prohibits "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" and continues to pre­scribe imprisonment up to life as well as whippings and fines. Any sexual act in­volving penetration of the anus or mouth by a penis, whether homosexual or hetero­sexual, makes both partners criminal, according to Indian courts. In addition, intercrural (between the thighs) sex has been held by Indian courts to be banned by this law. Lesbian activities, and heterosex­ual cunnilingus, however, are legal.
Indian legal tradition justifies this law with the argument that "the natural object of carnal intercourse is that there should be possibility of conception of human beings, which in the case of un­natural offence is impossible." Indian le­gal scholars, however, trace it to English beliefs that "all emission other than in vas legitimum was considered unchristian because such emission was supposed ulti­mately to cause conception of demons."
Under a 1925 court decision still cited in legal texts, fellatio (called "the sin of Gomorrah") is "less pernicious than the vice of Sodom. ... It has not been sur­rounded by the halo of art, eloquence and poetry. It is not common and can never be so. It cannot produce the physical changes which the other vice produces."
Evidentiary standards are rigor­ous, however, in that penetration "must be strictly proved" and corroborating tes­timony is normally required. According to Devi, prosecutions are "very rare." All the Indian cases cited in the legal manuals involve boys.
Following the British law reform of 1967, attempts were made in the Indian courts to challenge Section 377. In 1983, the Supreme Court (in Fazal Rah Chaudhary v. State) declared that "Nei­ther the notions of permissive society nor the fact that in some countries homosexu­ality has ceased to be an offense has influ­enced our thinking." Having said that, the court, dealing with a case involving sex between a man and a "young boy" but without force, upheld the law but reduced the sentence to six months.
Lesbianism. Female homosexu­ality is not discussed in modem Indian law, reflecting its invisibility in society at large. The harems of the rulers of various Indian states are said to have been "hot­beds of lesbianism." In the realm of leg­end, however, we find mention of strirajya or female-ruled ancient kingdoms in which "women were said to have group congress with their own sex, and more rarely with men." No historical evidence has survived for such kingdoms.
Hindu Traditions. As with most everything else in that amorphous collec­tion of religious traditions loosely called "Hinduism," there is a wide variety of attitudes displayed toward gender identity and homosexuality. In keeping with gen­eral Hindu attitudes, however, there is little attempt to impose religious views on sexuality on those who do not share them.
Apart from the previously men­tioned writings of the Brahmin legalists, there are not many references to homo­sexuality in the enormous corpus of main­stream Hindu scriptures and sacred texts. The yogic tradition, however, has main­tained a morbid concern that any emission of semen is debilitating and has thus taken a relentlessly hostile stance toward any male sexuality.
Throughout Indian history, the only acceptable escape from marital du­ties has been "renunciation" (sannyas), leaving family and caste behind to take up the unattached religious life as a monk, guru, teacher, or wandering holy man. It is not difficult to imagine that many Indians who had no heterosexual inclinations must have followed that route, which had the further advantage of placing them in the company of other members of their own gender.
Shiva, the most popular of all Hindu gods, has from the most ancient of times been worshipped primarily in the form of a lingam or erect phallus; in the most common ritual milk is poured over the tip of the lingam and flows down on all sides. The lingam is worshipped by males as well as by females, suggesting the exis­tence of a sublimated homoerotic element.
Perhaps the only record of something approaching homoeroticism in Hindu mythology is part of the myth of Shiva, who engaged in intercourse with his wife Parvati for a thousand years without ejaculating. Interrupted by a delegation of other deities, he withdrew from Parvati and then ejaculated. The semen was swallowed by Agni, a male god connected with fire and ritual sacrifices, but it proved too hot for him to handle and he vomited it up,- even­tually the sperm turned into Shiva's son Skanda ("The Ejected"), without any con­tribution from Parvati. Skanda became the god of youth, beauty, and warriors.
Indian mythology shows many examples of sex changes, which Thadani considers to be covers for male homosexu­ality. Vishnu, Shiva's main rival for the devotion of Hindus, turned himself into the stunningly beautiful Mohini in order to distract the demons at a critical mo­ment. Shiva was so taken with Mohini that he copulated with her and impreg­nated her so that she bore him a son. In some versions of the myth the son is Harihara, but in South India, where the act is described as a rape, the son is Ayappa, focus of a rapidly growing cult.
Androgyny has long been consid­ered a divine attribute, and many of the leading deities have been pictured as her­maphrodites, half male, half female, re­flecting the Hindu belief that godhead contains within itself all the elements of the cosmos, including both male and female. The most notable example of this, however, is Shiva, who is often shown with the left side female, the right male, and in this form is called "Ardhanarishvara."
Devotees of androgynous deities have occasionally sought to further their approach to God by emulating this divine quality, giving a sacred aura to androgyny. Thus the famous nineteenth-century Hindu reformer Ramakrishna went about for some time wearing women's clothes.
The Sakibhava cult, which wor­ships Krishna (an incarnation of Vishnu), holds that only Krishna is truly male and that all other creatures are female in rela­tion to him. Male followers of the cult dressed like women and even imitated menstrual periods. Vern Bullough, citing R. B. Bhandarkar in his Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: John Wiley, 1976), says they "all were supposed to permit the sexual act on their persons (playing the part of women) as an act of devotion. Usually, the male members did not show themselves much in public, in part because of public hostility." Benjamin Walker confirms this account in his encyclopedic The Hindu World. For com­parison, see the Hijra sect below.
Separate from such small sects is a wide religious movement which swept through India, affecting both Hinduism and Buddhism, in the late ancient and early medieval period, though it has be­come unrespectable since British Victo­rian prudery became dominant. This "left-handed" esoteric Tantrism utilizes ritual sexuality as a sacred technique. Though mostly heterosexual, numerous Tantric texts do advocate the desirability of a male follower developing his opposite (female) traits and visualizing himself as female; sometimes this has taken the form of participating in homosexual acts.
Walker, in his discussion of sex­ual "perversions" in Hinduism, considers these to be "aspects of antinomianism thought to be favored by the gods, and regarded as methods of achieving degrees of 'intensity,' which... release a stream of vital power which if rendered to the serv­ice of the deity is returned multifold to the giver."
Anal intercourse, called adhorata or "under-love," involves the anus as one of the most significant chakras, or energy-centers, in the body, and thus has been held to energize the artistic, poetic, and mystical faculties. "Some medieval writ­ers speak of it as quite common and do not regard it as perverse," according to Walker.
Maukhya, or fellatio, has also been given sacred significance in connection with the Shiva-Agni legend cited above. "Certain Hindu writers on erotics have held that 'the mouth is pure for purposes of congress,'" Walker writes.
The Hindu-Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation has been used to explain the phenomenon of homosexual orientation by depicting it as a transitional state fol­lowing a change of gender from one life­time to the next, on the theory that long-acquired ingrained habits (such as sexual interest in men) are slower to change than the physical body, which is replaced at death/birth. Noteworthy about this ra­tionale is the absence of negative over­tones.
Homosexuality in Contemporary India. Indian male friends are very affec­tionate with each other and do not hesitate to demonstrate this in public (something they would never do with their wives). Men and boys can easily be seen sleeping on the pavement in each other's arms. This has given many Western visitors the mistaken idea that homosexuality is rampant.
The legal scholar Ejaz Ahmad noted in 1975 that "there seems to be a widespread tendency of [Indian] males to experiment in homosexual activities, al­though most do not become pure homo­sexuals." Ahmad's observation, which may reflect his Islamic background, has found little support from other Indian writers, though that may have more to do with taboos on discussion - as Devi puts it, "Even today, people in India find it diffi­cult to conceive of the very idea of homo­sexuality" - than with the accuracy of his remark.
Devi paints a picture of Indian (Hindu) homosexuals leading very cau­tious, hidden lives, meeting primarily through private cliques while fulfilling their expected marital duties. A lack of privacy which is pervasive in this extremely overcrowded country seems to be the major handicap, along with an absence of clubs, bars, and similar meeting places. Devi states that "boy brothels are very common in the bigger cities" employing boys as young as eight.
Other reports indicate that big-city bus terminal toilets seem to be the major sites for anonymous non-reciprocal sex, while some urban parks serve as meeting places. No gay-oriented organiza­tions are known tobe functioning in India.
Among the hundred million Muslims still remaining in India after partition, it may be speculated, ancient practices such as pederasty which were more congenial to Islamic culture may continue to survive, but there are few or no data.
While there is almost no modern Indian literature on homosexuality, ac­cording to Devi two Hindi films have touched on the topic: Dosti and Raj Kapoor's Sangam.
The Hijras. No discussion of contemporary homosexuality in India can ignore a religious sect, the Hijras, whose numbers have been estimated between fifty and five hundred thousand. This all-male group, divided into those who surgi­cally remove the penis and those who remain intact, worships the Mother God­dess and seeks to identify with her by becoming as feminine as possible.
While their traditional role in North Indian society is as entertainers, and they theoretically uphold an ideal of chastity, many Hijras function as prosti­tutes, taking the passive role for Indian male insertors who look upon the transvestite Hijras as substitutes for females and do not consider themselves homosex­ual or unmasculine. In this their custom­ers reflect an inarticulated belief that "sexual object choice alone does not de­fine gender." SerenaNanda, in her study of the Hijras, points out that this sect wel­comes many teenage homosexuals who are cast out of their own families and have no other niche in a communal-oriented culture.
The level of tolerance experienced by the Hijras appears to vary considerably, so that one must question blanket asser­tions that their behavior is condoned by Indian society. Nevertheless, they seem to provide the only open social status for homosexuals, transvestites, and transsexu­als in a culture which otherwise provides it only through marriage and the family, and which can hardly conceive of an indi­vidual not attached to a communal group as well as a family.
Conclusion. The forces of mod­ernization, while slow by Western stan­dards, are accompanied by social changes in India which seem rapid to this very old, tradition-bound culture. Some young people are rebelling against the institution of the family-arranged marriage with its dowries, and educated professional women are beginning to make dents in the rigid social roles prescribed for females. One of the consequences of these changes are that the taboo on discussion of sex is slowly beginning to weaken, along with the devo­tion of the Indian educated elite to the values of Victorian Britain. Eventually, this candor is bound to open up the subject of homosexuality as well.
Urbanization is starting to loosen the grip of family and caste and beginning to provide the anonymity which seems necessary for homosexuals to develop independent lives. Whether Western no­tions of homosexuality take root in India (apart from the small English-educated professional class) remains to be seen - Indian mores have already proven their capacity for astonishing resistance to for­eign influence. Perhaps a model of pre- and extra-marital experimentalism by "nor­mal" males keeping to insertor roles with a small number of effeminate passives (and boys and foreign tourists) along more Mediterranean or pederastic lines will develop.
Apart from caste and family obli­gations, however, Indian society is re­markably tolerant of individual eccentrici­ties, and it is quite possible that when the curtain finally lifts on Indian sexuality one may find the patterns of homosexuality in India distinctively Indian.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Ejaz Ahmad, Law Relating to Sexual Offenses, 2nd ed., Allahabad: Ashoka Law House, 1975; J. P. Bhatnagar, Sexual Offenses, Al­lahabad: Ashoka Law House, 1987; Shakuntala Devi, The World of Homo­sexuals, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977; Serena Nanda, "The Hijras of India: Cultural and Individual Dimensions of an Institutionalized Third Gender Role," in Evelyn Blackwood, ed., Anthropology and Homosexual Behav­ior, New York: Haworth Press, 1986, pp. 35-54; Wendy Doniger OTlaherty, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; Benjamin Walker, The Hindu World, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968.
Lingananda

Indians of North America
Like many societies around the world that accepted homosexual behavior as a common and normal activity, North American Indian aboriginal cultures often incorporated same-sex activity into their way of life.
Underlying Cultural Attitudes. This acceptance was owing to several fac­tors, especially the fact that sex was not seen as sinful in their religions. With some exceptions, sex was not restricted to its reproductive role, but was seen as a major blessing from the spirit world, a gift to human beings to be enjoyed freely from childhood to old age. Among the matrilineal tribes, women were particularly free in their behavior, since their child's family status depended on the mother's relatives rather than on the father. In general, North American Indian religions emphasized the freedom of individuals to follow their own inclinations, as evidence of guidance from their personal spirit guardian, and to share generously what they had with others.
Children's sexual play was more likely to be regarded by adults as an amus­ing activity rather than as a cause for alarm. This casual attitude of child-rear­ing continued to influence people as they grew up, and even after their marriage. Yet, while sex was certainly much more accepted than in the Tudeo-Christian tra­dition, it was not the major emphasis of Indian society. The focus was instead on two forms of social relations: family (making ties to other genders) and friend­ship (making ties within the same gender). Since extremely close friendships were emphasized between two "blood broth­ers" or two women friends, this allowed a context in which private homosexual behavior could occur without attracting attention. Simply because this role of sex in promoting bonds of friendship was so accepted, there is relatively little informa­tion about this kind of casual same-sex activity. It demonstrates that the role of sex in promoting close interpersonal ties is just as important for a society as the role of sex as a means of reproduction. While Christian ideology emphasizes that the purpose of sex is only for reproduction, that is clearly not the view of many other religions.
Institutional Forms. Beyond its role in same-sex friendships, homosexual behavior among many aboriginal tribes was also recognized in the form of same-sex marriages. However, the usual pattern among North American Indians (as well as in many areas of the Caribbean, Central and South America) focused not on two masculine men getting married, or two feminine women, but to have a typical man or woman marry an androgynous person who takes on a different gender role. Traditionally in many tribes, the feminine male had a special role as a berdache and the masculine female took on an Amazon role.
These androgynous roles were different and distinct from the regular roles of men and women. Some scholars suggest that this pattern is "gender mixing," while others see such roles as forming their own unique "alternative genders," but almost all specialists currently doing research reject the older notion that berdaches and Amazons were hermaphrodites, transsexu­als, transvestites, or "gender-crossers," for the simple reason that Indian cultures allowed more than two gender options. Though the early sources are incomplete and unclear, probably most cultures that recognized such alternative genders as­sumed that such a person would have sex with a person of the same biological sex. While there are isolated examples of hetero­sexual marriage, the usual assumption is that a feminine male berdache would marry a man, while a masculine female Amazon would marry a woman. The complemen­tary advantages of persons filling different genders, meant that two hunters would not get married, nor would two plant-gathering/farming women. In aboriginal economies, a husband-wife team needed to do different labor roles to provide the household with a balanced subsistence.
Accordingly, the husband of a berdache was not defined as a berdache, merely because he had sex with a male. The community defined him on the basis of his gender role as a "man," being a hunter and/or warrior, rather than on his sexual behavior. Likewise, the wife of an Amazon was not defined as a lesbian, but continued to be defined as a woman be­cause she continued to do women's labor roles of plant-gathering, farming, cooking, and craftwork. This gender-defined role did not categorize people as "heterosex­ual" versus "homosexual," but left a cer­tain fluidity for individuals to follow their sexual tastes as they were attracted to specific individuals of whichever sex. In tribes that accepted marriage for the ber­dache or the Amazon, the clan member­ship of one's intended spouse was much more important than their sex.
This fluidity also meant that a person who had married a berdache or an Amazon was not stigmatized as different, and could later easily marry heterosexually. In fact, many tribes that accepted same-sex marriages did considerable kid­ding to the husband of the berdache, and the wife of the Amazon, which likely had the function of helping to break up these marriages after a time, so that the person would be heterosexually married at some point in his or her life. With the exception of the berdaches and Amazons, who were relatively few in number in a tribe, social pressure emphasized for most people that they should beget children. After they had done so, to help insure the continued population of the society, the sex of the lover did not matter much. Indeed, even the berdaches and Amazons contributed toward population growth through their important role as adoptive parents for orphaned children.
In many tribes' conceptions of spirituality, the person who was different was seen as having been created that way by the spirit world. Berdaches and Amazons were respected, even though they were recognized as different from the average tribal member. They were considered to be exceptional rather than abnormal.
The Encounter with Europeans. This view changed drastically, however, after the arrival of the Europeans. Bringing with them their homophobic Christian religion, Spanish conquerors in Florida, California, and the Southwest, as well as in Latin America, emphasized the Indians' acceptance of "sodomy" as a major justifi­cation for European conquest and plunder of the New World. Likewise, the English settlers brought a similar condemnation, and the United States and Canadian gov­ernments followed a policy of suppressing Indian peoples' sexuality as well as their native religions. The berdache and Ama­zon traditions went underground, and sex became a secret matter as it was persecuted by reservation officials and Chris­tian missionaries.
In the twentieth century, while European condemnation of homosexual­ity has had an influence on many modern Indians, those who have retained their traditions continue to respect berdaches and Amazons even today. This attitude had a significant impact on the white founders of the homophile and gay libera­tion movements in the United States and Canada. With a recent renaissance in In­dian culture, younger gay and lesbian Indians have in turn been influenced by the gay community to stand up openly and take pride in their accepting Indian tradi­tions. Like traditionalist Indians, they feel an appreciation for the strength and the magic of human diversity, and they accept people as they are rather than expect ev­eryone to conform. This respect for the different gifts that gay people can provide as a benefit for society, and a respect for women and for androgynous men, is hav­ing an impact on Western culture as a whole.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Will Roscoe, "Bibliog­raphy of Berdache and Alternative Gender Roles Among North American Indians," Journal of Homosexuality, 14:3/4 (1987), 81-171, Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture, Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Walter L. Williams

Indo-European Pederasty
Indo-European is the name given to a family of languages extending from Old Irish and Old Norse on the northwestern periphery of Europe to Old Persian and Sanskrit in the Middle East, together with the modern descendants of these tongues. The discovery by western European schol­ars that this set of languages was interre­lated in the same way as the members of the Semitic family led to the hypothesis of a primordial anthropological (ethnic) unity of the speakers of the proto-language, of­ten designated as Aryans in opposition to the Semites and Hamites of the Near East. Further study of the original common vocabulary of Indo-European pointed to a cultural and institutional legacy of the preliterate past which some investigators sought to reconstruct in meticulous (though often speculative) detail.
Sergent's Thesis. Recently Ber­nard Sergent has claimed that Indo-Euro­pean warriors practiced initiatory pederasty until after their dispersion in the second millennium b.c. Before a youth proved his manhood by a feat of valor, he was fem­inized and reduced to the passive sexual role. Sergent thus went beyond the nine­teenth-century German scholars who ascribed pederasty to the Dorian tribes­men invading Greece ca. 1200 b.c, after the Achacans and other Greeks who had no such institution had arrived there from their Urheimat (primitive homeland) on the Eurasian steppes (or wherever else a particular hypothesis located it).
Nothing, however, proves that pederasty was institutionalized among the kshatriyas (warrior caste) of India, the ancient Persians, or the grave patres of early Rome. Just as the theory of "Dorian invasions" and of their transformation of the material culture of Greece by intro­ducing iron and other innovations has been discredited by twentieth-century archeol­ogy and linguistics, the whole concept of the dispersion of an Indo-European speech community by nomadic conquerors dur­ing the second millennium b.c. has also been called into question. Colin Renfrew argues that the Indo-Europeans dispersed as early as 6000 b.c. as peaceful farmers. The institutionalization of pederasty in Greece belongs to historic time, not to prehistory.
The Greeks. Although Erich Bethe argued in a celebrated 1907 article that the Greeks believed that they transferred their manliness to their boys through their semen, many would still like to claim that the original "Dorian" pederasty was "pure," i.e., devoid of overt sexuality. Like most of the ancients, Cicero viewed Spar­tan mores with a grain of salt, even though they claimed not to soil even the thighs of their boys: "The Lacedemonians, while they permit all things except outrage in the love of youths, certainly distinguish the forbidden by a thin wall of partition from the sanctioned, for they allow em­braces and a common couch to lovers" [De República, IV 4). Vase painting, graffiti, and literary allusions leave no doubt that intercrural and even anal intercourse were frequent and expected. Black-figured vases portray sexual contact more explicitly, with youths having larger virile members and more mature bodies, than the red-figured ones that replaced them after ca. 520 b.c. Even if Zaleucus, the earliest colo­nial lawgiver who copied much from Crete, may have introduced pederasty to Locri in 664 b.c, the pederasty of Phalanthus, Spartan colonizer of Tarentum in 706 b.c, was just another founder's myth. The at­tempts of Sergent's mentor Georges Dumézil to name the god or hero who established pederasty in every polis shows that its origin had to be justified in each, as Bethe realized long ago when he claimed that the practice spread to the other city-states from Sparta. The institutionaliza­tion of pederasty followed rather than preceded the rise of the city-states during the eighth century b.c. One should not conclude with Sergent that Greek paideiasteia was "not started by the influence of the Dorians or of any others." It began in Crete in the seventh century b.c. and was popularized by Sparta's military and ath­letic prowess before spreading to most of the rest of Hellas during the sixth century b.c.
Other Peoples. Inadequate also is the documentation that any other Indo-European peoples ever practiced initiatory pederasty. It has been claimed that Tacitus depicted the Germans as drowning "pas­sive homosexuals" in bogs; recent scholar­ship has demonstrated that Tacitus' ex­pression meant "cowards and shirkers in combat." Two other historians, however, Ammianus Marcellinus, writing ca. a.d. 380 and, more ambiguously, Procopius, writing ca. 550, expressed disgust that Germanic tribes, Taifales and Heruls, practiced pederasty. In the early Middle Ages Germanic law also failed to mention homosexual acts, except under Christian influence in Visigothic Spain. While Ser­gent omitted evidence from the Irish penitentials for Celtic pederasty, he implausi­bly rationalized Caesar's silence in the Gallic Wars by claiming that the Roman general feared criticism of his own pro­clivities.
A recent effort at demolishing the Indo-European theory is Martin Bemal's thesis in Black Athena (New Brunswick, 1987) that the Greeks did not bring with them from the Eurasian heartland the genius, the ideas, and the institutions from which Western civilization evolved, but borrowed them from the Hamitic and Semitic peoples of the eastern Mediterra­nean. It was only the racism and anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century Germany that invented the "Aryan model" of Hel­lenic greatness. It is true that Greek civili­zation began in the south and east - the interface with the far older cultures of Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia - and that in the sphere of material culture the Greeks and Romans and even their successor nations did not innovate; they merely adopted the heritage of the Near Eastern peoples. But in politics, in science, and in philosophy the Hellenes were supremely original: the Near East simply had no counterpart to their democratic city-states or to their achievements in speculative thought. Moreover, it may be argued that the pederastic spirit guarded the cradle of Western civilization, shielding it well from the despotism and servility of the Persians and their client-peoples - with religions that rejected and condemned homosexual expression as an abomination in the sight of their deities. Though suggestive, the notion of a common Indo-European tradi­tion of initiatory pederasty long antedat­ing the rise of Hellenic civilization re­mains essentially hypothetical.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Erich Bethe, "Die dorische Knabenliebe: ihre Ethik und ihre Idee," Rheinisches Museum, 62 (1907), 438-75, Karl Otfried Müller, Die Doiiei [1820-24], vols. 2 and3 trans, as The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, London: John Murray, 1830; Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; Bernard Sergent, L'homosexualité initiatique dans l'Europe ancienne, Paris: Payot, 1986; Homosexuahty in Greek Myth, trans, by Arthur Goldham­mer, Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
William A. Percy

Indonesia
This island nation shares with its Southeast Asian neighbors a heritage of acceptance of homosexual behavior in its traditional cultures. Though little is known about the same-sex practices of many of the tribes of the East Indies, there is infor­mation from early explorers about several cultures. Among both the Dayak (Iban) of Kalimantan, and the Bugis (Makasar) of Sulawesi, there was a socially-recognized "half-man/half-woman" androgynous role for males similar to the berdache tradition among American Indians. Such individu­als were often sacred religious leaders of great spiritual power, wore a mixture of men's and women's clothes, combined masculine and feminine aspects in their character, and had sex with men. Among the Bugis, such bisu individuals tradition­ally resided at the courts of local rulers, where they took care of the sacred royal ornaments.
Melanesian Cultures. In contrast, the eastern part of Indonesia is Irian Jaya, which is a totally different culture area from the rest of the nation. Irian is the western part of the island of Papua New Guinea, where the tribes share the Pacific Melanesian way of life. Melanesian cul­tures emphasize super-masculinity for males, who are grouped together in warriorhoods. In these societies, feminized males are looked down upon, and boys are pressured to adopt the masculine warrior lifestyle. One means of gaining masculin­ity, in the lifestyle of many of these Mela­nesian cultures, is for a boy to absorb masculine characteristics through sex with a man. Accordingly, every boy is expected to go through a stage of growth, in which he either orally ingests or anally receives semen. It is believed that he cannot ma­ture into manhood without gaining this sperm through homosexual acts, even though he will marry heterosexually after he matures. Homosexual relations, often done in a ritual context, provide a major means for transmission of masculine val­ues from one generation of males to an­other.
Javanese Culture. The major culture of Indonesia is Javanese, and only in the Ponorogo area of eastern Java is homosexuality institutionalized in man-boy relationships. Here, however, boys are valued for their feminine charac­teristics, and men will take a boy as a gemblakan. Traditionally, gemblakans were kept by a warok, a spiritually and physically powerful masculine adult man. Waroks would gain social status by the lavish wealth they could display on their beautiful gemblakan. A man would ar­range with the boy's parents to keep him for one or two years, and would present the parents with gifts and financial support during the time in which he kept the boy. Some gemblakans were as young as seven years old, but most were in their teens, and some were loved so much by their man that they stayed together until the boy was in his twenties.
In recent decades, however, it has become too expensive for most men to support a gemblakan, so in the traditional villages of Ponorogo where the practice still continues, several men will combine their resources to share a boy. The group of men is usually either young and unmar­ried or a royal dance troupe, where the boy performs in androgynous dress and heavy makeup. The boy spends a few days in the house of each group member, before being shared with another member. Married men will sleep with the boy rather than with their wife while the gemblakan is visit­ing, but the wife usually does not mind be­cause of the social prestige that the gem­blakan brings. Often, after the boy ma­tures, he continues to regard the man's family as extended kin, and he will some­times even marry the daughter of the man he had formerly slept with.
Islam. Indonesia today is mostly Islamic in religion, and the attitudes of Islam toward homosexuality are ambiva­lent. Among fundamentalist santri fol­lowers of Islam, sex of any kind outside heterosexual marriage is discouraged, but it is an open secret that adolescents in Muslim boarding schools are often in­volved in homosexual relationships. Usually Islam has adapted itself to local customs, and in areas like Ponorogo where homosexual behavior was common, the religion did not oppose this practice. However, in recent decades as Islam has reacted against the European stereotype that all Muslim men are pederasts, and as a more fundamentalist wave has swept through the Middle East, Islam in Indone­sia has taken a more negative view of homosexuality. Fundamentalist Muslims today do not seem as intent on inducing guilt over homosexuality as fundamen­talist Christians are, but they come close.
Modem Homosexual Life. Nev­ertheless, among those Indonesians who are not so strict on religion, popular accep­tance of homosexuality continues. One popular form of entertainment in eastern Java is ludruk, a form of theatre in which female roles are traditionally played by transvestite males. The actors in these traveling troupes are often homosexual, and serve as sexual partners for married men who come and visit them after the ludruk performances.
With traditions like this, it is not surprising that transvestite homosexual­ity is well known in modern Indonesia. The term for such individuals is band, which is similar in meaning to the gay vernacular term "drag queen." Bancis are often employed in beauty salons or other fashion-related businesses, but many of them make their living by prostitution.
Gay men in Indonesia are a sepa­rate social group, quite distinct from bancis, even though some gay males will some­times dress in drag and will joke among themselves that they are banci. Although gay men are active in every field of labor, they are most noted as models, dancers, tourist guides, hair stylists, and fashion designers.
An open gay scene exists in all Indonesian cities, but many remain secre­tive. There is very little social contact between gay men and lesbians, who are usually quite secretive about their sexual­ity. The main fear of those in the closet is that their family will find out, which is an indication of low self-acceptance. Never­theless, there is not much pressure on gays outside of the family. Employment dis­crimination against gays is not often a problem, and homophobic violence against gays is quite rare. Police are not known for their anti-gay activities, and government policy in general is not discriminatory. Some top ministers of the government are commonly known to be gay, yet this does not lead to calls for their dismissal.
As a result of this lack of dis­crimination, few gays see a reason to be­come politicized, and they tend to inte­grate more into general society rather than establishing their own separate subcultural institutions. For example, since same-sex couples are free to dance together in discotheques, and gays can associate comfortably with each other in these dance places alongside heterosexuals, there are not many strictly gay bars. The one great social inhibitor for gays is that their family will confront them about their sexuality, and many of them seem resolved to be­come heterosexually married in their later years. Otherwise, gay people in Indonesia seem to have an accepted place in society generally.
It is ironic that the position of gay people in the democratic nations is often more repressed than it is in an authoritar­ian regime like Indonesia. Indonesian val­ues such as social harmony, non-violence, responding to the voice of the people, and unity in diversity seem to protect gays more effectively than traditions of major­ity rule and individual rights. Still, as Indonesians are becoming more western­ized, some "progressive" elements are bringing western homophobic attitudes into society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Penelope Graham, Iban Shamanism, Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, 1987; Gilbert Herdt, ed., Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; Justus M. van der Kroef, "Transvestism and the Religious Hermaphrodite in Indonesia," University of Manila Journal of East Asiatic Studies, 3 (April 1954), 257-65; James Peacock, Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Indone­sian Proletarian Drama, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
Walter L. Williams

Infamy
This term, which now connotes an evil reputation in a general sense, for­merly had a range of sexual connotations. Under the term inftimes, with the abstract noun infamie, eighteenth-century French designated all those "addicted to unnatu­ral pleasures," thus not exclusively homo­sexuals, but those who engaged in any category of nonprocreative sex. But for a short period - the second quarter of the century - infdmes and infamie applied almost entirely to male homosexuality.
The notion of infamy derived from Roman law where it served to designate a person as civilly unworthy or disgraced as a result of a judgment against him [infamia juris, infamy of law), or even without such a judgment [infamia facti, infamy of fact). The first was a matter of law, the second of public opinion. Feudal and canon law from the fourth century onward ex­tended the concept of infamy to heretics, whom this stigma excluded from com­munion with believing Christians. Wil­liam Eden, an English criminal jurist of the Enlightenment, explained the penal effect of civic degradation in his Principles of Penal Law (1771) by saying that "virtue, though of a social nature, will not associ­ate with infamy." Although the concept of infamy was never received into the com­mon law tradition, Jeremy Bentham in his work on the subject enumerated some thirty-three English synonyms for the expression.
For an individual to suffer the penalty of infamy, his misconduct had to be publicly known; the canon lawyers even upheld the principle Ecclesia de occultis non judicat, "The church renders no judg­ment on hidden matters." On the other hand, infamy of law could be established by a tribunal in accordance with received rules of evidence, while infamy of fact depended upon one's loss of reputation. It was the latter rather than the former that plagued homosexuals over the centuries, as actual prosecutions and convictions for sodomy were rare, even under the Old Regime, and were more often than not show trials intended to impress the multi­tude with the gravity of the offense and potential wrongdoers with the dreadful penalties to which they might expose themselves. Sodomy between laymen was punishable with excommunication, and when convicted by a tribunal, the culprits, if clerks, were permanently deprived of benefit of clergy, and then both classes were relaxed to the secular authorities, who would carry out the sentence by burn­ing them at the stake, from the mid-six­teenth century onward in accordance with two constitutions of pope Pius V, Cum primum (April 1, 1566) and Horrendum (August 30,1568). Conviction for the crime entailed infamia juris, notoriety infamia facti. Further, the overlap of sodomy with heresy and to a lesser extent with witch­craft in the medieval mind and in the texts of canon law darkened the penumbra of infamy that enveloped sins "against the order of nature."
French usage of the eighteenth century employed such expressions asgoút infame, vice infame, commerce infame, moeurs infames to designate homosexual relations; Voltaire in the Dictionnairephilosophique (1764) could even speak of the amour infame. The records of the Paris police even use these expressions as tech­nical terms for sodomy and those addicted to it when recording the activities of the vice squad in its surveillance of the homo­sexual underworld of the capital. Occa­sional lingering examples of the word in this meaning are found as late as the nine­teenth century, in Pierre Proudhon and, somewhat ironically, in the "decadent" bisexual poet Paul Verlaine.
Cesare Beccaria, in his treatise Dei delitti e dellepene (1764), attacked the concept of infamy in the Roman law of late feudal and early modern Europe, and the favorable reception of his work in the early Republic accounted for the reference to "a capital, or otherwise infamous crime" in the Fifth Amendment to the American Constitution. However, although Beccaria's principles were enacted into law in the Bill of Rights in 1791, the criminal penalties for sodomy, and the infamy of fact attaching to the homosexual in public opinion, remained in the United States and generally in the Protestant countries of northern Europe, whose religious tradi­tion had discarded the notion of infamy of law. Down to the second half of the twen­tieth century the overt, known homosex­ual continued to be a criminal and an outcast in the eyes of his fellow Ameri­cans.
Thus the Old Regime survived among a people who believed that its fore­fathers had left such intolerant practices behind when they set foot in the new land. The gay rights movement of today carries on the struggle against this survival of medieval infamy by combatting the defa­mation which the church had practiced for centuries - and in many instances contin­ues to practice in the face of the modern understanding of homosexual behavior and of twentieth-century norms of personal freedom and self-determination.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Claude Courouve, Vocabulaire de l'homosexualité masculine, Paris: Payot, 1985; Mitchell Franklin, "The Encyclopédiste Origin and Meaning of the Fifth Amendment," Lawyers Guild Review, 15 (1955), 41-62; Benno Lobmann, Der kanonische Infamiebegriff in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung, Leipzig: St.-Benno-Verlag, 1956.
Warren Johansson

Ingle
This word is now obsolete in English, but in the late Elizabethan era and afterward it designated a catamite or kept boy. The earliest quotation is from Thom­as Nashe, Strange News (1592): 'I am afraid thou wilt make me thy ingle." J. Z. Eglinton has suggested that the word may derive from Medieval Latin ángelus through one of the Celtic languages, Irish or Scots Gaelic, which has the word aingeal meaning "angel." The depiction of the angels in Christian art as beautiful, epicene creatures of the sort desired by the boy lover would have motivated the se­mantic transition. Ben Jonson, in the play Epicene (ca. 1609), has one character voice envy for another's luxury, including the option of "his mistress abroad and his ingle at home." The term was also used as a verb, attested by John Florio in A World of Wordes (1598), an Italian-English dic­tionary with the entry: Cinedulare, to bugger... to ingle; while ingler designated the active partner: pedicone, a buggrer, an ingler of boys.
The word should not be confused with the homophone ingle, "fire," which is derived from the Scots Gaelic aingeal (a homophone of the first aingeal) in the same sense, but of unknown origin; it is probably cognate with Old Prussian an­glis, Lithuanian anglis, Russian ugol', Polish wggiel, Albania théngjill - all with the primary meaning "glowing coal." The second English word figures in inglenook, "the nook or corner beside the hearthfire, chimney corner"; however, influenced by the erotic associations of the homonym, inglenook itself acquired the meaning "female pudendum."
Warren Johansson

Injustice Collecting
The Vienna, then New York, psy­choanalyst Edmund Bergler (1899-1962) developed the theory that the basic neuro­sis is psychic masochism, and that homo­sexuals are neurotic "injustice collectors." In Bergler's view the provocative behavior observed in his patients arises in the fol­lowing manner. They create a situation in which some substitute for the mother of early childhood is perceived as "refusing." Not realizing that they are themselves to blame, they become aggressive in right­eous indignation and self-defense alternat­ing with self-pity, while "unconsciously enjoying psychic masochism." Under the facade of pseudo-aggression are hidden deep self-damaging tendencies. The psychic masochist in the homosexual "habitually transforms conscious displeasure into unconscious pleasure," so that he can resign himself to the punishments result­ing from the humiliation and insult heaped on him by an intolerant society. Instead of learning to avoid punishment, the homo­sexual actually enjoys it, and by turning displeasure into pleasure he "takes the sting out of the pain and defeat of his tormented existence." Such were Bergler's idiosyncratic views.
While it is true that a homosexual with self-damaging tendencies (and such people do exist) is likely to encounter reprisals from a society permeated with Judeo-Christian homophobia, only a shrinking minority of homosexuals are of this type. Moreover, early writers denying the pathological character of homosexual­ity pointed to the success with which many closeted homosexuals deceive intol­erant heterosexuals in their entourage with the skill of an accomplished undercover agent or spy. But the "injustice collector" mentality may also have had the function of preserving the individual's self-esteem in the face of society's condemnation and rejection. Instead of internalizing the val­ues of the homophobic culture, he can in effect say: "You are the wrongdoer, and I am the one to whom the injustice is being done." The alternative would be to accept the stigma of being a sinner, a criminal, and a monster - which a rational subject could scarcely do without a total loss of self-respect. Whatever therapeutic results Bergler scored with his homosexual analysands seem to have been with individuals whose superego had been unable to ward off society's castigation of their behavior and the ensuing guilt and self-reproach. Then his very success with them attracted ever more to his couch, so that his "patient universe" became skewed in the direction of such guilt-ridden personalities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edmund Bergler, "The Myth of a New National Disease: Homosexuality and the Kinsey Report," Psychiatric Quarterly, 22 (1948), 66-88; idem, The Basic Neurosis: Oral Regres­sion and Psychic Masochism, New York: Grune &. Stratton, 1949; Edmund Bergler and Joost A. M. Meerloo, "The Injustice Collector," in Justice and Injustice, New York: Grune 8«. Stratton, 1963, pp. 20-^5.
Warren Johansson

Inquisition
During the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic church established spe­cial ecclesiastical courts to detect and punish heretics, blasphemers, witches, and sorcerers. Stemming from the Latin for "investigation," inquisitions may be di­vided into the episcopal phase, which began informally by 312, the papal phase, which began in 1232, and the royal phase, which lasted in Spain from 1478 to 1834. It was the royal Spanish Inquisition which was responsible for most of the burnings at the stake which posterity associates with the Inquisition.
Episcopal Inquisitions. In the early centuries, Christians usually punished heresy by excommunication, exclusion from the community of the faithful. Patristic writers generally disap­proved of physical sanctions, though after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, rulers often chose to regard heresy as a kind of lése-majesté, an offense to the imperial dignity worthy of loss of property or even death. The col­lapse of the Roman Empire in the west, in 476, made a uniform imposition of such severity impractical. On the whole, the early medieval church itself kept to a rela­tively restrained attitude, which lingered in the twelfth century in the precept "Faith is to be secured by persuasion, not by force" of St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
Shortly after the year 1000, how­ever, the western church was threatened by the inception of a new wave of heresy. In due course the new dissidents, who threatened not only the principles of faith but also the prerogatives of the church as an institution, rallied behind the dualism of the Cathars (or Albigensians), which in parts of Europe, notably in southern France, took on the character of a full-fledged counter-church. St. Dominic and his preaching friars tried in vain to win back the heretics to the church. Although the Cathars claimed that their elect members must be strictly celibate, the Catholics regularly accused them of sexual licence, as they had certain heretics before the fall of Rome. That such licence did occur and could be homosexual is shown, among others, by the detailed record of an inves­tigation of sodomy in Pamiers in the south of France. The Cathars were subjected to a bloody crusade called by Pope Innocent HI in 1208 and lasting until 1229, which succeeded in driving them partly under­ground but not extirpating them.
The Papal Inquisition. The establishment of a papal mechanism to combat heresy was gradual. One key step occurred in 1232 when Emperor Frederick II, him­self accused of heresy, charged state offi­cials of the Holy Roman Empire with the task of ferreting out and burning heretics. Fearing Frederick's ambitions, but more to suppress the Albigensians, whom the Crusade had failed entirely to extermi­nate, Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241 ) claimed this office for the church, appointing papal inquisitors. These were chosen, not from the retinue of the bishops who had hith­erto dealt with heresy and were now en­joined to cooperate, but from members of the newly-formed mendicant orders, espe­cially the Dominicans and Franciscans.
Torture Introduced. At first the inquisitors mainly admonished the guilty to confess voluntarily and accept penance. The obdurate were, however, imprisoned under harsh conditions. Influenced by the revival of Roman law, in 1252 innocent IV authorized the use of torture to break the resistance of the accused. Penalties were confiscation of property, imprisonment either temporary or perpetual, and surren­der (relaxation) to the secular arm, which meant death by burning at the stake. The proportion who suffered the supreme penalty was relatively small; out of 613 cases he prosecuted, the famous inquisitor Bernard of Gui "relaxed" 45.
Detection of sodomy per se was not a goal of the papal inquisition, though this prohibited behavior was not infre­quently uncovered in the course of inves­tigations conducted on other grounds, and appropriately punished - though rarely with death. The modem notion that the vernacular expression faggot derives from a supposed common practice of using male homosexuals as kindling for the burning of witches is fantasy, but English bugger comes from Bulgarus, the generic designa­tion for adherents of dualistic heresies such as the Bogomils of Bulgaria and the Cathars of Provence.
As late as 1179, the Third Lateran Council decreed only degradation and confinement within a monastery for sod­omitical clerics, the penalty prescribed by canon law, and excommunication for lay­men. Secular laws, feudal and royal, were harsher: the thirteenth-century Castilian law ordering castration and stoning was in 1497 altered by Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, los reyes católicos ("their Catholic Majesties"), to burning with confiscation of property, no matter what the rank or order of the condemned. Sodomy was mixti fori, subject to secular as well as regular ecclesiastical courts and after the decree of Pope Nicholas V in 1451 also to the papal Inquisition.
Spanish and Portuguese Inquisi­tions. In 1478 Ferdinand and Isabella cre­ated the Spanish Inquisition under royal sponsorship with papal approval. In 1524-30 pope Clement VII authorized the Inquisitions of Aragon, Saragossa, Valen­cia, and Barcelona to pursue sodomites. The Suprema in Madrid, the new capital after 1560, which allowed the accused to choose an "advocate" from members or familiars of the Inquisition as an illusory protection, sold exemptions at very high prices from its penalties such as prison, the galleys, or wearing the sanbenito (penetential costume). The grand inquisi­tor Tomás de Torquemada ( 1420-1498), of converso origin, even proceeded against bishops, who were usually exempt, and a successor did so against the archbishop of Granada, primate of Spain. After 1660 even the Jesuits, exempt from all ordinary au­thority, became subject to the Inquisition.
The Spanish Inquisition, though more avaricious, contributed less to royal centralization than had the one in France against the Albigensians. It was extended to the Italian provinces in the Spanish empire - Sicily, Sardinia, Naples, and Milan, as well as the Canaries, Mexico, Peru, and New Granada. The rumor that Philip II intended to introduce the Spanish Inquisition to the Netherlands in the 1560s contributed to the outbreak of the Dutch revolt against Spain, then the most power­ful country in the world.
The Spanish Inquisition was all-pervasive: It was organized hierarchically - district inquisitors, comisarios, and fa­miliares (local informers). In the province of Valencia in 1567 the number of familia­res peaked at 1638 or an average of 1 per 42 inhabitants; they were particularly dense in the smallest hamlets so that social control was well-nigh complete. Spanish inquisitors applied tortures commonly used by contemporary ecclesiastical and secular tribunals: the pulley, water tor­ture, and the rack.
In 1506 at Seville the Inquisition made a special investigation into sodomy, causing many arrests and many fugitives and burning 12 persons, but in 1509 the Suprema in Castile declared that crime not within the jurisdiction of the Inquisi­tion. But after a fiery sermon preached by Fray Luis Castellioli attributing the pesti­lence then raging in Valencia to God's wrath against sodomites, the townspeople found four who confessed and were burnt at the stake by order of the court, while a fifth, given a more lenient sentence [vergüenza), was torn from the jailers, garroted and burnt by the mob. Alleging that the crime of sodomy had been intro­duced to Spain by the Moors, the Spanish Ambassador to Rome obtained from Pope Clement VII in 1524 a special commission for the Holy Office to curb its spread by investigating laymen and clergy in Ar­agón, Catalonia, and Valencia and pro­ceeding according to local, municipal law in spite of the resistance by local bishops to this usurpation of their authority. In Castile, however, in 1534 and 1575, and in Peru in 1580 and again toward the end of Philip II's reign, royal inquisitors were barred from deciding cases involving only sodomy, but they nevertheless often or­dered arrests. Moreover, Castilian secular courts prosecuted sodomites even more vigorously than the Inquisition in Aragón: between the 1580s and the 1650s between 100 and 150 sodomites were executed in Madrid alone. In 1568 Philip II ordered death for all sodomites in all his realms but Sicily successfully resisted. There the authorities inflicted surprisingly lesser penalties in a large number of cases: im­prisonment or banishment for life or for a number of years or fines and degradation from office.
The papal Inquisition refused cognizance of sodomy and in 1638 Dr. Marti Real claimed that throughout Italy leniency inadequate to the enormity of the offense prevailed. In fact, in 1644 some Franciscans praised the practice.
In Portugal John III obstinately pursued jurisdiction for his Inquisition, which the reluctant papacy granted only in 1562 after his death and as in Aragon only provided that judges proceed accord­ing to municipal law. By 1640 the offense was tried like heresy and punished by scourging and the galleys or relaxation. As a result of complaints by the Cortes, the Concordat of 1646 recognized the prin­ciple of mixti fori so that whichever court proceeded first gained jurisdiction. In all the regions under the Spanish crowns, which included Portugal between 1580 and 1640, squabbles over jurisdiction, procedure, and penalties continued, but torture tended to be freely used even upon the testimony of but one accomplice.
Valencia. There were two peak periods of prosecution in Valencia: 1571-90 and 1621-30. The first sodomite was burned by the Inquisition in Valencia in 1572. The accused included 19.5 percent clergy, 5.6 percent nobles and other upper-class groups, 36.7 percent workers and artisans, 18.6 percent slaves and servants, 17.6 percent soldiers, sailors, and vaga­bonds, and 2.3 percent other groups. Poor boys leaving home to seek their fortunes beginning as early as 8 to 10 were the most frequent objects of desire, but as passives and minors they received much lighter if any sentences than their older and active seducers. Of those brought to trial, 29.1 percent were between 12 and 19 years old and 43.2 percent were under 25. Of the 347 cases of "crimes against nature" between 1566 and 1775,259 involved homosexual­ity; minus bestiality the proportion rises from 74.6 percent to 99.2 percent. Prior to 1570 the records show between 10 and 20 cases; from 250 to 260 were found between 1570 and 1700, and only 50 or 60 cases in the eighteenth century. Thus from 320 to 350 cases occurred between 1566 and 1775, of which 50 to 60 resulted in burnings.
A growing reluctance to convict those who, unlike heretics, could not es­cape by confession and penance led after 1630 to greater leniency and more com­mutations. Torture decreased: in Valencia 21.4 percent of sodomites were tortured prior to 1630, but only 4.2 percent after­wards. Priests held that only incorrigibil­ity should lead to relaxation, and sodomy was held to be a sin or vice, not a fixed characteristic. The subjects of inquisition then in theory could not be tortured until the church failed after repeated attempts to reform them, for torture should only be used when conviction could lead to death. In the trial of Fray Manuel Sánchez del Castellar y Arbustán in 1684 with two accomplices testifying to consummated acts and others - solicitation, lewd and lascivious acts, and a foul reputation - continual cross-examination, so rarely allowed in such tribunals, revealed incon­sistencies, discrepancies, contradictions, jealousies, and enmities; this trial led only to exile and silencing of the distinguished clerk, who had already lingered three years in prison. By the early eighteenth century, greater mildness in regard to those found guilty of sodomy was on the rise.
Portugal. The records of the Por­tuguese Inquisition, which are complete for sodomy from 1567 to 1794, have been carefully studied by Luiz Mott, a leading Brazilian scholar. During this period 4,419 persons confessed to, or were acccused of, sodomitical crimes, but of these fewer than ten percent were arrested and tried. Only thirty sodomites were actually burned by the Portuguese Inquisition, so that it seems milder than persecutions in other countries. Throughout western Europe, however, the strategy of social control of homosexual behavior seems to have been much the same: since there could be no possibility of blanket surveillance, the authorities severely punished in public a few signal cases of sodomy to intimidate others. The accused included a dispropor­tionate number of blacks and mulattoes, reflecting the popular belief that sodomy had been imported from overseas. As in Aragon, in Portugual the persecution of sodomites peaked in the period 1620-34, when as many cases were tried (94) as those recorded for the previous century. In the eighteenth century sodomy trials be­came uncommon, and the Portuguese Inquisition concentrated on persecuting heretics and libertines.
Overseas. Cardinal Jiménez had given bishops inquisitorial power in the Indies in 1516-17. Philip II established tribunals in Lima (1570) and Mexico City (1571). The first auto-da-fé (public burn­ing) took place at Mexico City in 1547, the year of Cortes' death. The Inquisition in America was less active than in Spain, with only some 100 executions in the 250 years of its existence; only 30 were exe­cuted in Lima, for example. The Portu­guese Inquisition made Goa its overseas capital and in 1571 Philip II had the pope create an "inquisition of the galleys ... of fleets and armies." Protestants, even Eng­lish and French ones, were burned.
Much work needs to be done in evaluating the records of the Iberian Inqui­sition. However, a glimpse of their treat­ment of sodomites is afforded by a scene in Seville in 1585. The authorities decided to make an example of a black man who had been accused of sodomy and procuring young boys. They painted his face, adorned him with a lace ruff and a big curled wig, and marched him through the streets to the stake.
How Many Victims} Estimates of the total number of victims of the Inquisi­tion vary enormously, and modern critical scholarship has corrected some of the exaggerations of earlier Protestant and anti­clerical historians. Stanley Paine, in his History of Spain and Portugal (Madison, WT, 1973), concluded that in the first cen­tury of the Iberian Inquisition (1478-1578), 50,000 conversos were condemned, but that the Spanish inquisition executed a total of some 3,000 (including a small number of Protestants) over a span of three hundred years (1478-1778). A few execu­tions are recorded from the eighteenth century, and the last hanging occurred in 1826. By contrast, between 1562 and 1684 3,200 individuals were executed for witch­craft in Southwest Germany alone.
Henry Kamen, in Spain 1469-1714 (New York, 1965), states that about 5.4 percent of those arrested by the Inqui­sition were accused of Judaizing and 7 percent of Protestant sympathies. Most of the Protestants were foreigners. In all of Spain after 1562 fewer than half a dozen individuals were burned at the stake for Protestantism. In Aragon, Granada, Saragossa, and Valencia most of the accused were moriscos (Moors forcibly converted to a nominal Christianity). Executions amounted to no more than 10 percent a year of those arrested. In much of this period the total number of executions by order of the Inquisition came to only 2 or 3 a year in all of Spain and its American colonies. Kamen further notes that as many as one-third of those arrested in Toledo were accused of extra-marital sexuality - fornication, adultery and the like - over which secular tribunals also had jurisdic­tion.
The anti-clerical Napoleonicera historian Juan Antonio Llorente concluded that 31,912 condemned persons were re­laxed to the secular authorities and 17,659 were relaxed in effigy because they had already fled, while 291,450 persons were given penitential sentences, thus assign­ing the Spanish Inquisition a total of 341,021 victims in its three-and-a-half century history.
Conclusion. The principle of tol­eration proclaimed by the Enlightenment caused the Inquisition in Spain first to be abolished in 1808 by Joseph Bonaparte and although restored by the reactionary Ferdi­nand Vil in 1814, it was abolished by the liberals after they came to power in 1820, and definitively abolished by royal decree in 1834. Its crimes are still remembered as a high-water mark of the attempt to im­pose uniformity of belief by systemati­cally prosecuting and punishing all who were guilty of "error," and it has served as a sad precedent for totalitarian states of the twentieth century that have demanded the same sort of ideological unanimity from their subjects. The mass purges and atrocities of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and other dictatorships that explicitly re­jected the legal doctrines of the Enlighten­ment have revived these horrendous prac­tices of the Old Regime. The Holy Office, responsible for the conduct of the papal Inquisition since 1542, was replaced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965.
In retrospect, it must be conceded that the number of homosexual victims of the Inquisition, even at its fiercest, was but a small percent of the whole. Marranos (nominal Christians of Jewish descent), Nicodemites, sundry heretics, and other offenders outside the sexual realm made up the bulk of those persecuted by the inquisitors, while a minority - perhaps only a fifth - of those convicted of sodomy were actually burnt at the stake. The ob­ject of the show trials and executions was to intimidate other, potential offenders, not to exterminate an entire segment of the population, since the modem notion of the "exclusive homosexual" did not exist at this time.
It is clear from the historical rec­ord that even in that era a few thinkers did everything in their power to calm the irrational panic unleashed by credulity and superstition, so that the peak of intoler­ance was always followed by a decline in the number of prosecutions and in the severity of the sentences. The Iberian peninsula seems to have reached the height of persecution of sodomy first, in the ear­lier half of the seventeenth century,- France (without the device of Inquisition) in the second half under Louis XIV; Holland in the first half of the eighteenth century, and last of all Protestant England in the eight­eenth and early nineteenth century. By the time such Continental reformers as Beccaria and Voltaire began their attack on the criminal practice of the Old Re­gime, mass trials and executions for sod­omy were largely a thing of the past, and an enlightened public opinion was preparing for the abolition of all offenses motivated by superstition and fanaticism - a step finally taken by the Constituent Assem­bly during the French Revolution, some time before the persecution of sodomites was to reach its peak in England.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Rafael Carrasco, Inquisición y represión sexual en Valencia: historia de los sodomitas (1565-1785), Barcelona: Laertes, 1985; Henry C. Lea, A History of the Inquisi­tion of Spain, 4 vols., New York: Macmillan 1906-07; Luiz Mott, "Pagode portugués: a subcultura gay em Portugal nos tempos inquisitóriais," Ciencia e Cultura, 40 (1987), 120-39.
William A. Percy

Insanity, Moral
Moral insanity, defined as "mad­ness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclina­tions, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remark­able disorder or defect of the intellect or knowing and reasoning faculties, and par­ticularly without any insane illusion or hallucination," was a widespread psychi­atric concept in the nineteenth century. In the English-speaking world it was particu­larly propagated by James Cow les Prichard (1786-1848), whose fame, however, rests upon his work as an anthropologist and comparative linguist. Educated at Cam­bridge and then at Oxford, in 1811 he became a physician at Saint Peter's Hospi­tal in Bristol and in 1814 at the Bristol Infirmary, besides which he developed a substantial private practice.
In the Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine Prichard published an article "Insanity," which he afterwards expanded into a separate treatise that became a clas­sic in this branch of medical literature. Its outstanding contribution was the defini­tion of the form of mental derangement that gained the name of "moral insanity." The subject had earlier been broached by Philippe Pinel (1745-1826), the founder of modem psychiatry, and then by his pupil, Jean Etienne Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840), who wrote extensively on the moral causes of insanity, which even more than his predecessor he considered to predominate over the physical ones in a ratio as high as 4 to 1, as in a memoir which he presented to the Society of Medicine in 1818. In the eyes of his contemporaries Prichard's merit was that of proving for the first time the existence of insanity "with­out marked intellectual aberration."
In A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (1835), Prichard only incidentally touched upon what were later to be called sexual perver­sions or parhedonias. For him the funda­mental criterion of the pathological was quantitative, so that he could write of instances "in which the unusual intensity of particular passions or emotions has been thought to constitute mental illness" and add that "a series of compound epithets has been invented for the purpose of af­fording names to such states of the mind and its affectations. Nostalgia [here mean­ing a longing for an absent lover] and eroto­mania have been considered as disorders of sentiment; satyriasis and nymphomania of the physical feelings. The excessive intensity of any passion is disorder in a moral sense; it may depend physically on certain states of the constitution; but this does not so clearly constitute madness as the irregular and perverted manifestation of desires and aversions." Prichard con­cludes with the pertinent remark that "this species of insanity has been the real source of moral phenomena of an anomalous and unusual kind, and of certain perversions of natural inclination which excite the greatest disgust and abhorrence."
Prichard further conceded that courts and medical writers in England recognized no such disorder as moral in­sanity, where insanity was held cotermi­nous with mental illusion, with what German writers called Wahnsinn. "Eng­lish writers . . . know nothing of moral insanity either as requiring control in the exercise of civil rights, or as destroying or lessening culpability in criminal ones." Thus from both the medical and the foren­sic standpoints Prichard's thinking never reached the insight which psychiatrists from the late 1860s onward were to achieve - but only after reading the work of the pioneer homosexual apologists Ulrichs and Kertbeny. He could not go beyond the concept of a quantitative change in the sexual drive, as did his successors, who recognized and defined a set of quali­tative ones which they classified as perver­sions of the sexual instinct and held that they limited, if not entirely abolished, the responsibility of the subject in criminal cases.
Another concept propagated by Prichard was that of monomania, which had been introduced by Esquirol in 1814. The British author defined this as "partial insanity, in which the understanding is partially disordered or under the influence of some particular illness, referring to one subject, and involving one train of ideas, while the intellectual powers appear, when exercised on other subjects, to be in a great measure unimpared." This notion did influence early psychiatric authors on sexual inversion such as Julien Chevalier, who in his dissertation of 1885 classified the phenomenon as an "instinctive mono­mania," that is to say, an illness affecting only one aspect of the instinctive lif e while leaving all the others sound and normal. Individuals suffering from instinctive monomanias could even possess great intellectual gifts, could be "dégénérés supérieurs" (superior degenerates). The abandonment of the whole concept natu­rally invalidated this particular applica­tion of it as well.
Discarded also was Esquirol's emphasis on moral rather than physical causes of mental illness, which Prichard had dutifully echoed in his work of 1835. On the eve of Westphal's discovery, a paper was published in an American psychiatric journal which analyzed recent statistics to show that all cases were now ascribed either to physical or to "unknown" causes, in other words, that the notion of moral causality had been abandoned. This triumph of materialism in psychiatry paved the way for the acceptance of the concept of psychopathia sexualis by Krafft-Ebing and later authors. It is instructive that Westphal's immediate predecessor in the psychiatric division of the Charité (Berlin's general hospital), Wilhelm Griesinger (1817-1868), actually had a male homo­sexual patient under examination, but dismissed his sexual proclivities as a "revolting aberration." Only when armed with the insights furnished by the early homosexual apologists could the new generation of psychiatrists overcome the narrow vision - and spontaneous aver­sion - that had hobbled such investigators as Prichard and Griesinger.
Warren Johansson

Intermediate Stages, Sexual
Homosexuality has sometimes been regarded as a type of sexual intermediacy, part of a continuum that stretches between the male and female poles. The notion stems from the propensity of the early investigators of sexual abnormality to devise conceptual schemes that would embrace larger categories of psychopathology, and also fit their new discoveries into the evolutionary framework that had been popularized by Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his Psychopathia sexuahs (first edition 1886), carried this schematizing tendency to inordinate lengths, even classifying delu­sion of change of sex as the last degree of abnormality of which sexual inversion was the first.
Magnus Hirschfeld followed his lead by changing the original title of the scholarly organ of the Scientific-Humani­tarian Committee, Jahrbuch für homosexuelle Forschungen, to Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intergrades), which first appeared in 1899 and lasted, with some interrup­tions, until 1923, when catastrophic infla­tion deprived the Committee of financial resources. Hirschfeld, with propaganda for repeal of Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code of the German Reich as his aim, for years endeavored to prove that homosexuals belonged to an "intermediate sex" that fell on the continuum between the male and the female and was characterized by a whole set of traits that were located on the statistical mean between the norms for the opposite sexes. He laid great stress on subjects who displayed marked inversion of the secondary sexual characters (pro­nounced effeminacy in men or masculin­ity in women), conveniently ignoring those homosexuals and lesbians who, while being exclusively attracted to their own sex, in no way depart from its normal physical type. Commensurate with the Zwischenstufentheorie, the pages of the fahrbuch carried articles on transvestism, hermaph­roditism, and androgyny from the stand­point of cultural history as well as mate­rial on all aspects of homosexuality proper.
This notion of sexual intergrades, confusing the orientation of the sexual drive with the anatomical traits of the sexes, stemmed in part from the classical notion of the hermaphrodite as combining male and female, and also from the notion that natura non facit saltus, "Nature makes no sudden leaps," but rather all phenomena are arranged along a contin­uum within which a certain group may be legitimately so defined. Sigmund Freud rejected the whole notion, maintaining that it was absolutely incorrect to set the homosexual apart as a special type or vari­ety of human being, and that all human beings are capable of a homosexual object choice and have already made one in the unconscious. The popularity of psychoa­nalysis caused the intermediate stage idea to be abandoned, even if it continues to figure in the reprints of the English trans­lation of the twelfth edition of Kraf ft-Ebing and similar works from the first decade of the century.
If, in its original form, the idea of sexual intermediate stages no longer en­joys currency, it reflects a broader concep­tual tendency that is found in other realms. Many are dissatisfied with the rigidity that they detect in such binary oppositions as good and bad, kind and cruel, extrovert and introvert, male and female, and would prefer to replace them with a scale admit­ting gradations between the two poles. In their first Report (1948) Alfred Kinsey and his associates proposed to abandon the dichotomy between heterosexual and homosexual, and to replace it with a seven-point scale. More recent gender studies have tended to emphasize states of androg­yny between the male and female. Al­though these approaches may raise prob­lems of explanation in terms of underlying biological mechanisms, they reflect an enduring feature of the modern mind: the quest to overcome dualism.
Warren Johansson

intertestamental Literature
This term designates a body of Jewish religious writings which in the main fall between the last writings of the Old Testament (mid-second century b.c.), on the one hand, and the closing of the New Testament and the creation of the Mishnah (late second century), on the other. Traditionally these texts are distinguished from the Old Testament Apocrypha, a relatively privileged group which, though not part of the Bible proper, is accorded deuterocanonical status by some Chris­tian groups. As cultural documents the intertestamental writings - though rarely consulted by the general public today - are of incalculable value in helping to trace the multifaceted evolution of Judaism in Hellenistic and Roman times.
Among other points these texts bear witness to the continuing Jewish re­jection of homosexual behavior. The Tes­taments of the Twelve Patriarchs contain repeated condemnations of fornication and sexual immorality, and the Testament of Naphtali (3:4-5) notes that the people of Sodom changed the order of their nature, a key concept that recurs in the Pauline discussion in Romans 1:26-27. The Book of Jubilees asserts that the Sodomites "were polluting themselves and they were forni­cating in their flesh and they were causing pollution upon the earth. And thus the Lord will execute judgment like the judg­ment of Sodom on places where they act according to the pollution of Sodom" (Jubilees 16:5-6). This is the first specific mention of Sodom as an example of sexual depravity whose punishment will be re­peated in the future. The passages in the Second Book of Enoch are interpolations found only in a manuscript written in Poltava in 1679, but the Testament of Isaac contains a description of the tor­ments of the Sodomites in Hell. As is well known, the Old Testament itself contains no explicit indication of infernal punish­ments.
The Sybilline Oracles condemn homosexual activity in numerous passages, such as 3:185: "Male will have intercourse with male and they will set up boys in houses of ill-fame," while in 3:596-600 the Jews are praised because "they do not engage in impious intercourse with boys, as do" many other nations, "transgressing the holy law of God immortal." This pas­sage establishes that for the Jews of the Hellenistic diaspora the taboo on male homosexuality had become one of the distinctive mores of their religion that set it apart from all others in its claim to possess a higher morality. For the proto-Christian community it was to be a norm of moral purity as well. Thus the intertes­tamental texts repeat and amplify the Biblical injunctions against homosexual behavior, even in the neighborhood of host peoples who tolerated such activity and knew no religious taboo against it. While the exclusiveness of the Jews and their disdain for the polytheism of the other peoples of the Hellenistic world precluded general adoption of their laws, Christian­ity was to retain the sexual provisions of the Mosaic code after it seceded from Judaism in a bid to become the universal religion of the Greco-Roman world.
W'anen Johansson

Inventor Legends
In some traditions, the introduc­tion of homosexual conduct to human society has been ascribed to a single indi­vidual. Some Greek writers held that same-sex relations among men had been devised and spread by Orpheus, perhaps as a result of his disappointment over the loss of Eurydice. In this story homosexual behav­ior is not regarded as a misfortune, but as a gift on a par with Orpheus' celebrated musical accomplishments. Pederasty in fact had a divine archetype in Zeus' love for Ganymede. Other Greek sources at­tribute the invention of human homo­sexuality to King Laius, who kidnapped Chrysippus, the beautiful son of his host Pelops, during his exile from Thebes. It was this outrage that set in motion the tragic fate of his son Oedipus, a fact rarely cited by interpreters of Sophocles' trilogy or by those who adhere to the psychoana­lytic construct known as the "Oedipus complex." The Chrysippus story was the subject of a lost play by Euripides. Apollodorus ascribes pederasty to yet another figure, the singer Thamyris.
Among the Arabs a curious rever­sal occurred in that Lot, urged by God in the Hebrew Bible to flee Sodom because of its devotion to vice [Genesis 19), was actu­ally made responsible for the practice it­self, so that in Arabic homosexuals may be called ahl Lilt, "the people of Lot."
Did homosexuality, as an aspect of human culture, in fact have an inventor, or at least a phase of introduction to human society? Any answer to this question, like that of the appearance of human language, would have to be hypothetical. To the extent that homosexuality is found among animals, it would not seem to be a human discovery at all. Yet historical sequences show that homosexual behavior has under­gone changes in social organization - as from the Greeks to the Romans, through the Middle Ages, and down to modern times. Where these changes can be moni­tored, as in this sequence, they seem to be the result of the gradual shift of ideologi­cal, economic, familial, and other factors, which could not readily respond to the suggestion of any single individuals. Thus while the inventor question is useful to raise social elements in the origins of par­ticular forms of homosexual behavior, in its literal sense it seems to be a false quest.
Wayne R. Dynes

Inversion
Since the end of the nineteenth century some medical and other writers have equated homosexuality with inver­sion. For some, the term meant simply the reversal of the current of attraction from the opposite to one's own sex. Others believed that inversion entails also an adoption of patterns of thinking, feeling, and action that are characteristic of the other sex. In this broader sense it amounts to effeminacy in the male, and viraginousness in the female, but it would not in­clude the majority of male homosexuals and lesbians who do not show these traits. Studies of androgyny have also suggested that there is a continuum rather than a sharp separation between the two poles of male and female, so that inversion in the sense of a complete volteface does not seem to occur. In any event, the terms inversion and invert have acquired a nega­tive, clinical aura, and for this reason they are less commonly used today.
An examination of the history of these terms is helpful in understanding the connotations they carry today. In 1878, in a professional article in the Rivista di freniatria, di psichiatria e di medicina legale, the Italian alienist Arrigo Tamassia introduced the term in veisione, which was quickly adopted into other languages as well as Italian to render the cumbersome German expression die contrare Sexualempfindung which Karl Westphal had used in 1869. The new coinage owed its success not only to its grammatical mal­leability - yielding the noun invert and the adjective in verted - but also to the fact that while the word itself was new, the ideas on which it drew were deeply rooted in Western consciousness.
The byways of the history of ideas reveal many episodes of the use of the spatial metaphors of "backwards-to-for-wards" and "upside down" to symbolize social abnormality. Sometimes the inver­sion procedure is temporal rather than spatial, as in reciting the alphabet or some ritual formula backwards to produce a magical spell.
In Euripides' play Medea (fifth century b.c.), the social disturbance of role reversal catalyzed by the heroine's assump­tion of masculine qualities is evoked by the image of rivers running backwards in their course. And Orpheus, who according to some Greek sources invented pederasty, was supposed to have made wild oaks migrate from their mountain habitat to the seashore, and to reduce savage beasts to lamb-like docility, thus altering the natural order by switching things to their opposites. In Hellenistic times, the poet Sotades (third century b.c. ) invented a kind of verse which was innocuous when read forwards, but obscene backwards.
The sexual predilections of the Romans for the "posterior Venus" (anal receptivity) were held to be revealed in the very name Roma, which is a backwards spelling for amor ("love"). In the Koran, God turns the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah literally upside down. Medie­val texts, such as the Roman de la rose, speak of sodomites doing things a rebours ("in reverse"), an expression that served Toris-Karl Huysmans in 1884 as the title for his novel of aristocratic perversion. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Eu­rope witnessed the popularity of a genre of popular prints known as Le Monde á l'Envers or The World Upside Down, whereby alongside such outlandish things as fish nesting in trees and men plowing the sea, we find the wife going out to hunt while the husband stays home to mind the baby, and similar instances of sex-role reversal.
As used by late nineteenth-cen­tury writers, the word inversion often had an application that went beyond sexual orientation. The medical authorities who studied "inversion" were fascinated by gender-role reversal - masculine women and feminine men - positing such purport­edly biological tendencies as the root cause of "inverted" sexual object choice, rather than vice versa. Certain writers preferred to restrict the term to the narrower mean­ing of the reversal of the secondary sexual characters as distinct from the sexual ori­entation proper; thus only the effeminate homosexual and the viraginous lesbian were "inverts" in this sense.
The idea was used in a number of creative ways by Marcel Proust in his great novel sequence A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) which shows that it need not always be negative. One of his homo­sexual characters, Robert de Saint-Loup, seeks out danger in battle instead of flee­ing it, while Baron Charlus becomes more pro-German rather than less so as war nears. In a larger sense the novel's goal - the gradual recovery of more and more layers of memory - is a process of inver­sion or retrogression. This great enterprise is mirrored in Proust's fascination with musical techniques, including the device of melodic inversion.
Wayne R. Dynes

Iran
Formerly known to the West as Persia, the name Iran was selected by the modem Pahlevi dynasty as a sign of the country's "Aryan," or Indo-European, heritage. This ethnically diverse land contains large numbers of Persians, Turks, nomadic tribesmen, and smaller numbers of Jews, Assyrians, and Arabs. The na­tional language (Farsi) is Indo-European, not Semitic; Iran is not an Arab country.
The Pie-Islamic Period. The his­tory of homosexuality in Iran has been both influential and contradictory. Zoroastrianism, the teachings of Zarathustra, is the most homophobic ancient faith known to modern scholarship. The fateful Zoroastrian doctrine (that all homosexuals, ac­tive or passive, are inherently demonic, and must be put to death when detected) was to make its way into the religious tradition of the Jews, who escaped their Babylonian captivity under Persian rule in 538 b.c.
This condemnation seems to have made its way but slowly against the much older Iranian traditions of polytheism and initiatory pederasty, traditions similar to those of the Greeks and probably inherited from a common ancestral Indo-European behavior pattern. During the Achaemenid period (sixth and fifth centuries B. C.), these two Iranian religious cultures were in conflict, as were two similarly warring faiths in the Palestine of the Old Testa­ment. The Mazdaist/Zoroastrian cult reached its zenith of social control under the Sassanids (second to seventh centuries of our era). The only surviving Zoroastrian documents date from this time, when factions urged the Mazdaist clergy to a formal codification in the Pahlevi language.
The Sassanian church was a cruel persecutor of other religions, which in­cluded by this time Jews, Christians, Manichaeans, and even Buddhists toward the east. The battle with the Christians was especially fierce, and it is a minor irony of history that Christianity seemed destined to triumph over Mazdaism in Iran, when the Arab whirlwind of conquest decisively overcame both of them.
Islam. The Persians were con­quered by the Arabs in a.d. 637. The Mazdaist faith was cast out and replaced by Islam, and the first three fourths of the oldest Pahlevi Avesta perished during the conquest. [The older religion now survives chiefly among the Parsees of India, who fled Iran during this epoch.)
The Arabs were only superficially intolerant of homosexuality, and certainly the Koran specified no earthly punish­ment for such behavior (it did, however, repeat the Sodom story in various places, most notably Sura 6, "The Heights," 80-84, where homosexual behavior is specified as the unique reason for the destruction of Sodom). The Islamic hadith, or oral tradi­tions of Muhammad, held only that homo­sexuality was a sin greater than zina, or fornication, and specified no earthly pun­ishment. The devout Muslim was expected to know that God would be displeased, and this knowledge (added to the desire for paradise) would be enough to control his behavior.
The outcome was a toleration and even celebration of pederasty in classical Islam, and much of the Arab poetry of this time (e.g., that of Abu Nuwas) is devoted to boys and their beauty. As a result, over a period of time the people of Persia once again moderated or reversed their earlier position. The most famous Persian poets were familiar with the love of young men - Hafiz, Rumi, Sa'di, and the astronomer-poet Omar Khayyam. The oft-cited lines "A Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness" are addressed to a young man. The matched themes of wine and boys became staples of Arabic and Persian poetry of the classic period, and echoed down the centuries into the gardens of Moorish Granada.
The conquered Persians did, however, formalize their anger at the Arab conquest into the Shiite schismatic move­ment. (The mainstream of Islam is Sunni.)
The Shiite faction has, from the beginning, been innately mystical, revolutionary, and capable of extreme sadism, masochism, and puritanism. It has hosted the whirling dervishes and the poetry of wine and boys; but it has also been the school of the Old Man of the Mountains, the fanatic who drugged his murderers with hashish and duped them into the belief that he held the keys to paradise on earth. (The term "as­sassin" derives from the hashish used by this group of thugs, who would risk any­thing for a return to the paradise they had glimpsed.)
In more recent times, this histori­cal confusion about the subject has pro­duced a sort of schizophrenia in the Ira­nian mind. Travelers from the nineteenth century report a man executing his son in the town square for the "crime," yet clearly many Iranians were and are devotees of pederasty, the Farsi term bachebazi (lit. "boyplay") being the equivalent of the ancient Greek paidika. In modern times under the Shah, Teheran had open gay bars and male hustlers were available. (These tended to come from the south of Teheran, particularly the impoverished suburb of Rayy, often under the guidance of tough lutiyy [brawling, folk-hero types] as their pimps and protectors.)
The overthrow of the Shah and the installation of the Khomeini regime saw another abrupt reversal. Basing their legitimacy on "Islamic fundamentalism," the mullahs (religious teachers) soon be­gan executing homosexuals en masse in town squares - acting like Zoroastrians while citing Islam. They were also execut­ing the few remaining Iranian Zoroastri­ans, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following this singu­larly erratic government.
The Iranian Baha'i sect, which claims to integrate all the great religions, also suffered at the hands of the mullahs. The Baha'i had never made any formal statement about homosexuality, finding this question difficult to solve, but unoffi­cially held that homosexuality was a "curable disease," which shows they had gathered elements of psychiatry into their ecumenical mixture.
An ironic sidelight on the new regime is the fact that, for centuries, the Iranian people had regarded the mullahs themselves as generic homosexuals, and respectable Persian fathers would routinely warn their sons to guard their chastity during religious instruction.
Geoff Puterbaugh

Ireland
In the first millennium b.c. the ancient Celts of the European continent were noted for their initiatory and military homosexuality. Yet as the mists of prehis­tory lift in Ireland in the fifth century of our era, no trace of these institutions is recorded. This absence (or silence) un­doubtedly reflects the thoroughness of the process of Christianization, initiated by the quasilcgendary St. Patrick. Yet the Irish Church pioneered in a new system of penitentials, a procedure that allowed sinners to "work off" their infraction with specified periods of restriction. The penal­ties for homosexual conduct found in these documents reveal a more lenient attitude toward homosexual conduct, while at the same time initiating the bureacratic ap­proach that was to eventuate, centuries later, in the confessional system of the Roman Catholic Church. Irish missionar­ies active in remote areas of the British Isles and the European continent were sometimes linked by bonds of intense af­fection, a homosocial (if not homosexual) pattern that was to recur among the later medieval clergy ("particular friendships").
Beginning in the ninth century devastation by foreign invaders, first the Vikings and then the English, complicated the history of Ireland. In the present state of our knowledge we can only point to a few homosexual episodes before recent decades. In 1640 John Atherton, bishop of Waterford and Lismore, was convicted of sodomy and hanged. There is some indica­tion that his execution occurred because he had offended both the powerful Earl of Cork and the still significant Roman Catho­lic party of the country. Two centuries later another high ecclesiastic became notorious throughout Europe. Jocelyn Percy, Bishop of Clogher, was in 1811 involved in a homosexual case in Dublin, for which he was not prosecuted. In 1822, however, he was apprehended in London, and only managed to escape serious pun­ishment by fleeing to Scotland, where for some years he made his living as a servant.
Unlike the tragedy of Oscar Wilde, which was enacted entirely outside the emerald isle, that of Roger Casement is closely connected with Irish politics. Casement, an Irish patriot, was arrested in Ireland in 1916, after disembarking from a German submarine. On his person the British found a diary which recorded his homosexual activities in some detail. During his subsequent imprisonment and trial the London government "leaked" portions of the diary to erode sympathy for Casement, who was then executed for treason. For decades defenders of Case­ment disputed the authenticity of the diary, but it is now generally conceded to be genuine.
The preeminence of the Roman Catholic church in the new Irish Free State (1922- ¡ meant repressive attitudes with regard to family and sex. The new republic retained the English laws of 1861 and 1885 against homosexual conduct. Pubs (bars) in Dublin were discreetly "mixed," and many Irish gays and lesbians undoubtedly joined the waves of immigration to Britain and America. During World War IT and after, the country benefited from economic and social development that culminated in its joining the European Common Market. Efforts to unify the island by ending British sovereignty in the northern six counties proved unsuccessful. Sexual re­strictions were slow to fall, though Ireland felt the impact of the American and Euro­pean gay liberation movement after 1969. Homosexuality was decriminalized in Northern Ireland as a result of a favorable decision handed down by the European Court of Human Rights (Strasbourg) in the Jeff Dudgeon case in 1982. Yet the Catho­lic preamble to the Republic's constitution was quoted by the Dublin Chief Justice in his 1983 opinion dismissing the suit of David Norris to have the laws against gay men struck down. Continuing control of educational, medical, and social services gives the Roman Catholic church power to mold consciousness throughout the Re­public of Ireland - but not in the larger world of the European Community to which Ireland belongs. Norris, the country's only openly gay legislator, ap­pealed the case, and on October 26, 1988, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Republic's sodomy laws violate Article 8 of the European Charter of Human Rights.
The National Gay Federation established a noteworthy premises in Hirschf eld Centre in Dublin, and telephone "hotlines" were set up and successfully maintained. Unfortunately a fire destroyed the Centre in 1987, but organizational work continues. For a time the Irish capi­tal was also the headquarters of the Inter­national Gay Association. Despite some problems with violence, today gay life flourishes in the cities of Dublin and Cork, and, in Northern Ireland, in Belfast.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Dublin Lesbian and Gay Men's Collectives, Out for Our­selves: The Lives of Irish Lesbians and Gay Men, Dublin: Women's Community Press, 1986.
Wayne R. Dynes

Irrumation
See Oral Sex.

Isherwood, Christo­pher (1904-1986)
Anglo-American novelist. Born in upper-middle-class circumstances, Isher­wood became acquainted with W. H. Auden, his life-long friend and occasional collaborator, during their English public school days. In 1930-33 Isherwood lived in Berlin, where he gathered the material for some of his most effective writing. After Hitler's rise to power, he moved from country to country in an effort to stay together with his young German lover Heinz. He described this period with con­siderable frankness in his later memoir Christopher and His Kind (1976). During this period he worked with Auden (who had emerged as a major poet) on three plays, and they traveled to China together in 1938. Isherwood then settled in South­ern California where in 1953 he took another young lover, Don Bachardy, who remained with him until Isherwood's death. Bachardy acquired some renown as an artist, creating many portraits of the writer and his friends.
Isherwood first found his footing as a writer in the material written in the 1930s and later collected in The Berlin Stories (1954). In these sketches of expa­triation and sexual eccentricity, of poverty and political turmoil, he introduced the naturalistic method he called "I am a camera." Through several stage and screen metamorphoses this material came to play an important part in the post-War fascina­tion with Weimar decadence.
Homosexuality, which was only one of several themes in his earlier novels, became increasingly prominent with the passage of time. The World in the Evening (1954), though later dismissed by the au­thor as unsuccessful, contains what may be the first satisfactory explanation of camp. A Single Man (1964) is the portrait of a lonely, but not despairing Los Angeles gay man, while Down There on a Visit (1966) offers a portrait of Danny Fouts, said to be the most expensive hustler in the world. In Southern California Isherwood became interested in mysticism under the influence of a fellow expatriate, Gerald Heard, who later emerged as something of a philosopher of the homophile move­ment. For several years the novelist was a devoted disciple of Swami Prabhavananda, a Vedantist who had settled in Hollywood (see My Cum and Myself, 1980). Isher­wood was also active in the homophile rights organization, ONE.
Isherwood's writing has a spare elegance, but he declined to participate in the avant-garde experiments of his time. In all likelihood, his works will continue to be read for their candid picture of the life trajectory of a gay man in a time that saw enormous social and sexual changes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Brian Finney, Christo­pher Isherwood: A Biography, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; Claude J. Summers, Christopher Isherwood, New York: Frederick j. Ungar, 1980.
Geoff Puterbaugh
1980). Isher­wood was also active in the homophile rights organization, ONE.
Isherwood's writing has a spare elegance, but he declined to participate in the avant-garde experiments of his time. In all likelihood, his works will continue to be read for their candid picture of the life trajectory of a gay man in a time that saw enormous social and sexual changes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Brian Finney, Christo­pher Isherwood: A Biography, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; Claude J. Summers, Christopher Isherwood, New York: Frederick j. Ungar, 1980.
Geoff Puterbaugh

Islam
A major world religion, Islam stems from the preaching of the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia in the seventh century. It is based on the principle that the believer [oxmushm) surrenders (Arabic: islam) to the will of the one and only God (Allah). God's will is expressed in Islamic law, consisting of a system of duties which every Muslim has to submit to by virtue of his belief. Islamic law, also known as the Shari'ah (path), forms a comprehensive code of behavior, a divinely ordained path of conduct that guides the Muslim in the practical expression of his religious con­viction toward the goal of divine favor in paradise. Law is based on the Koran, the word of God as revealed to his Prophet, on the Hadith, which is a collection of the words and deeds attributed to the Prophet which are used as precedents, and on the interpretations of the Islamic jurists [Ulama).
Basic Features. A central theme is Islamic law and its theoretical attitude toward male homosexual behavior, and how this attitude relates to the way Mus­lims generally deal with such behavior in practice. It is difficult to speak of Islamic law in general, however, because of the differences of opinion among various Is­lamic law schools and sects (such as the Shi'a), while the same can be said of Is­lamic attitude in practice, as it varies in specific historical periods and regions. Even with a focus on material from the contem­porary Middle East, an emphasis adopted in this article, general conclusions must be tentative Islam considers sexuality an ab­solutely normal and natural urge of every human being. Symbolic of this positive attitude is the important place sex is ac­corded in paradise, which will be the ful­fillment of the spiritual and bodily self. Islamic representations of paradise depict a height of delights, with, among other things, girls whose virginity is continually renewed, immortal boys as beautiful as hidden pearls, perpetual erections and infinite orgasms. On earth, however, be­cause of human imperfection, sex has a problematic side, which makes regulation necessary. Unregulated sex threatens the social order and leads to anarchy and chaos, and therefore has to be restricted to mar­riage. Marriage is a social obligation, and forms the basis of orderly society, giving expression to the divine harmony consist­ing of the complementarity of men and women. An essential and sacred part of marriage, sex is considered to be a tribute to divine will, an acknowledgement of God's kindness and generosity, and a fore­taste of the joys of paradise, which will sometimes lead to a renewal of his crea­tion. Social order and the God-given har­mony of life are threatened by the suppres­sion of sexuality in celibacy and by sexual acts outside of marriage, heterosexual as well as homosexual. Celibacy is regarded as boring and unnatural, and rejected be­cause it would inevitably lead to sinful feelings and to a knocking on forbidden doors. Sexual activity outside of marriage, adultery, is sharply condemned by Islamic law as a crime against humanity, which opens the door to many other shameful acts, and affects the reputation and prop­erty of the family, thereby disrupting the social fabric.
Homosexual behavior (liwat), i.e., sexual acts between members of the same sex, is considered to be adultery, being sex with an illicit partner. A person who per­forms such actions (luti) is regarded as extraordinarily corrupt, because he chal­lenges the harmony of the sexes and top­syturvies God's creation: "Cursed are the men who behave effeminately, and cursed are the women who behave in a masculine way." Homosexual behavior is actually considered a revolt against God which violates the order of the world, and would be a source of evil and anarchy. The only remedy against such unnatural and sinful feelings is to fight and suppress them: "He who falls in love, conceals his passion, is chaste and patiently abstains, is forgiven by God and received into Paradise." Those who stubbornly persist in their behavior, however, await severe punishments, at least theoretically.
The Koran and the Hadith. In the Koran, homosexual behavior is explicitly condemned: "And as for the two of you who are guilty thereof, punish them both. If they repent and mend their ways, let them be. God is forgiving and merciful." (4:16). Homosexual behavior is further mentioned in the parable of the apostle Lot, which is repeatedly told in the Koran, and relates of the corrupted and evil-minded people of Lot's village, who transgressed consciously against the bounds of God. The behavior of these unbelievers was considered evil in general, their avarice led to inhospitality and robbery, which in turn led to the humiliation of strangers by mistreatment and rape. It was their homo­sexual behavior, however, which was seen as symptomatic of their attitudes, because it was regarded as "an abomination such as none in all the world has ever committed before." Obstinately refusing to accept God's message brought by Lot, the villag­ers were punished by God raining upon them "stones of heated clay" which killed them all and left their village ruined as a sign of the power of God for all to see. "The doings of the people of Lot" even became proverbial, alluding specifically to homo­sexual behavior, while the Arabic words for homosexual behavior and for a person who performs such actions both derive from Lot's name.
In the Hadith, homosexual be­havior is condemned harshly: "Whenever a male mounts another male, the throne of God trembles"; the angels look on in loath­ing and say: "Lord, why do you not com­mand the earth to punish them and the heaven to rain stones on them?" God re­plies: "I am forebearing; nothing will es­cape me." Beside dreadful torments and humiliations in the world to come, homo­sexual behavior had to be punished on earth: "If you see two people who act like the people of Lot, then kill the active and the passive."
Legal Sanctions. The punishment which the Islamic jurists generally pre­scribe for adultery, and therefore also for homosexual behavior, is stoning to death for married people, and one hundred lashes for unmarried people. Persons who are married are punished more harshly be­cause their behavior had severe conse­quences in regard to property and reputa­tion, and would disrupt the family and the institution of marriage, both so important for the social order. The extravagant pun­ishments which are prescribed are meant to have a deterring effect, and for that reason punishments are even carried out publicly.
Discouragement and repentance are considered more important than pun­ishment, therefore the following condi­tions have to be met before condemnation is possible: Four adult muslims of the male sex, of unblemished integrity of character, have to swear that they have been eye­witnesses to the carnal act itself. Less than four witnesses will lead to a punishment of the witnesses themselves, while the false accuser will receive eighty lashes, because of slander. Perpetrators can only be condemned when adult, muslim, sane, and acting out of free will. A confession is sufficient for condemnation, if four times repeated. Before it is accepted, however, the judge has to point out to the accused the consequences of his confession, and the fact that repentance before the giving of testimony will be punished less harshly.
The fulfillment of all these condi­tions seems almost out of the question, leading to the conclusion that in practice it is only in very exceptional circumstances that persons are convicted and punished for adultery, and thus for homosexual behavior.
Theory and Practice. Theoreti­cally homosexual behavior is sharply condemned by Islam, but in practice it is at present, and has been in the past, for the most part tolerantly treated and frequently occurring in countries where Islam pre­dominates. The established societal norms and morals of Islam are accepted as un­changeable and respected by the majority of muslims, which does not imply how­ever that they will or can conform to them in practice. Human beings are considered by Islam as imperfect, and are expected to make mistakes and consequently to sin. God is understanding of man's weaknesses, and when a person is sincere in his shame and shows repentance of his sinful behav­ior, he will be mercifully forgiven by God. In practice it is only public transgression of Islamic morals that is condemned, and therefore Islamic law stresses the role of eye-witnesses to an offence. The police are not allowed to go in search of possible sinners, who can only be caught red-handed, and not behind the "veil of de­cency" of their closed doors. In a way, concealment is advised, because to dis­close a dreadful sin would be a sin in itself.
But it is not only condemnation by the law which can be avoided by se­crecy, the same can be said of shame, a concept which plays an important part in the social role pattern of Islamic countries. Shame is engendered by what an individ­ual thinks that others might think of him, and arises when public behavior is not according to the prescribed role, and there­fore improper and disgraceful, bringing obloquy on the individual and tarnishing the reputation and standing of his family.
This emphasis on externals in Islamic law as well as in the social concept of shame, with its connivance in theoreti­cally forbidden and shameful behavior, could be deemed hypocritical. But such a judgment would be beside the point, miss­ing the essence of the entire matter, which is that in principle the validity of Islamic morals and of the social role pattern is confirmed by not openly resisting it, and it is just that which maintains the system as it is.
Kicking at the boundaries of per­missibility by telling obscene and shock­ing anecdotes, sometimes expressed in literature but mostly in the conversation and speech of the people, has always been popular, but as long as it did not give rise to publicly unlawful behavior or to open resistance to morality, it posed no serious problem for the social order.
The generally tolerant attitude toward homosexual behavior in practice can partly be explained by the fact that it will usually take place discreetly. More­over it does not have serious personal consequences such as, for example, hetero­sexual adultery would have. There is no question of abuse of possession (which a wife is of her husband) or of loss of honor and face of husband and family, while there fortunately exists no danger of preg­nancy, with all its consequences.
Practical tolerance therefore is the rule with respect to discreet homosexual behavior, but what about homosexuality?
Islamic law in theory only con­demns homosexual acts and does not express itself on the subject of homosexu­ality. This is not in the least surprising, however, if we bear in mind that homo­sexuality is a western concept, crystalizing in the nineteenth century and stem­ming from the notion that sexual behavior is characteristic of someone's personality and identity, and therefore influences his behavior in general, leading to a certain lifestyle. Such a concept is essentially foreign to countries where Islam predomi­nates, because there (sexual) behavior is not so much determined by personal pref­erences or someone's personality, as by a person's role and the circumstances in which he finds himself. Generally speak­ing, a person behaves in a particular situ­ation as much as possible according to the social role pattern that prescribes whether a certain kind of behavior in that situation is proper or not. He conforms to this, because otherwise he would bring shame on himself and his family, and lose face and honor. For that reason it is, for ex­ample, not particularly important if a sexual act is homo- or heterosexual, but rather which role is performed (active, as is proper for a man, or passive, like a woman), and if the act has social consequences or not. Therefore concepts like homo- and heterosexuality make no sense in cultures like these. Such contemporary western principles as "I am a homosexual, and thus I do not marry" are laughed at, because a person has to comply with his role, and therefore is expected to marry and beget children. As long as he maintains his role in public, his private preferences and idio-syncracies arc nobody's business but his own, that is if he is discrete about them, and harms no one.
The Repression in Iran. What, then, of the executions of homosexuals in Iran betwen 1979 and 1984? The problem here is a confusion of terms, because the "homosexuality" meant in Iran is far dif­ferent from the western concept of it. In Iran "homosexuality" has become a nega­tive label, as it has in other Islamic coun­tries, but fortunately with less extreme consequences. The label "homosexuality" refers to behavior which clashes with the God-given order of society and with the social role pattern; it is behavior which violates public decency, and is moreover seen as a typical example of western deca­dence. "Homosexuality" refers specifically to passive homosexual behavior, which is considered particularly objectionable, becauseit turns God's creation topsyturvy,
and threatens the God-given harmony between men and women, which is re­flected in the social role pattern. A man who plays the active, penetrator role in a homosexual act, behaves like aman, and is therefore not considered "homosexual." Passive homosexual behavior, however, implies being penetrated like a woman, and is considered to be extremely scandal­ous and humiliating for a man, because it is feminine behavior. Deviant behavior like this was in olden times viewed as abnormal and unnatural, and sometimes even characterized as an illness, because it was incomprehensible that a man could voluntarily choose to be dishonored and debased in the role of a woman. More common is the belief that sexual behavior that deviates from the norm causes illness, a notion soon to be confirmed by the ap­pearance of AIDS.
Another myth that influences the negative labeling of "homosexuality" is that of the foreignness of sexually deviant behavior. In past centuries the Arabs as­cribed homosexual behavior to Persian influence, and nowadays it is mostly re­garded as originating from the West - a rather paradoxical viewpoint, because it used to be the other way around. Western society is viewed as shameless and de­praved, permissiveness making license public and ultimately leading to social chaos. "Homosexuality" epitomizes this western decadence, this "unbridled riot of wantonness."
Finally, "homosexuality" also refers to the public transgression of mor­als, the conscious refusal to hide behind the veil of secrecy, and thus openly chal­lenging established norms and values. As in the story of Lot, it is today "homosexu­ality" that has become symptomatic of evil behavior in general. "Homosexual­ity" would inevitably lead to chaos and decay, and therefore "homosexuals" are considered as antisocial, and as a threat to social order. Ayatollah Khomeini (who died in 1989) alluded to this idea, asserting that "homosexuals" had to be exterminated because they were parasites and corrup­ters of the nation by spreading the "stain of wickedness." "Homosexuality" not only is seen as evil in itself, but provides a convenient label for stigmatizing bad people in general. This broad-gauge defini­tion underpinned what happened in Iran, where "homosexuality" was often de­ployed as a generic label to be applied at will to persons adjudged criminals, whether rightly or wrongly. It did not matter much what they did, it was enough to know that they were antisocial and therefore evil. In this way, for example, political opponents could be eliminated without any legal justification. In times of crisis especially, when the need for security is strong, pub­lic morals tend to become more severe, and deviant behavior that was once ig­nored is repressed. Moreover, in a period of political, economic, and social instability, internal chaos will often be blamed on outsiders and foreigners.
But what occurred in Iran is cer­tainly not typical of the attitude toward homosexual behavior in the whole spec­trum of Islamic countries. Even in Iran it may be regarded as exceptional. The exe­cutions of "homosexuals" took place in an atmosphere of revolutionary turbulence, with strong reactionary and antiwestern accents that led to excesses and an overall atmosphere of terror. Yet the foundation of such extremes is probably present in all Islamic countries, and stems from a nega­tive attitude toward passive homosexual behavior, coupled with a rejection of west­ern morality and condemnation of public indecency. Therefore "homosexuality" is rejected. In practice homosexual behavior is usually treated tolerantly as long as it is discrete and harms no one. This tolerance was well characterized by the words of an unknown Arab poet: "As the boy looked at it, my thing moved, and he whispered: 'It is splendid! Do let me try its love making.' I answered 'Such an act is reprehended, in fact many people call it unlawful.' He said: 'Oh them; oh them! With me all things are lawful.' And I was too polite to disobey."
Lesbianism. Of female same-sex behavior [musahaqa] almost nothing is known. Islamic law considers it sex out­side of marriage and therefore as adultery, with all the consequences already de­scribed. Yet because no penetration takes place, punishment is theoretically limited to one hundred lashes. In practice lesbian behavior is regarded as relatively unim­portant, because it usually takes place discreetly.
See also Abu Nuwas; Africa, North; Mujun; Rumi; Sa'di; Sufism; Tur­key.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985; G. H. Bousquet, L'éthique sexuelle de l'lslam, Paris: Maisonneuve, 1966; Madelaine Farah, Marriage and Sexuality in Islam: A Translation of al Ghazzali's Book on the Etiquette of Marriage, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984,- Gabrielle Mande], Islamische Erotik, Fribourg: Liber, 1983; Basim F. Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control before the Nineteenth Century, 1983; A. L. al-Sayyid Marsot, Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, Malibu, CA: Undena, 1979.
Maarten Schild

Italy
Apart from classical antiquity, there are two eras in which Italy has a salient interest for the study of homosex­ual behavior. The first stretches from approximately 1250 to 1650 (the Renais­sance, broadly interpreted); the second from World War II to the present.
Italy has a particular attraction for the historian because of its vast ar­chives of material from the premodern period - archives which have not yet been much tapped. For the curious layperson, present-day Italy offers a lively homosex­ual subculture which sprang up after World War II, accelerating notably after the birth of the country's gay movement in 1971.
The Classical Heritage. Contrary to what has often been stated, there was no direct continuity on Italian soil between the homosexuality of Greco-Roman stamp and that which arose after the barbarian invasions. "Greek love" in Italy is in fact a later invention of northern European travelers of the nineteenth century, in­vented to lend dignity to the type of sex that they came to the country to enjoy.
In reality, at the time of the fall of the Roman empire there were recurrent foreign invasions. Over the centuries Ital­ian soil was occupied by the most dispa­rate peoples - Goths, Langobards (Lom­bards) and other Germanic tribes, Byzan­tines, Slavs, Arabs and Berbers, Normans, and Albanians. In addition it would be a mistake to discount the profound effects of the implantation of Christianity. All these factors could not help but disturb the characteristic features of the Greco-Roman world.
To cite an example of how com­plex the amalgam produced by the intro­duction of the customs of foreign peoples, one need only recall that the laws of the Lombards, a Germanic people, displaced Roman law in vast regions of Italy down to the thirteenth century. In fact the last remnants of Lombard law, confined to a few districts of southern Italy, disappeared only with the Napoleonic regime at the start of the nineteenth century. {See Law, Germanic.)
The Latin heritage was signifi­cant in the history of Italy (and not solely in that country) as an ideal image of a golden age which must be recaptured through a "revival." In the Middle Ages this aim took concrete form in the institu­tion known as the Holy Roman Empire, and it was to have later avatars.
This theme is found in jurispru­dence, having come about through the rediscovery and renewed study of Roman law (as concretized in the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian) conducted by the great Bolognese jurists of the twelfth and thir­teenth centuries. This rediscovery is re­sponsible for the West's adoption of the penalty of burning at the stake for sodomites, originally stipulated by the fourth-century Christian emperors of Rome. (The first such burning of which we have docu­mentary evidence dates only from 1266.)
The literary revival, which was accomplished by the labors of philologists and the renewed circulation of surviving ancient texts, was a later task - that of the Renaissance proper.
The process of rediscovery, resto­ration, and reelaboration of classical an­tiquity continued in Italy until the six­teenth century, constituting the backbone of the Renaissance, which was one of Italy's most important contributions to Western civilization. This revival, which in some circles assumed the guise of a real idolatry of the antique, influenced in one way or another the most varied realms of old Italy, from philosophy (as seen in the work of Marsilio Ficino), through language, the arts, and law, to religion itself.
One should not be surprised then if a substantial portion of the evidence on homosexuality in premodem Italy "speaks classically," in the sense that it allows one to see behind it a classical model that gave it inspiration. Of course the same phe­nomenon is to be seen to some degree in the other European countries.
Before the Renaissance. The first homosexual poem of Italy after the classi­cal age is the song, "O admirabile Veneris ydolum" ("Oh, splendid image of love") of the ninth century. It is in fact suffused with classical - even pagan - reminis­cences. Evidently the author was a cleric, that is a member of the only social class that could engage in cultural pursuits before the arrival of the new lay-bourgeois cul­ture after the year 1000.
From the religious sphere comes the first (condemnatory) treatise on homo­sexuality in Italy, the harsh Liber Gomorrhianus of ca. 1050 by St. Peter Damian (1007-1077), a violent invective against the sodomitical clergy, as well as the revealing Sermones subalpini, written in the vernacular at the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century.
Yet a real body of homoerotic poetry, such as that produced in France and the north­ern countries of Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (see Medieval Latin Poetry), has not come to light.
One cannot ignore the appear­ance of laws against sodomy in the statute books of the Italian city states. At first mild, then ever more severe, they began about the middle of the twelfth century.
Only at the end of the twelfth century does Italy show a literary interest in the theme of homosexuality. The course of the thirteenth century is illuminated by a whole constellation of poetry of love and moralizing which directly confronts the subjects of same-sex affection and love, with such well known names from Italian literature asBrunetto Latini (ca. 1211-1294, who was placed by Dante among the sodo­mites in the Inferno}! Rustico di Filippo (second half of the thirteenth century), and Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300).
Special note must be taken of the circle of Perugia love poets of the thir­teenth and fourteenth centuries (major figures are Cecco Nuccoli and Marino Ceccoli), as well as of the Sienese bur­lesque poets of the fourteenth century, who treat homosexual love with the great­est freedom of expression and natural­ness - whether they are approving or con­demning.
A special place belongs to the treatment of homosexuality by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), the "father of the Italian language," in his Divine Comedy.
It should be noted that the whole period was deeply marked, as Michael Goodich has shown, by the ascendency of the Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), and by the growth of a moral­izing trend calling for the reform of cus­toms among certain sectors of the bour­geoisie. The convergence of these two factors led, toward the middle of the four­teenth century, to the enactment of severe laws against sodomy in most of the Italian city states.
The Coming of the Renaissance. As a result of these developments Renais­sance Italy confronted homosexuality with a much more hostile attitude than that which had prevailed several centuries before. The source of this hardening was not so much the Catholic church, which did indeed have a reinforcing role, as those urban strata that in a struggle that stretched over the centuries had pursued a policy of moral reform.
And yet, if in the fourteenth cen­tury homosexual love disappeared from love poetry, the figure of the sodomite lingered, often described in a light-hearted way, in vernacular short stories. The best known author is of course Giovanni Boc­caccio (1313-1375), but alongside him are numerous short story writers and chroni­clers - too many to be cited here - who were not averse to recounting in explicit fashion the diverting adventures of this or that sodomitical character. In some in­stances the classical model becomes dominant (for example Apuleius' Golden Ass in Boccaccio), in others the pure anec­dote prevails.
The fact is that it is just at the start of the fourteenth century that one can detect the first signs pointing to the existence of a sodomite subculture in the great mercantile cities of Italy, including Venice, Siena, Bologna, and Florence. It would be interesting to know to what degree the legislative hardening consti­tuted simply a reaction to the perceived menace of a "deviant" underground which seemed to be proliferating.
Literary documentation and the trial records reveal how homosexual be­havior enjoyed a certain margin of toler­ance and protective silence among the citizens; paradoxically, silence was greater where legal sanctions were most severe, as in Venice, than where they were milder, as in Florence.
Nonetheless it is important not to commit the error of viewing this sub­culture as a kind of prefiguration or rough sketch of the gay "ghettoes" of American cities of our own day. Fourteenth-century sodomites formed a subculture with cer­tain recognizable features, but which was strongly marked by a type of relationship which was regarded as "normal" even by the heterosexual population of the day, though not necessarily by us: the adult-adolescent bond (pederasty). The denizens of this subculture, though accus­tomed to meeting one another, did not have sexual relations one with another, but rather with boys who came into their orbit from time to time (money usually served to facilitate consent). One must never lose sight of this fundamental char­acteristic when one speaks of the homo­sexual subculture of former times.
During the major phase of the Renaissance, with its characteristic show­casing of classical texts, Italian society entered into a period of enlightened toler­ance of homosexual conduct. This toler­ance, to which the so-called libertine cur­rent contributed, fostered a flowering of cultural expression in which homosexual­ity appeared in the forefront.
This efflorescence, noteworthy also in the field of the visual arts, began to lose strength with the coming of the Counterreformation, which imposed a return to a more moralistic climate, and above all an iron discipline over sexual themes.
The Counterreformation. In Italy the Catholic Counterreformation coin­cided with the inception of a period of decline that lasted until the nineteenth century. This decline was not merely economic, stemming in large measure from the shift of trade routes away from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic (to which Italy had no direct access), but also political.
In a changed European climate it was particularly disastrous that Italy saw the persistence of a pattern of many small states (some minuscule) which hindered the creation of any unified nation. The most determined opponent of such unifi­cation was the papacy, which until 1870 held a large-sized state that cut the penin­sula in two at the center.
In this atmosphere of stasis the bourgeois stratum became "feudal," per­mitting itself to be absorbed by the nobil­ity and becoming a parasitic class that was more concerned with preserving the status quo than with keeping up with the times.
The Counterreformation set the seal on these trends of ideological and political conservatism. The treatment of the scientist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) by the Holy Office is symptomatic of the fate of Italian intellectuals during this period. In this way Italian civilization suffered a blow that could not be easily remedied afterwards.
In accordance with the trends, the "enlightened" tolerance toward homo­sexuality that was typical of the Renais­sance gradually disappeared as the genera­tion born before 1550 died off.
In Italian literature evidence is found until about 1650, one example being the book Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, which defended pederasty, but these manifesta­tions become ever rarer and more isolated. In the same period historical evidence on homosexual behavior in Italy diminishes to a trickle, while at the same time it increases in countries like France and Eng­land, which in a fairly short time became as loquacious on homosexuality as Italy had been up until that point. One must add, however, that the historical period that precedes the Risorgimento, the Ital­ian national revival of the nineteenth century, has not been sufficiently studied. Recent scholarship shows that under the conformity imposed by the Counterrefor­mation there continued to flow, like under­ground streams, currents of heterodox thought, such as the libertine one that has been cited.
This fact means that, in order to unearth the indications of nonconformist thought of this period, special attention must be directed to the recovery of unpub­lished manuscripts - samizdat, in effect - created for internal circulation among private circles of enlightened intellec­tuals.
As regards the working class, the persistence of a homosexual cultural pat­tern that has been designated Mediterra­nean made possible the de facto tolerance of same-sex conduct, provided that it conformed to a rigid and prescribed model of behavior.
The Age of Enhghtenment and Positivism. A number of preliminary in­quiries pursued by the present author have shown that it is probable that in the seven­teenth and eighteenth centuries there arose the first prototypes of the insidious type of "repressive tolerance" still practiced to­day in Catholic countries. Even though in the initial phases of the Counterreforma­tion there were new outbreaks of persecu­tion, with the passage of the decades one notes an ever greater reluctance to impose the death penalty for sodomy.
An underground debate, the dimensions of which we are not now in a position to determine, must have taken place. Otherwise one cannot explain the appearance in 1764 of Dei dehtti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments) by Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794). A book that captured the spirit of the times, which influenced legislation throughout Europe, and which called for the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy - such a book cannot have come out of a void.
Nonetheless the fanatical censor­ship that was imposed during those centu­ries, combined with a certain reluctance by Italian historians to enter "obscure zones of a special character," has served to keep us from learning much of homosexual life of the epoch.
The only certainty is that in this period the homosexual subculture took shape and began to come out of hiding, as shown by several studies completed by scholars in the field. We still lack, how­ever, a precise analysis of what happened in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italy; from what is now known it seems that Italian conditions were not very dif­ferent from those of other Catholic coun­tries, such as France, which have been better studied.
Italy Today. Two main factors characterize Italian gay life today: its situ­ation overlapping the two main paradigms of homosexual culture - the central and northern European type, which predomi­nates in northern Italy, and the Mediterra­nean type, which rules the south - and its acceptance of a kind of "social pact," typi­cal of Latin and Catholic countries, be­tween the homosexual community and the state.
The first factor means that homo­sexual lifestyles in Italy are not homoge­neous. In the north the foreign observer, even though he does not fail to register the difference between Italian gay culture and his own, still recognizes the links with central and northern European gay life. Southern Italy, however, follows a com­pletely different model, that of the above-mentioned "Mediterranean homosexu­ality."
Situated astride the boundary of two different cultures, Italian homosexual life lacks homogeneity, embracing as it does lifestyles which are profoundly dif­ferent and even contradictory.
The second characteristic ele­ment is the "social pact" which the politi­cal authorities have tacitly conceded the homosexual minority since the nineteenth century, when sodomy was decriminal­ized thanks to the Napoleonic reforms. In exchange for the renunciation of homo­sexual militancy and advocacy of the right to be different, the state has agreed to respect the abrogation of all specifically antihomosexual laws.
This concession does not mean that homosexual conduct is exempt from stigma, but simply that the task of "social control" in the realm of sexual repression has been left to the Catholic church. Consequently, the state authorities need only intervene when the informal system of social control is not felt to be adequate. This occurred during the fascist period when scores of homosexuals were sent into exile on small islands for periods from some months to several years. Despite this policy, there is no known case of a homo­sexual deported as such to a concentration (extermination) camp or of anyone exe­cuted for his homosexuality.
These contradictory factors ex­plain how it was possible thatfrom 1800 to 1950 Italy was a "wonderland" for foreign gays, who saw in the country a paradise where everything was allowed (hence it was an obligatory stop for every aristo­cratic Anglo-Saxon gay tourist), while at the same time it remained a country in which homosexuals, with rare exceptions, were reluctant to seek affirmation of their own identity, or to proclaim it through fiction and essays.
For generations Italian gay people declined to speak up on a vital question, understanding that repression would be deployed only in response to an attempt to create an "alternative lifestyle" in compe­tition with that of the heterosexual family. In exchange they have benefited from a climate in which, though homosexuality officially did not exist and it was forbidden to mention it even in condemnation, scan­dals were systematically hushed up, the authorities dispensed with any "witch hunts," and the common people refused to make an issue of it. Italy has never had an Oscar Wilde scandal.
Moreover, the Mediterranean culture of homosexuality has long permit­ted a certain phase of homosexual experi­mentation to young heterosexuals in order to safeguard the virginity of nubile girls. Italian homosexuals took advantage of this situation - until the arrival of the "sexual revolution" which, by facilitating premari­tal sexual relations, has progressively re­duced the viability of.this erotic ploy.
Residues of this legacy of compro­mise persist even today in Italian poli­tics - on the one hand in the considerable integration that the gay community has achieved with society in general (no Italian cities have gay ghettoes, the ghetto being a reaction to a society that leaves no other space to the minority than the ghetto it­self), on the other, in the absence, thus far, of phenomena such as the antigay cru­sades of an Anita Bryant or a Jerry Falwell, or the witch hunts occasioned by hysteria over AIDS.
Also a product of this tradition are the lesser strength of the Italian gay movement in comparison with the Anglo-Saxon countries, as well as the reluctance of homosexual intellectuals to "come out." There are no laws to defy, no clearly defin­able immediate objectives, so that the average Italian gay man can hardly grasp the need for an affirmation that, in this context, is more a political choice than a lifestyle choice. This last factor explains the high degree of politicization of the Italian gay movement, which often sur­prises foreign visitors.
This situation should not obscure the fact that the period after World War II has seen the appearance of a generation of intellectuals more or less willing to dis­cuss homosexuality not only in the lives of others, but at times in their own. In recent years there has arisen a new generation with ideas influenced by the gay move­ment and more receptive to a "transgressive" vision of homosexuality.
Among the most important names of the first generation are the nov­elists Giovanni Comisso, Umberto Saba, Carlo Coccioli, and Alberto Arbasino; the poet-novelists Piero Santi, Dario Bellezza, Elio Pecora, Giampiero Bona; the poets Sandro Penna, Nico Naldini, Mario Stef ani; the directors Luchino Visconti and Franco Zeffirelli; the playwrights Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and Giovanni Testori (also a poet); the painters Filippo De Pisis, Aligi Sassu, Ottone Rosai, Mario Schifano, and Renzo Vespignani; and the composer Sylvano Bussotti. To these must be added the complex personality of the poet, novelist, playwright, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Other creative figures whose sexual orientation is known are omitted because their work does not reflect any commit­ment to homosexuality.
Among the most important per­sonalities of the new generation who can be defined without any hesitation as gay (apart from a few who claim the status of bisexuals) are Aldo Busi (unquestionably one of the most important living Italian writers), Piervittorio Tondelli, Dario Trento, Corrado Levi, Riccardo Reim, Giancarlo Rossi, Stefano Moretti, Gino Scartaghiande, Ciro Cascina, and the di­rector Marco Mattolini.
In the last few years theatre, film, music, and the entertainment world in general have experienced a flowering of interesting talent that is openly gay.
The new climate of intellectual openness means that it is now possible to speak of the homosexuality of major fig­ures of the Italian littérature of the past, such as Carlo Emilio Gadda, an innovative Roman writer, and Aldo Palazzeschi, not to mention the nineteenth century patriot Luigi Settembrini and even the great Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837).
Today's Italian gay scene is no­table particularly in the great industrial cities of the north; tourism has also stimu­lated the appearance of a leather scene in Florence. The south and Rome see, by contrast, the prevalence of a more "Medi­terranean" mode: cruising takes place mainly outdoors so that many cities lack locales, such as bars and bathhouses, that are directed at a gay clientele. As a whole the Italians - except for those in Milan and Turin - are still little accustomed to bath­houses as places of gay encounter.
The Italian gay movement dates only from 1971, but it grew rapidly. Today it is organized on a national scale in the Arci-gay confederation, with its seat in Bologna, where there is a gay center ¡11 Cassero) and an archive-library. In 1988 there were twenty-two groups affiliated with Arci-gay, which also issues publica­tions.
Turin and Milan boast their own gay archives linked to centers of gay ini­tiative: one of these, the Fondazione San­dra Penna in Turin, publishes a high-quality annual of gay culture, Sodoma. There is also a gay Catholic movement, active only in the north.
Closely related to the gay move­ment is the informative Milanese monthly Babilonia, the only non-pomographic gay magazine in Italy. Babilonia publishes an annual gay guide in pocket-book format, bilingual inltalian and English and known as Italia Gay.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Arci-gay Nazionale, ed., Omosessuali e stato, Bologna: II Cassero, 1987; Giovanni Dall'Orto, Leggeie omosessuale: bibliogiafia, Turin: Gruppo Abele, 1984; idem, "L'omoscssualita nella poesia volgare italiana fino al tempo di Dante," Sodoma, 3 (1986), 13-37, idem, ed., La vagina strappata, Turin: Gruppo Abele, 1987; Gianni Delfino, ed., Quando le nostre labbre sipailano, Turin: Gruppo Abele, 1986; Fondazione Sandro Penna, ed., Orgoglio e pregiudizio, Turin: Fondazione Sandro Penna, 1983; Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice, Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, 1979; William Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Ezos, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Giovanni Dall'Orto