M


Mabley, Jackie "Moms" (Loretta May Aiken; 1894-1975)
American black comedienne. Bom to poverty in North Carolina, Mabley ran away at the age of 14 to join a minstrel show. After many difficult years, she gained renown and worldly success through her frank portrayals of race and sex before all-black audiences. Mabley was a favorite at Harlem's legendary Cotton Club and at the Club Harlem in Atlantic City, where she performed with such headliners as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway. In her last years, she was able to achieve a "cross-over" to general audi­ences, appearing on television with Merv Griffin, Johnny Carson, Flip Wilson, and Bill Cosby.
Although one of her best-known personas was of a man-crazy older black woman, Mabley regarded herself as a les­bian. Her performances made fun of older men, satirizing the way they wielded au­thority over women as well as the fading of their sexual powers. In 1986-87, the black actress Clarice Taylor commemorated her life and work in an Off Broadway play with music entitled Moms, employing texts by Alice Childress and Ben Caldwell.
While she may be compared with such blues singers as Bessie Smith and Billie Holliday, Mabley's pioneering role in stand-up comedy was unique, and clearly linked to the difference in her sexual ori­entation.

Macdonald, Hector, Sir (1853-1903)
British general. Born the son of a poor Scottish crofter (tenant farmer) on the Black Isle, Macdonald made a career in the British Army, choosing to live abroad where social barriers and conventions mattered far less and a meager officer's wages went farther than they did at home. In 1870, lying about his age, he joined the 92nd, or Gordon, Highlanders, and as the purchase of officers' commissions had been abol­ished, it was possible for a mere private to rise through the ranks and even become a general - which he did. He served in India and accompanied his regiment during a British incursion into Afghanistan. Sent to fight against the rebellious Transvaal col­ony, he was captured by the Boers in the signal defeat of the British at Majuba Hill in June 1881.
In the spring of 1884 Macdonald married in the old Scots style by pledging his troth to his bride with only heaven as their witness. The common law marriage remained a secret even to the War Office, and to the world Macdonald was a stem, somewhat forbidding figure. A son was bom to the couple in 1887 - an only child. The reason for the concealment was that married officers were discouraged in Vic­torian times,- it was believed both that they were less than efficient and that it was unfair to expose them to the constant perils of disease and death on the remote periphery of the Empire. In 1884 also, Macdonald transferred to the first battal­ion in order to see active service in Egypt. In Cairo he met Horatio Herbert Kitch­ener, a young officer of the Royal Engi­neers, under whom he commanded the Egyptian brigade in the Nile campaign against the Dervishes. Here his bravery and resourcefulness earned him the thanks of Parliament and the appointment of aide-de-camp to Victoria, an honor continued by Edward VII. His valor on the battlefield won him the nickname of "Fighting Mac." During the Boer War of 1899-1901 he commanded the Highland Brigade and was wounded in action.
In 1902 he was appointed com­mander of the troops in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). However, "grave suspicions" had begun to form about him, inspired in part by the offence he had given to the closeknit soci­ety of British planters on the island. Ac­cused of a "habitual crime of misbehavior with several schoolboys," he requested leave to return home to discuss the matter with the War Office, which directed a court of inquiry to be held in Ceylon. Macdonald set off in the hope that a ses­sion "behind closed doors" might settle the matter without embarrassment, but in Paris, on learning from the European edi­tion of the New York Herald that the story had been broken to the press, he returned to his hotel room and shot himself in the head. Thus his outstanding military career ended tragically because the homosexual side of his character had been disclosed to an intolerant society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Trevor Royle, Death Before Dishonour: The True Story of Fighting Mac, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company, 1982.
Warren Johansson

Macho
The term macho is simply the Spanish word for "male," but in the con­text of the American gay subculture it designates the male whose virility is os­tentatious and often emphasized by con­ventional symbols - in a word, the tough guy as opposed to the feminine or even effeminate type of homosexual. There is a subtlety in the use of the term in English, because the Latin American norm of heterosexual manhood strikes the Anglo-Saxon as exaggerated and inappropriate. The Hemingway image, with its ambiva­lent and often overstated masculinity, played a role in the adoption of the His­panic term.
The contrast between the "super-male" and the sensitive androgynous type has recurred at various times and places. The split within the early German homo­sexual rights movement stemmed in large part from the unwillingness of the virile man-lovers to identify with the effemi­nate "inverts." Benedict Friedlaender and Karl Franz von Leexow focused on this virile type, as did (in part) Edward Carpen­ter in England. They cited in evidence the long line of homosexual or bisexual mili­tary leaders, from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar in antiquity to Prince Eu­gene of Savoy and Charles XII of Sweden in the eighteenth century, not to mention many figures in the medieval Islamic and Japanese annals of warfare. This phase of the pre-1933 movement was all but forgot­ten by the 1950s, and the homophile movement of that decade stressed the ef­feminate model who could pursue "real men," but would never think of becoming one. This style of behavior was almost normative in the gay subculture of that era.
In the 1960s, however, gay circles saw the emergence of a new style of man­liness, influenced in part by a trend toward proletarianization in the counterculture: blue j eans and casual clothing, rock music, the surliness known as "attitude," beer instead of cocktails. The leather cult emerged as a distinctive minority style, making inroads even into the mainstream of the gay subculture. The emphasis on the masculine culminated in the clone look, with its emphasis on rugged, though neat clothing (the Hollywood/television fan­tasy of how men dressed in the American West of the late nineteenth century), and a body kept in good shape by regular exer­cise in the gymnasium.
Some observers claim that the macho aspect of the homosexual subcul­ture is strongly conditioned by the inner anxieties that many gay men harbor on the subject of their own maleness, which is not an absolute and unalterable given but a matter of physical culture and personal grooming and dress. In other words, butchness must be maintained, its presence can never be taken for granted. There are also pressures to conform to the current notion of what is acceptable and appealing. The haircuts and informal clothing of one generation are out-of-date in the next. American culture has come to tolerate an increasing amount of exposure of the body: what was strictly beachwear forty years ago is now de ligueui in metropolitan areas in summertime, hence there is greater pressure on the American male to "keep his body in shape."
At the same time, the ideological currents of the late 1960s led many hetero­sexual men to adopt styles of dress and hairdo that would have been intolerably effeminate in earlier decades. Such shifts in the definition of masculinity have given men a greater freedom to express their maleness in symbols congruent with their self-image.
Warren Johansson

Mackay, John Henry (1864-1933)
German poet, novelist, and anar­chist writer. Mackay also campaigned for the acceptance of man/boy love.
Born in Greenock, Scotland, on February 6, 1864, Mackay was scarcely two years old when his Scottish father, a marine insurance broker, died. His mother then returned with her son to her native Germany, where she later remarried. After completing his schooling, Mackay was briefly an apprentice in a publishing house and then attended several universities, but never completed his studies. An allow­ance from his mother, who was of a well-off merchant family, gave him enough money to live modestly, so that he was able to choose the career of writer without worrying about eventual sales of his books. This situation changed in later years, espe­cially after World War I when runaway inflation in Gern^any wiped out the value of the annuity he had purchased with money inherited from his mother. Thus his last years were spent in relative pov­erty. He settled in Berlin in 1892 and died there on May 18, 1933.
Mackay began publishing in 1885, but instant fame came in 1891 with his non-novel Die Anarchisten (The Anar­chists), which also appeared in English that same year and was quickly translated into six other languages. He also published short stories, several volumes of lyric poetry, and in 1901 Dei Schwimme (The Swimmer), one of the first literary sports novels. This output was then interrupted, but when his Collected Works were printed in 1911, they already filled eight volumes. In the meantime he was engaged in a literary campaign, using the pseudonym Sagitta, to promote the acceptance of man/ boy love. The effort was crushed in 1909 by the state, which simply declared the Sag­itta books immoral and ordered them destroyed. But Mackay completed and published underground a one-volume complete edition in 1913. In 1926, again as Sagitta, Mackay released his classic novel of man/boy love, Dei Puppenjunge (The Hustler), which is set in the milieu of boy prostitutes in Berlin in the 1920s.
At the time, Mackay was nearly unique in not basing his argument on a biological theory of homosexuality (e.g., the theory of "sexual intermediates" of Magnus Hirschfeld) or on a glorification of male cultural values. As an individualist anarchist, Mackay applied his principle of "equal freedom for all" to all relations between and within the sexes. He did not exalt man/boy love above others. For Mackay, all forms of love, if truly love, were equally valid. That love between men and boys was possible he knew from his own experience; and he rejected the reformist efforts of Hirschfeld, who was willing to raise the legal "age of consent" (Hirschfeld proposed sixteen) in order to gain the legalization of adult homosexual­ity. Mackay basically saw his fight for "the nameless love" (as he called it) as part of the general struggle for the right of the individual to freedom from all oppression of whatever kind.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edward Morning, Kunst und Anarchismus: "Innere Zusammenhänge" in den Schriften lohn Henry Mackay, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Verlag der Mackay Gesellschaft, 1983; Thomas A. Riley, Germany's Poet-Anarchist föhn Henry Mackay, New York: Revisionist Press, 1972; K. H. Z. Solneman, Der Bahnbre­cher John Henry Mackay: Sein Leben und sein Werk, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Verlag der Mackay Gesellschaft, 1979.
Hubert Kennedy

Mamluks
The Mamluk military elite, pur­chased anew in each generation from the steppes of Eurasia, ruled Egypt and Syria from 1249, when they defeated an invad­ing army of Crusaders led by Louis DC, until they were overcome by the mass army of Napoleon in 1799. Their unusual social system suggests the interlinked acceptance of homosexuality, relatively high status of women, and lack of inheri­tance. Yet amidst the details of battles and palace intrigues in histories of the period, there is disappointingly little evidence of the everyday life even of the rulers.
Neither the wealth nor the status of Mamluk could be inherited. Upon the death of a warrior, his property, house, goods, wife, children, and slaves were sold for the benefit of the treasury. Thus, the common motivation in most social sys­tems of passing on wealth and position to one's children was missing among the Mamluks. Their children were proscribed from becoming soldiers, as the elite of the next generation was always recruited afresh from Eurasia. Attempts were made to pass the sultanate itself through primogeni­ture, but time after time the throne was usurped by the strongest amir. A more successful attempt by lesser Mamluks to guarantee a place for descendants was to endow mosques and libraries tended by heirs, who could not directly receive any patrimony.
Mamluks did not much mix with the Arab populations they were bought to protect. For the most part they despised the Arab language and kept to their native Turkish dialects. They also lived apart from the existing cities in their own colo­nies and only rarely intermarried with local notables' daughters.
Along with many special preroga­tives (notably their own courts of law), the mamluks were distinguished from the rest of the population by being forbidden di­vorce (out of keeping with a fundamental tenet of Islam). Still more astonishing, their wives received a fixed salary from the state, just as did the warriors themselves. These two customs greatly enhanced the autonomy of women among the Mamluks, although they may also have discouraged marriage altogether.
The mode of homosexuality fa­vored by the Mamluks was pederasty, apparently with boys recruited from the wilderness who were undergoing military training, rather than with boys raised in civilized Egypt. None of the military his­torians who have written about the Mamluks seem to have surmised that sexual attraction might have played some part in selecting which boys to buy.
In addition to the general ped­erasty with the cadets, several sultans showed marked favoritism for some of their courtiers. The most interesting case is that of an-Nasir Abu as-Sa'adat Muham­mad, who scandalized his society in 1498 by the "unnatural" interest he showed in the (black) Sudanese slaves who bore fire­arms, and for their leader, Farajallah, in particular. The youthful Sultan attempted to raise the status of the modern weapons that only a few years later would be turned on the traditional, brave, sword-wielding Mamluk cavalry with devastating results by the Ottomans. This attempt to modern­ize the technology of warfare was moti­vated in part by the Sultan's taste for the black men who had been assigned the use of the low status weaponry. Homophobic historians are, thus, presented the dilemma that the sultan who tried to modernize the army - in precisely the way they recognize was necessary for continued military suc­cess - was a youth of "unstable eharacf er" much given to "debauchery" and that his "debauchery" was inextricably tied to­gether with his motivation for the mod­ernization that might have maintained Mamluk military superiority.
When the (white) Mamluks re­volted and slew Farajallah, they told the Sultan, "We disapprove of these acts [of favor for the black firearm users]. If you wish to persist in these tastes, you had better ride by night and go away with your black slaves to faroff places!" (Lewis, p. 75-76). The sultan agreed to desist.
When the Mamluks began the sixteenth century with one of their tradi­tional thirteenth century cavalry charges against the Ottoman infantry of Selim I, they met their first defeat. Several centu­ries later, Ottoman control began to slip, the Mamluk aristocracy regained domi­nance, and the venerable cavalry charge that was their only tactic - whether against Mongols, Ottomans or French armies of Louis LX or Napoleon - was mowed down by a fusillade from Napoleon's army. Rifles of 1798 proved even more deadly than the 1517 models that had first revealed the obsolescence of the Mamluk cavalry.
The Mamluks exemplify a social system not built on family aggrandize­ment and patrimony. Without inheritance, with a very slim likelihood of living to a peaceful old age, and with wives paid di­rectly by the state, the usual motivation for building families was lacking. The Mamluk case shows that both a military tradition and an advanced artistic culture can be transmitted with no bands of blood. The guardians of high Arabic civilization from barbarians (whether Mongols or Crusaders), each new unrelated genera­tion of recruits to the elite was noted for appreciation for and patronage of the arts. The Mamluks built the mosques, palaces, and tombs that are the glory of Cairo, and "delighted in the delicaterefinement which art could afford their home life, were lav­ish in their endowment of pious founda­tions, magnificent in their mosques and palaces and fastidious iri'the smallest de­tails of dress, furniture and court etiquette" (Lane-Poole, p. 97), though they were re­cruited from their rude surroundings not for their aestheticism or refined tastes but for their horsemanship and prowess with sword and bow.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. David Ayalon, Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom, second ed., Totowa, NJ: Frank Cass, 1978; John B. Glubb, Soldiers of Fortune, Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973; Stanley Lane-Poole, Cairo, London: J. S. Virtue, 1898; Bernard Lewis, Race and Color in Islam, New York: Harper 8i Row, 1971.
Stephen O. Murray

MANICHAEANISM
Manichaeanism was a religion based on the teachings of the visionary prophet Mani (ca. 216-ca. 277 A. D.), who lived and was crucified in southern Baby­lonia. His doctrine incorporated various aspects of the Gnostic, Christian, and Zoroastrian belief systems, to which he fused a neo-Platonic and Stoic ethical strain.
Essentially Manichaeanism was a dualistic religion in which the universe was divided into kingdoms of light and darkness which were in juxtaposition, each reaching out into infinity. Heading one force was the Prince of Darkness while the other was directed by the God of Light. Human beings were called to choose which of the forces they would follow while they were on earth, where their material body acted as a prison for the spiritual light. To gain the Kingdom of Light it was necessary to free the spirit from the material: this separation could be accomplished by avoid­ing sexual activities and refusing to eat foods resulting from sexual union. Light was released and grew stronger by eating bread, vegetables, or fruit, and was kept imprisoned by eating flesh, drinking wine, or having sexual intercourse - all of which reinforced the material [and evil) aspects of being human. Intercourse leading to procreation was particularly offensive because it caused other souls to be impris­oned in spiritual bodies, thus continuing the cycle of good versus evil. Such an austere religion was difficult to practice, but the Manichaeans effected a compro­mise for their believers by dividing all humanity into three principal groups: (1) the Elect, those believers who had re­nounced private property, practiced sex­ual abstinence, observed strict vegetarian­ism, and never engaged in trade; (2) the Auditors, those who believed in the teach­ings of Mani and who were striving to become Elect, but could not as yet adhere to all the requirements; and (3) all the rest of humanity who did not know or accept Mani's teachings and were lost in wicked­ness.
St. Augustine of Hippo, who died in 430, was a Manichaean for some eleven years. Undoubtedly the system's austerity ., - - in sexual matters left an endurmg^mpreii in his later Christian writings, and these in turn were enormously influential in im­posing a standard of sex only within mar­riage and solely for procreation for over a thousand years in the West.
Apart from some eastern off­shoots, Manichaeanism proper died out in the early Middle Ages. Yet a related dualistic sect called the Paulicians appeared in the Byzantine Empire, and this trend in turn contributed to the Bogomil heresy, documented in the Balkans by the tenth century. In its turn Bogomilism spread to the West, where it became known as Albigensianism or Catharism. The Albigensians were popularly known as bougies, from their Bulgarian origin. (This term eventually gave rise to the English word bugger.) Although the highest rank of Albigensians, the perfecti, were supposed to abstain from sex, in keeping with the Manichaean precept that procreation was evil, this principle was apparently inter­preted by some as allowing same-sex ac­tivity which could not lead to impregna­tion. One must allow, of course, for some exaggeration on the part of Catholic oppo­nents, whose zeal to stamp out Catharism knew no bounds. Yet a detailed trial record (1323) of one Arnold of Vemiolle, residing in Pamiers in the south of France, seems to provide an authentic record of the combi­nation of sodomy and heresy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Peter R. L. Brown, "The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire," in his Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, London: Faber, 1977, pp. 94-118.
Vem L. Bullough

Mann, Klaus (1906-1949)
German author and critic (prose, lyric, drama, and nonfiction). The themes of his literary works, to a greater extent than is the case with other authors, rose out of his own life: loneliness, suffering, outsider status, decadence, opposition to fascism, and homosexuality. This oldest son of Thomas Mann's six children, Klaus played an important role in German let­ters as an author, as a critic of the younger generation of authors, as the editor of a literary/political journal, and as a forceful voice against the Third Reich while in American exile.
Mann lived an openly homosex­ual life and included homosexual charac­ters or portrayals of homosexuality in many of his works. In his first collection of stories, Voi dem Leben (Before Life, 1925), he describes a vision of homosexuality which would change little over the years: homo­sexuality is normal and natural, but the status of the homosexual as outsider makes integration into any larger social unit impossible. While this stance affords a critical view, it dooms the homosexual continually to attempt to open a door forever closed to him.
In his autobiography, The Turn­ing Point (1942), Mann wrote: "To be an outsider is the one unbearable humili­ation." That belief shaped his portrayal of male and female homosexuality in such works as Anja und Esther (1925), Der fromme Tanz ¡1926), Abenteuer (1929), and Treffpunktim Unendlichen (1932). In each, same-sex love ends or bears no hope of success, for those involved switch their affections to a heterosexual love object, literally succumb to the futility of such relationships and die, or continue to suffer a lonely existence. Often, homosexuality functions as a symbol of the decadence Mann saw within his own generation. A futile society can engender only futile love. Mann's view of homosexuality does not transcend that hopelessness as his literary works did not articulate a method of social or political change. This stands in contrast to his non-fiction works and to his in­volvement with the U.S. Army in working for the end of National Socialism and toward a more egalitarian future. Yet his fictional view seems to reveal the truth, for Klaus Mann chose to end the existence in which he could not overcome that hopelessness.
In exile, he turned to the past for inspiration: Alexander ( 1930), Symphonie pathétique (1935), and Vergittertes Fenster (1937). These great men from the homosexual pantheon - Alexander the Great, Tchaikovsky, andLudwigll - func­tion, however, as lonely figures whose love separates them from their societies. His most openly homosexual novel, Windy Night, Rainy Morrow (also called Peter and Paul, 1947), remained unfinished at his death.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Wilfried Dirschauer, ed., Klaus Mann und das Exil, Worms: Georg Heintz, 1973; Michel Griinewald, Klaus Mann, 1906-1949: Eine Bibliogra­phie, Munich: edition spangenberg im Ellermann Verlag, 1984; Fredric Kroll, ed., Klaus-Mann-Schriftenreihe, vols. 1-5, Wiesbaden: Edition Klaus Blahak, 1976-1986; Friedrich Krôhnke, Propa­ganda fur Klaus Mann, Frankfurt am Main: Materialis Verlag, 1981; Susanne Wolfram, Die tödliche Wunde: Über die Untrennbarkeit von Tod und Eros in Werk von Klaus Mann, Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe 1, vol. 935, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986; Stefan Zynda, Sexualität bei Klaus Mann, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1986.
James W. Jones

Mann, Thomas (1875-1955)
German novelist, critic, and es­sayist. One of Germany's greatest authors of this century, Mann bridged nineteenth-century realism and twentieth-century modernist style. For many in the German-speaking world, Mann was the epitome of the "educated burgher," that man of the upper middle class whose comfortable economic status allowed him to acquire not only possessions, but a cultural educa­tion, a spirit of refinement and good taste. Indeed, his works and his interests reflect such a status. Many of his stories and novels depict an upper middle class milieu and the concerns of family life (e.g. Bud­denbrooks, 1901). Mann was greatly influ­enced by some of the nineteenth century's German cultural icons: Wagner, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, as well as by the music and theories of Arnold Schoenberg.
Yet he battled against a complete identification with such a status. His major works speak in an ironic narrative voice in order to create distance between the sub­ject matter [Bürgertum, family life, in short: integration into the status quo) and the author. Indeed, one of Mann's major themes throughout his work concerned the cen­tral problematic of his own life, namely how to combine the seemingly antithetic spheres of artist and everyday man with­out destroying the uniqueness of art in the banalities of existence. An additional, more personal struggle, but still evident in his work and related to the previous theme, is Mann's sexual desire for other males, par­ticularly for males younger than himself. In his "essay" "Über die Ehe" ("On Mar­riage": actually part of a letter to a friend), Mann described his belief that homosexu­ality was linked to death, and, although it may play a role in the formation of states (compare the theories of Blüher), it under­mined the family.
These two themes are woven into several of Mann's best works. Death in Venice (1912) depicts the downfall of the writer Gustav Aschenbach after he be­comes entranced with a young Polish boy, Tadzio, whom he sees at a Venice resort. The boy embodies the spiritual beauty Aschenbach has sought but his desire and pursuit of this angehe youth led him to his death. Adolescent love between two males figures strongly in Tonio Kröger [ 1903) and in Magic Mountain (1924) as a factor which separates the character more strongly involved (Tonio and Hans Castorp, respec­tively) from his society. Doctor Faustus (1947), Mann's great novel about Germany's descent into fascism, also contains an artist figure who is homosex­ual. As in the other works, homosexuality is linked to creativity, but when it is not overcome by a move to heterosexuality, balanced by other forces, it inevitably leads to destruction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Gerhard Harle, Die Gestalt des Schönen: Untersuchung zur (Homosexuahtätsthematik in Thomas Manns Roman 'Der Zauberberg,' (Hochschulschriften Literaturwissen­schaft, vol. 74), Königstein: Hain Verlag bei Athenäum, 1986; CA. M. Noble, Krankheit, Verbrechen und künstler -isches Schaffen bei Thomas Mann (Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe 1, vol. 30), Bern: Herbert Lang, 1970; T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann: "Der Tod in Venedig": Text, Materialien, Kommen­tar, Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1983; Hans Wanner, Individualität, Identität und Rolle: Das frühe Werk Heinrich Manns und Thomas Manns Erzählungen "Gladius Dei" and "Der Tod in Venedig," Munich: Tuduv-Ver­lagsgesellschaft, 1976.
James W. Jones

Mansfield, Katherine (1888-1923)
New Zealand short-story writer, who resided mainly in England and Eu­rope. Born Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp, the writer was the daughter of a prominent New Zealand businessman. In 1908 she moved to England where she gravitated to bohemian circles, entering into a brief unhappy marriage. A year in Germany produced a volume of short stories, In a German Pension (1911). Re­turning to England, she began an impor­tant liaison with the editor and writer John Middleton Murry, whom she finally mar­ried in 1918. While personal circumstances and the state of her health denied Mans­field the stamina to attempt novels, she compensated by refining her short stories so that each made a memorable point.
Having developed tuberculosis in 1917, after World War I she moved to the country establishment of the mystic George Gurdjief f, La Prieuré near Fontaine-bleau south of Paris. Exuberantly hetero­sexual himself, Gurdjieff had a number of lesbian and male homosexual acolytes, and was at the time generally linked with "advanced thought." Unfortunately, Mansfield's guru decided to cure her tuber­culosis by having her sleep in an unheated stable. She died at La Prieuré in January 1923.
When she was eighteen and still living in New Zealand, Mansfield fell in love with a painter, Edith Bendall, who was twenty-seven. However, Bendall soon married, denying that there was anything sexual in her relations with the future writer. Yet Mansfield had a lifelong rela­tionship with Ida Constance Baker, whom she met at college in London. She referred to Baker as her "slave," her "wife," "the Monster," and "the Mountain." Despite these epithets, throughout her life Mans­field relied on her, taking her money and possessions when she needed them. Later, when her circumstances had improved, she employed Baker as a personal servant. It is possible that D. H. Lawrence based the lesbian episode in his novel The Rainbow on material gleaned indirectly from Mans­field. While some have denied any lesbian component to Mansfield's personality, the cumulative evidence makes this denial unlikely, and she is probably best regarded as bisexual.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, New York: Knopf, 1987.
Evelyn Cettone

Mardi Gras and Masked Balls
Both of pagan-Christian descent, they survive in only a few places today. Carnivalesque observances of this kind have long homosexual associations.
Historical Development. Mardi Gras and masked balls are not so very distant cousins, stemming from a union of pagan religious-theatrical festival and Christian tradition. The ancient Greek Anthesteria, honoring Dionysus with a boisterous mid-February revel in which celebrants, costumed as satyrs and mae­nads, drank, danced, feasted, and forni­cated, later blended with the Roman Februa and Lupercalia. Held at the same time of year, the latter two rituals centered on protecting villagers and livestockfrom wild animal molestation and on insuring fertil­ity. In earlier centuries, young nobles, acting as priests and called creppi or "he-goats," chased naked youths, representing wolves, through grain fields in a sort of reverse-molestation rite. The chase cli­maxed in festal drinking, feasting, and ceremonial sacrifice of dogs (wolves) and goats. Celebration of this festival contin­ued until A.D. 494when the church, unable to suppress it, shrouded it in religious garb as the Feast of the Purification of the Vir­gin. But many of the common people continued the old celebration.
Similarly, the masking associated with Greek and Roman drama, which it­self had originated in music, song, and dance in honor of Dionysus, survived in medieval mystery, miracle, and morality plays, and in more altered form, in mum­mers' plays and morris dances. A small gilded beard instead of a full mask, for example, served in the Middle Ages to identify St. Peter. Italy's medieval theatre retained a particularly high degree of spec­tacular and magnificent display, as well as use, in street processions, of "players' wagons" from the old Roman carnival tradition.
Because medieval religious drama focused on the Easter passion, Holy Week would normally have been the time for most of that age's theatrical presentations and their associated festivities. But the forty-day pre-Easter period of Lenten fast­ing and abstinence imposed by the church in the seventh century precluded that possibility. Instead, Lent effectively sepa­rated the devotional elements of theatre from the festive. The devotional elements were reserved for Holy Week itself, and the feasting and festive elements were made to precede the beginning of Lent.
Thus the pre-Lenten festivities fell during the time of year still associated, in the minds of many people, with the old pagan holiday. Thus evolved the tradition of plunging into fleshly indulgence during the days immediately preceding Lent. The last day for such worldly indulgence, the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday (which begins the Lenten season, and on which Catholics go to confession and are forgiven the sins committed in days previous), became the high point of the new festival. Hence Mardi gras, or "Fat Tuesday" in French alludes to a fatted ox paraded through the streets on that day, before being butchered for feasting. In England the day is called Shrove, Shrift, or Confes­sion Tuesday, and in the Germanies Fastendienstag or Fastnacht for the fasting required out of religious obligation to fol­low that day. Common in medieval Eu­rope, and extravagant by the time of the Renaissance, Mardi Gras celebrations survived the sixteenth-century religious reformations only in Catholic Europe, for rough-and-tumble capital of France's fron­tier Louisiana colony, masked balls repre­sented little more than stylish imitations of the mother country's social forms. But before the end of the eighteenth century, public dance halls adopted the trappings of masque and rented simple disguises to those among their patrons who failed to bring their own. After the United States purchased Louisiana from Napoleon in 1803 and began trying, largely unsuccess­fully, to force its Anglo-Protestant values and racial attitudes on carefree, tolerant, French, Catholic New Orleans, the masked balls took on a new importance for the city's natives. Behind their masks and under their cloaks, rich and poor, black and white, free and slave, straight and gay could meet and mingle, safe from authori­ties. Along with "quadroon balls," public dance halls run by free people of color but to which white men regularly went in quest of free black mistresses, masked balls flourished until the Civil War ended slavery in the 1860s. Vestiges of the masque tradition remain today, not only in the markedly high degree of transvestism seen in New Orleans streets, but in the pro­nounced and unparalleled delight that the local population, black as well as white, takes in the inordinate number of female impersonators featured by straight night­clubs throughout the city.
New Orleans' masked balls also bore, historically, a direct relationship to the city's Mardi Gras. Celebrated since the original French colonizers landed at the mouth of the Mississippi River on Fat Tuesday of 1699, Carnival came under hostile attacks from the city's new Ameri­can masters after the Louisiana Purchase. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the ballrooms, of which the "Salle de St. Louis" and the "Cafe de Paris" were particularly notorious for their racial and sexual mix, served as meeting and robing places for groups bent upon holding Mardi Gras masques and parades.
Unable to stamp out Mardi Gras, the ruling American elite changed its tac-
Protestantism either abandoned Lent alto­gether or so weakened its strictures as to make any pre-Lenten fleshly indulgence pointless. In England, for example, the only remaining vestige of the festival is a now near-forgotten tradition of eating buttered pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.
On the other hand, the Reforma­tion did not affect the tradition of mask­ing. Renaissance princes and nobles took theatrical performances out of the hands of clerics, secularized them, and made them into court spectacles and masquerades. The anonymity afforded by masks soon made masked balls, as well as individual masking for an evening on the town, the rage of Europe. So masked, a Romeo could infiltrate the household of his love; a Turk could move unobserved; and a Henri III of France could accost boys in Paris dives. The practice migrated from the continent to England, beginning in 1717 when the Swiss entrepreneur John James Heidegger organized public masked balls at the Haymarket Theatre in London.
For the most part, both Mardi Gras and masked balls died with the ancien regime at the end of the eighteenth century. Mardi Gras survived the nine­teenth century to continue into the twen­tieth in only a few Catholic cities, most notably in Venice, Munich, and Cologne; on certain Caribbean islands, where it acquired many African attributes; in Rio de Janeiro, where it was heavily influenced by both African and American Indian tra­dition; and in New Orleans, where, while incorporating a number of African and Indian elements, it preserved more of its original European form.
In Sydney, Australia, the local Gay Pride March was moved from wintry June to late-summer February and became the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, which is now the city's largest annual street parade.
New Orleans. The Louisiana city was the only place where masked balls continued into modern times in an unbro­ken tradition. Begun as private affairs in the mid-1700s, when the city was the tic, and in 1857 simply coopted the holi­day. By the end of the century it had tied Carnival into the world of New Orleans high society. The Mardi Gras season be­came the social season; debutantes reigned, and continue to reign today, as queens of the fifty or more "krewes," the Carnival organizations that hold parades; and the spectacular masked balls to which the parades lead function as the city's debu­tante parties.
The pageantry and costuming, the anonymity of masking, and the freewheel­ing tolerance and sexual permissiveness characteristic Carnival made it a natural attraction for homosexuals. From early on, individuals as well as organized groups took part in the festival, first with greater decorum and later with greater abandon. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, groups of affluent young men, still dressed in white-tie formals from balls the night before, drank, sang, and danced together in the streets on Mardi Gras day, but went little further.
Black celebrants, on the other hand, showed considerably more exuber­ance. A group of black transvestites calling themselves "The Million Dollar Dolls," made Carnival appearances from the 1920s through the 1940s dressed in extravagant wigs, sequined blouses, and leotards cov­ered with hundreds of one-dollar bills. In 1931 the King of Zulu, the major black Carnival krewe, chose as his queen one of the city's most outrageous female imper­sonators. And the relationships of the runneis, spy boys, and flag boys, youths who attend the needs of the braves of the nine famous, and curious, straight, black, all-male Carnival groups called "Indians," are reminiscent of the relationships be­tween ancient Greek warriors and their young pages.
In 1959 a number of individuals who had been masking in groups for some years formally organized the first gay Mardi Gras krewe, Yuga-Duga. Established ad hoc as a mockery of straight krewes and balls, it caught on and lasted a rocky three years, including a police raid on its first ball, only to disband in 1962. But other gay krewes, intent upon establishing perma­nent social organizations, immediately formed. By the end of the eighties, there were twelve, including one all-female organization. The gay krewes now closely copy, and often equal in size and wealth, the straight krewes they once parodied. Each holds a series of "King Cake" parties that begin on Twelfth-night (January 6) and end at Mardi Gras; some have elabo­rate parades. All stage, during Carnival season, huge masked balls featuring spec­tacular tableaux that rival, or sometimes surpass, their straight counterparts. The gay balls fill the five weeks before Mardi Gras day. Though technically private af­fairs, the balls fill with invited guests, most of whom are straight, the 2,000-plus-seat civic arenas in which they are held. This popularity makes them, far and away, the largest regularly scheduled gay social events in the world.
Lucy f. Fair

Marées, Hans von (1837-1887)
German painter. Marées was born into comfortable circumstances in Des­sau, where his father was a jurist and poet and his mother a cultivated scion of a Jewish banking family. After study with Karl Stef feck in Berlin in 1853-54, he gravi­tated to Munich, then Germany's premier center of artistic culture. There he struck up a friendship with the society painter Franz von Lenbach, who in 1864 took him to Italy where Marées subsisted for a time making copies of the Old Masters. Since the time of Goethe, Italy had been the promised land of sensitive Germans, and Marées, even more loyal than the Italophile painters of the time (the "Deutsch-Römer"), was to remain there for the rest of his life - except for the period 1869-73 which he passed in Berlin and Dresden. Italian landscapes and Italian men (espe­cially peasants and fishermen) - together with such Renaissance masters as Signorelli, Giorgione, and Michelangelo - were to provide unfailing sources of inspi­ration. These interests contributed to his mastery - unsurpassed for his time - of the theme of the male nude. Marees' frescoes in the Zoological Institute of Naples (1873) were his first monumental works - an impulse he continued in his celebrated triptychs.
Marees, who never married, main­tained a lifelong pair bond with the art theorist Konrad Fiedler (1841-1895). His deepest attachment, however, was to the sculptor Adolph vonHildebrand, ten years his junior, who helped him with the Naples frescoes. For several months the two art­ists lived in virtual isolation in the monas­tery of San Francesco near Florence, where Hildebrand posed for a major Marees canvas Three Youths among Orange Trees (1875-80). Later, to the painter's sorrow, relations lapsed.
Marees' work is characterized by a rich coloristic chiaroscuro that creates a mysterious bond between his figures and their landscape setting. The prevailing mood is one of arcadian nostalgia, suffused with classical and medieval reminis­cences - the former recalling such con­temporaries as the French painters Puvis de Chavannes and Odilon Redon, and the latter the English Pre-Raphaelites. Several canvases show a man who, while embrac­ing a woman, looks wistfully at a third figure, a man - as if pondering the choice between female and male love. Marees' last major work is an enigmatic version of The Rape of Ganymede (1885).
Marees had no immediate follow­ers and was little appreciated until the twentieth century. Even today his works defy assimilation into any of the standard sequences of the history of art; they belong to a category of their own, accessible only to a select few BIBLIOGRAPHY. Christian Lenz, et al., Hans von Marees, Munich: Prestel, 1987.
Wayne R. Dynes

Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593)
English playwright and poet. Born two months before Shakespeare, Marlowe was the son of an established and respect­able shoemaker in Canterbury, where he attended the King's School, later going on to take both his B.A. and M.A. degrees at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. One month before he was to appear for his commencement in 1587, amid rumors of his conversion to Catholicism and flight to France, the university received a letter from the Queen's Privy Council excusing his absence and assuring them of his loyal service to Elizabeth. This letter has cre­ated a great deal of speculation about the dashing and iconoclastic young man's activities, suggesting that he was probably working as a government spy.
The final six years of his short life were spent in London where "Kit" Mar­lowe was usually involved in something scandalous or illegal, resulting in several scrapes with the law and at least one prison confinement. During these years, he pro­duced his slender but highly important and influential canon: Dido Queen of Carthage (1586), Tamburlaine I and II (1597), The Jew of Malta (1589), The Mas­sacre at Paris (1590), Edward II (1591), Doctor Faustus (1592), and the unfinished narrative poem Hero and Leander. The first genuine poet to write for the English theatre was killed, perhaps assassinated, under highly suspicious circumstances by a knife wound to the head in a private dining room in an inn in Deptford on May 30, 1593.
Twelve days before his death, Marlowe had been arrested on charges of atheism, stemming in part from his repu­tation and from accusations made against him by fellow playwright Thomas Kyd, who had been charged earlier; Kyd's claim was based on documents seized during a search of the rooms both men used for writing. This sort of sensation followed Marlowe throughout his life and, seem­ingly, was fostered by the poet himself.
After his death, claims about him became more personal and explicit. In the proceed­ings of his inquest, government informer Richard Baines claimed that Marlowe had said that "all they that love not Tobacco & Boies were fooles," and in 1598, Francis Meres wrote that he "was stabbed to death by a bawdy seruing man, a riuall of his in his lewde loue." However characteristic of what we do know of Marlowe's life, these posthumous comments do little to estab­lish his homosexuality.
However, Marlowe's work does demonstrate an understanding and com­passion for mythological and historical homosexuality. His Hero and Leander deals directly with Jupiter's passionate infatuation for Ganymede, a story which is also mentioned in Dido, and his masterwork, Edward II, based on fact, can be considered the first gay play in English.
An effeminate child, Edward was given as a companion the orphaned son of a Gascon knight at age 14 by his royal father, who hoped that the handsome and virile 16-year-old Piers Gaveston would exert a positive and masculine influence on his son. However, Edward fell passion­ately in love, and the king banished Gaveston in 1307. Marlowe's play begins shortly after this point with Edward (who had become king upon his father's death) immediately recalling his love to court, much to the anger of his barons, who demand Gaveston's permanent banish­ment. Edward, more the lover than the ruler, will accept nothing of this and even shares his throne with Gaveston, who is eventually seized and beheaded. Enraged in his grief, Edward involves himself in a bloody civil war, eventually taking an­other lover, young Spenser, who also is killed by the barons. Edward himself is seized, forced to abdicate, and, in 1327, is murdered by having a heated poker in­serted into his anus, "intended as just retribution for his sins." In this one play, Marlowe surpasses the achievements of many explicitly gay writers in his sensi­tive and complex portrayal of a doomed and passionate relationship between two men caught up in a repressive and homo­phobic society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Alan Bray, Homosexu­ality in Renaissance England, London: Gay Men's Press, 1982; Paul H. Kochner, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of His Thought, Learning, and Character, Durham, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1946.
Rodney Simará

Marriage
It has long been observed that many married men and women have sex­ual desires for members of their own sex. In the case of those who are primarily homosexual in orientation (Kinsey Inci­dence nos. 4 to 6), the question which follows is why they marry. Marriage may be camouflage, a response to societal or familial pressure, and the relationship uncbnsummated; marriages of conven­ience between gay men and lesbians are not unknown. Marriage may also occur because the person does not understand or is unable to accept his or her sexual makeup; some of the latter group turn to marriage with the unrealistic hope of changing themselves. The desire for chil­dren is a motive for some, as is a desire for the public commitment and legal rights only available, at present, to heterosexual couples. Some simply happen to fall in love with a member of the opposite sex and try to make the best of it, and some, while preferring sexual partners of the same sex, or the anonymity and promiscuity readily available in the gay male world, prefer a marital partner of the opposite gender. A successful union of this kind is possible if honesty and tolerance are found on both sides, or if the bisexual partner is able to keep any extramarital activities from the other partner. Some report that a person aware and accepting of the homosexual component within him- or herself makes a better partner in a heterosexual relationship.
In the case of married persons who are primarily heterosexual (Kinsey 1 or 2), the problem is somewhat different: how to deal with occasional erotic desires for a partner of the same gender. In theory this is equally a problem for those in homosexual relationships who desire occasional sexual interaction with mem­bers of the opposite sex, and interest in the opposite sex can be more threatening to a homosexual relationship than same-sex interest is to a heterosexual one. Because male-female sex is less freely available for men than male-male sex, however, the question comes up less often. Again, the problem is not sexual activity but how the desired activity is viewed and the extent to which it threatens or is permitted to threaten the primary relationship. Not all desires need to be satisfied through activity, and questions of commitment, maintaining sexual interest, and protec­tion from sexually transmitted diseases come up in relationships regardless of sexual orientation.
Marriage among members of the same sex existed in ancient Rome but then disappeared until the present century, when it has returned as a goal for some gay people. Even for heterosexuals, marriage is becoming an emotional union and com­mitment rather than an arrangement to produce and protect children, and if it is that then there is no rational reason why marriages of homosexuals should not be endorsed by society. This proposal is con­troversial, however, even in the gay com­munity, since marriage has long been viewed by libertarian thinkers as an out­moded and repressive institution, and a significant number of homosexuals, male and female, have "come out" from very unhappy marriages. Public and religious opinion is moving toward permitting same-sex unions for those desiring them. Currently they are available only in Den­mark (in Sweden, while they may not marry, same-sex couples have more legal rights than in the U.S.). Elsewhere, cere­monies and rituals, even though they lack legal status, can serve some of the same purposes-as marriage.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, American Couples, New York: William Morrow, 1983; John Malone, Straight Women/Gay Men, New York: Dial, 1980; David R. Matteson, "Married and Gay," Changing Men, No. 19 (Spring-Summer, 1988), pp. 14-16, 45.
Daniel Eisenberg

Martial, Marcus Valerius (ca. 40-ca. 104)
The greatest epigrammatist in Latin literature and an inexhaustible source of information on sexual life in the Rome of the first century. Born in Bilbilis in Spain, he settled in Rome at the age of 24, living as a client of the Senecas, his re­nowned countrymen, and then of other wealthy patrons. His poems won him the favor of the court; he was honored by Titus and Domitian and awarded a knighthood. a friend of the leading intellectuals of his day, he lived in the capital until 98, when he returned to his Spanish homeland for the remaining years of his life. His major work is his twelve books of Epigrams, published between 85 and 103. The books were arranged and numbered by the author on the basis of smaller collections and individual pieces that he had composed over the years, with dedications to particu­lar friends and patrons. In form and lan­guage the poems exhibit the greatest pos­sible variety: a wide assortment of meters and speech ranging from artificial heights of literary diction to the coarsest and most vulgar slang. Martial's treatment of the sexual life of his contemporaries was so candid and unvarnished - particularly where homosexuality was concerned - that many of the epigrams could not be pub­lished in the modern languages until quite recently.
Martial knew and freely described in verse all possible varieties of sexual conduct: from heterosexual love to the bizarre practices that would later occupy Krafft-Ebing. He disavowed personal in­volvement in the sexual life that he de­scribed so piquantly: Lasciva est mea pagina, vita pioba, "My page is wanton, but my life is pure." He seems to have known happiness and pain both, but never passionate love. The poet had some close female friends, but was deeply moved by the beauty of young boys and sings their charms in various poems. In Martial's character - bisexual by nature - the homo­sexual side came out very strongly. A boy with the pseudonym Dindymus figures in a number of the epigrams, and like the Greek poets before him he writes of the perfume of the boy's kiss [xi, 8), but also of the disappointments which the lad made him suffer [xi, 73 j.
The homosexual types disparaged by the ancients - the passive-effeminate homosexual and the active-viraginous lesbian - are mercilessly satirized in his epigrams, which flagellate the cinaedus, the fellatoi and the tiibas: the master who is sodomized by his slaves, the fellator with stinking breath, and the hyper-mas­culine tribade. Martial acknowledged that he himself desired a male who was neither too coarse nor too effeminate - the golden mean. The aesthetic element predominated in his affection for boys, as in his brief and graceful epigrams onDomitian's cupbearer (ix, 12and 16). Though unmarried himself, he urged married men to devote them­selves to their wives, no longer to younger males. Martial's work remains as a de­tailed record of the sexual life of the an­cient world, of Rome in its heyday, a treas­ury of the Latin vocabulary of sexuality, and as a model for the erotic epigram in centuries to come. The entire collection survived the medieval period and contin­ued to amuse classical scholars, as well as to inspire poets in the vernacular languages of Europe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934.
Warren Johansson

Marxism
Stemming from the writings of KarlMarx (1819-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), the political philosophy of "historical materialism" emerged in the Communist Manifesto to revolutionaries in 1848. Today their views, or versions of them, are official policy in the countries of "actually existing socialism" - in the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe, as well as in Yugoslavia, Albania, the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Laos, Cam­bodia, Ethiopia, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Outside these countries vigorous schools of Marxist thought have flourished, nota­bly late nineteenth-century revisionism, democratic evolutionary socialism, and twentieth-century Trotskyism, as well as so-called "Western Marxism" and "Euro-Communism" which had a considerable impact on academic circles in the 1960s and 70s.
Foundations. The ideas of Marx and Engels fermented from radical thought in Restoration Europe, which included positivist, empiricist, anarchist, socialist, and Christian-socialist strains. Unlike the individualist Utopian Charles Fourier, Marx and Engels showed little interest in sex and sexual orientation; in­deed they were typical Victorians in this respect. There can be little doubt that, as far as they thought of the matter at all, Marx and Engels were personally homo­phobic, as shown by an acerbic 1869 ex­change of letters on Tean-Baptiste von Schweitzer, a German socialist rival. Schweitzer had been arrested in a park on a morals charge and not only did Marx and Engels refuse to join a committee defend­ing him, they resorted to the cheapest form of bathroom humor in their private comments about the affair. Similar lack of subtlety characterizes their views on the pioneering homophile theories of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, in which they confused uranism with pederasty and pederasty with pedication (anal intercourse).
The only important sexual pas­sage, however, in the corpus of work pub­lished in the lifetimes of the two founders occurs in Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State ¡1884): "Greek women found plenty of opportu­nity for deceiving their husbands. The men ... amused themselves with hetaerae-, but this degradation of women was avenged on the men and degraded them till they fell into the abominable practice of pederasty {Knabenhebe) and degraded alike their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede." Engels' tracing of the prob­lem to heterosexual infidelities is curious in view of his own record of amorous adventurism. Of course there is no truth in the innuendo propagated by a widely re­printed modern cartoon showing Marx and Engels walking hand in hand as lovers.
Setting aside these personalia, as a general principle one may concede the possibility that flaws in the initial formu­lation of a theory may be eliminated in its later maturing. It remains to be seen, however, whether the "flaw" of homopho­bia has been, or can be excised from ortho­dox Marxism.
Historical Unfolding. As in Freudian psychoanalysis, the very ques­tion of what is orthodox in Marxism has incited an enormous debate. Marx himself ejected Mikhail Bakunin and other anar­chists, all of whom by doctrine tolerated homosexuality, from the First Interna­tional. Yet one is on firm ground in saying that Social Democracy (which also had non-Marxist roots) departed in two funda­mental respects: it favored gradual reform instead of revolutionary upheaval and held that attitudes could be changed before the economy was transformed - thus eroding the basic Marxist doctrine of the depend­ency of the cultural superstructure on the economic base. In the 1890s, some Social Democrats like August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein in Germany sought to foster a more enlightened social attitude, advocat­ing women's rights and the elimination of laws criminalizing homosexuals. Such efforts were largely conducted among in­tellectuals and bureaucrats who intuited that the masses were not yet prepared to discard inherited prejudices. The Social Democrats were after 1918 to be violently rejected on other grounds as renegades by the more orthodox wing of Marxism under the leadership of Vladimir Il'ich Lenin. Out of this difference arose, after the Russian Revolution, a sharp antagonism between European Social Democratic and Labor parties on one hand and Communist and Trotskyist groups on the other.
Some gay leftists have projected a rosy picture of homosexual life in Russia in the years after the 1917 revolution. Yet the abrogation of the tsarist law against sodomy was simply part of an overall re­jection of the laws of the old regime, and significantly the Soviets never undertook any campaign to reduce popular prejudice against homosexuality, as they did, for example, against the inferior status of women, Great Russian chauvinism, and anti-Semitism. Also, despite much search­ing, no unequivocal statement in support of homosexual rights has ever been un­earthed from the prolific writings of Lenin and Trotsky, even though both had lived in Western Europe at the time of the early German homosexual rights movement. Under Lenin Russian homosexuals fared no better - if even as well - as they had done in the last decades of tsarist rule, when such brilliant figures as Tchaikovsky, Kuzmin, and Kluev came to the fore.
In the 1920s some German homo­sexual movement figures such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Linsert (the latter a minor Communist Party functionary in Berlin) were favorably impressed by re­ports of apparently enlightened attitudes in the Soviet Union - about which they had no direct knowledge. They would appear to have been the victims of an early disinformation campaign. Not everyone was taken in. Although Andre Gide pro­claimed his sympathy for the Soviet Un­ion in 1932, four years later after visiting the country he wrote openly of his disillu­sionment. Aware of antihomosexual legis­lation passed in 1934, he attempted to bring up the matter with Stalin, though without success. On publishing his defec­tion from the "Popular Front" line he was attacked by French and Czechoslovak party stalwarts (who had previously lauded him to the skies) as a "poor bugger" who had mixed up "revolution and pederasty."
As early as the 1920s leaders of Western Communist parties began to float the idea that the public discussion of homosexuality, and the seeming increase in homosexual activity, resulted from the decadence of capitalism in its death throes. Homosexuality was to disappear in the healthy new society of the future. These negative attitudes also had their parallels in cultural criticism. In 1930 in the Ameri­can Communist Party journal New Masses, Herbert Gold and others launched a cam­paign against "effete, fairy literature." Thornton Wilder, a principal target of the attacks, was accused of propagating a "pastel, pastiche, dilettante religion,... a daydream of homosexual figures in grace­ful gowns moving among the lilies."
After the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, Marxist proponents of the decadence theory added a new layer to these attacks in their myth of "fascist perversion," some purported affinity be­tween homosexuality and National So­cialism. Leftist propaganda of this type may have played a part in Hitler's decision to liquidate his homosexual henchman Ernst Rohm, thereby distancing himself from the accusation. In June 1934, for example, the exiled Marxian psychoana­lyst Wilhelm Reich opined: "The more clearly developed the natural heterosexual inclinations of the juvenile are, the more open he will be to revolutionary idea; the stronger the homosexual tendency within him... the more easily he will be drawn to the right." More generally, the heterosexualism that is so salient in the Marxist tradition may be augmented by the felt link between production and reproduc­tion. Most Marxists are, of course, hetero­sexual and, in keeping with the tendency of true-believer groups to exalt all their shared traits, subject to an unthinking bias.
Despite Gide's experience, the temptations and pleasures of political pil­grimage continued as seductive as before. Wide-eyed delegations visited the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, as often as not being taken on excursions to Potemkin villages and being regaled with highly romanticized accounts of the happiness of the masses under "actually existing so­cialism." After Castro's rude suppression of homosexuals in Cuba, the favorite des­tination of these pilgrims, who included some gay men and lesbians, shifted in the 1980s to Nicaragua, yet even there the authorities would not recognize a gay organization. Gay visits to Third World Socialist countries tend to be emotionally tinged with sympathy for nonwhite peoples as an oppressed world proletariat, mirror­ing the gay sense of oppression at home, while freighted with a certain amount of guilt over sexual tourism - the descent of well-heeled western gay men on the im­poverished fleshpots of the tropics. Some­how sympathetic visits to struggling, Third World countries are held to atone for this perceived exploitation - even as it contin­ues to occur.
Communist parties outside the Soviet bloc have generally been unsympa­thetic to homosexual participation in their activities and indifferent to gay issues. The only significant exception seems to be the independent-minded Italian Commu­nist Party, the promoter of "Euro-Com­munism," which has provided material assistance to gay groups and published sensitive discussions in party periodicals. In most western countries it has been Trotskyists, with their claustrophobic and faction-ridden experience of marginality, who have provided the few organizational havens open to gay people in the world Communist movement.
Contributions of Marxism. De­spite all these negative considerations, the contribution of Marxism to the move­ment for gay rights and to the interpretation of homosexual behavior itself merits separate consideration. When the second gay rights movement emerged in the form of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950, a number of its leaders, preem­inently Henry Hay, had backgrounds in the Communist Party (CP) of the United States. Hay used the CP model for the cellular structure he designed for Mat­tachine. In an era in which homosexuality was illegal in every American state, the organizational structure of a political group that had, in many countries, been forced into clandestinity in order to survive seemed relevant. The American Commu­nist Party had also been in the forefront of the early struggle against racial segrega­tion, and this example also proved attrac­tive: gay rights as a form of civil rights. When the civil rights movement entered its major phase in the 1960s, Marxist groups continued active but were less visible and dominant. At this time, however, they made a major contribution to the organiz­ing of the protests against the Vietnam war, though this was also permeated by New Left, anarchist, and hippie elements. This amalgam made its effect felt on the new gay organizations that arose in the wake of the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 - especially the Gay Liberation Fronts of New York and other cities. At the same time Marxist influences were appearing in some sectors of renascent feminism, and through this channel came such organiza­tional devices as consciousness raising.
By the middle seventies the Marx­ist influence on the gay liberation move­ment was receding, a decline reflecting recognition of its perennial marginality in American political life and the arcane, even scholastic character of many of its intellectual debates. Before the wave ebbed, however, Marxism had caused a reexami­nation of the fundamentally reformist cast of the earlier movement, which saw edu­cation of the electorate and the lifting of legal restrictions as virtually the only tasks and toleration as the goal. Ridiculing such a limited approach, Marxists insisted that deep structural changes were necessary for true sexual and personal freedom and social acceptance to become possible. To be sure, many were sceptical of the specific con­tent of Marxist promises and visions, in view of the poor performance of countries under "actually existing socialism." The imposition of Soviet-style totalitarianism in Castro's Cuba, once the cynosure of gay radicals, dashed many hopes, and rival visions came forward: anarchist, libertar­ian, and communitarian. But an important lesson had been learned: that a mere subtractive approach, gettingrid of oppressive laws and restrictions, would not suffice. For gay men and lesbians to flourish some­thing more fundamental was needed: not so much a political revolution as a "change of heart."
Some of the graduate students who had been converted to Marxism in academia went on to assume tenured teach­ing jobs. These scholars formed what has been called the "Marxist academy," and the periodicals they created were some­times hospitable to gay scholarship. Some who found a home in this milieu held that Marxism could make a fundamental con­tribution to the understanding of homo­sexuality itself. They argued that studies of homosexual behavior had neglected the element of class and class struggle, which in the standard Marxist view is the chief motor of social change. While feminists had rightly criticized this exclusive model, pointing out that gender, sexual orienta­tion, and race are also of prime impor­tance, there can be no doubt that class differences have been neglected even in sociological work on homosexuality. In­fluenced by the solidarity proclaimed by the gay movement, much empirical work tends to assume a unitary model of "the homosexual" and "the lesbian."
Some scholars influenced by Marxist dialectic advanced a more funda­mental criticism of what they regarded as a mistaken notion of "unchanging gayness." Noting the anachronism that re­sults when present-minded concepts of gay people are proj ected back into the past, they boldly proposed that there is no single nature of homosexuality that is stable across time. It has been shown that the broader attempt to derive this demolition of the whole idea of human nature from the writings of Marx and Engels them­selves is shaky, and that it really belongs to the thought of Georg Lukacs and the "Marxist-humanist" trend of revisionism that succeeded him. Also, it proved diffi­cult to find a "historical materialist" grounding for the changing concepts of homoerotic behavior, an accommodation to the well-known Marxist sequence of slave-owning, feudal, capitalist, and so­cialist societies. What caused the shifts in same-sex paradigms remained mysterious. Moreover, this attack on the unchanging nature of homosexuality - on "essentialism," as the assumption of uniformity has been called - was not restricted to Marx­ists. The Social Constructionists, as the opponents of "essentialism" styled them­selves, included symbolic interactionists, pragmatists, and nominalists. Still, when all is said and done, academic Marxism deserves credit for bringing into question assumptions of the historical uniformity of homosexual identities and relationships, and for asking scholars to seek an under­standing of the place which these occupy within the larger framework of social change.
Finally, Marxism has made a contribution in an unexpected quarter - in therealm of theology.The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise in Latin America of "libera­tion theology," strongly influenced by the Marxist critique of oppression. Some schol­ars have sought to adapt this perspective to the emerging theology of the gay churches, where it may well serve as a useful correc­tive to traditionalism and liturgical preoc­cupations.
As this last aspect shows, the Marxist influence on homosexuality has often been indirect, mediated by femi­nism, by the New Left, or by liberation theology. It seems that Marxist theories must be adapted or reformulated before they can function in the study of same-sex behavior. Moreover, Marxist concepts seem more suited to posing questions than to providing firm answers. The greatest weakness of the Marxist approach is the difficulty in correlating the changes in homosexual behavior and the attitudes toward it with the technological and eco­nomic determinism that is the very heart of Marxism, not to speak of the inability (or better refusal) of Marxian thinkers to incorporate the biological dimension of human existence into their reasoning. All the same, the Marxist contribution, whether direct or indirect, has served to broaden horizons and to strengthen the trend to supplant the present-mindedness and provincialism of the gay movement and gay studies on 1950s lines with a new outlook that is potentially subtle, critical, and multicultural.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. David Fernbach, The Spiral Path: A Gay Contribution to Human Survival, Boston: Alyson, 1981; Gay Left Collective, Homosexuality: Power and Politics, London: Allison and Busby, 1980; Hubert Kennedy, "J. B. von Schweitzer, the Faggot Marx Loved to Hate," Pag Rag, 19 (1977), 6-8.
Wayne R. Dynes

Masquerade
See Mardi Gras and Masked Balls.

Masturbation
Broadly defined, masturbation is tactile sexual stimulation obtained by means other than intercourse.
Techniques. Masturbation is harmless, legal, and carries no risk of dis­ease. Typical masturbation, involving pleasurable stroking, caressing, or massag­ing of the genitals and other parts of the body, is healthy fun and cannot be over­done. Soreness or chafing heals easily if treated gently, and use of a lubricant re­duces irritation. For men an oil, including household oils (Crisco, cooking oil, baby oil) and some hand lotions, will work well;
for women a water-based lubricant in­tended for genital lubrication, such as K-Y or Astroglide, will give better results. Through experimentation with different strokes and caresses, not just on the geni­tals but all over the body, each person can discover what, for him or her, is most pleasurable. Some find the use of a vibrator helpful, and a variety of gadgets, store-bought or homemade, are used to assist in providing the desired sensations. How­ever, a good masturbation machine for male use has yet to be developed. Thoughts or pictures of stimulating scenes, whether provided by individual fantasies or acquired pornography, can increase one's excite­ment. If desired, masturbation can be prolonged, and the intensity of orgasm enhanced, by stopping just before orgasm, to begin again when excitement has some­what subsided.
Masturbation with friends, a common male experience of adolescence, is becoming an adult practice as well. Pairs or groups can either masturbate separately while watching and talking to each other, or partners can masturbate each other, either simultaneously or taking turns. Masturbation while talking over the tele­phone (phone sex) has been a spreading practice in the 1980s.
Masters and Johnson reported that many find masturbation produces more intense orgasms than intercourse, and it also avoids the discomfort that anal pene­tration produces in many men. It is also reported that masturbation by a partner produces more intense orgasms, for some, than masturbating alone. If free of guilt, masturbation is said to have a positive effect on the personality. Masturbation, alone or with a partner, can be part of a spiritual experience.
History, Men. Masturbation in males is nearly universal. It is engaged in spontaneously by infants and children, and is found in many mammalian species, although no animal other than man mas­turbates to orgasm on a regular basis. Anthropological evidence suggests that masturbation rituals have been part of male coming-of-age ceremonies since prehistoric times. Temporary abstention from sexual activity, including masturba­tion, may be presumed to have been a common means to summon extra physi­cal performance (as today in the advice of some athletic coaches), and abstention from and indulgence in masturbation have been part of the worship of the generative powers.
Civilizations have been indiffer­ent or hostile to adult masturbation ac­cording to the fertility which they desired. (Masturbation by children has usually been treated more leniently.) In bellicose socie­ties, those trying to populate new land, and those subject to heavy losses from a hostile environment, there was pressure to direct sex toward reproduction, although masturbation's simplicity no doubt made it impossible to suppress. In more urban and pacifist cultures, in which population pressures were felt, reproduction then became a problem rather than a necessity. In such settings masturbation could be tolerated, along with prostitution and homosexuality, all of which were prefer­able to the infanticide which was common in parts of the ancient Mediterranean world.
In classical antiquity masturba­tion was called a "natural sexual prac­tice," and physicians recommended it as preferable to harmful continence, and as a treatment for impotence. Indeed to be masturbated was recognized as a delicacy, and masseurs, prostitutes, and especially slaves provided this service. Anal mastur­bation using fingers, dildos, and eggs is re­ported, as is auto-fellatio. The Greek Cynic Diogenes, and others following him, openly masturbated, saying that experience re­vealed masturbation to be the easiest and best sexual practice, that it was not shame­ful and did not need to be concealed, and that masturbation could have prevented the Trojan War. Masturbation's mythical inventor was said to have been Hermes, who taught it to his son Pan.
Among the extensive sexological literature of Islam is the first treatise on masturbation, by the ninth-century Al-Saymari [Encyclopedia of Islam, article "Djins"); it is today unavailable or lost. Classical Islamic culture was supportive of partnered sex, and masturbation, espe­cially in solitude, was mildly condemned. In part this was because one was not sup­posed to touch the "unclean" genitals; handless masturbation through use of a melon, though, is widely known in Arabic folklore. In the modern Islamic world it is sometimes considered more reprehensible than sodomy and bestiality. Classical Chinese culture encouraged masturbation without orgasm; emission of semen was only supposed to take place during inter­course with a woman.
Early Christian writers paid little attention to masturbation and fantasy. In the fourth and fifth centuries, with the spread of clerical celibacy and monasticism, masturbation and nocturnal emis­sion appear as concerns, though in the hierarchy of sexual offenses these were among the mildest. Handbooks to assist priests in hearing confessions, including a treatise of Jean Gerson (1363-1429) on taking the confession of masturbators, reveal that Catholics masturbated just like everyone else. Concern within Catholi­cism reached a peak after the Council of Trent (1545-63), when masturbation was seen as a more serious social problem than fornication or even adultery. Masturba­tion and sodomy were seen as related expressions of the same allegedly perverted sexual instinct, and the former was be­lieved to lead to the latter.
In the eighteenth century the medical profession proclaimed loss of semen a serious threat to health, and condemned above all the voluntary and unprocreative "wasting" of semen with masturbation. During the nineteenth century concern over masturbation rose to hysteria, and it was said to cause homo­sexuality as well as diseases: insanity, epilepsy, heart disease, impotence, and many others. Masturbation was even called "humanity's worst vice. " Means employed to control masturbation included circum­cision, pharmaceuticals, mechanical de­vices, and foods (Graham crackers and Kellogg breakfast cereals). Inasmuch as physicians based themselves solely on anecdotal (unsystematic) observations, and emission of semen is healthful rather than a threat to health, this medical "break­through" may confidently be attributed to puritanism.
In the twentieth century opposi­tion to sexuality has been deflected else­where, and masturbation is no longer condemned in Western culture, except by the Catholic church and a small minority of conservatives. The influential Kinsey surveys ¡1948, men; 1953, women), docu­mented how widespread masturbation is. Physicians have admitted that masturba­tion is harmless, and masturbation is an important part of sex therapy. Enlightened advice books recommend to parents that they allow their children privacy to mas­turbate. That adolescents need to mastur­bate to become fully functioning sexual adults is recognized, although the point is not made, in the United States, in sex education materials directed to youth. (Masturbation is presented as harmless but optional; instruction in masturbation is only given informally, usually by peers.) There are no figures by which to check, but it seems likely that over the past genera­tion there has been more masturbation and less guilt about it. The recent boom in pornography is itself evidence of a similar increase in masturbation. It remains a socially suspect practice, however, and is often viewed as a poor alternative to inter­course. In most of the Third World mastur­bation is still condemned.
History, Women. As with all aspects of women's sexuality, the history of female masturbation is much less known than is that of men; since it did not involve semen, it was seldom discussed by moral­ists. Furthermore, what glimpses one has of female masturbation are mostly through the eyes of male writers and artists, and it is likely that in large part they observed what women found it profitable to show them, i.e., what they wanted to see. The vagina was believed to be the focus of women's sexual pleasure, and thus mas­turbation was seen as focused there. Mas­turbation with dildos made of leather and other materials was known in both Western antiquity and the Renaissance, and evidence for its existence is found in the prohibition of it by medieval Christian writers. In Islamic culture the use of both dildos and vegetables is reported. It is very likely that such masturbation occurred in many other parts of the world. Classical Chinese culture was one of the most toler­ant of female sexuality, and there are re­ports of masturbation with a variety of objects inserted into the vagina, including small bells; special instruments made of wood and ivory, with silk bands attached, could be used by two women together or, through use of the leg, by one alone. Female masturbation using the hand alone (i.e., clitoral stimulation) is documented in antiquity, but until the nineteenth cen­tury there is no further mention of it. To the Victorians who discussed the topic, female sexual desire was threatening, and female masturbation caused terror. Clitoridectomy (surgical removal of the clito­ris) was used as a "treatment," especially in England and the United States. The operation was last performed in a western country (the United States) in 1937; as a means of forcing fidelity to husbands, however, it still survives in Africa.
Betty Dodson, Joani Blank, and other feminists, trying to help women get more and better orgasms, have taken the lead in removing the stigma from mastur­bation. The use of vibrators has been re­peatedly recommended, and they are now sold openly; the San Francisco store Good Vibrations, which specializes in vibrators, is openly pro-masturbatory. Sex therapist Ruth Westheimer has recommended the use of a cucumber, and that this was broad­cast on network television itself shows a big change in national attitude. Dodson has organized masturbation workshops and parties. In San Francisco, St. Priapus Church has made group male masturba­tion a worship ceremony. However, the group masturbation movement, while growing, remains surprisingly small.
Politics. As it is the only sex prac­tice available to an unpartnered person, masturbation has often been associated with loneliness. While apparently there have always been a number of cognoscenti who preferred it, masturbation has had a stigma and been ignored as a partnered activity. Thus it has not been, historically, a practice of the rich and powerful, who could purchase or otherwise compel the service of sexual partners. It has, rather, been a practice of the powerless. This means the poor and the isolated, those with elaborate fantasy lives or specialized sexual tastes, and, in recent times espe­cially, it has meant the young. Among men, the average age of those reaching orgasm through masturbation is much lower than those reaching it through inter­course. Some of the opposition to mastur­bation has been hostility to the sexuality of young people.
Masturbation, like homosexual­ity, has been opposed because it has been believed antithetical to human relation­ships. However, as writers on the topic point out, masturbation can not only be a pleasurable activity for a couple, it can be relationship-enhancing. Masturbation can discharge an imbalance of sexual desire, a hidden and destructive issue in many rela­tionships. It can be a means of low-risk adventures outside the relationship for those who find a single sexual partner confining. Masturbation can also enhance the bonds between a group or community, and it is inherently egalitarian.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Joani Blank, Good Vibrations: The Complete Guide to Vibrators; Burlingame, CA: Down There Press, 1982; Joani Blank and Honey Lee Cottrell, 7 Am My Lover, Burlingame, CA: Down There Press, 1978; Betty Dodson, Liberating Masturbation. A Meditation on Self Love, New York: Betty Dodson, 1974; idem, Sex for One, New York: Crown, 1987, John P. Elia, "History, Etymology, and Fallacy: Attitudes Toward Male Masturbation in the Ancient Western World," Journal of Homosexuality, 14 (1987), 1-19; How to Have a fO Party in Your Home, San Francisco: JO Buddies, 1985,- Werner A. Krenkel, "Masturbation in der Antike," Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Wilhelm-Pieck- Universität Rostock: Gesellschafts- und sprachwissenschafthche Reihe, 28 (1979), 159-78; Jack Morin, Men Loving Themselves: Images of Male Self-SexuaÜty, Burlingame, CA: Down There Press, 1980; R. P. Neuman, "Masturbation, Madness, and Modem Concepts of Childhood and Adolescence," Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), 1-27; René A. Spitz, "Authority and Masturbation" (1952), reprinted in Masturbation: Prom Infancy to Senes­cence, New York: International Univer­sity Press, 1975, pp. 381-409; Margo Woods, Masturbation, Tantra and Self Love, San Diego: Mho and Mho, 1981.
Daniel Eisenberg

Mattachine Society
One of the earliest American gay movement organizations, the Mattachine Society began in Los Angeles in 1950-51. It received its name from the pioneer ac­tivist Harry Hay in commemoration of the French medieval and Renaissance Société Mattachine, a somewhat shadowy musi­cal masque group of which he had learned while preparing a course on the history of popular music for a workers' education project. The name was meant to symbol­ize the fact that "gays were a masked people, unknown and anonymous," and the word itself, also spelled matachin or matachine, has been derived from the Arabic of Moorish Spain, in which mutawajjihln, is the masculine plural of the active participle of tawajjaha, "to mask oneself." Another, less probable, deriva­tion is from Italian matto, "crazy." What historical reality lay behind Hays' choice of name remains uncertain, just as the members of the group never quite agreed on how the opaque name Mattachine should be pronounced. Such gnomic self-designations were typical of the homophile phase of the movement in which open proclamation of the purposes of the group through a revealing name was re­garded as imprudent.
Political Setting. The political situation that gave rise to the Mattachine Society was the era of McCarthyism, which began with a speech by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin at a Lincoln's Birthday dinner of a Republican League in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950. In it McCarthy accused the Truman Administration of harboring "loyalty and security risks" in government service. And the security risks, he told Congressional investigators, were in no small part "sex perverts." A subcommittee of the Senate was duly formed to investigate his charges, which amounted to little more than a list of government employees who had run afoul of the Washington vice squad, but such was the mentality of the time that all seven members of the subcommittee endorsed McCarthy's accusations and called for more stringent measures to "ferret out" homosexuals in government.
Formation and Structure. The organization founded by Hay and his asso­ciates was in fact modeled in part on the Communist Party, in which secrecy, hier­archical structures, and "democratic cen­tralism" were the order of the day. Follow­ing also the example of freemasonry, the founders created a pyramid of five "or­ders" of membership, with increasing levels of responsibility as one ascended the structure, and with each order having one or two representatives from a higher order of the organization. As the membership of the Mattachine Society grew, the orders were expected to subdivide into separate cells so that each layer of the pyramid could expand horizontally. Thus members of the same order but different cells would remain unknown to one another. A single fifth order consisting of the founders would provide the centralized leadership whose decisions would radiate downward through the lower orders.
The discussions that led to the formation of the Mattachine Society be­gan in the fall of 1950, and in July 1951 it adopted its official designation. As Marx­ists the founders of the group believed that the injustice and oppression which they suffered stemmed from relationships deeply embedded in the structure of American society. These relationships they sought to analyze in terms of the status of homosexuals as an oppressed cultural minority that accepted a "mechanically . . . superimposed heterosexual ethic" on their own situation. The result was an existence fraught with "self-deceit, hypocrisy, and charlatanism" and a "dis­turbed, inadequate, and undesirable . . . sense of value." Homosexuals collectively were thus a "social minority" unaware of its own status, a minority that needed to develop a group consciousness that would give it pride in its own identity. By promot­ing such a positive self-image the founders hoped to forge a unified national move­ment of homosexuals ready and able to fight against oppression. Given the posi­tion of the Mattachine Society in an America where the organized left was shrinking by the day, the leaders had to frame their ideas in language accessible to non-Marxists. In April 1951 they produced a one-page document set ting out their goals and some of their thinking about homo­sexuals as a minority. By the summer of 1951 the initial crisis of the organization was surmounted as its semipublic meet­ings suddenly became popular and the number of groups proliferated. Hay him­self had to sever his ties with the Commu­nist Party so as not to burden it with the onus of his leadership of a group of homo­sexuals, though by that time the interest of the Communist movement in sexual reform had practically vanished.
Early Struggles and Accomplish­ments. In February 1952 the Mattachine Society confronted its first issue: police harassment in the Los Angeles area. One of the group's original members, Dale Jennings, was entrapped by a plainclothes-man, and after being released on bail, he called his associates who hastily sum­moned a Mattachine meeting of the fifth order. As the Society was still secret, the fifth order created a front group called Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrap­ment to publicize the case. Ignored by the media, they responded by distributing leaflets in areas with a high density of homosexual residents. When the trial began on June 23, Jennings forthrightly admitted that he was a homosexual but denied the charges against him. The jury, after thirty-six hours of deliberation, came out dead­locked. The district attorney's office de­cided to drop the charges. The contrast with the usual timidity and hypocrisy in such cases was such that the Citizens Committee justifiably called the outcome a "great victory."
With this victory Mattachine began to spread, and a network of groups soon extended throughout Southern Cali­fornia, and by May 1953 the fifth order estimated total participation in the soci­ety at more than 2,000. Groups formed in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, and the membership became more diverse as individual groups appealed to different segments of gay society.
Emboldened by the positive re­sponse to the Citizens Committee, Hay and his associates decided to incorporate in California as a not-for-profit educational organization. The Mattachine Foundation would be an acceptable front for interfac­ing with the larger society, especially with professionals and public officials. It could conduct research on homosexuality whose results could be incorporated in an educa­tional campaign for homosexual rights. And the very existence of the Foundation would convince prospective members that there was nothing illegal about participa­tion in an organization of this kind. The fifth order had modest success in obtain­ing professional support for the Founda­tion. Evelyn Hooker, a research psycholo­gist from UCLA, declined to join the board of directors, but by keeping in close touch with Mattachine she obtained a large pool of gay men for her pioneering study on homosexual personality.
Crisis. The political background of Hay and the other founders, while it gave them the skills needed to build a movement in the midst of an intensely hostile society, also compromised them in the eyes of other Americans. An attack on the Mattachine Society by a Los Angeles newspaper writer named Paul Coates in March 1953 linked "sexual deviates" with "security risks" who were banding together to wield "tremendous political power." To quiet the furor, the fifth order called a two-day convention in Los Angeles in April 1953 in order to restructure the Mattach­ine Society as an above-ground organiza­tion. The founders pleaded with the Mat­tachine members to defend everyone's First Amendment rights, regardless of political affiliations, since they might easily find themselves under questioning by the dreaded House Un-American Activities Committee. Kenneth Burns, Marilyn Rieger, and Hal Call formed an alliance against the leftist leadership that was successful at a second session held in May to complete work on the society's constitution. The results of the meeting were paradoxical in that the views of the founders prevailed on every issue, yet the anti-Communist mood of the country had so peaked that the fifth-order members agreed among themselves not to seek of­fice in the newly structured organization, and their opponents were elected instead. The convention approved a simple mem­bership organization headed by an elected Coordinating Council with authority to establish working committees. Regional branches, called "area councils," would elect their own officers and be represented on the main council. The unit for member­ship participation became the task-oriented chapter. Harry Hay emerged from the fra­cas crushed and despondent, and never again played a central role in the gay movement.
Mattachine Restructured. The new leadership changed the ideology of the Mattachine Society. Rejecting the notion of a "homosexual minority," they took the opposite view that "the sex vari­ant is no different from anyone else except in the object of his sexual expression." They were equally opposed to the idea of a homosexual culture and a homosexual ethic. Their program was, in effect, assimilationist. Instead of militant, collective action, they wanted only collaboration with the professionals - "established and recognized scientists, clinics, research organizations and institutions" - the sources of authority in American society. The discussion groups were allowed to wither and die, while the homosexual cause was to be defended by proxy, since an organization of "upstart gays . . . would have been shattered and ridiculed." At an organization-wide convention held in Los Angeles in November 1953, the conflict between the two factions erupted in a bitter struggle in which the opponents of the original perspective failed to put through motions aimed at driving out the Communist members, but the radical, militant impulse was gone, and many of the members resigned, leaving skeleton committees that could no longer function. Over the next year and a half, the Mattach­ine Society continued its decline. At the annual convention in May 1954, only forty-two members were in attendance, and the presence of women fell to token represen­tation.
An important aspect of Mattach­ine was the issuing of two monthly periodicals. ONE Magazine, the product of a Los Angeles discussion group, began in January 1953, eventually achieving a cir­culation of 5000 copies. Not formally part of Mattachine, in time the magazine gave rise to a completely separate organization, ONE, Inc., which still flourishes, though the periodical ceased regular publication in 1968. In January 1955 the San Francisco branch began a somewhat more scholarly journal, Mattachine Review, which lasted for ten years.
Helped by these periodicals, which reached many previously isolated individuals, Mattachine became better known nationally. Chapters functioned in a number of American cities through the 1960s, when they were also able to derive some strength from the halo effect of the civil rights movement. As service organi­zations they could counsel individuals who were in legal difficulties, needed psycho­therapy, or asked for confidential referral to professionals in appropriate fields. However, they failed to adapt to the mili­tant radicalism of the post-Stonewallyears after 1969, and they gradually went under. The organization retains, together with its lesbian counterpart, the Daughters of Bilitis, its historical renown as the legendary symbol of the "homophile" phase of the American gay movement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983.
Warren Johansson

Matthiessen, F[rancis] 0[tto] (1902-1950)
American scholar and literary critic. Having completed his undergradu­ate work at Yale, Matthiessen set out for European study on the ocean liner Paris in the summer of 1924. On the ship he met the American painter Russell Cheney, twenty years his senior. After an initial separation, they were to remain together as lovers for most of the ensuing years until Cheney's death in 1945.
Matthiessen's teachingcareerwas spent chiefly at Harvard University, where he quickly became known as an energetic and devoted tutor and lecturer. He also found time to write a number of books, including monographs on Theodore Drei­ser, T. S. Eliot, and Henry James. However, his massive Am erican Renaissance (1941) ranks as his most important achievement. Concentrating on major writings of Emer­son, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman from the years 1850-55, Matth­iessen showed that these works reflect social reality - the reform trends of the 1840s - while standing on their own as works of art. This dual approach, external and internal, left an enduring impress on the field of American studies. For much of his life Matthiessen was involved in leftist political causes, and it is thought that political disappointments, together with the loneliness that Cheney's death caused, contributed to his decision to take his own life on April 1, 1950.
During periods when they Avere apart Matthiessen and Cheney wrote to each other almost daily. The selection of their 3000 surviving letters that has been edited and published by Louis Hyde allows one to observe two men who first begin to understand their homosexuality and then find increasing strength in their bond. Unfortunately all was not roses: Matth­iesn style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-weight: normal;" lang="ES-TRAD">academia went on to assume tenured teach­ing jobs. These scholars formed what has been called the "Marxist academy," and the periodicals they created were some­times hospitable to gay scholarship. Some who found a home in this milieu held that Marxism could make a fundamental con­tribution to the understanding of homo­sexuality itself. They argued that studies of homosexual behavior had neglected the element of class and class struggle, which in the standard Marxist view is the chief motor of social change. While feminists had rightly criticized this exclusive model, pointing out that gender, sexual orienta­tion, and race are also of prime impor­tance, there can be no doubt that class differences have been neglected even in sociological work on homosexuality. In­fluenced by the solidarity proclaimed by the gay movement, much empirical work tends to assume a unitary model of "the homosexual" and "the lesbian."
Some scholars influenced by Marxist dialectic advanced a more funda­mental criticism of what they regarded as a mistaken notion of "unchanging gayness." Noting the anachronism that re­sults when present-minded concepts of gay people are proj ected back into the past, they boldly proposed that there is no single nature of homosexuality that is stable across time. It has been shown that the broader attempt to derive this demolition of the whole idea of human nature from the writings of Marx and Engels them­selves is shaky, and that it really belongs to the thought of Georg Lukacs and the "Marxist-humanist" trend of revisionism that succeeded him. Also, it proved diffi­cult to find a "historical materialist" grounding for the changing concepts of homoerotic behavior, an accommodation to the well-known Marxist sequence of slave-owning, feudal, capitalist, and so­cialist societies. What caused the shifts in same-sex paradigms remained mysterious. Moreover, this attack on the unchanging nature of homosexuality - on "essentialism," as the assumption of uniformity has been called - was not restricted to Marx­ists. The Social Constructionists, as the opponents of "essentialism" styled them­selves, included symbolic interactionists, pragmatists, and nominalists. Still, when all is said and done, academic Marxism deserves credit for bringing into question assumptions of the historical uniformity of homosexual identities and relationships, and for asking scholars to seek an under­standing of the place which these occupy within the larger framework of social change.
Finally, Marxism has made a contribution in an unexpected quarter - in therealm of theology.The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise in Latin America of "libera­tion theology," strongly influenced by the Marxist critique of oppression. Some schol­ars have sought to adapt this perspective to the emerging theology of the gay churches, where it may well serve as a useful correc­tive to traditionalism and liturgical preoc­cupations.
As this last aspect shows, the Marxist influence on homosexuality has often been indirect, mediated by femi­nism, by the New Left, or by liberation theology. It seems that Marxist theories must be adapted or reformulated before they can function in the study of same-sex behavior. Moreover, Marxist concepts seem more suited to posing questions than to providing firm answers. The greatest weakness of the Marxist approach is the difficulty in correlating the changes in homosexual behavior and the attitudes toward it with the technological and eco­nomic determinism that is the very heart of Marxism, not to speak of the inability (or better refusal) of Marxian thinkers to incorporate the biological dimension of human existence into their reasoning. All the same, the Marxist contribution, whether direct or indirect, has served to broaden horizons and to strengthen the trend to supplant the present-mindedness and provincialism of the gay movement and gay studies on 1950s lines with a new outlook that is potentially subtle, critical, and multicultural.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. David Fernbach, The Spiral Path: A Gay Contribution to Human Survival, Boston: Alyson, 1981; Gay Left Collective, Homosexuality: Power and Politics, London: Allison and Busby, 1980; Hubert Kennedy, "J. B. von Schweitzer, the Faggot Marx Loved to Hate," Pag Rag, 19 (1977), 6-8.
Wayne R. Dynes

Masquerade
See Mardi Gras and Masked Balls.

Masturbation
Broadly defined, masturbation is tactile sexual stimulation obtained by means other than intercourse.
Techniques. Masturbation is harmless, legal, and carries no risk of dis­ease. Typical masturbation, involving pleasurable stroking, caressing, or massag­ing of the genitals and other parts of the body, is healthy fun and cannot be over­done. Soreness or chafing heals easily if treated gently, and use of a lubricant re­duces irritation. For men an oil, including household oils (Crisco, cooking oil, baby oil) and some hand lotions, will work well;
for women a water-based lubricant in­tended for genital lubrication, such as K-Y or Astroglide, will give better results. Through experimentation with different strokes and caresses, not just on the geni­tals but all over the body, each person can discover what, for him or her, is most pleasurable. Some find the use of a vibrator helpful, and a variety of gadgets, store-bought or homemade, are used to assist in providing the desired sensations. How­ever, a good masturbation machine for male use has yet to be developed. Thoughts or pictures of stimulating scenes, whether provided by individual fantasies or acquired pornography, can increase one's excite­ment. If desired, masturbation can be prolonged, and the intensity of orgasm enhanced, by stopping just before orgasm, to begin again when excitement has some­what subsided.
Masturbation with friends, a common male experience of adolescence, is becoming an adult practice as well. Pairs or groups can either masturbate separately while watching and talking to each other, or partners can masturbate each other, either simultaneously or taking turns. Masturbation while talking over the tele­phone (phone sex) has been a spreading practice in the 1980s.
Masters and Johnson reported that many find masturbation produces more intense orgasms than intercourse, and it also avoids the discomfort that anal pene­tration produces in many men. It is also reported that masturbation by a partner produces more intense orgasms, for some, than masturbating alone. If free of guilt, masturbation is said to have a positive effect on the personality. Masturbation, alone or with a partner, can be part of a spiritual experience.
History, Men. Masturbation in males is nearly universal. It is engaged in spontaneously by infants and children, and is found in many mammalian species, although no animal other than man mas­turbates to orgasm on a regular basis. Anthropological evidence suggests that masturbation rituals have been part of male coming-of-age ceremonies since prehistoric times. Temporary abstention from sexual activity, including masturba­tion, may be presumed to have been a common means to summon extra physi­cal performance (as today in the advice of some athletic coaches), and abstention from and indulgence in masturbation have been part of the worship of the generative powers.
Civilizations have been indiffer­ent or hostile to adult masturbation ac­cording to the fertility which they desired. (Masturbation by children has usually been treated more leniently.) In bellicose socie­ties, those trying to populate new land, and those subject to heavy losses from a hostile environment, there was pressure to direct sex toward reproduction, although masturbation's simplicity no doubt made it impossible to suppress. In more urban and pacifist cultures, in which population pressures were felt, reproduction then became a problem rather than a necessity. In such settings masturbation could be tolerated, along with prostitution and homosexuality, all of which were prefer­able to the infanticide which was common in parts of the ancient Mediterranean world.
In classical antiquity masturba­tion was called a "natural sexual prac­tice," and physicians recommended it as preferable to harmful continence, and as a treatment for impotence. Indeed to be masturbated was recognized as a delicacy, and masseurs, prostitutes, and especially slaves provided this service. Anal mastur­bation using fingers, dildos, and eggs is re­ported, as is auto-fellatio. The Greek Cynic Diogenes, and others following him, openly masturbated, saying that experience re­vealed masturbation to be the easiest and best sexual practice, that it was not shame­ful and did not need to be concealed, and that masturbation could have prevented the Trojan War. Masturbation's mythical inventor was said to have been Hermes, who taught it to his son Pan.
Among the extensive sexological literature of Islam is the first treatise on masturbation, by the ninth-century Al-Saymari [Encyclopedia of Islam, article "Djins"); it is today unavailable or lost. Classical Islamic culture was supportive of partnered sex, and masturbation, espe­cially in solitude, was mildly condemned. In part this was because one was not sup­posed to touch the "unclean" genitals; handless masturbation through use of a melon, though, is widely known in Arabic folklore. In the modern Islamic world it is sometimes considered more reprehensible than sodomy and bestiality. Classical Chinese culture encouraged masturbation without orgasm; emission of semen was only supposed to take place during inter­course with a woman.
Early Christian writers paid little attention to masturbation and fantasy. In the fourth and fifth centuries, with the spread of clerical celibacy and monasticism, masturbation and nocturnal emis­sion appear as concerns, though in the hierarchy of sexual offenses these were among the mildest. Handbooks to assist priests in hearing confessions, including a treatise of Jean Gerson (1363-1429) on taking the confession of masturbators, reveal that Catholics masturbated just like everyone else. Concern within Catholi­cism reached a peak after the Council of Trent (1545-63), when masturbation was seen as a more serious social problem than fornication or even adultery. Masturba­tion and sodomy were seen as related expressions of the same allegedly perverted sexual instinct, and the former was be­lieved to lead to the latter.
In the eighteenth century the medical profession proclaimed loss of semen a serious threat to health, and condemned above all the voluntary and unprocreative "wasting" of semen with masturbation. During the nineteenth century concern over masturbation rose to hysteria, and it was said to cause homo­sexuality as well as diseases: insanity, epilepsy, heart disease, impotence, and many others. Masturbation was even called "humanity's worst vice. " Means employed to control masturbation included circum­cision, pharmaceuticals, mechanical de­vices, and foods (Graham crackers and Kellogg breakfast cereals). Inasmuch as physicians based themselves solely on anecdotal (unsystematic) observations, and emission of semen is healthful rather than a threat to health, this medical "break­through" may confidently be attributed to puritanism.
In the twentieth century opposi­tion to sexuality has been deflected else­where, and masturbation is no longer condemned in Western culture, except by the Catholic church and a small minority of conservatives. The influential Kinsey surveys ¡1948, men; 1953, women), docu­mented how widespread masturbation is. Physicians have admitted that masturba­tion is harmless, and masturbation is an important part of sex therapy. Enlightened advice books recommend to parents that they allow their children privacy to mas­turbate. That adolescents need to mastur­bate to become fully functioning sexual adults is recognized, although the point is not made, in the United States, in sex education materials directed to youth. (Masturbation is presented as harmless but optional; instruction in masturbation is only given informally, usually by peers.) There are no figures by which to check, but it seems likely that over the past genera­tion there has been more masturbation and less guilt about it. The recent boom in pornography is itself evidence of a similar increase in masturbation. It remains a socially suspect practice, however, and is often viewed as a poor alternative to inter­course. In most of the Third World mastur­bation is still condemned.
History, Women. As with all aspects of women's sexuality, the history of female masturbation is much less known than is that of men; since it did not involve semen, it was seldom discussed by moral­ists. Furthermore, what glimpses one has of female masturbation are mostly through the eyes of male writers and artists, and it is likely that in large part they observed what women found it profitable to show them, i.e., what they wanted to see. The vagina was believed to be the focus of women's sexual pleasure, and thus mas­turbation was seen as focused there. Mas­turbation with dildos made of leather and other materials was known in both Western antiquity and the Renaissance, and evidence for its existence is found in the prohibition of it by medieval Christian writers. In Islamic culture the use of both dildos and vegetables is reported. It is very likely that such masturbation occurred in many other parts of the world. Classical Chinese culture was one of the most toler­ant of female sexuality, and there are re­ports of masturbation with a variety of objects inserted into the vagina, including small bells; special instruments made of wood and ivory, with silk bands attached, could be used by two women together or, through use of the leg, by one alone. Female masturbation using the hand alone (i.e., clitoral stimulation) is documented in antiquity, but until the nineteenth cen­tury there is no further mention of it. To the Victorians who discussed the topic, female sexual desire was threatening, and female masturbation caused terror. Clitoridectomy (surgical removal of the clito­ris) was used as a "treatment," especially in England and the United States. The operation was last performed in a western country (the United States) in 1937; as a means of forcing fidelity to husbands, however, it still survives in Africa.
Betty Dodson, Joani Blank, and other feminists, trying to help women get more and better orgasms, have taken the lead in removing the stigma from mastur­bation. The use of vibrators has been re­peatedly recommended, and they are now sold openly; the San Francisco store Good Vibrations, which specializes in vibrators, is openly pro-masturbatory. Sex therapist Ruth Westheimer has recommended the use of a cucumber, and that this was broad­cast on network television itself shows a big change in national attitude. Dodson has organized masturbation workshops and parties. In San Francisco, St. Priapus Church has made group male masturba­tion a worship ceremony. However, the group masturbation movement, while growing, remains surprisingly small.
Politics. As it is the only sex prac­tice available to an unpartnered person, masturbation has often been associated with loneliness. While apparently there have always been a number of cognoscenti who preferred it, masturbation has had a stigma and been ignored as a partnered activity. Thus it has not been, historically, a practice of the rich and powerful, who could purchase or otherwise compel the service of sexual partners. It has, rather, been a practice of the powerless. This means the poor and the isolated, those with elaborate fantasy lives or specialized sexual tastes, and, in recent times espe­cially, it has meant the young. Among men, the average age of those reaching orgasm through masturbation is much lower than those reaching it through inter­course. Some of the opposition to mastur­bation has been hostility to the sexuality of young people.
Masturbation, like homosexual­ity, has been opposed because it has been believed antithetical to human relation­ships. However, as writers on the topic point out, masturbation can not only be a pleasurable activity for a couple, it can be relationship-enhancing. Masturbation can discharge an imbalance of sexual desire, a hidden and destructive issue in many rela­tionships. It can be a means of low-risk adventures outside the relationship for those who find a single sexual partner confining. Masturbation can also enhance the bonds between a group or community, and it is inherently egalitarian.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Joani Blank, Good Vibrations: The Complete Guide to Vibrators; Burlingame, CA: Down There Press, 1982; Joani Blank and Honey Lee Cottrell, 7 Am My Lover, Burlingame, CA: Down There Press, 1978; Betty Dodson, Liberating Masturbation. A Meditation on Self Love, New York: Betty Dodson, 1974; idem, Sex for One, New York: Crown, 1987, John P. Elia, "History, Etymology, and Fallacy: Attitudes Toward Male Masturbation in the Ancient Western World," Journal of Homosexuality, 14 (1987), 1-19; How to Have a fO Party in Your Home, San Francisco: JO Buddies, 1985,- Werner A. Krenkel, "Masturbation in der Antike," Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Wilhelm-Pieck- Universität Rostock: Gesellschafts- und sprachwissenschafthche Reihe, 28 (1979), 159-78; Jack Morin, Men Loving Themselves: Images of Male Self-SexuaÜty, Burlingame, CA: Down There Press, 1980; R. P. Neuman, "Masturbation, Madness, and Modem Concepts of Childhood and Adolescence," Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), 1-27; René A. Spitz, "Authority and Masturbation" (1952), reprinted in Masturbation: Prom Infancy to Senes­cence, New York: International Univer­sity Press, 1975, pp. 381-409; Margo Woods, Masturbation, Tantra and Self Love, San Diego: Mho and Mho, 1981.
Daniel Eisenberg

Mattachine Society
One of the earliest American gay movement organizations, the Mattachine Society began in Los Angeles in 1950-51. It received its name from the pioneer ac­tivist Harry Hay in commemoration of the French medieval and Renaissance Société Mattachine, a somewhat shadowy musi­cal masque group of which he had learned while preparing a course on the history of popular music for a workers' education project. The name was meant to symbol­ize the fact that "gays were a masked people, unknown and anonymous," and the word itself, also spelled matachin or matachine, has been derived from the Arabic of Moorish Spain, in which mutawajjihln, is the masculine plural of the active participle of tawajjaha, "to mask oneself." Another, less probable, deriva­tion is from Italian matto, "crazy." What historical reality lay behind Hays' choice of name remains uncertain, just as the members of the group never quite agreed on how the opaque name Mattachine should be pronounced. Such gnomic self-designations were typical of the homophile phase of the movement in which open proclamation of the purposes of the group through a revealing name was re­garded as imprudent.
Political Setting. The political situation that gave rise to the Mattachine Society was the era of McCarthyism, which began with a speech by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin at a Lincoln's Birthday dinner of a Republican League in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950. In it McCarthy accused the Truman Administration of harboring "loyalty and security risks" in government service. And the security risks, he told Congressional investigators, were in no small part "sex perverts." A subcommittee of the Senate was duly formed to investigate his charges, which amounted to little more than a list of government employees who had run afoul of the Washington vice squad, but such was the mentality of the time that all seven members of the subcommittee endorsed McCarthy's accusations and called for more stringent measures to "ferret out" homosexuals in government.
Formation and Structure. The organization founded by Hay and his asso­ciates was in fact modeled in part on the Communist Party, in which secrecy, hier­archical structures, and "democratic cen­tralism" were the order of the day. Follow­ing also the example of freemasonry, the founders created a pyramid of five "or­ders" of membership, with increasing levels of responsibility as one ascended the structure, and with each order having one or two representatives from a higher order of the organization. As the membership of the Mattachine Society grew, the orders were expected to subdivide into separate cells so that each layer of the pyramid could expand horizontally. Thus members of the same order but different cells would remain unknown to one another. A single fifth order consisting of the founders would provide the centralized leadership whose decisions would radiate downward through the lower orders.
The discussions that led to the formation of the Mattachine Society be­gan in the fall of 1950, and in July 1951 it adopted its official designation. As Marx­ists the founders of the group believed that the injustice and oppression which they suffered stemmed from relationships deeply embedded in the structure of American society. These relationships they sought to analyze in terms of the status of homosexuals as an oppressed cultural minority that accepted a "mechanically . . . superimposed heterosexual ethic" on their own situation. The result was an existence fraught with "self-deceit, hypocrisy, and charlatanism" and a "dis­turbed, inadequate, and undesirable . . . sense of value." Homosexuals collectively were thus a "social minority" unaware of its own status, a minority that needed to develop a group consciousness that would give it pride in its own identity. By promot­ing such a positive self-image the founders hoped to forge a unified national move­ment of homosexuals ready and able to fight against oppression. Given the posi­tion of the Mattachine Society in an America where the organized left was shrinking by the day, the leaders had to frame their ideas in language accessible to non-Marxists. In April 1951 they produced a one-page document set ting out their goals and some of their thinking about homo­sexuals as a minority. By the summer of 1951 the initial crisis of the organization was surmounted as its semipublic meet­ings suddenly became popular and the number of groups proliferated. Hay him­self had to sever his ties with the Commu­nist Party so as not to burden it with the onus of his leadership of a group of homo­sexuals, though by that time the interest of the Communist movement in sexual reform had practically vanished.
Early Struggles and Accomplish­ments. In February 1952 the Mattachine Society confronted its first issue: police harassment in the Los Angeles area. One of the group's original members, Dale Jennings, was entrapped by a plainclothes-man, and after being released on bail, he called his associates who hastily sum­moned a Mattachine meeting of the fifth order. As the Society was still secret, the fifth order created a front group called Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrap­ment to publicize the case. Ignored by the media, they responded by distributing leaflets in areas with a high density of homosexual residents. When the trial began on June 23, Jennings forthrightly admitted that he was a homosexual but denied the charges against him. The jury, after thirty-six hours of deliberation, came out dead­locked. The district attorney's office de­cided to drop the charges. The contrast with the usual timidity and hypocrisy in such cases was such that the Citizens Committee justifiably called the outcome a "great victory."
With this victory Mattachine began to spread, and a network of groups soon extended throughout Southern Cali­fornia, and by May 1953 the fifth order estimated total participation in the soci­ety at more than 2,000. Groups formed in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, and the membership became more diverse as individual groups appealed to different segments of gay society.
Emboldened by the positive re­sponse to the Citizens Committee, Hay and his associates decided to incorporate in California as a not-for-profit educational organization. The Mattachine Foundation would be an acceptable front for interfac­ing with the larger society, especially with professionals and public officials. It could conduct research on homosexuality whose results could be incorporated in an educa­tional campaign for homosexual rights. And the very existence of the Foundation would convince prospective members that there was nothing illegal about participa­tion in an organization of this kind. The fifth order had modest success in obtain­ing professional support for the Founda­tion. Evelyn Hooker, a research psycholo­gist from UCLA, declined to join the board of directors, but by keeping in close touch with Mattachine she obtained a large pool of gay men for her pioneering study on homosexual personality.
Crisis. The political background of Hay and the other founders, while it gave them the skills needed to build a movement in the midst of an intensely hostile society, also compromised them in the eyes of other Americans. An attack on the Mattachine Society by a Los Angeles newspaper writer named Paul Coates in March 1953 linked "sexual deviates" with "security risks" who were banding together to wield "tremendous political power." To quiet the furor, the fifth order called a two-day convention in Los Angeles in April 1953 in order to restructure the Mattach­ine Society as an above-ground organiza­tion. The founders pleaded with the Mat­tachine members to defend everyone's First Amendment rights, regardless of political affiliations, since they might easily find themselves under questioning by the dreaded House Un-American Activities Committee. Kenneth Burns, Marilyn Rieger, and Hal Call formed an alliance against the leftist leadership that was successful at a second session held in May to complete work on the society's constitution. The results of the meeting were paradoxical in that the views of the founders prevailed on every issue, yet the anti-Communist mood of the country had so peaked that the fifth-order members agreed among themselves not to seek of­fice in the newly structured organization, and their opponents were elected instead. The convention approved a simple mem­bership organization headed by an elected Coordinating Council with authority to establish working committees. Regional branches, called "area councils," would elect their own officers and be represented on the main council. The unit for member­ship participation became the task-oriented chapter. Harry Hay emerged from the fra­cas crushed and despondent, and never again played a central role in the gay movement.
Mattachine Restructured. The new leadership changed the ideology of the Mattachine Society. Rejecting the notion of a "homosexual minority," they took the opposite view that "the sex vari­ant is no different from anyone else except in the object of his sexual expression." They were equally opposed to the idea of a homosexual culture and a homosexual ethic. Their program was, in effect, assimilationist. Instead of militant, collective action, they wanted only collaboration with the professionals - "established and recognized scientists, clinics, research organizations and institutions" - the sources of authority in American society. The discussion groups were allowed to wither and die, while the homosexual cause was to be defended by proxy, since an organization of "upstart gays . . . would have been shattered and ridiculed." At an organization-wide convention held in Los Angeles in November 1953, the conflict between the two factions erupted in a bitter struggle in which the opponents of the original perspective failed to put through motions aimed at driving out the Communist members, but the radical, militant impulse was gone, and many of the members resigned, leaving skeleton committees that could no longer function. Over the next year and a half, the Mattach­ine Society continued its decline. At the annual convention in May 1954, only forty-two members were in attendance, and the presence of women fell to token represen­tation.
An important aspect of Mattach­ine was the issuing of two monthly periodicals. ONE Magazine, the product of a Los Angeles discussion group, began in January 1953, eventually achieving a cir­culation of 5000 copies. Not formally part of Mattachine, in time the magazine gave rise to a completely separate organization, ONE, Inc., which still flourishes, though the periodical ceased regular publication in 1968. In January 1955 the San Francisco branch began a somewhat more scholarly journal, Mattachine Review, which lasted for ten years.
Helped by these periodicals, which reached many previously isolated individuals, Mattachine became better known nationally. Chapters functioned in a number of American cities through the 1960s, when they were also able to derive some strength from the halo effect of the civil rights movement. As service organi­zations they could counsel individuals who were in legal difficulties, needed psycho­therapy, or asked for confidential referral to professionals in appropriate fields. However, they failed to adapt to the mili­tant radicalism of the post-Stonewallyears after 1969, and they gradually went under. The organization retains, together with its lesbian counterpart, the Daughters of Bilitis, its historical renown as the legendary symbol of the "homophile" phase of the American gay movement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983.
Warren Johansson

Matthiessen, F[rancis] 0[tto] (1902-1950)
American scholar and literary critic. Having completed his undergradu­ate work at Yale, Matthiessen set out for European study on the ocean liner Paris in the summer of 1924. On the ship he met the American painter Russell Cheney, twenty years his senior. After an initial separation, they were to remain together as lovers for most of the ensuing years until Cheney's death in 1945.
Matthiessen's teachingcareerwas spent chiefly at Harvard University, where he quickly became known as an energetic and devoted tutor and lecturer. He also found time to write a number of books, including monographs on Theodore Drei­ser, T. S. Eliot, and Henry James. However, his massive Am erican Renaissance (1941) ranks as his most important achievement. Concentrating on major writings of Emer­son, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman from the years 1850-55, Matth­iessen showed that these works reflect social reality - the reform trends of the 1840s - while standing on their own as works of art. This dual approach, external and internal, left an enduring impress on the field of American studies. For much of his life Matthiessen was involved in leftist political causes, and it is thought that political disappointments, together with the loneliness that Cheney's death caused, contributed to his decision to take his own life on April 1, 1950.
During periods when they Avere apart Matthiessen and Cheney wrote to each other almost daily. The selection of their 3000 surviving letters that has been edited and published by Louis Hyde allows one to observe two men who first begin to understand their homosexuality and then find increasing strength in their bond. Unfortunately all was not roses: Matth­iessen had a nervous breakdown in 1938, and Cheney suffered from a chronic drinkingproblem. Significantly, Cheney seemed able to bring his alcoholism urider control when far away from his lover, as at his sister's ranch in Texas, but when he re­turned to live with Matthiessen in New England it would recur. This pattern sug­gests that the drinking was grounded in guilt. Matthiessen, for his part, was clos­eted in his relations with most of his Harvard colleagues, going so far as to ex­press disapproval when the homosexual­ity of someone else came up. In the Ameri­can Renaissance he did not venture even to hint at homophile aspects in the work of Melville and Whitman. Yet Cheney and Matthiessen were figures of their time and this representative character, together with their unusual articulateness, makes the record of their relationship virtually sui generis.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Louis Hyde, ed., Rat and the Devil: Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978.
Wayne R. Dynes

Maugham, W. Somerset (1874-1965)
English novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist. A descen­dant of English barristers, W. Somerset Maugham was born in the British embassy in Paris. French was his mother tongue; he began to master English only when he was orphaned at the age of ten and sent to live with his uncle, Henry Maugham, a clergy­man in the Church of England. Maugham had his first homosexual experience in 1890 with the aesthete John Ellingham Brooks, during a stay in Germany. But Maugham was and remained an Edwar­dian, who insisted on keeping up appear­ances. He refused to admit his homosexu­ality until the end of his lif e, and then only to a trusted few. Attempts to discuss the subject in any favorable way were sure to bring instant and permanent ostracism.
Not daring to tell his uncle that he had decided to become a writer, Maugham enrolled in medical school and produced his first novel, Liza of Lambeth. He passed the next ten years in some desperation. He witnessed, with dismay, the trial of Oscar Wilde: like the Great Depression, the Wilde trial left its mark on an entire generation.
Maugham was contemplating a return to medicine when success struck. On October 26,1907, Maugham's comedy "Lady Frederick" opened in London. The play was a smash hit; he soon had four plays running simultaneously, and began to grow rich. He abandoned the novel for the theatre, and spent the next two dec­ades churning out product for this market.
During World War I Maugham served as a British spy in Russia - an expe­rience which he used for his "Ashenden" stories. Just before his (unsuccessful) mis­sion to Russia, Maugham had met and fallen in love with Gerald Haxton, a San Francisco youth of twenty-two who was serving in the same ambulance unit. It was an attraction of opposites: Haxton was a gregarious, extroverted, dashing scoundrel, while Maugham was shy and closeted. Maugham also had a daughter during the war, by Mrs. Syrie Wellcome, whom he married after she was divorced.
The marriage was not a success: Maugham spent most of his time abroad, traveling in exotic locales with Haxton, who not only supplied local boys for Maugham, but much of the raw material for his short stories. Maugham finally fled to his new villa, the famous "Mauresque," on the French Riviera, to take up life with Haxton. Mr. and Mrs. Maugham were divorced in 1928.
Maugham had returned to the novel in 1918 with Of Human Bondage. Others followed in succeeding years, as well as several collections of short stories. He had the knack of creating "properties" and was able to sell his work several times over - the short story could be turned into a play, which was then filmed and filmed again. The money flowed in and Maugham entertained the titled, the famous, and the intelligent at the Mauresque - as well as handsome young men, frequently procured for him by Haxton, who was rapidly slip­ping into alcoholism.
Between the wars, Maugham continued to turn out short stories, many of them about his travels in the Far East. He antagonized the entire British popula­tion of Malaya by staying as their honored guest, absorbing all the local gossip, and writing up the nastiest bits in flimsy dis­guise when he returned to Europe.
He spent much of World War II as a guest of the Doubledays in South Caro­lina. An estrangement between Maugham and Haxton was suddenly ended by Haxton's death in New York in 1944. For a moment, Maugham's treasured facade disappeared; he wept openly and bitterly at the funeral.
He returned to the Mauresque after the war and acquired a docile young man to replace Haxton: Alan Searle. The new man had the unpleasant chore of at­tending to the famous writer during his last twenty years, which were marred by paranoia and immense bitterness. He brooded particularly on his worth as an author; his wealth was obvious but his merit remained problematic. In the last years, Maugham fell victim to senile dementia, and would burst into obsceni­ties during an otherwise friendly conver­sation. Many of the attacks were so severe that hehadtobeputto sleep with tranquil­izers. He also made a bizarre attempt to disinherit his daughter and adopt Alan Searle as his son, an effort which was defeated by French law.
Maugham's place as a writer, the question which so obsessed him, is fairly secure. He is frequently referred to as a writer of the second rank, but also admit­ted to be of the very best second-raters. Throughout his working life, Maugham wrote for six hours in the morning, never rising without having completed at least a thousand words. Over a long career, he would have produced over ten million words of material; he was prolific through discipline.
His plays have mostly perished, although "The Circle" and "The Constant Wife" have been revived in the 1970s. Of his novels, at least four have shown stay­ing power: Of Human Bondage (notable for its treatment of unrequited love, as well as its cruel portrait of his uncle Henry Maugham), The Moon and Sixpence (a thinly disguised fictionalization of Paul Gauguin's life), Cakes and Ale (Maugham's own favorite and perhaps his best, a fic­tionalization of the life of Thomas Hardy), and The Razor's Edge (a story of Eastern mysticism which strangely presaged the hippie movement of the 1960s and has been filmed several times). Maugham's short stories stand unchallenged - he made the world of the British colonials in the Far East his own territory, and he had a defi­nite genius for telling a tale.
Maugham's influence on homo­sexuality in our time has been at once non­existent and pervasive. Securely closeted, his literary work contains only a few pass­ing mentions of the subject, from a very safe distance. Yet he was known to be homosexual, and discreetly entertained the international gay community at the Mauresque. Maugham set the style for many upper-class homosexuals of his time: they were to be Anglophile gentlemen, of urbane wit and a taste for modern art, with a strong bias toward the French as the second-most-preferred nation. They would not discuss such mundane matters as sex, using polished manners to protect their closeted existence. The pattern is certainly not extinct today.
Maugham summed up his own Ufe bitterly in his famous remark to the effect that he had wasted his Ufe pretend­ing that he was three quarters heterosex­ual and one quarter homosexual, while the reality was the other way round.
After Somerset Maugham's death, his nephew Robin Maugham (1916-1981) recycled his "memoirs" of Uncle Willie into no less than three books. Robin, a lifelong alcoholic with a history of mental illness and sadomasochism, never had the intimate acquaintance he claimed with his celebrated uncle, and often retells sto­ries heard from Barbara Back and Gerald Haxton. Some of these may be pure fan­tasy, such as the bizarre theory that Maugham sold his soul to Aleister Crowley in return for literary success. Robin pur­sued a literary career with little distinc­tion [The Servant is still remembered today); his real energies were devoted to the bottle and to social climbing. A collec­tion of dismal homosexual stories [The Boy from Beirut, San Francisco, 1982) did nothing to enhance his tarnished reputa­tion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Ted Morgan, Maugham, New York: Simon &. Schuster, 1980.
Geoff Puterbaugh

McAlmon, Robert (1896-1956)
American writer and publisher. McAlmon was born in Clifton, Kansas, the son of an itinerant Presbyterian minister, the youngest of ten children. Of his mother (Bess Urquhart), he wrote: "Her love's my prison,/ and my pity is the lock." The family migrated through a number of South Dakota towns into Minneapolis and even­tually California. McAlmon attended the universities of Minnesota (1916) and Southem California (1917-20), but he received more education as a Western farmhand, as a merchant mariner, and in the Army Air Force, where he was stationed at San Di­ego in 1918. The airmen inspired his first poems published in college and in Poetry (March 1919).
In 1920, McAlmon moved first to Chicago and then to New York City in search of freedom and companions. In New York he worked nude as a male model and formed a life-long friendship with artist and poet Marsden Hartley. With William Carlos Williams, McAlmon founded Con­tact, which in its short life published Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Kay Boyle, and Hartley.
On February 14,1921, McAlmon married Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), heir­ess to a vast English fortune and H. D.'s lover. Their arrangement - "legal only, unromantic, and strictly an agreement," McAlmon wrote - served both Bryher, who received control of her inheritance, and McAlmon, who gained financial independ­ence. (They were amicably divorced in 1927.) After a short stay in London, McAl­mon made Paris his base where his Con­tact Press published (with Three Moun­tains Press) a group of then-unpublishable authors: Bryher, Mina Loy, Ernest Hem­ingway, Marsden Hartley, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Mary Butts, Gertrude Stein, H. D., Djuna Barnes, and Saikaku Ihara [Quaint Tales of Samurais).
In their magazine Williams and McAlmon had called for an "essential contact between words and the locality." In his own fiction, McAlmon achieved that goal. His own Contact Press issued his first volumes: A Hasty Bunch (1922), A Companion Volume (1923), Post-Adoles­cence (1923), Village: As It Happened through a Fifteen Year Period ¡1924), Dis­tinguished Air (Grim Fairy Tales) (1925); while Black Sun Press published The In­definite Huntress and Other Stories (Paris, 1932). In his portraits of Dakota farm life, Greenwich Village parties, and gay Berlin, McAlmon wrote it down just as it hap­pened, but he did not then find and has not now found a wide audience. His four vol­umes of poetry found a wider range of publishers: Explorations (London: Egoist Press, 1921), The Portrait of a Generation (Paris: Contact, 1926), North America, Continent of Conjecture (Paris: Contact, 1929), Not Alone Lost (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1937). But his only book to find wide circulation has been his memoir of the twenties: Being Geniuses Together (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1938). And even it has been somewhat diluted with interleaved chapters by Kay Boyle in the later (New York: Doubleday, 1968; San Francisco: North Point, 1984) editions.
McAlmon became a drinking buddy with both James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. When a prude destroyed the only copy of the concluding erotic solilo­quy in Ulysses, McAlmon reconstructed the text from Joyce's notes, improvising as he went along. Hemingway's relationship with McAlmon was rockier. McAlmon took him to his first bullfight and pub­lished his first two books, but Hemingway was upset by McAlmon's homosexuality. McAlmon teased Hemingway for his friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose cock Hemingway examined at a urinal. Both James Joyce and Ezra Pound declared that McAlmon was tougher, more coura­geous, and a better writer than Heming­way.
McAlmon kept his distance from the French homosexuals. From parties, bars, and cafés he knew Jean Cocteau, Raymond Radiguet, René Crevel, Louis Aragon, and others. While his French may not have been sufficient to follow their writings, Dada and Surrealism left him completely cold. His ties were closer with artists Francis Picabia and Constantin Brancusi, but McAlmon saw in Europe only "the rot of ripe fruit."
John Glassco, who arrived as a teenager in Paris with his best friend and who received financial favors from McAl­mon, claims that he and his friend did not have to put out for the older man because "he was more vain of being seen with young men than actually covetous of their favors." McAlmon's preferences for men are not entirely clear: he found Marsden Hartley too old. McAlmon liked bullfight­ers who (like himself) had tight, lean bod­ies. A Paris bartender describes McAlmon's impassioned speech defending Plato, Michelangelo, and other creative geniuses who celebrated the masculine form. "I'm a bisexual myself," McAlmon shouted, "like Michelangelo, and I don't give a damn who knows it." (A similar speech is credited by other sources to Arthur Cra­ven, Mina Loy's lover, who claimed to be Oscar Wilde's nephew and was a profes­sional boxer.) In the 1950s, McAlmon wrote, "There are no real homos, male or female, but there is the bisex, and in more people than know it themselves." The "real abnorms" were the men who swag­ger "with virility."
How can one explain McAlmon's lack of success? He had little appreciation, but Fitzgerald and Hemingway were ru­ined by too much acclaim. He drank plenty and enjoyed drugs, but so did Joyce, Cocteau, and Crevel. Coming into money may have been corrupting, butH. D. thrived with the Ellerman wealth. Perhaps he was too far ahead of his time. When Allen Ginsberg with his poetry or Jack Kerouac with his prose made "first thought best thought" an axiom, McAlmon was dead. Moreover, his precise rendering of gay bar talk in Distinguished Air (1925) may be too advanced even now. He uses terms like "blind meat" (uncircumcised hard cock whose foreskin does not pull back), "rough trade," and "auntie."
McAlmon wrote very little after 1935; he was interested in radical politics but found little support among the expatri­ates. He was caught in France by the Ger­man occupation, came down with tuber­culosis, and escaped through Spain to the United States, where he joined his broth­ers in a surgical supply house in El Paso. He died at Desert Hot Springs, California, in 1956.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert E. Knoll, McAlmon and the Lost Generation, A Self Portrait, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1962; idem., Robert McAl­mon: Expatriate Pubhsher and Writer, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1959; Robert K. Martin and Ruth L. Strikland, "Robert McAlmon," American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, Karen Lane Rood, ed., Detroit: Gale Research, 1980; Sanford J. Smoller, Adrift Among Geniuses: Robert McAlmon, Writer and Pubhsher of the Twenties, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975.
Charley Shively

McCarthyism
The political tactics of the United States Senator from Wisconsin Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957) have since the 1950s been labeled McCarthyism. They consisted in poorly founded but sensation­ally publicized charges against individuals in government service or public life whom McCarthy accused on the Senate floor of being Communists, security risks, or oth­erwise disloyal or untrustworthy. Senator McCarthy's campaign did not spare "sex perverts in government," and so it made homosexuality an issue in American political life for the first time since the found­ing of the republic.
Emergence of the Tactics. Elected in the Republican landslide of 1946, McCarthy attracted little attention as the junior Senator from Wisconsin during his first three years in office. But in a Lincoln's Birthday address delivered in Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9, 1950, he catapulted himself into national fame by claiming that he had "in his hand a list of 205" active members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring in the State Department. With attention now focused on possible "security risks in government," Under Secretary of State John Peurifoy testified on February 28, 1950 that most of 91 employees dismissed for "moral turpitude" were homosexuals. On March 14 McCarthy himself raised the alleged case of a convicted homosexual who had resigned from the State Depart­ment in 1948 but was currently holding a "top-salaried, important position" with the Central Intelligence Agency; he would divulge the name of the accused only in executive session, but demanded his immediate dismissal: "It seems unusual to me, in that we have so many normal people . . . that we must employ so many very, very unusual men in Washington." After the head of the District of Columbia vice squad told a Senate committee that thousands of "sexual deviates" worked for the government, the Republican floor leader, Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska - a minor demagogue in his own right - de­manded a full-scale investigation. In June 1950 the full Senate bowed to mounting pressure and authorized an investigation into the alleged employment of "homo­sexuals and other sex perverts" in govern­ment.
Apogee and Decline. The sub­committee headed by Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina consisted of 4 Demo­crats and 3 Republicans; it was to deliver its report in December 1950, thus after the mid-term Congressional elections. Hoey, a conservative on many issues, neverthe­less had stood his ground against right-wing attacks on civil liberties until then. But the Report of the subcommittee - in contrast with an earlier finding that McCarthy "had perpetrated a monstrous fraud and a hoax on the Senate" - was a bloodless victory for the senator from Wisconsin. The subcommittee found that homosexual acts were illegal and that those who committed them were "social out­casts," and more relevantly, that fear of exposure made homosexuals subject to blackmail for espionage purposes. The only evidence that it could present to bolster this assertion was the case of a homosex­ual Austrian counter-intelligence officer (Alfred Redl) who had committed suicide in 1913 after he was discovered to be re­ceiving payment for information that he furnished to the intelligence service of Tsarist Russia! The far more interesting - and politically embarrassing - Harden-Eulenburg affair that had occurred a few years earlier in imperial Germany was never mentioned. The subcommittee dis­covered, moreover, that the laws against sexual perversion in the District of Co­lumbia were inadequate - in other words, that homosexual acts in private were not a crime, and that individuals arrested by the vice squad were allowed to disappear after posting trivial sums of money as surety. Its recommendations were to correct these shortcomings in the law and its admini­stration so that no one would escape iden­tification and punishment. The vicious circle of reasoning involved in such a pol­icy was lost on all concerned, simply be­cause the traditional attitudes toward homosexuality precluded a rational ap­proach to the matter. It is also noteworthy that the danger of blackmail which Magnus Hirschfeld and his Berlin Scientific-Hu­manitarian Committee had used as an argument for the repeal of Paragraph 175 was now turned against homosexuals to deny them employment in the name of "national security." This factor and others worked so strongly in McCarthy's favor that despite bitter opposition he was reelected in 1952 in the Eisenhower land­slide that brought the Republican Party back to the White House after 20 years of Democratic rule.
Once the Republicans had become the majority party for a brief time, McCarthy's tactics became a source of embarrassment to them, and in 1954 a campaign was launched against him in the Senate which included the (true) accusa­tion that a young University of Wisconsin graduate employed in his office in 1947 to handle veterans' affairs had been arrested as a homosexual and then promptly fired, and the (probably false) accusation that McCarthy himself was a homosexual, which Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont included in his denunciation. However, it was alleged that McCarthy's marriage in 1953 at the age of 45 was motivated by his need to squelch the rumors of his own sexual deviation; the marriage remained childless, though the couple did adopt a little girl. What is significant in retrospect is that Roy Cohn, a young attorney who was one of McCarthy's chief aides during his heyday, was a lifelong homosexual who died of AIDS in 1986. Censured by the Senate in 1954, McCarthy thereafter faded in political importance, and when he died in 1957 no great wave of emotion went through the ranks of either his friends or his enemies.
Aftermath. The policy of denying employment to homosexuals on moral grounds and as security risks, however, remained long after McCarthy himself. It was only in the 1970s that concerted ef­forts were begun to combat the exclusion­ary measures that had cost many hundreds of homosexuals and lesbians their jobs in the Federal Government - often in posi­tions where no element of security was involved. Given the absence of any organ­ized gay movement in the United States in 1950 and the defensive on which McCarthy's unprecedented accusations had put the Democratic administration, homosexuals were the most exposed of his targets.
Broader Perspectives. Fairness requires one to note that the left has also sometimes employed its own variety of McCarthyism. During the 1930s they oung Whittaker Chambers was a clandestine member of the Communist Party of the United States who cooperated with others in securing information for the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, having become more conservative, he denounced his former companions and their ideas. His testimony was of central importance in the convic­tion of Alger Hiss for perjury. In their turn his erstwhile friends began a word-of-mouth campaign based on the claim that his information was tainted because he was a homosexual and therefore un­trustworthy by nature. While Chambers was in fact homosexual, the way his oppo­nents used the allegation amounted to a homophobic smear campaign. In France, after Andre Gide published his negative reflections on his trip to the Soviet Union in 1936-37, he was attacked by his former Communist associates as a pédé (faggot).
These recent events are in fact the newest episodes in a long history. The sexual aspect of McCarthyism has an ancestry going as far back as Aeschines, Cicero, and the Byzantine Emperor Justin­ian (r. 527-565), whose laws against sodo­mites forged the "crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed," a weapon for political intimidation and blackmail that even the enlightened twentieth century has not deprived of its cutting edge.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983; Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of foe McCarthy: A Biography, New York: Stein and Day, 1982.
Warren Johansson

McCullers, Carson (1917-1967)
American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. Born Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, the writer lived in a small town world of summer heat, drab houses, greasy-spoon cafés, and small-scale factories that provides the basic setting for her work. Her typical characters suffer alienation through loneliness, inadequate financial and psychological support, and incomprehension of their fellows. McCullers further sets her characters apart by making them freaks, oddities, and out­casts. Despite this unpromising material, her central theme is love, which though often thwarted nonetheless casts a tran­scendent note that cuts through the other­wise overpowering bleakness. Without love the human community could not survive the corrosive pressures of fear, violence, and racial and social injustice. As she wrote: "[LJove is a joint experience between two persons - but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a simi­lar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these come from two different countries. So there is one thing for the lover to do.
He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world - a world intense and strange, complete in himself." At the time she wrote, the pre-gay liberation years, this underlying philosophy of love struck a deep chord in many homosexual readers.
As a young woman her determi­nation to succeed was exemplified by her siege at the door of the cottage of her idol, the established writer Katherine Anne Porter, whom she forced literally to step over her. Her relationship with her hus­band Reeves was unhappy, and after re­peated bouts with alcoholism he commit­ted suicide. At several points in her life she felt strong lesbian attraction, as with the aristocratic Swiss Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach. McCullers had major friendships with gay male writers, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and W. H. Auden.
Published when she was twenty-three, the novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) presents the isolation of the deaf-mute hero and the effort of the other characters to break through to some kind of communication with him. Reflections in a Golden Eye ( 1941 ) deals, in sometimes opaque prose, with the thwarted homo­sexual longings of an army officer, Captain Penderton. In the homophobic climate of the time, such themes earned her scorn from establishment critics, who abjured her to give up her "preoccupation with perversion and abnormality." She did not do so, and attained fame nonetheless. Although her last years were marred by illness, her New York funeral produced a remarkable outpouring of writer solidar­ity, reflecting esteem for her person and her work. Subsequently, material from Ballad of a Sad Cafe (1951) was adapted for the stage by the homosexual playwright Edward Albee.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Virginia Spencer Carr, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975.
Evelyn Gettone

Medical Theories of Homosexuality
Since Greek antiquity medical science has pondered the issue of homo­sexuality, seeking an explanation for be­havior that seemed to contradict the evident anatomical dimorphism of the opposite sexes in human beings. Broadly speaking, the theories proposed by medical authors fall into two categories: those which explain the phenomenon as the result of innate or constitutional factors, and those which see in it a purely psychological disorder, one possibly amenable to therapy.
Classical Antiquity. The Greek Hippocratic Corpus, the collection of medical treatises ascribed to Hippocrates of Cos but actually written by an entire school of physicians from the sixth to the first century, touches upon the issue from the standpoint of generative secretions from the parents. If both male and female parents secrete "male bodies," the off­spring are men "brilliant in soul and strong in body." If the secretion from the man is male and that from the woman is female, the former gains the upper hand, so that the offspring turn out less brilliant, but still brave. In case, however, the man's secretion is female and the woman's is male, the fusion of the two produces a "man-woman" [androgynos], which cor­responds to the modern notion of effemi­nate homosexual. The same is true of girls: if the man's secretion is female and the woman's male, and the female gains the upper hand, the offspring will be "man­nish" [andreiai). Hence by the fourth cen­tury B.C. the Hippocratic school saw characterological intersexuality as determined by factors of procreation [Peii diaites, 28-29).
Aristotle formulated his own theory of homosexuality with reference to love and friendship. When love has a boy as its object, the object of sexual desire, namely procreation, is excluded, but the wish for pleasurable intimacy remains. The wise man will either resist these de­sires or make of them a means to win the love of the boy. The beauty of an adoles­cent boy greatly resembles that of a girl, and the lover can err in the object of his desire, which can become a habit strong enough to seem a natural tendency, al­though it has no constitutional or patho­logical cause. In some pederasts the desire for boys has the quality of an animal-like ferocity that resembles epilepsy, and such individuals should be regarded as men­tally ill rather than as vicious [Nicomachean Ethics, Book 7). On the other hand, the pathicus, the passive-effeminate homo­sexual, presents a special problem because he plays the role that should belong to the woman, and in an organ not destined for sexual pleasure. The explanation for him lies in an abnormality of the channels through which the bodily secretions flow: in the pathicus the seat of sexual pleasure is the rectum, to which his sperm flows instead of to the penis, while those in whose bodies the flow is divided between the two organs take both the active and the passive roles. This last point occurs in Problems, Book 4, a work produced by Aristotle's school, rather than by the phi­losopher himself.
Still later, the school of astrology that flourished in Alexandria sought to explain homosexuality and lesbianism as determined by planetary influences, in particular the position of Venus in the subject's horoscope. Remarkably enough, the ancient mind placed the woman who was aggressive in heterosexual relations [crissatrix] in the same category as the tribade or lesbian [fricatrix], because both departed from the female norm of passiv­ity in sexual relations. This theory, mak­ing the sexual orientation of the subject dependent upon environmental factors (the position of the planets at the moment of birth), but still anchored in the individual's constitution, was propounded by authors from Teucer of Babylon to Firmicus Maternus.
In the fourth century of our era, Caelius Aurelianus addressed himself to the problem of the passive-effeminate homosexual [malthakos, molhs), whom he regarded not as the victim of a disease, but as suffering from unrestrained libido that causes the subject to lose all shame, to behave like a woman and to use for sexual gratification the parts of the body that are not destined by nature for such enjoyment [Chronic Diseases, IV, 9). Thus for the ancients - given their strict active-passive dichotomy - the paradox was that of the passive homosexual and the active les­bian; in their thinking the active homo­sexual and the passive lesbian had nothing of the "abnormal."
Medieval and Renaissance Tra­ditions. The medieval period was marked by the continuity of the ancient tradition in both medicine and astrology. The con­servatism of medieval culture allowed for only a gradual shift in the direction of a new conceptual framework. Arab astrolo­gers took considerable interest in the vari­ety of sexual expression, assigning the determining role to the heavenly bodies. The notions formulated by Claudius Ptol­emy in his Tetrabiblos, composed about 161-182, that divided the sky into mascu­line and feminine zones, with Mars and Venus occupying the crucial positions, continued to be echoed down to the end of the Middle Ages by Ali ibn Ridwan, Albubather, Ibn Ezra, Albohali, Abenragel, and Alchabitius.
For Christian authors beginning with the Patristic writers the notion of the "sin against nature" [peccatum contra naturam) little by little modified the atttitudes of the ancients in regard to homo­sexuality. While Albertus Magnus could still quote an Arab author to the effect that inordinate itching in the posteriors caused the desires of the pathicus and could be relieved by a salve applied to the region in question, his contemporary Thomas Aqui­nas struck out on a new path. In citing Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in the medieval Latin translation by William of Moerbeck, he deliberately omitted the reference to innate homosexual tenden­cies, thus leaving medicine in the Western tradition with no function except the fo­rensic task of examining the accused to determine whether his anatomy revealed signs of "unnatural abuse." The primacy of genital anatomy over the rest of the constitution thus being affirmed, modern medicine had painfully to rediscover the possibility that an individual could reach sexual maturity with no attraction to members of the opposite sex but only to his own.
The forensic tradition of the Renaissance begins with Paulus Zacchias (1584-1659), the physician at the papal court, who in his Quaestiones medico-legales (1621-50) dealt with the evidence for submission to anal sodomy. His views were parroted by a score of writers down to the last quarter of the nineteenth century in books duly illustrated with engravings of the areas of the body to be scrutinized by the medical examiner. The eighteenth century saw an extensive literature, mainly in Latin but sometimes in the vernacular, that dealt with the various sexual offenses, never challenging the assumption that the guilty party was acting out of wilful de­pravity and merited only the sanctions adopted by the criminal codes of the Chris­tian states from the canon law of the Church.
Theoretical Innovations. In the first half of the nineteenth century, psy­chiatry introduced a number of concepts that were to prove crucial for the under­standing and classification of homosexu­ality in the second. The French psychia­trist J. D. E. Esquirol (1772-1840) invented the concept of monomania in 1816 for a specific type of partial insanity in which only one faculty of the mind is diseased. Two subdivisions were instinctive mono­mania, in which only the will is diseased, and affective monomania, in which the emotions are excessive or "perverted," and therefore distort behavior; and a quite specific type of the illness was erotic mono­mania, in which the sexual appetite was diseased and abnormal. Then in 1857 Benedict Auguste Morel (1809-1873) in­troduced the term degeneration as a com­plex of religious, anthropological, and pathological assumptions, in particular the belief that acquired defects of the organ­ism can be transmitted to later genera­tions. This innovation led to the psychiat­ric hypothesis that a whole range of abnor­mal mental states could be explained by "degeneration of the central nervous sys­tem." In Germany the physician and au­thor Ernst vonFeuchtersleben) 1806-1849) introduced the term psychopathy for "ill­ness of the mind" in general, with the implicit notion that there could be a patho­logical state of the mind without a lesion of the brain or central nervous system. Alongside these, the word perversion had come to be employed in medicine in the sense of "pathological alteration of a func­tion for the worse." Then deviation had in French assumed the meaning of "a depar­ture from the normal functioning of an organ." In England, to complete the series, James Cowles Prichard 11786-1848) coined the expression "moral insanity": "amorbid perversion of the natural feelings,... 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."
This was the situation on the eve of the discoveries in forensic psychiatry that were prompted by the writings of the early homosexual apologists, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Károly Mária Kertbeny; but crucial as their arguments were for the continuing development of "sexual psy­chopath ology," they also had a distant background in the Greek and Latin litera­ture which, never entirely forgotten, had preserved the tradition of a culture that had been far more tolerant of homosexual expression and certainly did not relegate it to the category of the rare and monstrous. The interplay of the ancient, medieval, and modern ideas on homosexuality thus constitutes the history of the medical theories of the period from 1869 to the present.
The Modem Period. The earliest paper that mentioned homosexuality in a psychiatric context was written in 1849 by Claude-Francois Michéa (1815-1882), in connection with the famous case of Ser­geant Bertrand, who was charged with violation of graves for the purpose of en­gaging in necrophilia. Faced with the claim of the defense that Bertrand was suffering from an instinctive monomania, the court merely sentenced him to a year in prison. But Michéa had the inspiration that there could exist a whole series of "erotic mono­manias, " one of which was an attraction to members of one's own sex, and he men­tioned the poetess Sappho of antiquity as having exhibited such a condition. This isolated study, however, had no impact on medical thinking at the time.
In Germany the expert in forensic medicine Johann Ludwig Casper (1796-1864) had occasion to examine indi­viduals accused of "pederasty" (= anal intercourse) for the purpose of determin­ing whether their persons revealed that the crime had been committed. In a note appended to a paper of 1833 by the anato­mist Robert Froriep, he casually remarked that he had observed a subject in whom sexual desire for the opposite sex was absent - the first such instance in modern medical literature. Toward the close of his life he became convinced that a species of mental alienation was present in at least some of the subjects he had examined.
The medical concept of homo­sexuality could not, however, have arisen without the intervention of the pioneers of the movement, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) and Karoly Maria Kertbeny (1824-1882). All the early physicians whose papers introduced "sexual inversion" to the medical world had read the works of one or both of these authors; none arrived at the notion by his own reasoning or by pointed interrogation of a patient with the condition. If they rejected the apologetic claim that the condition was an idiosyn­crasy, a normal variety of the human sex­ual drive, it was largely because their case material was small and atypical; it usually amounted to one or two individuals exam­ined in prisons or insane asylums. They were confronted with an unknown and paradoxical state of mind, all the more enigmatic because Darwinian biology, which just then was becoming an issue of the day in Europe, emphasized procreation as the mechanism of the evolutionary process. The total absence of the urge to procreate one's kind, and an attraction to members of the same sex with whom coupling could only be sterile, could for the progressive psychiatrists of that era only be a pathological condition.
It was against the background of these concepts and notions that Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833-1890), Richard Freiherr von Kraf ft-Ebing (1840-1902), and Arrigo Tamassia (1849-1917) introduced die contrare Sexualempfindung = sexual inversion to psychiatry in articles pub­lished between 1869 and 1878. The condi­tion itself they defined as "absence of sexual attraction to members of the opposite sex, with a substitutive attraction to members of one's own sex." The reasoning that underlay their definition was that in nor­mal subjects sexual contact with mem­bers of the opposite sex excites pleasure, while with members of the same sex it elicits disgust, but in the cases which they had observed the reverse was true. The condition itself was an "affective mono­mania, " since the rest of the personality of the subject was unaffected. At first only sporadic reports of such abnormal indi­viduals appeared in the literature, but in 1882 the Russian psychiatrist Vladimir Fiodorovich Chizh published an article with the insight that far from being the rare anomaly that psychiatric science had assumed, this condition was in fact the explanation of many of the cases of "ped­erasty" that daily came to the attention of the police; and in 1886 a book earlier published in Russian and then translated into German by Veniamin Mikhailovich Tarnovskii, Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes (The Mor­bid Manifestations of the Sexual Instinct), communicated this finding to the Euro­pean public. In the same year Krafft-Ebing published the first edition of his Psychopathia sexualis, in which sexual inversion was only one of a series of newly discov­ered abnormalities of the sexual drive. Although the author stressed that the sexual act itself, however monstrous it may be, is no proof of the mental abnor­mality of the subject who has committed it, only that some individuals commit forbidden sexual acts because they are compelled by an exclusive and involun­tary urge, this caveat has been too subtle for the mass mind - and even for many so-called experts - to grasp.
A long and in some respects futile controversy has ensued over whether homosexuality is to be classified as a "disease." Often the physicians who have debated this issue have argued that they were taking a truthful middle ground be­tween the religious attitude toward homo­sexuals as depraved and vicious individu­als, and the claims of homosexual apolo­gists that their condition was "normal." The medical concept of homosexuality as disease has in fact been utilized by both sides: on the one hand to deny the legiti­macy of homosexual expression by label­ing the condition pathological, and on the other to exculpate defendants caught in the toils of the law by claiming that they were only "sick individuals" in need of treatment rather than punishment.
In relation to the legal and politi­cal debates engendered by the issue, the psychiatric concept of homosexuality is a secondary derivative of Christian asceti­cism and of the condemnation of homo­sexual acts in Roman law by the Christian emperors, and in the canon law of the Church based in part upon it. These in turn were incorporated into European civil law between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. In other words, it was only because the laws stemming from the Christian Roman Empire and the late Middle Ages made homosexual acts crimi­nal that the forensic psychiatrist had any reason to take note of them, and the homophile apologist had to argue for removing the statutes from the penal code. As an issue of private morality homosexu­ality would scarcely have interested the psychiatrist in modern times any more than it did in ancient Greece. And under­lying the argument for legal toleration has been the (usually unstated) assumption that healthy adult human beings have a sexual drive which they need to gratify and therefore cannot be expected to practice "lifelong abstinence" as demanded by the Church of celibates. Often the debate on this issue has therefore been a kind of intellectual shadowboxing between the opponents of an ascetic morality and its defenders, who ignoring the history of its origins pretend that it is virtually cotermi­nous with the universe.
Psychoanalysis and Its After­math. The psychoanalytic school origi­nated by Sigmund Freud has largely per­petuated the belief in homosexuality as a mental illness, if only because its adher­ents rejected the theory of an innate and unmodif iable condition in favor of a search for its origins in the psychodynamics of the human personality. Some of the case histories published sporadically in the psychoanalytic press are accompanied by quite fanciful theories, while others show genuine insight into certain causal factors. But on the whole the patient universe into which the psychotherapist has delved has been atypical of the homosexual popula­tion in general, and consisted mainly of subjects with acute moral and legal, if not psychological, problems. Only recent stud­ies by academic psychologists have been able to break out of this vicious circle and produce the experimental or statistical evidence such as Kinsey's that homosex­ual subjects were, on standard tests and by a multitude of criteria, indistinguishable from heterosexual ones. However, during the more than a century in which the subject has been debated, one clear line of demarcation has emerged: those who be­lieved in the innate and constitutional origins of homosexuality have with rare exceptions been friends of the movement, while conversely those who held to a psychogenic explanation have been its often vociferous enemies - Alfred Adler, Edmund Bergler, Abram Kardiner, and Charles Socarides. And the proponents of the latter view usually reinforced the Christian dogma that the homosexual character was replete with moral failings, or else maintained that the spread of homosexuality was contingent upon some malaise within society itself - an assertion that played into the hands of dogmatic Marxists who, echoing such fin-de-siècle authors as Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso, would dub homosexu­ality a symptom of the "decadence" of bourgeois society.
In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association was finally persuaded to remove homosexuality per se from its nomenclature of mental illnesses, and in 1986 even the compromise "ego-dystonic homosexuality" was stricken from the list, though the World Health Organization continues the classification. But the issue lingers within the psychiatric profession independent of any politically motivated decision, and decades of controversy ech­oed in the mass media have left the general public with the ill-defined belief that "homosexuality is a disease."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Henry Werlinder, Psychopathy: A History of the Concepts, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Uppsala, 1978; Georges Lantén-Laura, Lecture des perversions: Histoire de leur appropriation médicale, Paris: Masson, 1979.
Warren Johansson

Medieval Latin Poetry
The classical tradition of pederástic poetry may never have completely died out despite Christian homophobia, though no examples in Latin survive from the fifth through the eighth century. But then little was written in the so-called Dark Ages (476-1000), and less survives. If the last surviving pagan homoerotic poems in Latin by Nemesianus in his fourth Bucolic were made in the reign of Numerian (283-284), Christian Latin pédérastie verses appeared some two centuries later, best exemplified by Ausonius (d. ca. 395). Ausonius' library contained homosexual literature that scan­dalized Romans and he translated from Greek into Latin Strato's riddle about three men simultaneously enjoying four sexual postures. Saint Paulinus of Nola expressed his love for Ausonius: "As long as I am held in this confining, limping body..., I will hold you, intermingled in my very sinews." (Stehling, p. 5). Production of pédérastie poetry, as indeed of most other Latin literature, declined and almost ceased after 476. Whatever forms of sexuality the Merovingian kings (420-751) practiced -
especially the degenerate, drunken later ones, the Rois Faineants, with their long golden locks - shocked observers.
Elements of Continuity. A tradi­tion of tolerance for sodomy can be traced from Ausonius through Sidonius Apollinarius to the monks of the central Middle Ages with their taste for "particular friend­ships." A North Italian among poets of the ninth century who rescued classical tradi­tions wrote: "Hard marrow from mother's bones/Created men from thrown stones;/ Of which one is this young boy,/Who can ignore tearful sobs./When I am heartbro­ken, my mind will rejoice./I shall weep as the doe whose fawn has fled." ("O admirabile Veneris ydolum.") So much of the classical tradition had survived that poems of love or intimate friendship for other men could be written by bishops and men of learning without incurring scorn or censure as would have happened in nine­teenth-century Europe. The masters of Latin literature, having written in their own spoken tongue, were revered as models by authors composing in a learned, artifi­cial speech, not their own vernacular, and celebrated in their writing their affection for other men, and especially the passion which as adult males they felt for boys. The whole homoerotic tradition of Medi­terranean culture, made this inevitable. And the contrasts and antagonisms - the boy who scorns his lovers, the lover who is interested only in a boy's looks and not his mind and character - are commonplaces in the Latin literature of pederasty.
From the Carohngians to the Later Middle Ages. In the revival of learn­ing during the Carolingian era (late eighth and ninth centuries), a distinctly erotic element can be perceived in the circle of clerics over which Alcuin, the "friend of Charlemagne," presided. The direction of the passion, however, was largely from Alcuin to his pupils,- he went so far as to bestow upon a favorite student a "pet name" from one of Vergil's Eclogues. The affection of Walafrid Strabo for his friend Liutger took on more specifically Chris­tian terms, anticipating Elizabethan love sonnets. His friend Gottschalk while in exile wrote a tender poem to a young monk, probably at Reichenau.
After the restoration of order imposed by counts and kings during the central Middle Ages (1000-1300) litera­ture once again flourished in Western Europe, gushing forth in the vernaculars, as well as in Latin during the "Renaissance of the twelfth century," and pederastic poems were part of this new wave. Marbod of Rennes (ca. 1035-1123), master of the school of Chartres, who wrote mainly on religious themes, became involved in a frustrating triangle with a boy whom he loved, but who loved a very beautiful girl herself in love with Marbod. Baudri of Bourgueil (1046-1130), his disciple, exem­plifies the transition to the more baldly erotic poetry of the new era. Some of his poems address the moral qualities of the addressee, others extol merely his physi­cal charms. Hildebert of Lavardin (ca. 1055-1133) repeats standard moralizing objections to the "plague of Sodom," sug­gesting that the hated practices were common enough in his time. Another poem of his boldly asserts that calling male love a sin is an error and that "heaven's coun­cil" was at fault in so doing.
Medieval allegorical poetry was less favorable to love for one's own sex. Alan of Lille composed a didactic poem entitled De Planctu Naturae (On the Complaint of Nature; ca. 1170), in which mankind is indicted for having invented monstrous forms of love and perverted her laws. In his continuation of the Roman de la Rose (ca. 1270), Jean de Meun has nature's genius liken those engaging in nonprocreative sex to plowmen who till stony ground, and other metaphors convey the message that if such practices are not halted, the human race will die out in two more generations.
A German manuscript of the twelfth or thirteenth century contains two anonymous lesbian love letters. Anony­mous likewise is the Dispute of Ganymede and Helen in rhyming Latin verse, which is a contest over the merits of love for boys against love for women, in which a not exactly unprejudiced jury opts for hetero-sexuality.
When homophobic repression by clerical and secular authorities mounted during the thirteenth and fourteenth cen­turies, pederastic verse disappeared until the Italian Renaissance, when interest in classical antiquity gave it a rebirth.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexaahty, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980; Ramsay MacMullin, "Roman Attitudes to Greek Love," Historic, 31 (1982), 484-502; Thomas Stehling, trans., Medieval Latin Poems of Male Love and Friendship, New York: Garland Publishing, 1984.
William A. Percy

Mediterranean Homosexuality
This term serves to designate a paradigm of homosexual behavior found in the Latin countries of Europe and the Americas, in the Islamic countries of the Mediterranean, as well as in the Balkans. The diffusion of the paradigm is not uni­form, but for the most part coincides with areas in which industrialization is recent or has not yet begun. In countries such as Italy and Spain it is not found in industrial areas and is starting to recede in those that are industrializing.
The Mediterranean paradigm may be defined as an attempt to interpret and harmonize exclusive homosexual conduct employing the same conceptual frame­work as that in use for heterosexuality. Its most salient characteristic is the sharp dichotomy between the one who is consid­ered the "homosexual" in the strict sense, that is the one who plays the insertee role, as against the one who plays the insertor role (the "active").
To designate the insertee there are various terms in various countries: in Italy, arruso and ricchione - which indi­cate that the passive homosexual so named does not cross-dress - and femmenella for the transvestite; in Spain and Spanish-speaking Latin America, loca and mar­icón-, in Brazil, bicha and veado-, in Haiti, masisi; in North Africa, zamel. By con­trast the insertor is not differentiated, ei­ther by concept or by a separate name, from the maschiofmacho, "(male) hetero­sexual." (For clarity henceforth the south­ern Italian ricchione stands as a generic name for the passive type.)
The consequences of this system of interpreting homosexual behavior are striking. In the first place, only the ricchione, that is, the passive homosexual (who is often recognizable by external signs of stereotypical feminine behavior, which in the femmenella becomes unmistakable because of cross-dressing), feels the need to build a subculture, to create an argot, and to form peer networks. In areas where the Mediterranean paradigm is still domi­nant, the homosexual subculture is in reality the subculture of the ricchioni alone.
In the second place, the members of the subculture generally regard it as inconceivable to have sexual relations with one another. The idea of copulation be­tween two ricchioni is satirized by refer­ring to it as "lesbianism," meaning that actually it is nothing but intercourse be­tween "women," since no "real male" is present. This subculture only valorizes sexual relations between a ricchione and a "man." Relations between two "men" or two ricchioni are senseless, being scarcely imaginable.
Social Advantages of the Para­digm. This system of conceiving homo­sexuality offers several advantages. The first is that by accommodating homosex­ual acts to the dichotomies male/female and active/passive their apparent illogical­ity is elided - that is, the anomaly that comes from the presence of a male (by definition "active") who lends himself to the passive role (by definition "feminine") disappears. By affirming that whoever has an active role in a homosexual act is in reality a "male," while whoever takes the passive role is in reality a kind of woman {femmenella means "little female") the integrity of the dichotomy male-active vs. female-passive is safeguarded.
Moreover, the grotesqueness of the ricchione status constitutes a warning to anyone who might feel homosexual tendencies and be tempted to act upon them. The alternatives are clear: on the one hand, to Uve one's desires exclusively and openly, while accepting that one's level be lowered to that of a caricature, a queen; on the other hand, Uving one's own desires but keeping the privileges con­nected with the male role - at the price of renouncing Uving them in an exclusive manner and of contracting a heterosexual marriage.
Finally, and paradoxically, the ricchione's sexual activity performs a socially useful function. Relations with ricchioni provide a safety valve for the relief of sexual tensions, especially those of adolescents. In the peasant and patriar­chal societies of the Mediterranean type women are (or were until very recently) carefully supervised and chaperoned until marriage, while the modest economic situ­ation of adolescents usualiy does not suf­fice to gain access to prostitutes, the only women who are not off-limits. In this context it is impossible to obtain sexual relief without infringing on one of the basic social taboos: the seduction of vir­gins or married women. The homosexual act can be regarded as a "lesser evil," though it is not openly acknowledged as such.
Advantages of the Role for the Homosexual Individual. The homosexu­als also profit from this "unwritten social pact." There is no other way of explaining why millions of them throughout the world chng to this paradigm, rejecting as absurd the figure of the "gay man" in whom they cannot recognize themselves.
First, as long as those who are "different" decline to claim for themselves a deviant identity and to construct an alternative lifestyle that might chalienge the dominant one, they are granted a fairly wide margin of manoeuvre without social constraints. (Note that in most of the countries in which the Mediterranean paradigm prevails there are no laws against homosexuality; where such laws do exist, as in a few Arab countries, they were imposed long after the social pattern emerged and are rarely enforced.)
Secondly, they can count on very easy contacts with "macho men," includ­ing heterosexual ones. Inasmuch as the society assures that as long as he plays the insertor role, he is not a ricchione, the "man" (hetero- or homosexual according to the individual) is always ready for sex with the ricchione, for the inviolability of his role provides the needed guarantee. (To try to get him to reverse his role would risk violence.)
Moreover, although the role of ricchione exposes one to ridicule, as does the prostitute role for women, the folk cultures of the countries that have Medi­terranean homosexuality have developed remarkable zones of tolerance for those who are viewed as "nature's mistakes," individuals who are not aff Ucted with guilt for what they are. Hence the social accep­tance in Naples of a ritual that would elsewhere be incomprehensible - the mock marriage of femmenelle (one of them dressed as a man), which takes place in public. People accept it as a rightful at­tempt to obtain at least a surrogate of that "normality" precluded by nature's mis­take.
Finaliy, one must not underesti­mate the importance of the availability of a sexual identity (personal and social) that is extremely simple, powerful, and above all not in conflict with the sexual identity of "normals." Paradoxically, many ricchioni refuse to recognize themselves in the image of the "homosexual" and the "gay man," because they perceive the lat­ter as "deviant" - as roles, that is, that can find no place within the "natural" polarity of human categories (male and female) and that create an artificial third category.
All this does not mean that the ricchione thinks of himself as a woman. His awareness of being different both from men and from women (that is to say, of being simply a ricchione} is strong and clear, and it expresses itself in a very camp manner. Nonetheless, the absence of a clear boundary between the condition of ricchione and that of the woman favors in some the acquisition of a feminine iden­tity and, as an ultimate step, of transsexuality. In fact change of sex permits one to bring to completion the process of nor­malization and social integration that began with the acceptance of the ricchione role.
Present Status and Prospects of Mediterranean Homosexuahty. Today Mediterranean homosexuality is slowly retreating, at least in the industrialized countries of the West. This decline is not due to the struggles of the gay movement (which is always weak where homosexu­als reject the figure of the "gay" as aber­rant), nor does it result from the theories of physicians and psychiatrists (who have little resonance among the uneducated, who are the bulwark of this paradigm of sexual behavior). The reasons for the re­treat must rather be sought in the fading of peasant patriarchal society, in the impos­sibility of continuing to seclude women, and in the spread of the "sexual revolu­tion." These factors are inexorably erod­ing the ranks of "macho men" who are disposed to have relations with licchioni.
A part is certainly played by the concept of the homosexual that is rooted in the culture of northern and central Europe and diffused by the mass media - a concept which melds in a single category the (homosexual) "men" and the ricchioni. The acceptance of this model is hampered by Catholic propaganda, which denies the existence of homosexual individuals, claiming that there exist only homosexual acts but no persons as such. Finally, AIDS has had a certain impact, makingthe "men" shy away from contact with those known to be exclusively homosexual.
However, what is occurring is not the disappearance of the paradigm but its adaptive transformation. It is not a matter of an "old" concept simply yielding to a "new" one. What is observable today in such countries as Italy and Spain is the mingling of two different models, though the model of the "gay man" seems to be gaining the upper hand.
The lingering substratum of the Mediteranean paradigm probably accounts for the slight success in Latin countries of the clone subculture, the persistence of a certain camp taste in the gay movements of the countries in question, the greater difficulty experienced by homosexuals in gaining self-acceptance, reduced hostility toward transvestites, as well as a continu­ing gay enthusiasm for sexual contacts with "heterosexual males."
Curiously, while the transforma­tion of Mediterranean homosexuality is taking place, one also finds its glorifica­tion in literary works of high quality, such as The Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. In the book, though not in the film, the hero is a teresita, the Argentine equiva­lent of the ricchione.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Evelyn Blackwood, ed., Anthropology and Homosexual Behav­ior, New York: Haworth Press, 1986; "Méditerranée," Masques 18 (Summer 1983); Stephen O. Murray, Male Homosexuality in Central and South America, New York: Gay Academic Union, 1987 (Gai Saber Monographs, 5).
Giovanni Dall'Orto

Melanesia
See Pacific Cultures.

Melville, Herman (1819-1891)
American novelist and short story writer. Born in New York City of Boston Calvinist and New York Dutch ancestry, Melville grew up in an educated and comfortable environment that ended when his father went bankrupt and then died insane. In 1839 Melville became a ship's cabin boy and was exposed to menial squalor and brutal vice both at sea and in Liverpool. After further adventures, first on a whaling ship in the South Pacific, then in Hawaii, he returned to Boston in 1844. Extensive reading and research rein­forced his experience at sea and underlies the series of novels that he wrote, begin­ning with Typee in 1846 and followed by Redbum (1849) and White Jacket (1850). But his greatest work is Moby-Dick (1851), the classic novel that combines seafaring and allegory into one of the masterpieces of American literature. Moby-Dick proved too difficult for both critics and public at the time, and his next novel, Pierre (1852), was inaccessible because of its psychologi­cal complexity and elaborate prose. De­spite the lack of appreciation of his work, Melville continued to write prose and poetry until his death. He left Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Story in manuscript. By that time his literary reputation had nearly vanished, and only in the twentieth cen­tury, beginning in the 1930s, was the great­ness of his accomplishment realized.
The homoerotic component of Melville's writing is subtle, pervasive, and rich in symbolic overtones. It was Leslie Fiedler, in Love and Death in the Ameri­can Novel, who first glimpsed this ele­ment in the work. The Hero, the ego-persona of the author, is caught between two opposing forces. One is the Captain, the superego authority figure, who repre­sents the moral demands of Western civi­lization and the imperative of obedience,-the other is the Dark Stranger - or later, the Handsome Sailor - who personifies a state of innocence or of uninhibited nature, replicating the myth of Tahiti inherited from the travel literature of the eighteenth century. As part of a primi­tive culture free of the restraints of Chris­tian morality, the Dark Stranger embodies the allure of primitive sensuality and eroti­cism. The novels depict the hero's psycho­logical progress toward opting for the Dark Stranger and rebelling against the Captain. The fulfillment of homoerotic longing is thus contingent upon rejecting the dic­tates of Western civilization.
Melville's work is imbued with intense sexual awareness, but couched in terms that betrayed nothing to the prudish nineteenth-century reader. There is much phallic imagery, but also a blatant associa­tion of sexuality with friendship and the assumption that male friendship is sub­versive to the social order. The masculin­ity of Melville's heroes is their endearing quality; it is a celebration of male bonding in its classic form, to the exclusion of the feminine. Within the American society of his time overt male homosexuality had no place; it had to be relegated to the margin of consciousness or to an exotic setting, with partners of another race and culture. The implicit sexual politics of the novels is a rejection of the norms of nineteenth-century America and an affirmation of an erotic fraternity, an alternate style of rela­tionship between males that takes the form of a democratic union of equals.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, New York: Criterion Books, I960; Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville, Chapel Hill: Univer­sity of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Warren Johansson

Merchant Marine
See Seafaring.

Mesopotamia
Named the "land between the two rivers," the Tigris and the Euphrates, Mesopotamia was the cradle of the earliest human civilization, where the art of writ­ing began shortly before 3000 B.C. Here Sumer and Akkad created a culture that was already old when the golden age of Greece was just beginning. Its literary languages, Sumerian and Akkadian (Se­mitic), were the medium of a vast corpus of texts of mythology and poetry, law and administration, religion and magic, writ­ten in the cuneiform script. The earlier phase of Mesopotamian history saw the rise of the Sumerian city-states, which was followed by the formation of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. The later achievements of Judaea and Greece were heavily indebted to Mesopotamia for the enormous fund of science and technology that it had accumulated over the centu­ries, as well as for the legal and ethical lore that it bequeathed to their prophets and philosophers. What kept this contribution from being appreciated was the historical circumstance that the literary idioms of Mesopotamia became extinct, knowledge of the cuneiform writing was lost, and the horizon of the past limited to the frag­ments preserved in Hebrew and Greek sources. In modem times, the decipher­ment of Sumerian and Akkadian, and then of Hittite and Human, revealed the mil­lennia of cultural evolution that underlay the high civilizations of middle antiquity.
Basic Attitude toward Sexuality. The Mesopotamian attitude toward sexu­ality lacked the religious and philosophi­cal inhibitions which Judaism and Hel­lenic thought were to develop, and it had not even begun to cultivate the ascetic ideal that came to flower in Christianity. Moreover, one of the principal divinities of Mesopotamia, Inanna/Ishtar, was the goddess of love in all the senses of the term. Nearly all of what survives in regard to homosexuality pertains specifically to relations between men, which are attested from the beginning of the third millen­nium. A depiction of anal intercourse shows the receptor kneeling while drink­ing through a straw, perhaps a scene of an orgy in a tavern. It is paralleled by a tableau in which a woman takes the passive role. There are also lead figurines from the end of the second millennium depicting amo­rous encounters between males.
Literary sources include oneiric texts devoted to erotic dreams in which the subject has intercourse with males: a god, a king, a notable, another man's son, a young man, a child, his own father-in-law, even a corpse. The manner in which the material is codified does not allow the modem investigator to derive much infor­mation, although several passages insist on the youth of the partner, hence on the pederastic character of their relationship. There are also divination texts in which the sexual happenings of everyday life are the basis for prognostication; a small number presuppose a male partner, who may be either an equal in social rank, a professional prostitute, or a slave belong­ing to the household. The homosexual activity is nowhere reproved, and does not even incur the stigma of "pollution," as may result from sexual contact with a woman.
Laws. The Middle Assyrian laws contain a provision that penalizes the active partner who has forcibly sodomized his equal by prescribing that he be anally penetrated and then castrated, in strict accordance with the lex talionis. The pre­ceding article in this text deals with the false accusation of repeated passive anal intercourse, treated as analogous to the slanderous charge that one's wife has engaged in prostitution. The stigma in both cases would have attached to the passive partner trafficking in his or her body. The passive role in the homosexual relationship is assimilated to the woman's in the heterosexual one.
Prostitution. Mesopotamian so­ciety did possess its class of professional male prostitutes, the assinnu, the kulu'u, and the kurgarru, some specified as being young, who performed various functions in the sphere of entertainment and reli­gious liturgy. In the former capacity, they played musical instruments, sang and danced, and may even have performed pantomimes or dramatic pieces; in the latter, they officiated at ceremonies in honor of Ishtar, sometimes in the costume of the opposite sex, sometimes in erotic rites for the pleasure of the worshipper.
They are clearly associated with female devotees of Ishtar, whose role as hierodules is abundantly attested in the cunei­form literature. In one text the assinnu is overpowered by a desire to be penetrated by other males, while in others the physi­cal charm of the subject is stressed. On the other hand, the androgyne of later Greek art and mythology was unknown to the Mesopotamians. That these hierodules could be bisexual and father children emerges from passages that allude to their children, with no suggestion that these were merely adopted. However, the assinnu might also be a eunuch, a "half male" in the language of the texts, which further equate him with a "broken vessel."
The appearance and behavior of the male prostitute were markedly effemi­nate: one of the emblems that he carried was the spindle, the symbol par excellence of women's labor; in one cuneiform text the term nas pilaqqi, "spindle-bearer" immediately follows assinnu and kurgarru, an affinity that sheds light on David's imprecation in II Samuel 3:29 ("one hold­ing the spindle"). Certain of them had feminine names, and the guilds of male and female prostitutes at times included persons of the opposite sex from that of virtually all the others. The male might even serve as the lover of a woman, so that no strict line of demarcation was observed. There is even an astrological text in which the outcome of a given juxtaposition of the planets is that "Men will install kurgarrus in their homes, and the latter will bear them children."
The attitude of contemporary Mesopotamian society toward these male prostitutes was ambivalent at best; even if they played a necessary role in its civiliza­tion, as individuals they were marginal­ized and subjected to intense contempt. In the Akkadian version of the Descent of Ishtar to the Nether World, Ereshkigal burdens Asushunamir (and through him, all his imitators in the future), with a great curse that afflicts him with a pitiful exis­tence, exposed to every mishap, and bannished to the very fringe of the social space occupied by the denizens of the city. Others who shared this marginality were the "ecstatics," the eccentrics, and the insane. As "men transformed into women," male prostitutes were stigmatized even when they performed in the cult of Ishtar.
Literary Aspects. Quite different was the role of the homoerotic in the encounter of the hero Gilgamesh with the companion of his adventrues, Enkidu. Here the analogy with the Achilles-Patroclus relationship in the Iliad is striking. If the institutionalized pederasty of the golden age of Hellenic civilization had not yet come into being, still the homosexual element entered spontaneously into friend­ship between males, and was not sup­pressed or condemned by their peers. It could even rival a heterosexual attach­ment, as when Gilgamesh spurns Ishtar's advances. Male bonding was superior to marriage in a society where the sexes were rigidly segregated in private life and loy­alty on the battlefield was a vital element of comradeship. Recent investigators have discovered subtle patterns of erotic double-entendre in the original texts of the epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first classics of world literature. That such effusions of sexual feeling should have been present in his­torical liaisons, such as between David and Jonathan, is therefore only natural.
If love in the explicit sense is but rarely mentioned in Mesopotamian texts, the same intensity of feeling that occurs today could not have been alien to the hearts of men who lived four thousand years ago. In a series of prayers to accord divine favor to amorous attachment, one is concerned with "the love of a man for a man." No religious condemnation or ta­boo in any way analogous to the one in Judaism and Christianity has ever been found in the sources for modern knowl­edge of the land between the two rivers - texts that have the advantage of being contemporary and authentic, not copies made [or censored) by scribes of later centuries who cherished a wholly different moral code.
Of lesbianism the Mesopotamian literature has virtually nothing to say: there is but a single mention of a homosexual relationship between two women in the thousands of cuneiform texts uncovered and deciphered since the mid-nineteenth century. This may be explained partly by the fact that the scribes who composed and transcribed the tablets were male, and partly by the circumstance that women's Uves were private and outside the concern of male society. The lone exception is an astrological prognosis that "women will be coupled," which reveals that such prac­tices were not unknown, and need not even have been rare.
Conclusion. Mesopotamian rec­ords attest that at the dawn of Near East­ern civilization, homosexual activity was, if not glorified, at least accepted as a part of everyday life alongside its heterosexual counterpart, and while the passive-effemi­nate male prostitute was stigmatized, the heroic component of male love was recog­nized and celebrated in literature of true verbal art. No ascetic tendencies in Meso­potamian religion cast their shadow over the erotic bond between males, andlshtar, the goddess of love, gave her blessing to homosexual and heterosexual adorers alike.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jean Bottéro and H. Petschow, "Homosexualität," Real­lexikon der Assyriologie, 4 (1975), 459-468; Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., "Incest, Sodomy and Bestiality in the Ancient Near East," Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to Cyrus H. Gordon, Kevelaer: Verlag Butzon & Bercker, 1973, pp. 81-90; Anne Draffkom Kilmer, "A Note on an Overlooked Word-play in the Akkadian Gilgamesh," Zikir Sumim: Assyriological Studies Presented to P. R. Kraus, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982, pp. 128-32.
Warren Johansson

Metastasio (assumed NAME OF PlETRO Trapassi; 1698-1782)
Italian poet and opera librettist. Hearing the ten-year-old lad improvising poems to a street crowd, an aristocratic literary critic, Gian Vincenzo Gravina, adopted the son of a Roman grocer. Grav­ina hellenized Trapassi to Metastasio and gave his young protege, whom he made his heir adoptive, a fine education, but when the strain of competing with the leading improvvisatori in Italy nearly wrecked the ambitious boy's health, he sent his be­loved protege to rest quietly by the sea in Calabria.
In 1718 Gravina died, bequeath­ing a fortune to Metastasio, who had be­come an abbe. Having squandered his leg­acy in a mere two years, he had to appren­tice himself to a Neapolitan lawyer. In 1721 he composed a serenata, Gli Orti Esperidi, at the request of the viceroy, to celebrate the birthday .of the Empress of Austria. The Roman prima donna Marianna Benti-Bulgarelli (known as "La Romanina" [1684-1734]), who had played the leading role in the serenata, took Metastasio into her house where he long resided (together with her husband), and eventually moved in his parents and sib­lings. La Romanina persuaded him to abandon the law and to devote himself to music. Through La Romanina he came to know the leading composers: Porpora, Hasse, Pergolesi, Alessandro Scarlatti, Vinci, Leo, Durante, and Marcello - all of whom later set his libretti to music, and singers, with one of whom, the castrato Carlo Broschi (better known as Farinelli; 1705-1782), he may have had an affair. His 26 somewhat conventional melodramas (1723-1771), based on heterosexual love stories from classical mythology and his­tory influenced by the seventeenth-cen­tury French theatre, often had absurd plots and little concern for historical accuracy. Yet when set to music, particularly of the Venetian school which was then eclipsing the Neapolitan, they became masterpieces, some being adapted over seventy times.
After 1723, always encouraged by La Romanina, Metastasio produced libretti rapidly, beginning with Didone abandonata, which was loosely derived from Vergil. In 1729 he was appointed poet to the court at Vienna, then beginning its rise to become the world center of music, where Haydn arrived fifteen years later. He moved in with a Spanish Neapolitan, Nicolo Martinez, with whom he remained until his death and composed there his finest plays, including Olimpiade, La Clemenza di Tito (later set by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), Achille in Sciio, and Attilio Regolo, his own favorite. He became so close to the Countess of Althann, Marianna Pignatelli, that many believed that they had secretly married. Perhaps out of jeal­ousy and seeking an engagement at the court theatre, La Romanina set out for Vienna, but died en route, leaving her fortune to Metastasio, who declined it.
Metastasio's later cantatas and the canzonetti he sent his friend the castrato Farinelli were produced before the Countess of Althann died in 1755. As his fame increased, the collection of his works in his own library stretched to over forty editions and were translated into all major languages, even modern Greek. With the musical changes introduced by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Mozart, the innova­tor who created the "modern" opera, his works came to seem old fashioned and increasingly difficult to adapt, and after 1820 were neglected. Farinelli, whom he called his "twin brother," best expounded his poetry. The decline of castrati com­bined with the popularity of opera bouffe to end his domination of the operatic stage, which had lasted almost a century. Maria Theresa prohibited the huge sums ex­pended by her predecessor Charles VI on operas.
Opera, the chief cultural export of eighteenth-century Italy to northern Europe, was often regarded with suspicion there - especially in England, where it was even blamed for the spread of homosexual­ity. Inasmuch as Italy was then in the throes of Counter-Reformation repression and papal obscurantism, this claim seems ironic until one remembers that the balco­nies of Sicilian opera houses and the stand­ing room of the old Metropolitan in New York (to give two far-flung examples) pro­vided not only quarry but even sexual action for homosexuals, a disproportion­ate number of whom are aficionados of this artificial but consummate art form. Yet Metastasio sailed serenely - more or less - through troubled waters. With today's revival of opera seria, works set to his libretti are once again being performed, including his Olimpiade during the 1988 Olympic Games.
William A. Percy

Mexico
The modern Mexican republic displays a fascinating duality of indige­nous (Amerindian) and European-derived themes. Theprocess of integrating the two streams is still continuing.
Pre-Columbian Societies. At the point of European contact, the area we now call Mexico (along with parts of Guatemala and Honduras) was inhabited by numerous diverse societies. But in spite of prominent regionalism exhibited by Mayas, Zapotecs, Mexicas (Aztecs), and others, it was a single culture area. When the Spaniards arrived early in the sixteenth century, some parts of Mesoamerica were in a state of urban decline - particularly the Mayan areas. Yet the central highlands of Mexico were experiencing a cultural florescence. In the Valley of Mexico, the Nahuatls or "Aztecs" of the central valley of Mexico lived in urban centers such as Texcoco, Tlatelolco, and Mexico/Tenochitlan (all now part of the federal district). These people claimed a direct heritage of urban living on a massive scale which dated back to the founding of Teotihuacan, about 300 B.C. In comparison with Euro­pean cities of the time, the largest Aztec City, Mexico/Tenochitlan, is said to have been surpassed only by Paris. From the Valley of Mexico, the Aztecs politically dominated most of Mesoamerica and ex­tracted a heavy tribute of raw materials, finished products, slaves, and sacrificial victims. However, they usually allowed a fair degree of home rule and the continu­ance of local traditions within the various cultures of their empire.
The Aztecs exhibited a profound duality in their approach to sexual behav­ior. On one hand, they held public rituals which were at times very erotic, but on the other, they were extremely prudish in everyday life. In their pantheon, the Mexi­cans worshipped a deity, Xochiquetzal (feathered flower of the maguey), who was the goddess of non-procreative sexuality and love. Originally the consort of Tonacatecutli, a creator god, Xochiquetzal dwelled in the heaven of Tamaoanchan, where she gave birth to all humankind. However, subsequently she was abducted by Tezcatlipoca, a war god, and raped. This event mystically redefined her character from the goddess of procreative love to the goddess of non-reproductive activities. Aztec deities often had such multiple dualistic aspects such as male and female and good and evil. Xochiquetzal was both male and female at the same time and in her male aspect (called Xochipilli), s/he was worshipped as the deity of male homosexuality and male prostitution. In Xochiquetzal's positive aspect, s/he was the deity of loving relationships and the god/dess of artistic creativity; it was said that non-reproductive love was like a piece of art - beautiful and one-of-a-kind. But in her dualistic opposite, as the deity of sex­ual destruction, s/he incited lust and rape, and inflicted people with venereal disease and piles.
In a partly mythical, partly his­torical account of their past, the Aztecs asserted that there had been four worlds before their own and that the world imme­diately preceding the present was one of much homosexuality. This "world" may refer to the Toltec empire (conquered by the Aztecs around 1000 A.D.). In this "Age of the Flowers, of Xochiquetzal, " the people supposedly gave up the "manly virtues of warfare, administration and wisdom," and pursued the "easy, soft life of sodomy, perversion, the Dance of the Flowers, and the worship of Xochiquetzal." It has been suggested that the "Fourth World" refers to the empire of the Toltecs because there are similar statements referring to Toltec invaders in historical records of the Maya in Yucatan, e.g., the Chilam Balam of Chumayel state. The Yucatan Maya held large private sexual parties which included homosexuality. However, according to I. Eric Thompson, they were aghast at the public sexual rites of their Toltec conquerors.
As noted, the Aztecs allowed the people they conquered to maintain their own customs. Thus, although the Aztecs were publically sexually exuberant and privately prudish, their subjects varied greatly in their sexual customs - as the Maya example illustrates; and in some Mesoamerican cultures it appears that homosexuality was quite prominent. The area that is now the state of Vera Cruz was very well known for this activity. When Bernai Diaz del Castillo reached Vera Cruz with Cortes, he wrote of the native priests: "the sons of chiefs, they did not take women, but followed the bad practices of sodomy" (Idell, p. 87). When the conquis­tadors reached Cempoala, near the present city of Vera Cruz, Cortes felt compelled to make a speech in which he stated, "Give up your sodomy and all your other evil practices, for so commands Our Lord God ..." (Diaz del Castillo in Idell, p. 8). Also, Cortes wrote his king, the Emperor Char­les V: "We know and have been informed without room for doubt that all [Veracruzanos) practice the abominable sin of sodomy." Most of them were sodomites and especially those who lived along the coast and in the hot lands were dressed as women; "boys went about to make money by this diabolical and abominable vice" (Idell, p. 87]. It would be folly to accept all the statements about homosexuals at face value. Spaniards of the time also claimed that homosexuality had been introduced into Spain by the Moors and attributed sodomy to new enemies as well. Nonethe­less, there is an interesting legend in Mexico that says the Spaniards were more easily able to capture the Aztec emperor Mon­tezuma because they sent a blond page to seduce the ruler,- and when the emperor had fallen thoroughly in love, threatened to separate the two if the emperor did not place himself in the hands of the Span­iards. While the Spaniards' allies, the Tlaxcalans, asserted the story was true, the Spaniards denied it. However, the tale may help us to understand why the Az­tecs, who were so blatant in public but puritanical in private shouted "Cuilone, Cuilone" ("queer, queer") from their ca­noes at the Spaniards during the "Noche Triste" when Cortes was forced to retreat from Mexico City losing many soldiers (Novo, p. 43). The warriors' epithets, of course, may only have been another ex­ample of labeling one's enemies homo­sexual.
To summarize the material we have at the time of the conquest, homo­sexuality played an important part inmuch of the religious life in Mexico, and was commonly accepted in private life in many Mesoamerican cultures as well; but the prevailing sentiment of the ruling Aztecs outside of ritual was one of sexual rigidity, prudishness, and heavy repression.
Colonial Mexico. In the opening years of the sixteenth century, the Span­iards discovered Mesoamerica and con­quered it. One of the most dramatic social changes which occurred was the evolution of Mestizo or ladino culture. Miscegena­tion, acculturation, and the melding of beliefs created a social milieu which was neither Spanish nor Indian, but which has come to form the core features of modern Mexico. The Spaniards held a moral view­point toward homosexuality which (aside from ritual) paralleled that of the Aztecs.
In Mexico, after the conquest, all pagan rituals were banned and their rationale discredited. Mestizo culture came to ex­hibit a melding of Aztec attitudes toward private homosexuality with those of the Spaniards. Indeed, the former Aztec ritual tradition which celebrated homosexuality as communion with the gods was all but lost. In early Colonial times, when Bishop Zumarraga was the Apostolic Inquisitor of Mexico, sodomy was a prime concern for the Inquisition. The usual penalties for homosexuality were stiff fines, spiritual penances, public humiliation, and flog­gings. However, homosexuality was tried by the civil courts as well, whence people were sentenced to the galleys or put to death.
Homosexual Social Life. At pres­ent, the only records which give us a glimpse of homosexual social life during the Colonial period are the records of court proceedings when homosexual scandals occurred. Of such events, a purge which took place in Mexico City between 1656 and 1663 is the best known. Whereas here­tics and Jews were burned in the Alameda, now a park near the center of Mexico City, homosexual sodomites were burned in a special burning ground in another part of the city, San Lázaro, because sodomy was not a form of heresy and thus fell into an ambiguous category of offenses. Thus, the group was marched to San Lázaro where the officials first garroted them, starting with one Cotita de la Encarnación. They "were done with strangling all of them at eight o'clock that night;... then they set them afire." Novo states that several hundred people came from the city to watch the event. It should be noted that strangling the victim s before burning them was considered an act of mercy; for burn­ing was such terrible agony that it was feared that the prisoners would forsake their faith in God and thus lose their immortal souls. The purge seems to have ended when the superiors in Spain wrote back to Mexico that they did not have papal authority to grant the jurisdiction the Mexican Holy Office requested, and that the Inquisitors were "not to become involved in these matters or to enter into any litigation concerning them."
Independent Mexico. Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 brought an end to the Inquisition and the kind of homosexual oppression described above. The intellectual influence of the French revolution and the brief French occupa­tion of Mexico (1862-67) resulted in the adoption of the Napoleonic Code. This meant that sexual conduct in private be­tween adults, whatever their gender, ceased to be a criminal matter. In matters con­cerning homosexuality, the Mexican gov­ernment held that law should not invade the terrain of the individual moral con­science, in order to protect the precious concerns of sexual freedom and security; and that the law should limit itself "to the minimum ethics indispensable to main­taining society." In limiting itself thus, the Mexican law would seem to be obey­ing a certain Latin tradition of overt indif­ference.
This change of legal attitude was obviously a tremendous improvement for homosexuals over previous Aztec and Spanish way s of dealing with homosexual­ity, and was considerably more liberal than legislation in much of the United States. Yet it did not grant people the right to be overtly homosexual; for included in the "minimum ethics indispensable to main­taining society" are laws against solicita­tion and any public behavior which is considered socially deviant or contrary to the folkways and customs of the time. Accordingly, one is again confronted with the basic cultural structure - homosexual expression between individuals if known is considered a form of deviation which can bring serious consequences.
"The Dance of the Forty-One Maricones." On the night of November 20, 1901, Mexico City police raided an affluent drag ball, arresting 42 cross-dressed men and dragging them off to Belén Prison. One was released. The official account was that she was a "real woman," but persistent rumors circulated that she was a very close relative of President Porfirio Díaz, and even today "número cuarentaydos" (number 42, the one who got away) is used to refer to someone covertly pasivo. Those arrested were subjected to many humiliations in jail. Some were forced to sweep the streets in their dresses. Eventu­ally, all 41 were inducted into the 24th Battalion of the Mexican Army and sent to the Yucatan to dig ditches and clean la­trines. The ball and its aftermath were much publicized, among other places in broadsides by Guadalupe Posada (who provided the cross-dressed men with moustaches and notably upper-class dress). Although the raid on the dance of the 41 maricones was followed by a less-publi­cized raid of a lesbian bar on December 4, 1901, in Santa Maria, the regime was soon preoccupied by more serious threats.
The Mexican Revolution is gen­erally dated 1901-10, but if one includes the attempted counter-revolutions of the Cristeros, armed conflict continued through the end of the 1920s. The capital city with a population of half a million before the revolution became a major metropolis with seven million residents by 1959, eighteen million or more by 1988.
Despite the international depres­sion of the 1930s and along with the social revolution overseen by President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40), the growth of Mexico City was accompanied by the opening of homosexual bars and baths supplement­ing the traditional cruising locales of the Alameda, the Zócalo, Paseo de Reforma, and Calle Madero (formerly Plateros). Those involved in homosexual activity continued to live with their families, and there were no homophile publications. In the absence of a separate residential con­centration, the lower classes tended to accept the stereotypes of the dominant society and enact them. While some of the cosmopolitan upper classes rejected the stereotypical effeminacy expected of mari­cones, they tended to emulate European dandies of the late nineteenth century - "clever, non-political, elegant, charming men trying to outdo everybody else in the Salon . . . the Mexican homosexuals as­pired to be French decadents like Montesquiou" in the characterization of one interviewee. Wildean influence and the emulation of Hollywood screen goddesses followed. During World War II, ten to fif­teen gay bars operated in Mexico City, with dancing permitted in at least two, El África and El Triunfo. Relative freedom from official harassment continued until 1959 when Mayor Uruchurtu closed every gay bar following a grisly triple murder. Motivated by moralistic pressure to "clean up vice," or at least to keep it invisible from the top, and by the lucrativeness of bribes from patrons threatened with ar­rests and from establishments seeking to operate in comparative safety, Mexico City's policemen have a reputation for zeal in persecution of homosexuals.
Some observers claim that gay Ufe is more developed in the second-larg­est city, Guadalajara. In both cities there have been short-lived gay Uberation groups since the early 1970s, e.g., La Frente Lib­eración Homosexual formed in 1971 around protesting Sears stores' firing of gay employees in 1971 in Mexico City, and La Frente Homosexual de Acción Revolu­cionaria which protested the 1983 round­ups in Guadalajara. There are now annual gay pride marches, gay publications (e.g., Macho Tips which includes a nude center­fold), and gay and lesbian organizations in contact with organizations in other countries. Although there have been challenges to the dominant conception of homosexuality as necessarily related to gender-crossing, the simplistic activo-pasivo logic continues to channel thought and behavior in Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Albert Idell, The Bernal Diaz Chronicles, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956; Salvador Novo, Las Locas, el sexo, los burdeles, Mexico City: Novaro, 1972; Antonio Requena,
"Noticias y consideraciones sobre las anormalidades de los aborígenes americanos: sodomía," Acta Venozolana, 1 (1945), 43-71 (trans, as "Sodomy Among Native American Peoples," Gay Sunshine 38/39 [1979], 37-39); J. Eric Thompson, Maya History and Religion, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970.
Stephen O. Murray and Clark L. Taylor

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)
Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. Michelangelo, who was to be­come the greatest artist of the Renais­sance, was born the son of a magistrate in Caprese near Florence. Raised in Florence, he was apprenticed for three years to the artist Domenico Ghirlandaio. His studies of the antique sculptures in the Boboli gardens brought him into contact with the neo-Platonist thinker Ficino. Although there has been some dispute as to the direct effect of neo-Platonic ideas on his early work, they certainly surfaced later, shaping his self-concept as an artist and a psychosexual being.
In 1496 Michelangelo went to Rome, where he carved his first great masterpiece, the Vatican Pieta. This work, which solved the problem that had vexed earlier sculptors of convincingly showing a grown man reclining in the lap of his mother, made him famous, and Mich­elangelo triumphantly returned to Florence in 1501. Here he carved the heroic nude David, a traditional symbol of the city's underdog status that he endowed with a new power. He then returned to Rome to work on avast project for the tomb of pope Julius II. This daunting task was never completed, in part because the pope di­verted Michelangelo's efforts to the fresco painting of the Sistine ceiling, a work of encyclopedic scope and ubiquitous ur­gency. In the 1980s the cleaning of the ceiling, which had become much obscured with grime and restorations over the centuries, revealed brilliant colors, but was attacked by some critics as having dam­aged it in other respects.
The artist then turned to the Medici tombs in Florence, which were commissioned by the new pope, Leo X. After the expulsion of the Medici from the city in 1529, Michelangelo defected to the republicans, but was forgiven and rein­stated by that powerful family not long thereafter. In 1534 he returned to Rome. In the thirty years that remained to him he painted the Last Judgment on the wall of the Sistine Chapel and the frescoes of the Capella Paolina. He also addressed him­self to architecture, and to several unfin­ished sculptures.
When Michelangelo was a boy, his father had opposed his choice of profes­sion as being fit only for a laborer. Long before the artist died, however, he was regularly hailed as II Divino, an almost blasphemous title for a unique artist who exemplified the idea that the supreme genius surpasses the ordinary rules to which other artists are subject.
For fifty years Michelangelo en­joyed undisputed sway as an artist. Yet his psyche exual identity was much less se­cure. Throughout his life Michelangelo experienced a powerful emotive and erotic attraction to men, particularly those in their late teens and early twenties. The presence of apprentices in his studio, who were undoubtedly among the models for such sensual male nudes as the Slaves for the Julius tomb and the ignudi of the Sistine ceiling, exposed him to constant temptation. At least one case is recorded where a former apprentice attempted to blackmail the artist by threatening to tell tales, while in another instance the father of a potential apprentice offered the boy's services in bed. (Michelangelo indignantly refused.)
In 1532 the artist met a young Roman nobleman, Tommaso de' Cavalieri, to whom he was to be devoted for the rest of his life. To Cavalieri he sent draw­ings, including the famous one of an eagle (evidently himself) carrying a beautiful Ganymede (Cavalieri) aloft. Poems and letters also avow his passion. However, beginning in his late fifties, this love, being directed to a person whose standing placed him far above the working-class youths to whom he was accustomed, assumed a sublimated character.
Michelangelo's poems contain many fascinating hints of his self-under­standing. Yet his language is difficult and his handling of philosophical ideas un­sure. Revealingly, in 1623 the artist's grand-nephew and editor, Michelangelo the Younger, bowdlerized them, changing many male pronouns to female ones. This act (since remedied in modem editions) shows that contemporaries were em haras­sed by his love objects.
While Michelangelo's enemies (including the spiteful Aretino) gossiped, his friends insisted on his chaste purity. As yet we have no actual proof of genital contacts with young men. However, what evidence there is suggests that they were not lacking - though probably sparse - in his earlier years, ceasing later. Mich­elangelo was bom into an era in which the relatively easy-going attitudes toward artists' sexual peccadillos that prevailed in the early and middle decades of the fifteenth century had yielded to more disapproving ones, a development that climaxed in the bigoted prudery of the incipient Counterreformation of the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Michelangelo witnessed such contempo­raries as Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Bot­ticelli, and Benvenuto Cellini disgraced by charges of sodomy. Evidently, he was able to convince himself, and many others as well, that his "spiritual" love of beautiful young men had nothing in common with base acts of buggery.
In an as-told-to life penned by his epigone Ascanio Condivi, Michelangelo seems to have intended to attribute his attraction to men to the stars. Referring to the fact that he was bom under the joint influence of Mercury and Venus, he surely knew that the ancient astrological tradi­tion stemming from Ptolemy held that this conjunction caused men to be at­tracted more to boys than women. Thus the tendency was not the product of a whim, but was foreordained by cosmic forces. However this may be, because of his fame and the changing temper of the times in which he lived, Michelangelo experienced unique pressures on his sex­ual self-understanding. These pressures are linked to - though they cannot explain - the special intensity of his art, the terribilta for which he is renowned.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Giorgio Lise, L'Altzo Michelangelo, Milan: Cordani, 1981, James M. Saslow, '"A Veil of Ice between My Heart and the Fire': Michelangelo's Sexual Identity and Early Modem Constructs of Homosexuality," Genders, 2 (July 1988), 77-90.
Wayne R. Dynes

Middle Ages
The Middle Ages constitute the major phase of European history that stands between classical antiquity (Greece and Rome), on the one hand, and the Renais­sance, on the other. The beginning of the Renaissance can be placed with relative precision in fifteenth-century Italy, whence the new outlook spread in the following century to the rest of Europe. The other boundary, the end of classical antiquity, cannot be pinpointed, as the change was a gradual process beginning in the third century of our era and not completed until the fifth or even later. Moreover, to under­stand the formation of the Middle Ages it is necessary to look back even earlier: to the origins of Christianity. Inspired by the teachings of Jesus Christ, the church did not achieve firm institutions until the latter half of the second century. At this time one can confirm the separation from Judaism, the consolidation of the canon of writings known as the New Testament, the crystalization of a system of govern­ance based on bishops as presiding officers, and a growing roster of martyrs created by official persecution - in attacks which were to have the ultimate effect of strengthen­ing rather than smothering the church.
The Patristic Period and the Offi­cial Recognition of Christianity. From this time onwards comes a large body of exegetical tracts and theological disquisitions known as the Patristic writings. Taken as a whole, these texts tend to confirm the ascetic morality of the New Testament. In those rare instances where they depart from rigorism, as in relaxation of the ban on visual images, there was extensive and heated controversy, with both sides strenu­ously maintaining their positions. In the case of sex between males, no such debate occurred, a silence signifying that the matter needed no discussion, for the nega­tive judgment of homosexuality enshrined in the Levitical prohibitions was incorpo­rated in the constitution of the primitive church and reinforced by New Testament passages condemning sexual activity be­tween males in particular and all forms of sexual depravity and impurity in general. Occasionally, the Fathers do attack the corrupt morals of pagan pederasty, warn­ing their own flock not to yield to tempta­tion.
The transition from the tolera­tion and indifference which the pagan ancient Mediterranean world had shown toward homosexuality to the implacable intolerance and social ostracism of the later Middle Ages could not have been effected overnight. Apologists for Chris­tian rigorism would like to begin in mediasres, claimingthat "theChurch taught, and people universally believed" that homosexual behavior was a crime against nature for which an act of divine wrath had destroyed Sodom and the neighboring cit­ies. But this Jewish legend embellished with Hellenic moralizing was only gradu­ally inculcated into the mass mind, par­ticularly in countries outside the classical world and ignorant of Palestine and its geographical myths.
Constantine the Great's Edict of Milan (313) transformed Christianity from the faith of an embattled minority to what amounted to a state religion. Heretofore, the Roman empire had known no general antihomosexual legislation - the shadowy "Scantinian law" notwithstanding. In 342, however, the emperor Constantius issued a somewhat opaque decree making male homosexual conduct a capital crime. This enactment was followed in 390 by a more unambiguous antihomosexual statute, decreed by Valentian II, Theodosius the Great, and Arcadius. It was Theodosius who consolidated the Christianization of the Roman empire by banning all compet­ing faiths other than Judaism.
At the same time the ascetic ideal became diffused throughout Christian society, as monks took over leadership of the church, replacing the cultivated aris­tocracy that had earlier predominated. A key feature of asceticism was the exalta­tion of virginity for both men and women. Two polemical writings of St. Jerome, Against Helvidius (ca. 383) and Against fovinian (ca. 393), advance arguments that condemn marriage altogether. Though St. Augustine and others modified this posi­tion, an aura of the less than ideal hung over even the limited acceptance of mar­riage for procreation only, and celibate monks and nuns became the culture he­roes of the new society. Meanwhile Christian monasticism took shape.
Byzantium. The reign of Justin­ian (527-565) is remembered as a highwater mark of antihomosexuality. Of two novellae (new laws) referring to sodomy, one accuses the perpetrators of bringing on famines, earthquakes, and pestilences. Incorporated into the Corpus Juris Civilis, the great codification of Roman law under­taken at Justinian's behest, they lent offi­cial sanction to the superstitious fear of the homosexual as a Jonah figure. Justinian's court also made political use of charges of homosexual conduct to black­mail or discredit opponents, particularly of the Green circus faction. Needless to say, these measures did not stop same-sex activity in the ensuing centuries. A num­ber of Byzantine emperors themselves are believed to have been homosexual, includ­ing Constantine V (741-775), Michael HI (842-870) - who was murdered by his lover - Basiln (976-1025), Constantine VBI (1025-1028), and Constantine IX (1042-1055). Research is needed to docu­ment homosexuality in other sectors of Byzantine society. It is known to have flourished in the monasteries, and was an undoubted feature of urban life. There was also an interface, particularly in the later centuries, with Islamic homosexuality.
The So-Called "Dark Ages" in the West. In Western Europe the year 476 is the traditional date for the end of the Roman Empire, which was succeeded by barbarian kingdoms controlled by monarchs and gentry of Germanic origin. In their northern European home some Ger­manic tribes had prohibited certain types of homosexuality. According to a much-discussed passage in Tacitus "cowards and shirkers and the sexually infamous (corpore infames) are plunged in the mud of marshes with a hurdle on their heads" [Germania, 12), but close analysis of this passage shows that the Latin terms para­phrase Old Norse argr and that the text as a whole refers to cowardice in battle, not sexual conduct in private life. In apparent continuation of this tradition the medieval Scandinavians associated passive homo­sexuality with cowardice, subsuming both under the aforementioned epithet argr. In the fifth century when the Vandals took possession of Carthage in North Africa, they supposedly suppressed effeminate homosexuality with great brutality.
Despite this background, how­ever, the barbarian kingdoms showed rela­tively little interest in antihomosexual legislation. The Germanic penal codes that replaced Roman law in territories detached from the Western Empire make little mention of homosexual conduct and have no term that in any way corresponds to the later notion of sodomy. Exceptionally, in seventh-century Visigothic Spain a par­ticularly severe regime persecuted Jews and subjected homosexuals to the novel penalty of castration, clearly under the influence of inchoate canon law. Char­lemagne (768-814), otherwise distin­guished for his impressive program of administrative and cultural reform, con­trived only to repeat the old prohibitions in a routine manner. The church, in the hands of manor-raised sons and brothers with little spiritual calling, was weak and ineffective.
What would appear to be the most important legal document from Western Europe in the period 500-1000 is in fact a forgery. Yet forgeries are sometimes even more revealing of the climate of opinion than authentic documents, for they ex­press what their devisers would like the case to have been. A capitulary, suppos­edly issued by Charlemagne in 770, was actually written by one Benedict Levita about 850. The author shows interest in a number of sexual offenses, including sod­omy. Apparently for the first time, he explicitly connects the penalty of burning at the stake with God's punishment of Sodom. A novel element is his ascription of the Christian defeat in Spain to the toleration of sodomy - echoing the old Germanic preoccupation with cowardice, but also anticipating the role of the sodo­mite as a scapegoat for all of society's ills and misfortunes, from earthquakes to reverses in battle.
More significant for the long run was the church's innovation of the peni­tential system for chastising sins accord­ing to their gravity. For the early Chris­tians, still anticipating the imminence of the Second Coming, to commit a sin was an ineradicable blemish for which one must suffer the full dire penalty at the hour of Judgment. In time, however, the church began to modify this severity. In exchange for a specified penance the sinner could wipe his or her slate clean. This major change seems to have begun in the Celtic Church, from which we have the first main body of manuals, the Penitentials. These books assigned penalties in ascend­ing order of severity ranging from simple kissing through mutual masturbation and interfemoral connection through oral and anal intercourse. They made due allow­ance for the age of the partners and occa­sionally mentioned lesbian behavior. The penalties vary considerably, from as little as 20 to 40 days' restriction of liberty for mutual masturbation to as much as 7 to 15 years for sodomy itself. We know little of the way these procedures worked in prac­tice, but a certain amount of "plea bargain­ing" probably occurred. While the death penalties remained as part of inherited Roman law (civil as distinct from canon law), they do not seem to have been much imposed, if at all, in the early Middle Ages. With much of the countryside unconverted and unadministered, it would have been difficult to enforce draconian measures. The laws and regulations of this period are virtually the only source for the occur­rence of homosexuality; no surviving documents record the disciplining or punishing of an individual or group of individuals by ecclesiastical or secular courts.
The Carolingian empire, poor and weak because Muslims controlled the Mediterranean and shut if off from world trade, collapsed when Charlemagne's grandsons warred over their portions of the legacy. Meanwhile, invaders came from all sides: Saracens by sea from the south, Magyar horsemen from the east, and, worst of all, Northmen from Scandinavia who, as their epics and sagas mostly written in thirteenth-century Iceland reveal, had their own form of homosexuality. Wreaking the worst devastation on Ireland and England, which like Normandy they eventually conquered and settled, the Northmen came in their long boats to ravage western Eu­rope. The later Carolingians and their local officers, the counts, could not cope with the disintegrating empire. Consequently local strong men, barons, built wooden castles and manned them with knights, the new heavily armored horsemen devel­oped by the Carolingians. A baron domi­nated the neighborhood from his rough castle, where he lived with his knights and squires, who often slept on pallets around the bigcenter room, with the baron and his lady enjoying separate quarters. Commonly before 1000, knights did not marry, living rather like cowboys of the Old West in the one big room, occasionally seducing serv­ing wenches, peasant girls, and inexperi­enced nuns. Such opportunities notwith­standing, a good deal of "situational homosexuality," especially between the knight and his squire, must have taken place. Evidence of such involvements is fragmentary, but it can be gathered among the Anglo-Norman, Northern French, and Provencal nobility, as well as among Ger­man royal families (witness Frederick II).
The Central Middle Ages. After 1000 an extraordinary economic advance in Western Europe spurred the growth of towns and educational institutions. Espe­cially during "the Renaissance of the twelfth century" a remarkable body of homosexual love poetry in Latin reflects a highly sophisticated literary culture of a restricted upper crust. No evidence indi­cates that the text circulated generally among even the small community of the literate. Moreover, classical literary com­monplaces and allusions suffuse this medieval Latin poetry. While it would be wrong to dismiss the texts as mere literary exercises, they cannot be regarded as di­rect and candid reflections of experience either. In addition, a tradition of effusive friendship among monks should not be confused with avowals of sexual passion. One is confronted then with what must be termed gay literature, but one that allows few conclusions about gay life in general.
Yet other less beguiling evidence survives. A passage from a late twelfth-century British historian, Richard of De­vizes, gives a glimpse of a homosexual subculture that coexisted in medieval London with other marginalized elements of society, while Walter Map, an English­man who had studied in Paris, complained of homosexuality there. In keeping with the German proverb "City air makes one free," the towns were increasingly the refuge of individuals uncomfortable living elsewhere. The migration of gay men and women to urban centers had begun. The new conditions of town life probably in­spired the enactment of new sodomy leg­islation, beginning with that of the Coun­cil of Nablus in the Latin Kingdoiri of Jerusalem in 1120.
The authorities after 1000 became very interested in religious deviation or heresy. Perhaps the most formidable of these spiritual movements of dissidence was Albigensian dualism, which flourished particularly in the south of France. This heresy was believed, not altogether wrongly, to have come from the Balkans, from the Bulgarian Bogomils in particular. Their French persecutors applied the term bougre [bulgarus; bugger) to them, and by extension to heretics generally, from the beginning of the thirteenth century, which saw the establishment of the papal Inqui­sition. The association of heresy with sodomy, a recurring feature from this point onwards, gave bougre an additional mean­ing, that of sodomite. In English this sense has usurped the older one of "heretic," though the term is also used for heterosex­ual anal intercourse and for sexual rela­tions with animals. Yet another medieval transformation gave bougre the meaning of usurer, someone who lent money at prohibited rates of interest. The attacks on the heretics are major historical exem­plars of the orchestration of popular fears and prejudices by clerical and lay author­ity to punish actual deviation and to cow the rest of society into continued submis­sion. The most notorious instance is Philip the Fair's repression of the Templar Order for heresy and sodomy in the early four­teenth century.
To the disciplining and purifica­tion of the people assured by the "two swords" of church and state corresponded a regimentation of higher knowledge, symbolized by the Scholastic movement. The best known figure in this trend is Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica (1266-73) remains an imposing point of reference. As is well known, Aquinas created a new synthesis by weaving Aris­totle together with the Patristic corpus, imparting to the whole a transcendent sense of order which compels comparison with the great Gothic cathedrals. Aquinas' classification of unnatural vice was to have resounding influence over the centuries. After a brief mention of masturbation, he divides unnatural intercourse into three kinds: with the wrong species (bestiality), the wrong gender (homosexual sodomy), and the wrong organ or vessel (heterosex­ual oral and anal intercourse), and declares that such sins are in gravity second only to murder.
If a certain degree of toleration or indifference to homosexuality had pre­vailed previously, after the end of the thir­teenth century the individual known to have engaged in homosexual activity was both a criminal and an outcast, without rights or feelings that church or state needed to recognize in any way. Not to denounce and persecute him meant complicity. The penalties for homosexual activity between males (rarely between females, and then only when an artificial phallus was em­ployed) ranged from compulsory fasting to confinement in irons, running the gaunt­let, flogging with the cat o'nine tails, the pillory, branding, blinding, cutting off the ears, castration, and perpetual banishment. The death penalty prescribed by Leviticus was rarely enforced, but when it was, it took the form of hanging or burning at the stake. Some of the inhuman punishments of the Middle Ages lingered into the early nineteenth century, when the reformers of the criminal law secured their abolition by denouncing them as survivals of supersti­tion and fanaticism.
The Later Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century the medieval synthe­sis began to break down, signaled by a climactic struggle between the papacy and the secular authorities. The only major innovation in official attitudes toward homosexuality was a gradual shift to en­forcement by the secular authorities, be­ginning in such Italian cities as Florence and Venice, which had become sensitive not only through their growth and diver­sity, but also through greater appreciation of the literary heritage of classical antiq­uity, permeated with pederasty. Even king Edward II of England was overthrown and murdered because of his homosexuality. What effects the Black Death (1348-49), Europe's greatest epidemic, may have had on sexuality are unknown, but the Jews, already persecuted since the Crusades, were made scapegoats. Certainly a vital urban subculture of homosexuality was alive at this time, though one catches only fleeting glimpses of it in the literature. With the coming of a new secular spirit in the Ren­aissance more detailed records of the life and attitudes of homosexual men and women finally emerge.
The disapproval of homosexual­ity in Western Christian civilization is the last and most pertinacious survival of medieval intolerance, one for which the church would now gladly disown respon­sibility, even while its political supporters do everything in their power to keep the archaic statutes on the books and frustrate liberal demands for the acknowledgement of gay rights. Even the medieval attitudes have not totally lost their respectability - witness the undisguised hatred and con­tempt which many display without com­punction in regard to homosexuals, when they would be ashamed to avow such feel­ings toward members of religious commu­nities other than their own. So the homo­phobia of today is a part of the "living past" - of the persistence of the beliefs and superstitions of the Middle Ages in the midst of an otherwise enlightened succes­sor civilization.
See also Capital Crime, Homo­sexuality as; Common Law; Law, Feudal and Royal; Law, Germanic; Law, Municipal; Papacy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980; Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period, Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1979.
Wayne R. Dynes

Military
The relationship between homo­sexuality and the military profession is a complex and paradoxical one. The modern stereotype of the homosexual male as lacking in manliness is utterly belied by the masculine character of the traditional warrior who is also passionately attracted to his own sex. Instead of diminishing the warlike nature of the tribe, this tendency immensely strengthened its valor and endurance. The homoerotic bond fostered ideals of heroism, courage, resourceful­ness, and tenacity among the warrior caste, and exalted these virtues to the apogee of public honor. Such was the case among the Dorians of ancient Greece in the seventh century B.C. and among the Samurai of feudal Japan.
Ancient Greece. The virile and warlike Hellenic tribes, migrating south­ward into the Peloponnesus and to the island of Crete, institutionalized the cus­tom of paiderasteia (literally "boy-love"). This custom meant the love of an older warrior for a younger one, who corre­sponded to the squire or page attending the medieval knight. The attachment was always conceived as having an element of physical passion, sometimes slight, some­times dominant and all-engrossing. If it originally designated the heroic devotion of comrades to each other, it was later ex­tended to the more spiritual relationship that prepared a boy for intellectual life and for public service to the pohs (city-state), and also to the unabashed sensuality re­corded in the twelfth book of the Greek Anthology.
In Sparta and in Crete it was customary for every youth of good charac­ter to have his lover, and every educated and honorable adult was bound to be the lover and protector of a youth. The con­nection was intimate and faithful, and recognized by the state. The citizen of Sparta was a professional soldier through­out life; his landholding, cultivated by helots, assured him a sufficient income to devote himself to his obligations to the state. The Spartan form of pederasty was imprinted with virility, with male com­radeship, and with fidelity; the physical aspect was secondary, though rarely ab­sent. At home the youth was constantly under the gaze of his lover, who was to him a role model and mentor; on the battlefield they fought side by side, if need be to the death, as in the inscription commemorat­ing the battle of Thermopylae: "O stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians that we fell here in obedience to our country's sacred laws." The pederastic spirit guarded the cradle of Western civilization against the Oriental despotism that a Persian victory would have imposed on the Hellenes.
Whether or not a formal abduc­tion of the youth by his lover took place, the institution of military comradeship spread far and wide among the Greeks, and immense importance accrued to what was regarded as a cornerstone of public life, a recognized source of political and social initiative, an incentive to valor, an inspira­tion to art and literature, and a custom consecrated by religion and divine sanc­tion. The ethos of the ruling caste was inculcated by pederasty, so that Pausanias of Athens could solemnly declare that the strongest army would be one composed entirely of pairs of male lovers. Stories of the heroic feats of such couples testify to the profound concern which the Greeks felt for the subject. The heroism of the Sacred Band of Thebes, organized on Pau­sanias' model, who perished to the last man in the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.) while fighting against the huge army of Philip of Macedon, sealed the glorious tradition of comradeship-in-arms, and engraved upon it for all time an inefface­able symbol of valor.
Japan. The Samurai of feudal Ja­pan afford another example of the part played by homoerotic attachments in the military life of a nation; the Japanese knighthood dominated its country until the end of the Tokugawa era (1867). The Samurai had their own tradition of chiv­alry, simplicity of living, bravery, and loyalty and dedication to the service of nation and Emperor. Numbering some two million in all, the Samurai were exempted from taxation and privileged to wear two swords. The ideals of Bushido, as the Japa­nese code of knighthood was called, were those of a nobleman and warrior: heroism, courage, endurance, justice in dealing with others, and unflinching readiness to die in the call of duty. "To live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die - that is true courage," said a Japanese author. All commercial pursuits and gain­ful activity were forbidden the warrior caste, but the finer arts were not neglected. The blend of the masculine and feminine that marks the homosexual personality was inherent in the Japanese character - the virile strongly pronounced but alloyed with a feminine tenderness and delicacy. The study of letters, of poetry, and of , music was widespread. The intellectual and moral heritage of feudal Japan stemmed from the Samurai ethos, which like paiderasteia in ancient Greece, gave an impe­tus to every facet of national life.
To the Samurai it seemed more manly and heroic that men should love other males and consort sexually with them than with women. Almost every knight sought out a youth who could be worthy of him, and formed a close blood brotherhood. The attachment could pro­voke jealousy or even lead to a duel, as the stories told by Saikaku Ihara in Nanshoku Okagami (Tales of Manly Love,- 1687] attest. The passionate love of a knight for his page - kosho in Japanese - could at times end in the heroic death of both partners on the battlefield. Such relation­ships were characteristic of the southern rather than the northern provinces. The region of Satsuma is particularly men­tioned as the center of Japanese military pederasty, and public opinion in Japan held the affection to reinforce the manli­ness and fighting spirit of its natives. The Tokugawa era has also left to posterity other literary works that describe the adventures of pairs of lovers, their hero­ism, and self-sacrifice. As late as the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) such homoerotic relationships persisted in the army, be­tween officers and soldiers, and underlay the defiance of death and sacrifice of life on the battlefields of Manchuria.
Europe. It in the Christian Middle Ages in Europe the clergy imposed a for­mal ban on homosexual activity, it did not diminish the psychological reality of the warrior's need for male comradeship or the social isolation of the soldier from conven­tional married life. So renowned command­ers with homosexual natures continued to write chapters in the history of warfare: Eugene of Savoy and Frederick the Great of Prussia are only the most brilliant. The male who identifies solely with other men, who disdains and rejects the company of women, and prefers the all-male setting of the camp and the bivouac to the drawing room and the marriage chamber - such a man is a born soldier. That other homosex­ual types depart extensively if not com­pletely from this ideal does not negate its existence; the contrast proves only how protean in reality are the phenomena grouped under the rubric of homosexual­ity. It is also relevant in this connection that in some European countries homo­sexual gratification is regarded by the common people as a pleasure or preroga­tive of the upper classes, including the warrior nobility with its leisure-class ethos and its sporadic bouts of orgiastic release from the tensions of battle.
The German theoretician Hans Bliiher (1888-1955) went so far as to formulate the principle that "When a number of persons of the male sex must live to­gether under compulsion, then the social strivings that exceed the mere organiza­tional purpose develop according to the pattern of the male society," which is to say that male bonding with an uncon­scious homoerotic content is the psycho­logical cement of the association. Bluher counterposed the "male society" with its primary homoeroticism, which he deemed the basis of the state and the military formations that protect its security, to the family as a social unit grounded in hetero­sexual attraction and the ensuing repro­ductive activity. The first assures the po­litical and cultural continuity of the state, the second the biological survival of the nation. He maintained that Judaism had suppressed the homosexual aspect of its culture, with concomitant hypertrophy of the family, so that ultimately the Jewish state lost its independence, and the Jews were doomed to centuries of wandering in exile as a people of merchants and traders without a military caste. The success of the Zionist movement he foresaw, as early as 1919, as dependent upon the ability of diaspora Jewry to generate a true leader­ship initiated in the mysteries of male bonding and therefore achieve a national identity with a military ethos. And in point of fact the army has grown ever more influential in the politics and national life of Israel since 1948 - making a compara­tively small country the only first-class military power in the region, even if the Orthodox parties in the Knesset clung to the Pentateuch's prohibition of male homo­sexuality. Bluher further saw male bond­ing as crucial to the formation of male elites with a firm sense of group solidarity and loyalty that enables them to play a leading role in the state, of whose strength war is the severest test. The discipline, the comradeship, the willingness of the individual to sacrifice himself for the victory of the nation - all these are deter­mined by the homoerotic infrastructure of the male society.
Prejudices and Stereotypes. In total contrast to this analysis is the atti­tude of the military establishment toward homosexuality in recent times, since the emergence of mass citizen armies - "the nation in arms" - and the psychiatric concept of sexual inversion. Once vast numbers of draftees had to be classified and trained, and the notion of homosexu­ality as "degeneracy" or "disease" had reached the half-educated public, it was certain to be abused by authoritarian re­gimes such as the military,- and in fact was.
For the American armed forces during World War II, the homosexual posed a particular dilemma: the services badly needed fighting men at the outset of the war for which America was sadly unpre­pared, and the psychiatric examination given to draftees was perfunctory in the extreme. So, many homosexual men were inducted, served in the fighting lines - and then, when the pressure to draft more recruits waned, were ignominiously re­leased from the armed forces with undesir­able or dishonorable discharges. A study of the unfit soldier even classified homo­sexuals with eneuretics, as presumably both were guilty of incontinence. During the latter part of World War II a systematic effort was made to detect and exclude homosexual men and lesbians from the American armed forces. As a result many lives were blighted and even ruined.
The intolerance of the American military mounted in the wake of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's charges that the Truman Administration was "harboring sex perverts in government," followed by the report of a seven-member subcommit­tee that found homosexuals to be security risks at a time when the media were ac­tively propagating fears of Soviet espio­nage, and even commended the army for "ferreting out sex perverts." Even the armed forces of America's allies in NATO, many of which had no penal laws against homo­sexual behavior, were pressured to do like­wise. The procedures used to obtain con­fessions from suspected homosexuals of­ten violated the rights guaranteed a defen­dant in a criminal case in civilian life, but the courts have been loath to deny the armed services the option of discharging individuals whose homosexuality has come to light, even if no criminal behavior while on duty could be imputed to them. A series of cases have been appealed and lost on the ground that the concept of privacy has no application in military life, while close observers of the upper eche­lons of the officer corps have noted an official reaction to homosexuality that borders on the paranoid. It is significant that a postwar study of German military justice in the 1939-45 period concluded that despite the official attitude of the Nazi regime, the German tribunals dealt less harshly with homosexual offenders than did the American - in part because the emphasis that Magnus Hirschfeld had placed on the constitutional etiology of sexual inversion had convinced the Ger­man physicians and biologists that crimi­nal proceedings against such individuals were largely useless, while their American counterparts were for the most part naive and uninformed, or had been persuaded that the homosexual needed only psycho­therapy to be converted to a normal mode of life. So the medieval attitudes toward homosexual behavior are perpetuated by the American military (see Law, United States) with a host of rationalizations such as the authoritarian-bureaucratic mind loves to devise.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Hans Blüher, Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft: Eine Theorie der menschli­chen Staatsbildung nach Wesen und Wert, Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1917-19, 2 vols; Félix Buffière, Eros: adolescent: la pédérastie dans la Grèce antique, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1980; Edward Carpenter, Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919; Colin J. Williams and Martin S. Weinberg, Homosexuals and the Military: A Study of Less than Honorable Discharge, New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Warren Johansson

Milk, Harvey (1930-1978)
American gay political leader. Bom into a Jewish family on Long Island, NY, at the beginning of the Depression, Milk enjoyed the family's greater prosper­ity in the 1940s, when he began to journey to Manhattan to attend opera and theatre performances. Yet the adolescent Harvey, becoming aware of his homosexuality, nonetheless absorbed the dominant idea of the period, that conformity was the sine qua non of success. He attended a college in upstate New York, served a hitch in the Navy, and then settled down to an incon­spicuous life in a New York apartment with a male spouse. He joined a Wall Street firm and campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964. It was the theatre - the musical Hair in which he had invested - that began to erode Milk's social and political conser­vatism.
Moving to San Francisco also helped to shift his perspectives. He had the good fortune to open his camera shop on Castro Street when the neighborhood had not yet achieved its renown. His notoriety grew with that of the street itself, for Milk not only absorbed the genius loci but was largely instrumental in creating it. With a kind of outsider's holy simplicity, Milk blithely proceeded to upset the applecart of San Francisco's carefully nurtured gay establishment. Behind the flamboyant facade he proved a shrewd wheeler-dealer, cultivating an improbable but effective alliance with the city's blue-collar unions. He would hire people off the street for his political campaigns, sometimes because of physical attraction, sometimes on a hunch. The hunches often paid off, and a number of members of San Francisco's 1980s gay establishment owed their start to Milk's intuitions. But his last lover, Jack Lira (who committed suicide in their apartment), was a disaster. Milk neglected and mismanaged his camera business so that at times he scarcely had money for food. Yet somehow he pulled the whole thing off. On his third try, in 1977, he was triumphantly elected to the coveted post of San Francisco supervisor. He quickly became a nationally known figure, whom many believed destined to rise to higher office.
Later mythology has portrayed Harvey Milk as a radical leftist, but more careful scrutiny shows that he retained elements of his conservative background to the very end. At bottom he held an almost Teffersonian concept of the auton­omy of small neighborhoods, prospering through small businesses and local atten­tion to community problems. His belief in citizen participation led him to stress voting, something radicals often reject as irrelevant. Above all, by not painting himself into a corner through a set of inflexible doctrinaire principles, Milk was able to develop the broad base he needed for acquiring and keeping power.
Milk's public career was tragi­cally short. On the Board of Supervisors he was frequently opposed by his colleague Dan White, a militant defender of "family values." After White first resigned and then sought vainly to reclaim his post, he decided to shoot Mayor Moscone, who had thwarted him. On November 27,1978, he shot not only Moscone but his enemy Harvey Milk. In the subsequent trial White's lawyers mounted the notorious "twinky defense," claiming that his judg­ment was impaired through consuming too much junk food. The judge sentenced him to only seven years, eight months for voluntary manslaughter. This verdict trig­gered a major riot on the part of San Fransciso's gay community. After White's release from prison he took his own life, ending the sordid chapter in American politics that he had begun.
Despite his differences with the San Francisco gay establishment and his occasionally unethical behavior, Milk succeeded in riding the crest of a wave that had been gathering strength for some years. During the beatnik/hippie period the city had become a mecca for all sorts of disaf­fected people, while retaining its old eth­nic mosaic. Milk anticipated the later strat­egy of the "rainbow coalition," but be­cause of his personal gifts, and the time and place in which he lived, he was able to make it work more effectively for gay and lesbian politics than any other single indi­vidual has done before or since.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Warren Hinckle, Gayslayer, Virginia City, NV: Silver Dollar, 1985; Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982.
Wayne R. Dynes

Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892-1950)
American poet. Bom in Rockland, Maine, she attended Vassar College (1913-17), and then settled in New York's Greenwich Village, where she was at first associated with the rebellious bohemianism then at its height. However, her 1923 volume The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems confirmed an independent matur­ity, which she had already projected in her precocious "Renaissance" of 1912. Her work drew not only on the austere land­scape of her childhood in Maine, but on the Elizabethan and Cavalier poets which, thanks in part to t.S. Eliot, were then undergoing a revival. She was one of the last poets of the twentieth century to master the sonnet.
Millay's poetic drama, The Lamp and the Bell, written during a stay in Paris after her graduation, concerns the undying devotion between two women. Octavia, the authority figure in a school that seems to be Vassar, holds that the friendship between her own daughter and the prin­cess is unhealthy and will not last. But she is mistaken, and the women prove their passionate devotion until one of them dies. While Millay had always written hetero­sexual verse, several of her sonnets of this period are deliberately ambiguous as to gender. She became more specific after her marriage in 1923, excising the ambiguity from her new work - a tacit confession that the earlier poems concern women. Many critics believe that the quality of her poetry gradually declined as Millay grew older (she wrote nothing in the last decade of her life). This decline may be linked with her felt need to suppress one half of her sensibility.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jeannette Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature, New York: Vantage Press, 1956.
Evelyn Gettone

Minions and Favorites
Since the late sixteenth century these terms have been given to the inti­mates of kings and queens who accorded sexual favors to their royal protectors in return for honors, gifts, and positions of influence. In particular, the mignons were the openly effeminate courtiers of Henri III of France, who behaved in a manner well calculated to scandalize the puritani­cally minded. But this was no new phe­nomenon in European history: as far back as classical antiquity, when homosexual conduct was not so stigmatized, rulers had bestowed titles, honors, and estates on handsome youths who shared their beds - and often exercised a decisive role in the political life of the court. The relationship of the Roman emperor Hadrian to his favorite Antinous was the outstanding instance of such a liaison. Edward II and Piers Gaveston, James I and the Duke of Buckingham, William of Orange and Wil­liam Bentinck are later examples from British history.
In an age when power was con­centrated in the hands of a sovereign whose every whim was law, those who could gratify his sexual tastes often became his advisers as well, though the two functions could also be kept rigorously distinct. The power could also be exercized in the oppo­site direction, so that the term acquired a pejorative nuance as designating an indi­vidual with no political will of his own, totally dependent upon his protector or benefactor. The role of female favorites has been more frequently acknowledged by historians who so titled the chief mis­tress of the monarch, who was often the de facto ruler of the court, with the power to disgrace and exile a rival and her clique of followers. The favorites might have their own entourage of lesser courtiers anxious for the favors to be had through the inter­mediary of the royal bed partner, so that elements of jealousy and ambition com­plicated the political struggles behind the scenes. Naturally heterosexual animos­ity, particularly in eras when homosexual­ity was strongly tabooed, could lead to conspiracies that would endanger the position or even the life of the favorite.
The status was therefore a cov­eted but precarious one. A favorite whose beauty was fading or had made a false move in the deadly game of court politics could be supplanted by a younger and more adroit rival, as others were always ready and waiting to occupy the monarch's couch. But the rewards of such a position were great enough to ensure a constant stream of aspirants, often the ambitious sons of members of the lesser nobility who capitalized on their looks and virility - and were not infrequently requited with arranged marriages into influential fami­lies that betokened wealth and power. There was no sharp dividing line between the heterosexual and homosexual spheres in antiquity and even in much of the later period of European history. For some rul­ers marriage was largely pro forma, as in the case of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who made no secret of his preference for the male sex.
With the coming of the constitu­tional state and of parliamentary rule in the nineteenth century the significance of the minions faded. Their modern counter­part would be the intimates of figures in the musical and entertainment world (such as Rock Hudson and Liberace) - intimates who bask in the fame and multimillion dollar incomes of these celebrities in re­turn for the sexual pleasures they bestow.
And in other spheres of life physical beauty and sexual versatility can still be rewarded with access to the private domains of the wealthy and powerful. The history of the minions and favorites reveals the erotic undercurrents beneath the surface of po­litical life that could direct the tide which led some on to fortune, others only to disappointment and death.
Warren Johansson

Minority, Homosexuals as a
In the 1970s some U.S. gay lead­ers began to speak confidently of gay men and lesbians "emerging as a people" - a stable minority within an America made up of a mosaic of such groups. Apart from the problem of whether there is to be one people or two - homosexuals per se vs. gay men and lesbians - such claims raise seri­ous conceptual, historical, and sociologi­cal issues.
Historical Precedents and Paral­lels. Minorities in the sense of an array of peoples ruled by a dominant group have existed at least since the formation of the Assyrian empire in the ninth century B.C. Yet as long as the rule of the Herrenvolk remained unchallenged, the status of the incorporated groups remained unproblematic. The question of ethnic minorities first attracted modern analysis in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century, when the intro­duction of a parliamentary system had made the issue acute. In 1898 Georg Jellinek contrasted the older concept of a parlia­mentary minority, that is a fluid and changeable interest group, with the more fixed situation of the minority as an ethnic or religious collectivity, whose member­ship is determined not by the changing tides of political opinion but by loyalty to the community in which one was born.
To be sure this late nineteenth-century situation had parallels. The Otto­man Empire retained its millet system, grantingof ficial recognition to what might be called national minorities, though these were organized on a religious basis. In the United Kingdom from 1707 onwards there were three subordinate entities: Wales, Ireland, and Scotland - the last possessing de jure, but not de facto, equality with England. Two characteristics seem essen­tial in minorities of this general type: (1) they are communities of lineage or geneal­ogy in the sense that a Romanian child is bom of Romanian parents, a Welsh child of Welsh ones; and (2) each ethnic group has a territory which it occupies or occu­pied and which its members regard as their homeland, even if they reside, say, in Vienna or London.
The minority issue took on gen­eral European urgency when the represen­tatives of the powers met in Paris in 1919 to redraw the map of Europe in the wake of World War I. The attempt to square logic with the principle of allocating the spoils to the victors led to many anomalies. In this atmosphere of the clash of conflicting rights, Kurt Hiller, the German left thinker and homosexual activist, conceived the idea of the sexual minority. In an address of September 19, 1921, he insisted that "human beings are marked not only by differences of race and character type, but also of ... sexual orientation."
The coming of the world Depres­sion in 1929 caused the issue to fall dor­mant, as economic problems dwarfed all else. In the 1940s in the United States, however, the second-class status of Ne­groes evoked increasing discussion and concern, which were to eventuate in the mass Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. As early as 1951, however, Donald Web­ster Cory (pseud, of Edward Sagarin) organ­ized his widely read book The Homosex­ual in America around the idea of gay men and women as a minority who should be accorded their just rights. Cory and other leaders of the new homophile rights move­ment saw the opportunity of making a persuasive appeal to the traditional Anglo-Saxon virtue of fairness, while at the same time allying themselves with a powerful emerging social movement.
Changes in American Society. During this period it was becoming all too evident that America could no longer sustain the "melting pot" myth of a soci­ety moving rapidly toward homogeneity. The process of assimilation predicted by such classic sociologists as Weber and Durkheim, as well as by the Marxists, was not preceding smoothly - and this con­tinuing exceptionalism is not owing solely to lingering irrational discrimination. It was becoming apparent that minority resistance was sustained not merely by way of response to pressures from a nonaccepting society but by an internal sense of pride. In-group cohesiveness was becom­ing a function of a "quest for community," a felt need for intermediate structures between the atomized individual, on the one hand, and the universal institutions of the State, on the other. Alongside assimi­lation (which some groups were still expe­riencing) arose the "deassimilation" of groups that consciously rejected the sup­posed imperatives of the melting pot.
Once the cause of blacks had been taken up by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, other groups, first Hispanics then white ethnics, came forward to demand their place in the sun. With a few exceptions the new "unmeltable ethnics" differed from earlier groups in other coun­tries, in that they were usually not territo­rial (though a few idealistic individuals were heard to voice a demand for a black homeland). Some of the newly recognized ethnic groups have little salience, that is to say they are on the way to being assimi­lated (Armenian-Americans) or largely havebeen (German-Americans). Formany, ethnic consciousness lingers only in street fairs and such events as the annual marches on Fifth Avenue in New York City (which include a gay/lesbian one on the last Sun­day in June).
Nonetheless, these social move­ments generated an academic counterpart in the form of ethnic studies in the univer­sities. Some came to cherish a vision of a rainbow nation, in which most citizens would be bicultural. This exaltation of pluralism implicitly discounts the still-ongoing counterprocesses of amalgama­tion and homogenization - as shown by the fact that many recent immigrants and their children do wish simply to "be American." It is highly significant that homosexuality has not been admitted within the discourse of ethnicity, though (illogically) women's studies sometimes are. One can search through vast bibliogra­phies of American minorities without finding a single reference to gay men and lesbians.
Problems of Treating Homosexu­als as a Minority. While this exclusion may to some extent reflect prejudice and academic rigidity, it is also supported by real differences. In the personal process of psychoindividuation, homosexuals gener­ally achieve self-awareness in defiance of the norms and counsels of the family. By contrast, among ethnic groups the family is the incubator for group consciousness and a refuge from the intolerance of the majority. Another difference is that homo­sexuals can "pass" more easily than most, which they tend to do in the belief (true or not) that in this way they are perceived like anyone else. Another key point is that homosexuals never constituted an ethnic group with contiguous territory, state for­mations, a distinctive language, and the like. Paradoxically, homosexuals do not rank as a minority in the usual sense be­cause they were always a minority, usu­ally unrecognized as such (there having been, until recently, no concept of sexual orientation as distinct from overt behav­ior). Lastly, the (ethnic) minority is typi­cally a group that has immigrated into a country far more recently than the major­ity which claims to be autochthonous and resents the "self-invited guests" who have "disrupted its unity." This situation has no parallel with the distinctiveness of the homosexual group, which is disenfran­chised for quite different reasons.
Still if one examines such indica­tors as residential enclaves ("gay ghettoes"), self-help groups, religious organi­zations, travel guides, and distinctive taste preferences, homosexuals do indeed qual­ify - perhaps more than most groups. How many American ethnic entities can count as many bookstores, for example, as gays and lesbians? Another feature is the sense of identity and shared fate with homo­sexuals in other countries, cultures, and political and social systems - together with the emergence of gay subcultures modeled on the American one throughout the non-Communist world. With minimal social skills a foreign homosexual can pick up partners in a bar, bath, or cruising area. This facility suggests another paradoxical concept: that of a transnational minority.
The idea of homosexuals as a minority has obvious appeal to would-be political leaders as an organizing tool. But it also meets resistance from the rank and file who reject the role of "professional gays." Moreover, the concept of homosex­ual identity is of recent origin, and it may not last. As yet unmeasured is the impact of the social construction theory of his­torical development, which denies the stability of the homosexual orientation. To put it most sharply, if there are no homosexuals, they cannot be organized - as a minority or anything else. Then again, to the middle class, "minority" usually connotes underprivileged, oppressed, per­secuted people, not members of a group who may on average be wealthier, more educated, and more intelligent than the majority in the given country. The afflu­ent homosexual can retreat into a world of private clubs, social groups, and exclusive institutions invisible to the larger society. Thus the concept of homosexuals as a minority may appeal rather to the two extremes - street people and gay leaders - while having little to offer to the mass of homosexuals in between. While in prin­ciple the matter of political practicality should be separated from the epistemo­lógica! question of whether homosexuals are a minority, in real life the two are closely related.
In recent years the magnitude of the overall minority question has been recognized not only in the United States, but in such European countries as Britain, France, and Germany, where populations are changing. World demographic shifts and new migration patterns are likely to make the minority concept even more complex, while the place of homosexuals within it will remain scarcely less prob­lematic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Stephen O. Murray, Social Theory, Homosexual Realities, New York: Gay Academic Union, 1984.
Wayne R. Dynes

Mishima Yukio (1925-1970)
Japanese writer of fiction, drama, and essays. Bom in Tokyo as Hiraoka Kimitake, the son of a government official and grandson of a former governor of Karafuto (now southern Sakhalin), he pre­ferred to emphasize his descent from the family of his paternal grandmother, which belonged to the upper samurai class. He attended the Peers' School, where non-aristocrats were often treated as outsiders, and where Spartan discipline prepared young men to be soldiers rather than poets. A story entitled "The Boy Who Wrote Poetry" has strong autobiographical ele­ments stemming from this period of his life, and describes the boy's fascination with words.
Mishima's mentors at the Peers' School not only encouraged him to study the Japanese classics but brought him into contact with the Nipponese Romanticists, a group of intellectuals who stressed the uniqueness of the Japanese people and their history. His later devotion to Japanese tradition, however, was tempered by fasci­nation with the West. As a student he was much taken with the essays of Oscar Wilde, and even after war broke out with Great Britain and the United States, Mishima continued to read - generally in Japanese translation - authors who had been de­nounced as "decadent." But unlike most postwar writers, who distanced them­selves from the literature of the Tokugawa period and earlier, he read the classics for pleasure and inspiration.
A story entitled "The Forest in Full Flower" so impressed Mishima's adviser that he proposed publishing it in Bungei bunka (Literary Culture), a slim magazine of limited circulation, but of high quality and with a nationwide reader­ship. To protect the identity of the author, still a middle-school boy, the editors gave him a name of their own invention, Mishima Yukio. The work was published in book form even during the war, when the paper shortage was acute. Mishima himself took care not to be conscripted, and was more concerned about his own writing than about his country's defeat in 1945.
His first full-length novel, The Thieves (1948), was an implausible and unsuccessful portrayal of two young members of the aristocracy who are irre­sistibly drawn toward suicide. In the same year he was invited to join the group that published the magazine Kindai bungaku (Modern Literature). He was an outsider here too, because he was essentially apo­litical in a left-leaning milieu, though his criticism of postwar Japan's business and political elite was that in their craze for profit they had forgotten Japan's tradi­tions.
In July 1949 Mishima published the most self-revealing of all his works, the novel Kamen no kokuhaku (Confes­sions of a Mask), which made his reputa­tion and continued tobe ranked among his finest work, even when his corpus had grown to some 50 books. Yet the homosex­ual tendencies of the hero, which keep him from desiring the girl he loves, so baffled the critics that some imagined the intent to be parody. Neither then nor later was the novel read as a confession of guilt. Japanese readers interpreted the work as an exceptionally sensitive account of a boy's gradual self-awakening, with the homosexual elements attributed to sexual immaturity or explained as symbolic of the sterility of the postwar world. In Confessions of a Mask Mishima boldly countered every convention of the novels that had served him as models: the hero fails to win the hand of the girl he loves because he can no longer endure the mask of the "normal" young man that society and literature forced him to wear. The intensity and truth of his revelatory in­sights justify the novel's reputation, and the combination of truth and beauty made the work a landmark in his development as an artist.
With his literary reputation in hand, Mishima then began to compose works of popular fiction with largely fi­nancial motives in mind. He continued until the year of his death to devote about a third of his time each month to writing popular fiction and essays in order to be free the remainder of the time for work on serious fiction and plays. In a novel entitled Kinjiki [Forbidden Colors; 1953), Mishima sought to show the discrepancies and conflicts within himself, "as represented by two Ts." The first "I" is Shunsuke, a writer of sixty-five, whose collected works are being published for the third time. Despite the acclaim accorded to his liter­ary work by the world, he experiences only a horror of his aging self. The second, contrasting "I" is Yuichi, a youth of exqui­site beauty, first seen by the older man as he emerged from the sea after the swim. Yuichi is a spiritually uncomplicated sensualist who enjoys the act of love, but for that reason far more a narcissist than a homosexual - true to Mishima's own character in this respect. The novel is strongly misogynist: Shunsuke uses Yuichi to wreak his revenge on several women whom he detests. The novel was also chauvinistic: the foreigners among the characters are deliberately absurd.
Mishima's private life at this time resembled Yuichi's. He patronized Brunswick, a gay bar in the Ginza, where he met the seventeen-year old Akihiro Maruyama, who had just begun a golden career from which he was to graduate to the theatre, where he became the most celebrated female impersonator of his day. Mishima had reservations about the gay bars, as (in keeping with the pederastic tradition) he intensely disliked effeminate men and sought both male and female company - in the Japanese phrase "a bearer of two swords" - while preferring the male.
After passing the peak of his liter­ary career, he became more of a public figure than ever. In 1967 he secretly spent a month training with the Self Defense Forces, and in 1968 he formed a private army of 100 men sworn to defend the Emperor, the Tate no Kai (Shield Society). From the same period is an essay deploring the emphasis given by intellectuals to the mind and glorifying the body instead. On November 25,1970, he committed suicide in samurai style to publicize his appeal for revision of the postwar Japanese constitution that would allow his country to rearm. However one may judge his political views, Mishima was the most gifted Japanese author of his generation, and he retains a secure place in the litemture of his country and the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography, Boston: Little, Brown, 1974; Henry Scott-Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974; Marguerite Yourcenar, Mishima, ou la vision du vide, Paris: Gallimard, 1980.
Warren Johansson

Modernism
The literary and artistic currents that came forcefully to public attention at the end of the nineteenth century and favored stylistic and thematic experiment are known collectively as modernism. High modernism, the age of the pioneers, is generally accepted as lasting until about 1940. After that date modernism expanded beyond its early base, becoming more dif­fuse. In the 1970s many critics and histo­rians concluded that modernism had, for all intents and purposes, come to an end, having been overtaken by post-modern­ism. Even though there was no consensus as to the meaning of the new term, its introduction signals the possibility of assessing the meaning of modernism itself as a period which had attained closure.
Although some would trace its roots to the later eighteenth century, most scholars concur that modernism was a response to the complexities of urbaniza­tion and technology as they reached a new peak in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The hallmarks of modernism vary from one medium to another, but they may be summed up as a new self-con­sciousness, irony, abstraction, and radical disjunction of formal elements. Among the trends highlighting the first stage of modernism are aestheticism, with such figures as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, and decadence, with Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud as central figures. Mod­ernism entered a new phase in the second decade of the twentieth century, with such movements as Cubism and non-objectiv­ism in painting, imagism in poetry, and twelve-tone music. This phase is some­times known as high modernism, with late modernism ensuing about 1940.
The bearers of high modernism, such as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, Guillaume Apollinaire and F. T. Marinetti, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, were reacting against some features of incipient modernism as they perceived them: the so-called "fin-de-siecle," associated with over-refinement, decadence, and homo­sexuality. Consequently, we find in these writers and artists a strong element of masculism, leading them loudly to dis­dain "pansies," and to treat women as mere adjuncts in their creative endeavors.
The case of Pound shows a grad­ual hardening of attitudes. In the winter of 1908 he was dismissed from Wabash Col­lege, ostensibly for a minor heterosexual escapade. Yet to a friend he remarked af­terwards, "They say I am bisexual and given to unnatural lust." Later in 1908, in a letter from London, he remarked that "in Greece and pagan countries men loved men"; although he did not share this taste, he did not feel it necessary to condemn it. After World War I, however, he inserted a coarse homophobic joke in Canto XII, and connected sodomy with usury as two evils of the age. Although he continued to cher­ish his friendships with Jean Cocteau and Natalie Barney, Pound could be heard inveighing in the 1950s against the "pansification" of America. Illustrating the fact that bigotries tend to come in sets, Pound's thinking showed a simultaneous increase in anti-Semitism. It is probably too simple to attribute this growth of homophobic attitudes to the poet's involvement with Mussolini's fascism. Even before World War I, Pound had had a portrait sculpture made depicting himself as a phallus. And he associated artistic creativity with the aggressive performance of heterosexual coitus.
It is interesting to observe the interplay of trends in a more conflicted figure, such as D. H. Lawrence, who railed against Bloomsbury's effeteness, but at the same time recognized his own homoerotic component. Nonetheless, he felt that maturity required commitment to a heterosexual relationship, which he main­tained through thick and thin with his wife Frieda. The artist Marcel Duchamp twice had himself photographed in femi­nine clothing as "Rrose Selavy," but seemed to compartmentalize his flirtation with this identity, and otherwise showed no gender-bending or homosexual tenden­cies.
An exception to the link between modernism and machismo is the activity of lesbian innovators. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the lesbian editors of the avant-garde magazine The Little Review, never had any difficulty with the most advanced literary modernism. At consid­erable risk from the forces of Comstockery they issued the first, serial publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Later the complete volume was to be issued by Sylvia Beach from her bookshop, Shakespeare and Co. in Paris. Gertrude Stein created a prose style that was consciously aligned with Cubism and other avant-garde movements in the visual arts. For many years she was close to Picasso, an arch-sexist. In conver­sation Stein tended to put down male homosexuals, going so far as to impugn even the masculinity of Ernest Heming­way, though she did collect paintings by the minor homosexual artist Sir Francis Rose. Her younger modernist contempo­rary Djuna Barnes seemed to have more sympathy for gay mem. Other lesbian writers working in Paris, such as Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien, were relatively traditional in style. The case of Virginia Woolf is complex, because she belonged to Bloomsbury, where she was on intimate terms with other lesbian, bisexual, and homosexual figures. At the same time she strove to innovate in her own prose style.
On the Mediterranean fringe of European industrial civilization, two of the most significant modernist poets, Constantine Cavafy (Greek, residing in Alexandria) and Fernando Pessoa (Portu­guese) were homosexual. In America the gay poet Hart Crane was a chief modernist innovator, while Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth were advanced painters who were homosexual. Perhaps the most visible figure of late modernism in the visual arts was Andy Warhol, whose pub­lic persona combined elements of camp and dandyism. In the experimental film genre sometimes known as the "Baudelairean cinema" a number of leading fig­ures were gay, including Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith. These last examples sug­gest that, among men at least, modernist machismo was most characteristic of the European core where it all began; at the periphery there was more room for vari­ation.
In a bizarre twist in the 1980s, a few architectural critics hostile to the new trend of post-modernism, have attacked it as homosexual, claiming that the con­trasting treatment of facades and interiors is a form of "transvestism."
There can be no simple, one-to-one correlation of literary and artistic styles, on the one hand, and gender con­cepts, on the other. Yet an interplay does exist, and working out its details in the case of modernism - in its several varie­ties - is a challenge for future scholarship.
Wayne R. Dynes

Moll, Albert (1862-1939)
Berlin neurologist who helped shape the medical model of homosexual­ity that was created in late nineteenth-century Germany. His first treatise on the subject, Die konträre Sexualempfindung (1891), differentiated between innate and acquired homosexuality and proceeded to focus on the former, describing the homo­sexual as "a stepchild of nature." He pro­posed that the sex drive was an innate psychological function which could be injured or malformed through no fault or choice of the individual himself.
Moll refined his theory in his more general treatise on sexuality, Unter­suchungen über die Libido sexualis (1897), and placed more stress on the nature of homosexuality as an illness, often an "inherited taint." With his Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften (1911), he turned his attention to the cases of acquired homosexuality, for which he offered asso­ciation therapy (replacing same-sex asso­ciations with those of the opposite sex) as a cure.
As the years passed, he became increasingly hostile to Magnus Hirschfeld and his Scientific-Humanitarian Commit­tee. Alienated in part by Hirschfeld's po­lemical mode of dealing with the subject, in part by certain ethically dubious sides of Hirschfeld's activity, he became the major "establishment" opponent of the Com­mittee. At the same time, he lessened his emphasis on the innate character of homo­sexuality in favor of one that could be used to justify penal sanctions by the state.
In his autobiography, Ein Leben als Arzt der Seele (1936), he stated his belief that most homosexuality is acquired by improper sexual experiences, and only a small percentage can be said to be innate. He even went so far as to attack those (especially Hirschfeld) who believed homosexuality an inborn condition and sought social and legal acceptance for homosexuals.
Although his name is largely for­gotten today, his works were widely read in their time. His Sexualleben des Kindes and Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften were the first works to appear on their respective topics. His theory on the sex life of the child had a profound (but largely unacknowledged) effect on Freudian con­cepts.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edward M. Brecher, The Sex Researchers, Boston: Little, Brown, 1969; Max Hodann, History of Modern Morals, trans, by Stella Browne, London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1937, p. 48ff; Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend, New York: Basic Books, 1979, 309-15.
James W. Jones

Mollis
The primary meaning of this Latin adjective is "soft," but it was also used in a secondary, sexual sense. From the first century B.C. onwards the Romans used the word as an equivalent malakosf malthakos, "soft, passive-effeminate homosexual." Other Latin words in this semantic field are semivir, "half-man," and effeminatus. The compound homo mollis ("softy") is also found. The abstract noun molhties meant "softness, effemi­nacy" but also "masturbation," with the underlying notion that "only a sissy has to masturbate." In St. Jerome's translation of I Corinthians 6:9 themolles (pi.) are (along with the musculorum concubitores, "abusers of themselves with mankind,")
excluded from the Kingdom of God; the former term denotes the passive, the latter the active male homosexual. This usage was continued in medieval Latin and even found its way into the early literature of sexology composed in the learned tongue. As late as 1914 Magnus Hirschfeld com­mented on the appropriateness of the term by claiming that 99 percent of the homo­sexual subjects he had interviewed de­scribed their own character as "soft" or "tender."
The Latin mollis may well be the origin of the eighteenth-century English molly (or molly-cull) = effeminate homo­sexual, a term given publicity by police raids on their clandestine haunts in Lon­don (1697-1727) following the relative tolerance of the Restoration era that had seen a homosexual subculture emerge in the British metropolis. The term molly also suggests the personal name Molly, a diminutive of Mary, so that the folk ety­mology introduces a separate nuance of the effeminate.
See also Effeminacy; Women's Names for Male Homosexuals.

Molly Houses
The molly houses were gathering places for male homosexuals in London during the eighteenth century. The public was first made aware of them by the prose­cuting zeal of the Societies for the Refor­mation of Manners. These public houses were at times relatively informal, or there could simply be a special room for "mol­lies" at the back of an ordinary public house. Other establishments were quite elaborate. Mother Clap, as she was called, kept a house in Holborn which on Sunday nights in particular - the homosexuals' "night out" - could have from twenty to forty patrons. The house had a back room fitted out with beds. In 1726 a wave of repression led the authorities to discover at least twenty such houses; a number of their proprietors were convicted and made to stand in the pillory, while three indi­viduals were actually hanged for the crime of buggery.
The term molly for an effeminate man may be simply the feminine name Molly, often applied to a prostitute, but it may derive in part from Classical Latin mollis, "soft", which designated the pas­sive-effeminate partner in male homosex­ual relations. It is also the first component in mollycoddle, which alludes to the manner of childrearing that makes a pampered, effeminate adult.
Outside the clearly defined set­ting of the molly house, it was exceedingly dangerous to approach another man for sexual favors. The descriptions of the subculture of the molly house always emphasized the effeminacy of the deni­zens. All the patrons were likely to be addressed as "Madam" or "Miss" or "Your Ladyship," and in conversation they spoke as though they were female whores: "Where have you been, you saucy quean ?" Sometimes the diversions entailed mim­icry of heterosexual respectability, such as enactments of childbirth and christening. Intercourse was referred to as "marrying," and the dormitory in the molly house was termed the "chapel." A prostitute remarked that his procurer had "helped him to three or four husbands." On occasion there were collective masquerades in which all the participants dressed as women.
The male homosexuals who fre­quented these establishments were from eighteen to fifty years old. Those who sought adolescent partners had the far more risky undertaking of meeting and courting them outside the bounds of this subcul­ture. The popular notion of sodomy at the time made it a vice of the idle and wealthy, and there is some evidence that members of the upper classes frequented the molly houses, mainly in search of male prosti­tutes, but in so doing they also exposed themselves to scandal and blackmail. The records of prosecutions and executions contain no aristocratic names; the justice of eighteenth-century Europe was class justice. There were about a third as many trials for attempted blackmail as for sod­omy committed or attempted. Blackmail was the form of extortion practiced by the criminal or semi-criminal classes at the expense of the individual with means and social position who was nevertheless in the grip of forbidden sexual desires. When a blackmailer was convicted, the penalty was usually the same - pillory, fine, and imprisonment amounting to ten months in jail - as for attempted sodomy.
The subculture of the molly houses tried to protect itself from discov­ery and from betrayal by its own members. The worst foe of all was a vindictive par­ticipant in the molly houses' activity, or an individual who had kept records and documents which later fell into the hands of the authorities, indirectly revealing the whole clandestine network of sexual inter­action.
For the ordinary Englishman with no powerful protectors, access to the shielded environment of the molly house was the sole way of making homosexual contacts with ease. The absence of a highly organized police force and of a vice squad with regular infiltrators and paid inform­ers actually gave such houses more secu­rity than comparable establishments in the first half of the twentieth century enjoyed. It was religious fanaticism in the form of societies "for the protection of morals" that persecuted the subculture from above, while the criminal underworld preyed on it from below - a situation that remained into the twentieth century until the campaign to enlighten the public on the nature of homosexuality and reform the the archaic criminal laws made pos­sible a new social environment for the homosexual community.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Randolph Trumbach, "London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the 18th Century," Journal of Social History, 11(1977), 1-33.
Warren Johansson

Monasticism
Originating in late antique Egypt, the monastic movement had as its goal to achieve an ideal of Christian life in com­munity with others or in contemplative solitude. Monastic asceticism required the rejection of worldly existence with its cares and temptations. The institution, one of the formative elements of medieval soci­ety, transformed the ancient world. The asceticism it demanded stands at the op­posite pole from what most modern (and classical) thinkers would deem a healthy attitude toward sex, diet, sleep, sanitation, and mental balance.
Institutional History. St. Anthony of Egypt (died 356), a son of Coptic peas­ants, came to be regarded as the father of the monks, though he was not the founder of monasticism. The Egyptian anchorite movement began, perhaps under the influ­ence of Buddhism, just before the end of the persecutions, about 300. The Life of Anthonyby Athanasius of Alexandria (circa 357) emphasizes Anthony's orthodoxy, the gospel sources of his renunciation of the world, his fight against the demons, and his austere way of life. Later depictions often stressed the sexual aspect of the temptations to which Anthony was sub­jected. Anthony found a number of imita­tors who lived in solitude, separated by greater or lesser distances, but coming to him at intervals for counsel; eventually he agreed to see them every Sunday.
Farther to the south, a younger contemporary of Anthony's, Pachomius, who had become a monk about 313, began organizing cenobitic communities. He founded monasteries that were divided into houses where men lived in common, performed remunerative labor, and prac­ticed self-imposed poverty joined with organized prayer. A novelty in the ancient world, monastic communities were rig­idly homosocial, consisting of members of only one gender but, needless to say, geni­tal sexuality was proscribed. Monasticism began in the eastern provinces of the empire and was strongly colored by the ascetic trends found in that part of the world. It included not just members of religious communities, but also hermits who pre­ferred to wander far from civilization, in wild and desert places, choosing a primi­tive and eccentric mode of life. Systematic practice of deprivation of food and sleep produced a hypnotic effect designed to obviate direct need for sexual release, in part by stimulating a kind of ecstasy that was its surrogate.
Monasticism reached the West through the exile of Athanasius to the Italian peninsula, while John Cassian from Egypt set up houses near Marseilles. There it characteristically penetrated the clergy in the service of the local church. From the end of the fourth-century monasticism based on communal life spread in the West, and the Oriental monastic texts were early translated into Latin by Jerome, Rufinus, Evagrius, and others. The Latin genius multiplied and codified the Oriental rules, until St. Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480-ca. 543) synthesized them, mainly shortening the Rule of the Master. The monks had their own culture, independent of the world of classical antiquity and strongly perme­ated with the ideal of asceticism, new forms of worship such as the recitation of the Psalter, and a cultivation of the inner life.
Western monasticism was at first not organized into an order, nor did it have a common rule. Oriental, Celtic (most of these usually hermits, not cloistered), and Benedictine elements were combined to form various rules, but in the course of the seventh century these rules incorporated ever larger parts of the Rule of St. Columban and St. Benedict. It was the latter that spread and finally became obligatory for all monks and nuns under Carolingian authority. Missionaries when abroad, at home the good monks labored in the school and scriptorium, composing and copying theological, hagiographical, and historical works, and managing the lands of the abbey. They also copied (and sometimes com­posed) secular Latin and Greek texts, in­cluding some sexually explicit ones. Bad monks, some even under lay abbots, enjoyed the good life and observed the Rule, though also transgressing it.
Following the foundation of the Abbey of Cluny in 910, Western monasti­cism entered a new phase. The monastic institutions of that congregation, which came to have hundreds of daughter houses, were centralized in a single order. Monks were no longer primarily missionaries and teachers, manual labor was curtailed or rather shifted to serfs, and the Divine Office was made longer and more solemn. Many great churchmen of the tenth to twelfth centuries such as the fanatical enemy of Judaism St. Bernard were monks. As bish­ops and popes others led the struggle of the church for freedom from secular authority and like Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII, for political domination in Christendom. Until the rise of the cathedral schools in the mid-twelfth century (followed by the universities), the monks enjoyed a near monopoly on intellectual life.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries monasticism lost much of its initial fervor and sincerity. The abbeys had become immersed in secular affairs, some had become resorts for members of the nobility, and others restricted their mem­bership so that the professed monks could enjoy a larger income. The Friars, who at first begged for their living - Dominican, Franciscan, and Augustinian - wandered among the people and gained much of the prestige formerly enjoyed by monks. The Hundred Years War and the Black Death intruded on the self-isolated existence of the monasteries, while the office of abbot and other monastic dignities were treated as benefices and commitment to personal poverty all but vanished.
Erotic Aspects. As communities composed of members of but one sex, the monasteries were a Christian innovation - and one that could hardly have been free of homosexual desire. St. Basil (ca. 330-ca. 379) had to warn against the dangers which a handsome monk in the pride of his youth could pose to those in his entourage, yet in so doing he indirectly admitted the homoerotic character of the attraction which the novice inspired. As early as the reign of Charlemagne (died 814), accusations of sodomy among the monks begin to appear in documents, and not without evidence. The immediate forerunner of the Rule of St. Benedict provided that all monks were to sleep in the same room, with the abbot's bed in the center. Benedict refined this principle by decreeing that a light had to be kept burning in the dormitory all night, the monks had to sleep clothed, and the young men were to mingle with the older ones, not being allowed to sleep side by side (chapter 22). This precaution had its precedents in the Eastern Church, where the purpose was explicitly to forestall homosexual relations. The St. Gall plan of an ideal monastery (ca. 820) clearly shows these preoccupations about sleeping ar­rangements. All this, naturally, was in the context of an institution whose members had taken a vow of celibacy.
The tradition of friendship that had survived from antiquity gave the homoerotic feelings of the literarily gifted monks an outlet in the form of passionate verses addressed to a "friend" or "brother. " These outpourings belong to a specific legacy of erotic attachment between males with a wealth of strands and nuances both pagan/secular and biblical/religious. The guilt that was later to envelop such in­tense feelings had not yet ensconced itself in the Christian mind.
It is not easy for the modernreader to penetrate the mind of the author of texts written in a dead, even if still cultivated tongue, where so much is cast in the form of clichés and commonplaces. St. Anselm (1033-1109), the prior of Bee and later archbishop of Canterbury, who advised mitigating punishments, especially against sodomitical clerks, and St. Aelred of Rievaulx (ca. 1109-1166), the abbot of a Cistercian monastery and adviser of Henry II of England, whom some suspect of homosexuality, gave Christian friendship a quality that united human and spiritual love and rendered it an avenue to divine love. A great intellect may have been capable of the self-discipline that denied such feelings any physical expression, but lesser souls probably were not. A German manuscript of the twelfth or thirteenth century contains two eloquent Latin poems of nuns who were lovers. Not surprisingly many of the penalties for homosexual misconduct in the early penitentials ap­plied specifically to monks and novices, not to the laity. The thin line between pure emotion and sensuality could be crossed imperceptibly and - from the standpoint of Christian morality - fatally.
The question legitimately arises as to what extent the monastic life at­tracted individuals whom the modern world would label homosexual. The Rus­sian Vasiliï Vasil'evich Rozanov (1856-1919), in Liudi lunnogo sveta (Moonlight Men), claimed that the monas­tic orders were an ideal refuge for such individuals from the cares and obliga­tions - more often the latter, in an age of arranged marriages - of heterosexual life: an instance of the psychological "I can­not" masquerading as the moral "I will not!" The outward celibacy of the monks and nuns was a cover for homoerotic in­volvements shielded from the arm of the secular power - which was to take an inter­est in the matter only much later - by the high walls of the abbey. Rozanov likened monasticism to a hard crystal indissoluble within Christian civilization, the embodi­ment of the Christian ideal of life - reject­ing this world, and preparing the soul for its transition to the next. Some medieval writers compared monasteries to prisons, and they are the prototype of the "total institution" in Western society. It would be of no small interest to compare the sexual mores of the inmates of such insti­tutions - boarding schools, reform schools, prisons, military units - in different set­tings. For women the nunnery meant an escape from the world of male domination and the drudgery imposed upon the wife and mother in an ever-growing household.
Aftermath. By the early sixteenth century the great days of the monasteries were long over. Protestant reformers and monarchs greedy to confiscate their wealth, found them easy targets for their charges of idleness, self-indulgence, and vice - fornication, masturbation, and sodomy. For the most part abbeys and nunneries survived only in Catholic and Orthodox countries, where they eventually came under attack by secularists and in not a few instances saw their property sequestered by the state power. The link between reli­gious mysticism and sexual ecstasy was inadvertently brought out in the vivid imagery of the Spanish mystics St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) and St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582). In an unusual, sensa­tional case ¡1619-23), the lesbian sister Benedetta Carlini of Pescia, near Florence, created a complex visionary world of magic in which she enveloped her lovers. La Religieuse, a posthumously published novel by Denis Diderot (1713-1784), por­trays graphically, even melodramatically, the distress of a nun at the hands of a lesbian prioress. After the end of the Old Regime this work was followed by a large class of exposé literature, perpetuated by the anti-clerical movement at the close of the nineteenth century, and designed to flay the Catholic church as a redoubt of the vicious and depraved and to undermine its self-proclaimed sanctity.
At the present time it is hard to know (and harder even to appraise the situation in historical epochs) what pro­portion of Catholic and Orthodox mem­bers of religious orders are homosexual and, of these, how many are practicing. Probably both figures are much higher than the ecclesiastical authorities would care to admit. As in former times, abbots seek to inhibit the formation of erotically charged pair-bonds by separating "particu­lar friends." But declining vocations and applications of religious for return to lay status make such interventions seem counterproductive: if monasteries are to survive as an institution a less harsh re­gime may be required. In 1985 consider­able stir was caused by the publication of Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence (ed­ited by Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan), which contains autobiographi­cal accounts by some fifty women.
Though it has its obvious socio­logical aspect (the magnetism of a homosocial environment), the question of gay and lesbian religious is part of a broader interface between homoeroticism and religious feeling that extends from the shamanism of the paleo-Arctic cultures to the occult underground of today. Albeit explored by such pioneers as Rozanov and Edward Carpenter, it is yet to be fully recognized or understood by researchers into the phenomena of religion.
See also Christianity; Clergy, Gay; Medieval Latin Poetry,- Middle Ages; Pa­tristic Writers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuahty, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980; James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987.
Warren Johansson

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533-1592)
French courtier, essayist, and thinker. In 1571, during the French reli­gious wars, he retired from the Parlement of Bordeaux and, after inheriting his father's estate, lived in seclusion at his chateau. Here, isolated in a tower to avoid visitors, he wrote his Essais, published in 1580. After a stint as mayor of Bordeaux he again returned in 1588. Inspired by the Latin classics and by Plutarch's Parallel Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans, he skepti­cally considered the careers and beliefs of the prominent figures of his own time. His Essais influenced both French and English literature, being considered models of precise style and of accurate analysis. Although France has no universal writer like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante, and Goethe, Montaigne, who like all of them had a homosexual or at least homoerotic side, is one of the outstanding French writers before the classical age of the sev­enteenth century. With his elder contem­porary François Rabelais ca. 1494-1553), he helped modernize French prose, soon after his death standardized by the Ac­adémie Française, founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu and the homosexual Abbé de Boistobert.
About 1558 Montaigne, while serving on the parlement of Bordeaux, developed an intense affection for a young judge, Etienne de La Boétie, author of an essay, "Against One Man," honoring lib­erty against tyrants. This passion inspired his composition "On Friendship" in the Essais. There he asserts that friendship is more passionate than the "impetuous and fickle" love for women and superior to marriage, which one can enter at will but not leave. He concedes that physical inti­macy between males "is justly abhorred by our moral notions," while the "dispar­ity of age and difference of station" which the Greeks demanded "would not corre­spond sufficiently to the perfect union that we are seeking here." Montaigne condemns pederasty because of the age asymmetry between the partners, "simply founded on external beauty, the false image of corporeal generation, " but approves fully of intense friendship between men of the same age, "friendship that possesses the soul and rules it with absolute sover­eignty. " In this respect he is a forerunner of modern, age-symmetrical, androphile homosexuality. Physical beauty means less than the "marriage of two minds" such as he contracted with his friend, who died some five years later, in 1563, of dysen­tery, leaving I 'ontaigne with a memory that haunted Í im all the rest of his days. Never again would such an enthralling experience befall him, but the great love of his life underlay his classic essay on friend­ship.
Also relevant to homosexuality are the "Apology for Raymond Sebond" and "On Some Verses of Vergil." So if Montaigne could not openly defend physi­cal intimacy between men, he at least evoked the ancient ideal of friendship, anticipating the modern notion of homosociality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Beck, "Montaigne face à l'homosexualité," Bulletin de la Société des amis de Montaigne, 9/10 (1982),41-50; Maurice Riveline, Mon­taigne et l'amitié, Paris: Félix Alcan, 1939.
William A. Percy

Montesquiou, Count Robert de (1855-1921)
French aristocrat, poet, and aes­thete. Descended from the d'Artagnan of The Three Musketeers, he spent most of his wealth on collecting art objects and throwing parties, as well as vanity-press editions of his own books. He was the model for Jean des Esseintes in the novel A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884), Phocas in Jean Lorrain's novel Mons. de Phocas (1902), the Peacock in Rostand's play "Chantecler" (1910), and Baron de Charlus in Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921), all of which portray his flamboy­ance and homosexuality. However, he was so afraid of scandal that he avoided associ­ating with notorioushomosexuals and was so discreet in his sexual life that there is no proof that he ever had sex with any of the handsome young men in his entourage. The great love of his life was a South American, Gabriel Yturri, whom he met in 1885 and who died in 1905. Montesquiou wrote some poems on homosexual themes. Although he was a glittering center of Parisian society, he is remembered today only as the original of Charlus and des Esseintes, and Giovanni Boldini's portrait of him is on the cover of the Penguin paperback edition of Huysmans' novel.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Philippe Jullian, Prince of Aesthetes, New York: Viking, 1968.
Stephen Wayne Foster

Montherlant, Henry de (1895-1970)
French novelist, dramatist and essayist. A Parisian by birth, Montherlant was educated in an elite Catholic board­ing school, whose atmosphere of particu­lar friendships and ambivalent student-teacher relations left an abiding impres­sion. At the age of sixteen he fell passion­ately in love with a younger boy - an inter­est evoked in La Ville dont le prince est un enfant (1952) and Les Garçons (written in 1929 but published posthumously).
In World War I he used family connections to make sure that he had a taste of combat without really being en­dangered by it. His first novel, Le songe (1922), is an account of the war initiating a lifelong personal cult of virility and courage that many have subsequently found spurious. In ensuing novels, as well as in his plays (1942-65), Montherlant presents resolute heroes and heroines who are steadfast in their confrontation of God and nothingness, embodying audacity, patriotism, purity, and self-sacrifice as opposed to cowardice, hypocrisy, compro­mise, and self-indulgence. Throughout his lif e, Montherlant labored to polish an image of a manly stoic, and it was in this key that he took his own life in 1972, as blindness set in.
The postumous publication of his correspondence with the openly gay nov­elist Roger Peyref itte threw a new light on Montherlant, one that could only prove disconcerting to many of his erstwhile admirers. In April 1938 the thirty-one-year old Peyref itte met Montherlant, then forty three, at an amusement arcade in Place Clichy in Paris. Both had discovered independently that, in a Paris that had still not entirely recovered from the Depres­sion, these commercial undertakings pro­vided good opportunities for picking up impoverished teenaged boys, taking them to the movies, and then home to bed. Montherlant soon fell in with one particu­lar youth, who was fourteen, with the knowledge of the boy's mother. Although not a novice in these matters, the older novelist came to rely on Peyrefitte's ad­vice as to how to conduct the affair. After Montherlant settled in the south of France, their friendship continued on a weekly, sometimes daily postal basis, though with verbal dodges to fool the censor. Through the tragic events of the declaration of war, the defeat of France, and the beginning of the Occupation, the two remained obses­sively preoccupied with their affairs with boys. Both men got into scrapes with the authorities, but while Montherlant was able to use influence to smooth things over, Peyrefitte lost his job with the Quai d'Orsay.
Although a first version of the novel Les Garçons was written in 1929, the full text, which shows the pupils of Sainte-Croix in an almost frantic ballet of love affairs with each other (though not with the teachers), did not appear until after the writer's death. The book captures the sultry mixture of passion, religion, and (a very definite third) study in an elite French school as well, if not better than any other in this well populated genre. Before his death Montherlant seems to have foreseen that the truth about himself would come out, and even to have given this process some anticipatory encourage­ment.
In their lives Montherlant and Peyrefitte offer a vivid contrast: the one striving to retain and even polish the mask of heterosexuality, the other frank about his homosexuality from his first novel, Les amitiés particulières (1945). Yet after Montherlant's death a truer picture has emerged, and the divergent perspectives of work and lif e have become visible without growing together. In fact his work abounds in divided characters: a colonial officer who does not believe in imperialism, an artist who does not care for painting, a priest for whom God is an illusion, and an anarchist who has never believed in anar­chism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Henry de Montherlant and Roger Peyrefitte, Correspondence, Paris: Robert Laffont, 1983; Pierre Sipriot, Montherlant sans masque, I: L'Enfant prodigue, 1895-1932, Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982.
Wayne R. Dynes

Motion Pictures
See Film.

Movement, Homosexual
Modern life has seen many movements for social change, including those intended to secure the rights of disenfran­chised groups. The homosexual movement is a general designation for organized po­litical striving to end the legal and social intolerance of homosexuality in countries where it had been stigmatized as both a vice and a crime, and where the revelation of an individual's homosexuality almost inevitably led to social ostracism and economic ruin. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did such organized movement endeavors become possible in continental Europe, in no small measure because of the impact of scientific think­ing on the political discourse of that ep­och. Characteristic of such movements is their capacity to give the homosexual individual not just a sexual but a political identity - as a member of a minority with a grievance against the larger society. These movements varied in the size of their membership and the scope of their activ­ity, as well as in the specific goals which they pursued and the arguments by which they sought to persuade the decision­making elites and the general public of the justice of their cause.
Origins. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which took up arms against every form of arbitrary op­pression, may be regarded as the spiritual parent of all later homosexual liberation movements. Yet such leading Enlighten­ment thinkers as Voltaire and Diderot had ambivalent attitudes toward sexual non­conformity. While opposing barbaric op­pression, they clung to the notion that the church remained the arbiter of "moral­ity," which in practice meant sexual morality, and that same-sex relations, being "unnatural," were destined to disappear in a truly enlightened polity. During the French Revolution two pamphlets appeared, Les enfans de Sodome and Les petits bougres au manege, purporting to give information on adherents to a proto-liberation movement for homosexuals, but this anticipation remains shadowy.
A lonely precursor was Heinrich Hoessli (1784-1864), a Swiss milliner from the canton of Glarus, who in 1836-38 published in two volumes Eros: Die Mannerliebe der Griechen: ihre Beziehungen zur Geschichte, Erziehung, Literatur und Gesetzgebung aller Zeiten (Eros: The Male Love of the Greeks: Its Relationship to the History, Education, Literature and Legislation of All Ages). Amateur that he was, Hoessli collected the literary and other materials - mainly from ancient Greece and medieval Islam - that illustrated male homosexuality. His writings, issued in very small editions, had no immediate effect on public opinion or the law.
Second in the prehistory of the movement, the German jurist and poly­math Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) began in January 1864 to publish a series of pamphlets under the title Forschungen zur mannmannlichen Liebe. The first of these was entitled Vindex, a name meant to vindicate the homosexual in the eyes of public opinion. The second had the name Inclusa, taken from Ulrichs' formula anima muliebris corpore virili inclusa, "a. female soul trapped in a male body." The pamphlets rambled over the entire field of ancient and modern history and sociology, with comments on contemporary scan­dals. Although he even conceived the idea of an organization that would fight for the human rights of Urnings, as he called them,
Ulrichs' efforts to ameliorate the legal plight of the homosexual in Germany failed, since the North German Confed­eration and then the German Empire adopted the Prussian law penalizing "unnatural lewdness" between males. He ended his days in poverty and exile, be­friended by an Italian nobleman who wrote a short tribute to him after his death.
Emergence. Two years after Ulrichs' death, the world's first homosex­ual organization came into being: the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), founded in Berlin on May 14, 1897 under the leadership of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), a physician who became the world's leading, if controversial, authority on homosexuality in the years that fol­lowed. The Committee's first action was to draft a petition to the legislative bodies of the German Empire calling for the re­peal of Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code of the Reich. For this petition the Commit­tee solicited the signatures of prominent figures in all walks of German life, and ultimately it obtained some 6,000 names, an impressive cross-section of the intel­lectual elite of the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic. It also began to publish the world's first homosexual periodical, the fahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intergrades], whose title embraced not only homosexuality but also transvestism, pseudohermaphro­ditism, and other departures from the norm of masculinity or femininity.
The Committee professed the view - which did not go unchallenged even within homosexual circles - that homo­sexuals belonged to a "third sex" which represented an innate "intermediate stage" between male and female. All traits of mind and body it assigned to the mascu­line or the feminine, while insisting that there was a continuum between the two in every human being. It also issued pam­phlets and brochures for the lay public, trying to break down the layers of preju­dice and ignorance that had encrusted the subject over the centuries. Gatheringsome 1500 members from all parts of Germany, the Committee never became a mass or "activist" organization; unlike some later groups, it never even sought this status.
Outside Germany the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee only gradually attracted imitators, as in countries that had adopted the Code Napoleon where no criminal statute remained in need of re­peal. In the Netherlands a branch was founded in 1911 in the wake of the passage of a law which ominously raised the age of consent from 14 to 21 - discriminating against homosexual acts for the first time in the twentieth century. This Dutch branch had been preceded by the participa­tion of several writers - Arnold Aletrino, L. S. A. M. von Römer, Jongherr Jacob van Schorer - in the international aspect of the German movement. Aletrino had coura­geously spoken in defense of homosexuals at the Congress of Criminal Anthropology in Amsterdam in 1901 and been roundly abused by the other delegates. Another offshoot of the Committee was founded in Vienna in 1906 to seek reform of the Austrian law of 1852which penalized both male and female homosexual expression.
By the second decade of the twen­tieth century the various organizations or groups of friends such as those around John Addington Symonds, Edward Car­penter, and Havelock Ellis that were con­cerned with changing the law and public opinion in regard to the legitimacy and morality of sexual behavior began to coa­lesce into a larger "sexual reform move­ment." All rejected the traditional ascetic morality of the Christian Church and its more modern variants to a greater or lesser degree, though some affected a neutral pose on this issue. The birth control movement was joined by the eugenics movement and by an organization that sought to abate the stigma attaching to unwed motherhood - the Deutsche Bund für Mutterschutz (German League for the Protection of Motherhood). Also, voices were raised against the laws prohibiting voluntary abortion as a method of birth control and the religiously based laws which made divorce difficult - if not im­possible, as was the case in most of Catho­lic Europe. Despite entrenched opposition, the women's suffrage organizations were becoming ever more influential in coun­tries such as Germany and Great Britain.
Throughout the industrial world, the old order in the realm of sexuality - a kind of Old Regime of social control - was under attack on many fronts. By and large, the protagonists of these various reform movements saw one another as natural allies and clerical and traditionalist par­ties in the national legislatures as natural enemies. So the homosexual movement was part of a much larger wave of social agitation against nineteenth century sex­ual morality. This positive development was paradoxical in that its roots lie in part in the "social purity" campaigns of the late Victorian era. In their conviction that social hygiene required repressive as well as fostering aspects, the social purity advo­cates were hardly unambiguous support­ers of sexual freedom. Social purity sought reform in the context of normative man­agement and social engineering, not lib­eration. But in the actual situation, which was one of revolt against the corseted restraints of High Victorianism, reformers of various stripes were swept along in a wave of libertarian or quasi-libertarian openness. Yet the contradictions exposed in this era were to reemerge in the 1970s in the feminist campaigns against pornogra­phy and child abuse.
The 1920s. World War I brought the efforts of the sexual reform movement to a temporary halt, but then ushered in the far more radical rejection of Victorian norms of sexuality of the 1920s. The pre­occupation of the police with espionage, sabotage, and other crimes directly affect­ing the war effort, the mood that youth had "so little time" to enjoy the pleasures of Ufe when death was always imminent, the breakdown of authority in the wave of revolution that swept Central and Eastern Europe in 1917-18 - all created a new set­ting for efforts at homosexual emancipa­tion.
Germany, now the Weimar Re­public, remained the center of the move­ment, which barely existed in most other countries, even where a semi-clandestine subculture flourished, as it had in London, Paris, and the major Italian cities since the late Middle Ages. The Deutsche Freundschaftsverband [German Friendship Asso­ciation] was founded in 1920 as an expres­sion of the displeasure felt by many homo­sexuals at the academic and political ori­entation of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the narrow elitism of the Community of the Exceptional. The Asso­ciation was more oriented toward the needs of the average homosexual; it opened an activities center in Berlin, held weekly meetings, sponsored dances, and pubhshed aweekly entitled DieFreundschaft [Friend­ship]. Some 42 delegates from chapters throughout Germany attended the second annual conference of the Association. A period of rivalry with the Committee ensued that lasted until 1923 when the Association renounced its involvement in the struggle for legal reform and changed its name to the Liga fur Menschenrechte [League for Human Rights), while Die Freundschaft changed from a weekly to a monthly and took on a more literary and cultural focus. A third journal Uranos also competed with Adolf Brand's Dei Eigene in the artistic sphere. The Jahibuch itself was forced to discontinue publication af­ter the inflationary spiral of 1923 had destroyed its resources. Its 23 volumes remain the classic repository of informa­tion on all aspects of homosexuality from the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Most of the organizations and periodicals that flourished in the 1920s had a more social than political purpose, though Hirschfeld and the Committee continued their struggle against the "para­graph." In 1922 Gustav Radbruch, the Social Democratic Minister of Justice, drafted a far more progressive criminal code, but it never came before the Reich­stag. The indifference of conservative ju­rists to legal reform led to the formation in 1925 of the Kartell für Reform des Sexualstrafrechts [Coalition for Reform of the Law on Sexual Offenses], which under the direction of the lawyer and litterateur Kurt Hiller (1885-1972) set about drafting a comprehensive alternative. Only one of the seven member-organizations of the Coalition, whose own draft was published as a compact volume of legal texts and commentaries in 1927, was a homosexual group (the Committee).
The country that had the most sweeping revolution of all was Russia, where the codes of the fallen autocracy were abolished in one stroke, and when the Soviet regime drafted its penal code in 1922, homosexual offenses were not in­cluded. Only crimes involving force or the corruption of minors were punishable, and the definition of minor was a sliding one, to be determined by physical examination of the subject, not by chronological age. The actual degree of freedom that homo­sexuals enjoyed during what later came to be seen as the "golden age" of the Soviet regime remains moot. No publications on homosexuality for the general reader are known from this decade, and no organiza­tion comparable to the Scientific-Humani­tarian Committee or the League for Human Rights was formed. A group of medical experts did seek to enlighten the masses on sexual matters in general, and a rather tolerant attitude of the regime toward heterosexual promiscuity, divorce, birth control, and abortion facilitated some public discussion of homosexuality. But no direct benefits for homosexuals en­sued, and a number of individuals suffered repression or persecution.
The English-speaking world lagged sadly behind Europe, as the tradi­tional "Anglo-Saxon attitudes" toward sexuality changed but slightly in spite of protests after the condemnation of Oscar Wilde. At the end of the 1920s Bertrand Russell wrote that it would be virtually impossible to discuss the findings of modem psychologists on sexuality in print because of the English laws on "criminal obscenity," which the courts had defined as the power to corrupt any individual "into whose hands the publication might fall." A British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology had been established in 1914, but its real interest focused in the subcom­mittee on sexual inversion which was surreptitiously a "committee of the whole." Between 1915 and 1933 the Soci­ety published 17 pamphlets, one of them a translation of a German tract issued by the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.
In the United States, Henry Gerber, who had served in the American Army of Occupation in the Rhineland, attempted to transplant the ideas and organizational forms of the German movement. In De­cember 1924 the (Chicago) Society for Human Rights received a charter from the state of Illinois; it was officially dedicated to "promote and protect" the interests of those who, because of "mental and physi­cal abnormalities" were hindered in the "pursuit of happiness." It lasted only long enough to publish a few issues of the newspaper Friendship and Freedom, modeled on the German periodical Fieundschaft und Fieiheit. One member of the ill-fated group was a bisexual whose wife complained to a social worker, with the result that all four members of the group were arrested without a war­rant. Gerber lost all his savings and had only the bitter memory that no one came to the aid of the organization.
In France Inversions published a few issues in 1925 but was halted by a prosecution inspired by Catholic mem­bers of the National Assembly. The prose­cution appealed to anti-German senti­ments (the movement drew its inspiration "from across the Rhine") quite as much as to the traditional intolerance promoted by the church; the defendants lost. Still, in the absence of any penal law comparable to Paragraph 175, French homosexuals had little reason to organize. The frightful loss of life in the trenches during World War I coupled with the declining French birth rate even led in 1920 to anti-birth control legislation.
On the international front, a World League for Sexual Reform on a Sci­entific Basis was founded in Berlin in 1921 at the recently created Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Sci­ence) headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. The founders included world leaders in law, sex education, contraception, endocrinol­ogy, eugenics, and sexual research in gen­eral. At its peak, the League united groups with a total membership of 130,000, and had members in countries from the Soviet Union to Australia. All were devoted to the task of replacing the ascetic morality of the church with a new standard of rights and obligations shaped by the findings of biology and medicine as well as by a modern conception of society's interests and of the individual's claim to happiness. Further congresses of the League were convened in Copenhagen (1928), London (1929), and Vienna (1930). The London conference, attended by many prominent figures in British intellectual and public life, may have had the greatest influence. In the following year, 1930, the Lambeth Confer­ence of the Church of England approved the use of birth control by married couples. Breaching the long tradition of intolerance on this subject, Anglicans began to aban­don the old ascetic norms of morality, thereby opening the way to ultimate ac­ceptance of sexual pleasure as legitimate in its own right.
Setbacks. The 1930s - the Depres­sion era - saw the sexual reform move­ment, as a whole, retreat. While it fostered radical movements throughout the world, the economic crisis made sexual problems seem secondary if not irrelevant. Worst of all, the rise of National Socialism and its seizure of power spelled the end of the homosexual movement in Germany. As early as 1929 Nazi harassment had forced Hirschfeld to leave the country. In 1933 the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee had to dissolve, and on May 6 the Institute for Sexual Science was invaded by Nazis who seized the library and files and burned them publicly four days later. Many of the homosexual and lesbian cafés and bars in Berlin were closed; all publishing activity of the organizations ceased for twelve years of National Socialist rule. The World League for Sexual Reform lasted until 1935, when the death of Magnus Hirschfeld in Nice led to its collapse, because the lead­ership was split over the issue of whether to remain a centrist movement or to form an open alliance with the Communist Party - which, as it happened, would have been a dead end.
The Soviet Union amended its penal codes to make homosexual acts between males - though not females - criminal. The "Law of March 7, 1934" patently alluded to the day of National Socialist assumption of power in Germany the previous year. Repudiating most of the other reforms of the 1920s, the Stalin re­gime prohibited abortion, suppressed the sale of birth control devices, and returned to a puritanical "petty bourgeois" code of sexual morality. Communist parties un­der Soviet domination lost all interest in sexual reform and became - and mostly remain - foes of homosexual emancipa­tion.
Towards the Present. In Switzer­land, just as the movement in Germany was coming to an end, a new homosexual organization began. In 1933 a monthly journal called Schweizerisches Preundschaftsblatt (Swiss Friendship Bulletin) came under the editorship of Karl Meier ("Ralf"), a former contributor to DerEigene and Die Freundschaft, publishing articles, short stories and photographs of interest to the general gay reader. Subsequently the namewas changed to DerKreis/Le Cercle, and French (1943) and English (1952) sec­tions were added, so that the publication took on an international character. The headquarters of the publication in Zurich became a social center for the subscribers; foreigners were admitted upon presenta­tion of a passport. From their observation post in neutral Switzerland the contribu­tors recorded the death of the older move­ment as the Nazis occupied one European country after another, but after the war they watched the rebirth of the move­ment, in due course, with an ideological and social base in the Anglo-American world.
The movement revived only slowly after the liberation of Europe from Nazi rule. The first country to have a postwar movement was the Netherlands, where the "Amsterdam Shakespeare Club" held its first meetings on December 8-9, 1946. This group and its journal Levensrecht (Right to Life] formed the nucleus of the Cultuur- en Ontspanningscentrum [Culture and Recreation Center] with the publication Vriendschap (Friendship), both of which began early in 1949. Despite the Catholic Center Party's efforts at repres­sion in the Parliament, the organization grew in size from 1000 members in 1949 to 3000 in 1960. In preference to the term "homosexual," the Dutch group preferred the coinages homofiel, "homophile," and homofilie, "homophilia," which gained a certain currency in other languages and served to designate the first phase of the movement in the United States.
For a time the Netherlands be­came the refuge of the reviving homosex­ual movement. Supported by such world-renowned figures as Alfred C. Kinsey, whose pathbreaking studies (1948-53) had begun to reorient public opinion, the Inter­national Committee for Sexual Equality (ICSE) held its first conference in Amster­dam in 1951 and for a number of years issued an ICSE-Newsletter. In France Andre Baudry founded the monthly Aicadie in 1953 as a forum for the discussion of homosexual issues; like Dei Kreis, it had a membership of Arcadiens who gathered at intervals for political and social purposes. Although France and Switzerland had no laws against homosexuality between con­senting adults, the pressure of public opin­ion and the refusal of the establishment media to open its channels to the homo­sexual cause left the leaders and support­ers of these publications with a painful sense of their outsider status.
The Eaily American Movement. The United States had no tradition of homosexual movement activity, though many Americans had lived in Central Europe and Hitler's persecution brought exile and emigré homosexuals to such centers of the American gay underworld as New York and Los Angeles. "Vice squads" of the metropolitan police forces regularly entrapped homosexual men, raided bars, and generally intimidated public manifes­tations of same-sex proclivities. As early as 1948 in Southern California "Bachelors for Wallace" had appeared as a cover for the gathering of homosexuals, but Wis­consin Senator Joseph McCarthy's cam­paign against" sex perverts in government" put the gay community on the defensive: its response was the founding of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles by Henry (Harry) Hay in December 1950. With lead­ership modeled on the organizational forms and practices of the American Commu­nist Party and of freemasonry, it designed a five-tiered structure that would preserve the anonymity of members while allow­ing the highest tier to control the entire group. The founders conceived homosexu­als in a separatist manner as a minority deprived of identity and rights, and need­ing a new consciousness of its history and place in society. Initial successes of the group led to growth in Southern California and spread to the San Francisco Bay Area, with chapters elsewhere in the country (these became independent in 1961). Mattachine also had a nationally circulated monthly, ONE, which for the first time provided American homosexuals with a forum for discussion of their problems and aspirations. In the course of time ONE emerged as a separate organization, while the original group's San Francisco branch issued Mattachine Review.
The anti-Communist campaigns of the cold war could not leave the Mattachine Society untouched, and in 1953 an open struggle developed between the found­ers and a new set of leaders who challenged their "separatist" ideology, instead stress­ing the normality of homosexuals as dif­fering from other Americans only in sex­ual identity. With this assimilationist program went a rejection of activism, so that the group could only by proxy appeal for toleration and understanding - through psychiatrists, jurists, sociologists, and the like who would come forward as seem­ingly disinterested authorities.
In San Francisco in 1955 Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon founded the les­bian counterpart to Mattachine, the Daugh­ters of Bilitis. Its monthly publication, the Ladder, provided an English-language fo­rum for homosexual women analogous to the Mattachine Review and ONE. The three organizations worked together in the face of the indifference and hostility of the Eisenhower years, in which "devia­tion" and nonconformity were relentlessly decried.
Law Reform. In 1953 a series of sensational trials in England brought the subject of homosexuality to the attentior> of Parliament. Urged by the Church of England and a number of prominent intel­lectuals, the Conservative government appointed a Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution headed by John Wolfenden. After hearing the testimony of witnesses from the British establishment, the Committee voted 12-1 in favor of repeal of the existing laws punishing male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. Its Report, published in September 1957, proved a major landmark in the evolution of public opinion in the English-speaking world. It held that sex­ual acts belonged to the realm of private life which was not the law's business, rejecting the theological arguments that these were "crimes against nature," "contrary to the will of God," and the like, just as it dismissed the notion of homo­sexuality as a disease, finding it - to the chagrin of the psychiatric establishment - compatible with full mental and physical health.
In a country where the whole subject had been taboo since time imme­morial, and where German homophile literature had remained largely unknown, the public discussion of the Wolfenden Report put the issue on the agenda and set the precedent, though ten years were to pass before a Labour government enacted the recommendations. The Homosexual Law Reform Society (later known as the Albany Trust) was founded to press for repeal of the criminal laws; it issued bro­chures and a magazine, the first special­ized periodical in Great Britain.
The United States followed in 1961 with the American Bar Association's drafting of a model penal code that omit­ted homosexual offenses from the roster of punishable acts. Illinois, in 1961, became the first state to enact this recommenda­tion. Furthermore, professors of criminal law at the major schools began to teach the coming generation of lawyers that "vic­timless crimes" had no place on the stat­ute books because they violated the free­dom and privacy of the individual, and in time half of the states of the Union struck the archaic laws from the books either by legislative act or by an appellate court decision holding them unconstitutional.
Warren Johansson
America in the 1960s. The period from 1961 to 1969 saw the evolution of the American homophile movement from a defensive, self-doubting handful of small, struggling groups in California and the Boston-Washington corridor to an asser­tive, self-confident, nationally organized (if ideologically divided) collection of some three score organizations with substantial allies and a string of major gains for which it could take credit.
A characteristic figure in the ideo­logical change was Franklin E. Kameny, a Harvard-trained astronomer, who became president of the Mattachine Society of Washington after unsuccessfully fighting his dismissal from a government job. Where the previous leaders of the movement emphasized "helping the individual homo­sexual adjust to society," Kameny and such associates as Barbara Cittings, Randy Wicker, and Dick Leitsch urged a program of militant action designed to transform society on behalf of a homosexual commu­nity which was perfectly capable of speak­ing for itself. Not the psychiatrists, not the theologians, not the heterosexual "authori­ties," but homosexuals themselves were the experts on homosexuality, they in­sisted. Progress would come not by accom­modation to the powers-that-be but by publicly applied pressure, legal action, demonstrations, and aggressive publicity.
Operating from his base in Wash­ington, Kameny targeted the federal government's discriminatory practices in employment, military service, security clearances (a key to employment in large sectors of private industry), and other ar­eas. Finding that government officials were relying on the doctrines current in psycho­analytic and other psychiatric circles to the effect that homosexuality was a debili­tating mental illness, Kameny launched a systematic and rigorously formulated at­tack on the medical model in July 1964. While this effort would make considerable progress during the 1960s, gaining support from a National Institutes of MentalHealth task force under Dr. Evelyn Hooker (1969), it was not to reach its triumphant conclu­sion until a 1973 vote by the American Psychiatric Association. More importantly, the campaign transformed the self-image of the American homosexual from one which internalized many of the most negative characteristics attributed to homosexuals by homophobic "authorities" to one which embraced his slogan "Gay is good."
Other activists, such as Laud Humphrey and Arthur Warner, preferred to work more quietly, though their efforts too reflected the new mood of urgency.
The National Committee for Sexual Civil Liberties, headed by Warner, orchestrated a subtle and resourceful campaign of sodomy decriminalization, which pro­ceeded methodically on a state-by-state basis through the 1960s and 1970s.
Throughout the decade, mass media coverage of homosexuality snow­balled, starting with Randy Wicker's pub­licity barrage of 1962 in New York and extending through articles on homosexual lifestyles in national magazines, until the once-forbidden topic had become a com­mon subject for television and newspa­pers. In the process, previously isolated homosexuals became aware of the gay subculture and the homophile movement in large numbers and the ground was laid for substantial shifts in public, as well as professional, opinion on issues of concern to the movement. Notable also was the favorable publicity and financial support extended to the hard-pressed movement from the Playboy empire.
The movement's involvement with the social life of homosexuals was another major development of the sixties, originating in San Francisco. First came the organizing of gay bars there in the Tavern Guild (1962), then the founding of the Society for Individual Rights (S. I. R.) in September 1964, combining a militant stance with social activities. This led to the first gay community center in April 1966, and made S. I. R., with nearly a thousand members, the largest homophile organization in the country.
Other milestones in San Francisco saw the involvement of liberal clergymen and then whole religious groups (Council on Religion and the Homosexual, founded by the Rev. Ted Mcllvenna in December 1964, and spreading to a number of other cities later in the decade); and the begin­nings of productive political involvement with candidates for office and city officials (August 1966). These innovations heralded San Francisco's later reputation as the "gay capital" of the United States.
Southern California contributed the first nationally distributed large-circu­lation homophile news magazine, The Ad­vocate (1967 onward). Dick Michaels, the magazine's editor, represented a new type that became influential: the journalist-activist. In October 1968, Los Angeles witnessed the founding by the Rev. Troy Perry of the first gay church, the Metro­politan Community Church; from the start the MCC and its leaders were heavily involved in the homophile movement and provided major financial and personnel support.
Another organizational break­through of lasting importance was the establishment of the homophile move­ment in academia, beginning with the founding of the Student Homophile League at New York's Columbia University by Stephen Donaldson (Robert Martin) in October 1966. Granted a charter by the university in April 1967, and making front-page headlines around the world, the student movement spread quickly and contributed a major impetus first to the spread of militancy and later to the radicalization of the homophile movement.
An important victory on the is­sue of employment discrimination came with the Bruce Scott case, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed Scott's disqualification for federal employment in a June 1965 decision. This set the ground for the Civil Service Commission's accep­tance of homosexuals in the 1970s. Piece­meal progress was made on the issue of security clearances, while efforts to gain admission to the armed forces remained stymied.
Another result of the new mili­tancy was the recognition by the Ameri­can Civil Liberties Union of the move­ment as a legitimate civil rights activity. The national ACLU reversed its policy in 1967 under pressure from the Washington, D.C., area affiliate, which began backing homophile causes in 1964, supported by the two California affiliates; this decision did much to legitimize the movement and gave it much-needed support on a wide range of legal and legislative issues.
On a local rather than a national scale, homophile organizations were often involved in contesting police practices, and were successful in halting raids on gay bars and entrapment of homosexuals in New York, San Francisco, and other cities. This effort probably had the greatest im­pact on the life of the average homosexual in the cities concerned.
A major transformation in the movement of the 1960s led from the clos­eted, fearful members of the early 1960s, operating under pseudonyms and avoiding involvement with the public, to the highly visible and equally vocal activist of the latter part of the decade. Landmarks in this evolution were the first public demonstra­tions organized by the movement in the spring of 1965 at the United Nations in New York in April and at the White House on May 29. The latter picket, with seven men and three women participating, gained nationwide television coverage, thus ex­posing the new gay militancy to a nation­wide audience for the first time.
These changes in philosophy, strategy, and tactics did not come easily, but were accompanied by bitter struggles within the movement between the new militants and the old-guard "accommodationists"; the New York Mattachine Soci­ety, which was captured by militants in a crucial election in May 1965, and the Daughters of Bilitis in particular were wracked by internal struggles and eventu­ally foundered. New groups took their place; a tendency by the movement to devour its leaders generated continual organizational instability. Despite these problems, the period witnessed a growth in the total membership of its groups from under a thousand in 1961 to an estimated eight to ten thousand by the spring of 1969.
While there is a popular tendency to believe that nothing of importance happened in the homophile movement until it expanded to the dimensions of a mass movement in the summer of 1969, such a view proves on examination to be highly superficial. The explosion of the 1970s was made possible only by the labo­rious efforts of the pioneers of the 1960s, and in particular by the victory of the militants. As John D'Emilio points out, "their decisive break with the accommodationist spirit of the 1950s opened impor­tant options for the homophile cause. The militants' rejection of the medical model, their assertion of equality, their uncom­promising insistence that gays deserved recognition as a persecuted minority, and their defense of homosexuality as a viable way of living loosened the grip of prevail­ing norms on the self-conception of lesbi­ans and homosexuals and suggested the contours of a new, positive gay identity."
North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO). One of the characteristic developments of the homophile movement in the 1960s was its attempt to forge a semblance of first re­gional, then national, and finally conti­nental unity under the umbrella of a common organization. Frank Kameny initiated this effort, stimulating the for­mation in January 1963, in Philadelphia, of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO). It was this loose confederation of four groups which sponsored the series of public demonstrations launched in May of 1965 at the White House, and it played a major role in gaining control of the move­ment on the East Coast by the militants.
The next step was the formation of a national grouping, established at a Kansas City conference of fifteen groups in February, 1966, as the National Planning Conference of Homophile Organizations. Meeting in San Francisco in August of 1966, this loose assembly reconvened in Washington a year later, where it changed its name to the North American Confer­ence of Homophile Organizations (NACHO), developed an organizational structure with officers, by-laws, and estab­lished three regional subsidiaries (ECHO became ERCHO).
Though wracked by infighting among the groups, NACHO provided a largely informal but no less important boost to a sense of common purpose and identity among the leaders who attended its annual meetings and more frequent regional con­ferences, and to a certain extent among the rank-and-file members who read of its activities. It facilitated the spread of a militant approach on a nationwide basis, and presented the national media and other nationally-organized groups with a more formidable-looking movement.
Much credit for holding NACHO together was due to its secretary and coor­dinator, Foster Gunnison. Among its more tangible accomplishments, it established a national legal fund, coordinated public demonstrations on a nationwide basis, undertook a number of regional projects, and officially adopted and publicized the "Gay Is Good" slogan (adopted in Chicago in 1968). Furthermore, NACHO and its regional affiliates were instrumental in spreading the movement from its bicoastal base by colonizing the major cities of the North American heartland. And from 1968 until its demise in 1970 it provided a major forum for the growing radical wing of the movement.
The Stonewall Uprising and Af­ter. The slow pace of the American move­ment in the 1950s was accelerated in the early and mid-1960s in part under the influence of the black civil rights move­ment ("Gay Is Good" derives from "Black Is Beautiful"), then injected with the tre­mendous energies that accompanied the opposition to the war in Vietnam. With American involvement in Vietnam at its peak, student uprisings shook the cam­puses of Columbia and Harvard Universi­ties in 1968 and 1969, and by the late spring of 1969 the country was in a mood of unprecedented mass agitation. It was against this background that the Stone­wall Rebellion of June 27-30,1969, marked the start of a new, radical, and even more militant phase of the homosexual move­ment in the United States.
ity" to be "part of a general attempt to oppress all minorities and keep them powerless."
The committee report was voted down, but the battle had just begun. The next confrontation came at the November 1969 meeting of ERCHO in Philadelphia, when GLF and SHL delegates pushed through a resolution declaring "freedom from society's attempts to define and limit human sexuality," a step beyond the movement's previous insistence on equal­ity into the realm of social autonomy. Chaos ensued and the meeting broke up in disorder.
The handwriting was on the wall: when NACHO reconvened in San Fran­cisco in August, 1970, gay liberation was over a year old and had no use for complex continental organizations with their by­laws, officers, and parliamentary proce­dures. Deeply divided between reformers and revolutionaries, itself the object of disruption by feminists on its first day and by radicals on its last, NACHO broke up in disorder as the more conservative dele­gates fled before an invasion by non-dele­gate radicals. Thus the five-year effort to bring all of North America's movement groups under a single roof collapsed in a tidal wave of gay activists.
In New York, those who called for a return to the "single issue" approach seceded to found the Gay Activists Alli­ance, which retained radical tactics of confrontation but focused on the specific problems of homosexuals in American society. "Zaps," sit-ins, blockades, seizures of lecterns and microphones, and disrup­tive tactics of all kinds were featured in highly publicized scenes which astonished the American public, longused to an image of homosexuals as passive and weak. And now it was not just repeal of the sodomy laws that the movement demanded, but the enactment of positive legislation pro­tecting the rights of homosexual men and women in all spheres of life. None of this would have been possible without the ability of the new groups to call out hun­
Beginning as violent resistance to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a bar in New York's Greenwich Village, the popu­lar movement found a new expression in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). The GLF was conceived as uniting homosexuals (without guidance or even participation from sympathetic heterosexuals) around their own identity and grievances against an oppressive American society and as organizing them to force their own libera­tion from the persecution and powerlessness that was their lot even in the "land of the free." The radicals saw themselves as part of a broad alliance of oppressed groups developing autonomously but in an at­mosphere of mutual support.
Superficial as was the New Left rhetoric of the Gay Liberation Front, since its analysis of the whole problem began virtually "from scratch," it had the merit of giving its followers a sense of identity as a group inevitably oppressed by the estab­lished social structure. The black and feminist movements as well as their homophile predecessors supplied the ideo­logical resources that the growing organi­zation needed to legitimate itself in its own eyes, if not those of the larger society.
The new Gay Liberation activists quickly collided with the pre-Stonewall movement leaders, whom they saw as part of an established structure too rigid for the kind of gay guerrilla warfare unleashed by Stonewall. Only two months after the riot, at the August 1969 NACHO convention in Kansas City, the Youth Committee under Donaldson issued a 12-point "radi­cal manifesto" which stated, "We regard established heterosexual standards of morality as immoral and refuse to con­done them by demanding an equality which is merely the common yoke of sexual repression." The youth leaders further demanded the removal of strictures against prostitution, public sex, and sex by the young; urged the development of inde­pendent "homosexual ethics and esthet­ics," denounced the Vietnam War and declared "the persecution of homosexual­
dreds and then thousands of supporters, drawing on the post-Stonewall mass base which the homophile movement had never been able to mobilize.
This new wave of mass "coming out" led to the formation of hundreds of gay associations with particular identi­ties: political clubs, student groups, reli­gious organizations, professional caucuses, social clubs, and discussion groups in towns and neighborhoods from one end of the country to the other. Far from the margin to which it had been confined until the end of the 1960s, the movement became an institutionalized part of American life. In the two decades that followed the Stone­wall uprising, the movement grew to a network of interest groups as diverse in its origins, as multi-faceted in its identities and aspirations as America itself. National marches held in Washington in 1979 and again in 1987 brought tens of thousands of participants from all sections of the coun­try, rallying behind the banners of hun­dreds of different groups all demanding their place in the sun.
The proliferation of gay groups in the 1970s led to a fragmentation of con­cerns and a lessening of a sense of focus for the homophile movement as a whole. Victories were attained on the psychiatric front (the American Psychiatric Association' svoteinl974 and subsequent defeat of a campaign to reverse that vote] and in a number of nationwide profes­sional associations, but the struggle for decriminalization continued to be fought on a state-by-state basis, and with the demise of NACHO there was no longer a clearly legitimized national leadership. The Rev. Troy Perry was the most visible homophile spokesman as his Universal Fellowship of Métropolitain Community Churches expanded to nearly two hundred congregations and Perry engaged in highly publicized hunger strikes, led marches, and addressed protest meetings, even as arson destroyed a number of his church buildings. In 1974, Dr. Bruce Voeller, for­merly president of GAA in New York, founded the National Gay Task Force (NGTF), a membership organization rather than a federation. The NGTF lobbied on nationwide issues and in the next decade moved to Washington, but it never devel­oped a mass following.
Much of the movement was turn­ing its attention in the seventies to the adoption of gay civil rights laws, ordi­nances, and executive orders, and to the blocking of numerous attempts to repeal their scattered successes. In the absence of major progress towards a federal civilrights law, this was a local effort, though the campaigns pro and con often drew consid­erable nationwide publicity. Portland, Oregon, and St. Paul, Minnesota adopted rights ordinances in 1974, San Francisco in 1978, Los Angeles and Detroit in 1979, and New York City in 1986; Wisconsin adopted the only statewide gay rights law in 1981. Two Christian fundamentalists, the singer Anita Bryant and the Rev. Jerry Falwell led extensive homophobic campaigns which produced repeal of rights measures in Miami (1977), St. Paul, and Wichita, Kan­sas. Their efforts, however, suffered a major setback with the defeat in a California statewide vote of the Briggs Initiative, which would have banned gay teachers, in 1978.
Gay men and lesbians became visible in party politics and sent openly homosexual delegates to Democratic na­tional conventions, forcing battles over "gay rights" planks (a weak one was adopted in 1980), and making homosexu­ality a presidential campaign issue; under the Carter administration a gay delegation was received by aide Midge Costanza in the White House and military discharge policies were changed to provide for fully Honorable Discharges, though the exclusionof known homosexuals from the armed forces remained intact. Notable here was the effort to avoid discharge by Air Force Sgt. Leonard Matlovich, whose fight brought him a Time cover in 1975. In San Francisco, the movement rallied behind supervisor (councilman)Harvey Milk, who was first elected and then assassinated in 1978; elsewhere the movement welcomed the emergence (usually but not always involuntary) of gay legislators and con­gressmen from their closets.
Reinforcing this movement ac­tivity was a thriving gay subculture, with its bars, baths, bookstores, guest houses, and services of all kinds, and above all a press that discussed the issues that con­fronted the gay community as a segment of American society.
World Perspectives. Given the extent of America's influence on popular culture throughout the world, this subcul­ture became a model for gay life every­where, from Norway to Taiwan - though the Islamic world still resisted this aspect of Westernization. The American example inspired countless imitators of the "life style" of the affluent and hedonistic America of the 1970s. In Europe bars adopted incongruous American names, such as The Bronx and Badlands, while gay rights organizations, retreating from their earlier radical stance, adopted American terminology and tactics.
Canada, being most intimately related to the United States, developed a homophile movement early on with the establishment in Vancouver of the Asso­ciation for Social Knowledge (ASK) in 1964. Decriminalization passed in Canada in May of 1969, followed by emergence of the main Canadian group, the Community Homophile Association of Toronto (CHAT) in February, 1971. The influential gay newsmagazine, The Body Politic, also began publishing in 1971, surviving gov­ernment harassment until 1986. The Canadian province of Quebec adopted an antidiscrimination law in 1977, followed a decade later by the provinces of Ontario and the Yukon, while the city of Vancou­ver passed a rights law in 1982.
In Latin America the first organi­zation seems to have been Argentina's Nuevo Mundo (1969), but this promising development was cut short by the imposi­tion of a cruel military dictatorship. Other organizations, often short-lived, appeared in Mexico (FHAR, 1978, followed by street demonstrations in 1979), Colombia, and Peru (Movimento Homosexual de Lima, 1982). InBrazilamajor journal, O Lampiâo, began in 1976, and stable organizations appeared in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and Sâo Paulo.
In Japan economic prosperity contributed to the expansion of the gay subculture, but traditional reticence im­peded the formation of gay associations. Elsewhere in Asia, gay conferences were held in both India and Indonesia in 1982. In 1988 Israel discarded the sodomy law that it had inherited from the British mandate.
The Movement in Europe and Australasia. The watershed year of 1969 saw law reform in West Germany, while the next year witnessed the establishment of a gay Italian journal, Fuori, in Turin. By 1971 there was a proliferation of gay lib­eration groups in Britain and West Ger­many, while the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire was getting es­tablished in France. London's sole wide-circulation gay newspaper, Gay News, w as established in 1972 and soon ran into major problems with the government, including an obscenity conviction which was up­held by the House of Lords. In Milan, 1973 saw the establishment of the Italian Association for the Recognition of Homosexual Rights.
By the mid-70s, the gay church in the form of the UFMCC was putting down roots in Britain, France, Denmark, Bel­gium; it even found a predominantly heterosexual congregation in Nigeria. Northern Ireland got a Gay Rights Asso­ciation in 1975. In Spain, the Front d'Alliberament Gai de Catalunya (FAGC) was launched with marches in Barcelona in 1977. Catalonia remained the most important focus of activity, though other groups appeared in Madrid, the Basque ; country, and Andalusia.
Coventry, England, was the site of the formation in 1978 of the International Gay Association, like the defunct NACHO, a coalition of independent groups. The same year saw gay marches in Sydney, Australia. In the following year Austrians organized the Homosexuelle Initiative (HOSI) in Vienna.
The 1980s saw major advances in the European and Australian movements, with British decriminalization extended to Scotland in 1980. In 1981 the Assembly of the Council of Europe voted in favor of gay rights, the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg struck down a homophobic statute in Northern Ireland, and Norway adopted antidiscrimination legislation. In the same year Greece organized the group AKOE and Finland began the Sexuaalinen Tasavertaisuus (SETA). The Australian state of New South Wales adopted gay rights legislation in 1982, while New Zealand not merely repealed its criminal laws, but enacted a gay rights measure in 1986.
The European Parliament went on record in favor of gay rights in 1984, with France becoming the largest jurisdic­tion to adopt such protections in 1985. Progress, however, has not been uniform. In Great Britain in 1988 Parliament adopted Clause 28, which prohibited the use of public money for any activity deemed to "promote" homosexual behavior. Con­versely, in the Netherlands gay studies programs became established in all major Dutch universities. The officially sup­ported international conferences in Am­sterdam in 1983 and 1986 set new stan­dards for gay and lesbian scholarship.
The Challenge of the 1980s. The 1980s, with their conservative trend in most major industrial countries, con­fronted the movement with new obsta­cles and challenges. The spread of Ac­quired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in the United States and Western Europe meant that ever larger resources of time and money had to go into lobbying around the issues of research on the causes and cure of AIDS and the financing of health care for victims of the syndrome.
The stigma that linked homosexuality with a contagious and fatal condition was ex­ploited by sensation-mongering media eager to profit from public curiosity and fear. The columns of the gay press began to print, week after week, the obituaries of those who had died of the consequences of AIDS, and new organizations such as New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) were formed to deal specifically with this new challenge. In October 1988 AIDS activists from across the country staged a blockade of the Food and Drug Admini­stration in Rockville, Maryland, charging that it was dilatory in making newly de­veloped drugs available to the public. The AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed first in Washington in 1987 and then in other major cities, providing a public symbol of grief. The new activism showed some similarities with that of the sixties, but it was accompanied by a battle-scarred real­ism regarding means and ends.
Homosexuals may take no small comfort from the ability of the movement to adapt, to this crisis in creative and pub­licly effective ways, sustaining a sense of community and gaining a strong voice in government efforts to deal with the dis­ease. Efforts to protect the rights of AIDS victims, recently being pressed as a medi­cal necessity, may end in opening the door to long-denied measures on behalf of homosexuals in general.
The movement everywhere still faces the task of articulating the concerns of a minority in a society that continues to harbor hostility toward homosexuals. Fearing this hostility, the majority of male homosexuals and lesbians tend to remain in the closet, and the claims of the gay movement to represent them rest at best on silent consent. Movement leaders seek to become players in a political process still largely geared toward responding to economic interest groups mobilized to influence officeholders and alter public opinion, and toward accommodating eth­nic minorities that have achieved voting cohesion. In the closing years of the cen­tury, the movement still aspires to achieve for its followers the same degree of politi­cal rights and social acceptance that the democratic countries have gradually ac­corded to other minorities in their midst.
Stephen Donaldson
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Barry D. Adam, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987; John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homo­sexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983; Hans Hafkamp and Maurice van Lieshout, eds., Pijlen van naamloze Iiefde: pioniers van de homoemancipatie, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij SUA, 1988; Laud Humphreys, Out of the Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Libera­tion, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972; John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-193S), New York: Times Change Press, 1974; Jim Levin, Reflections on the American Homosex­ual Rights Movement, New York: Gay Academic Union, 1983; Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981; James Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, New York: Arno Press, 1975; Donn Teal, The Gay Militants, New York: Stein and Day, 1971; Rob Tielman, Homoseksualiteit in Nederland, Amsterdam: Boom Meppel, 1982.

MUJUN
This Arabic word denotes frivo­lous and humorous descriptions of inde­cent and obscene matters in stories and poems, what is sometimes called pornog­raphy. It is an important theme in Arabic literature, appearing often in combination with sukhf, scurrilousness and shamelessness. The most famous example of mujun is the stories of the Thousand and One Nights, in which the story-teller saves herself through the power of her imagina­tion. Mujun can be considered as a verbal liberation from the shackles of decency, a kind of literary protest against social, and therefore also Islamic, norms and values.
With its obscenity, slander, and blasphemy, it meant to shock society. It stood for enjoyment of pleasure, drinking of wine, and spending the night with wide-but-tocked beardless youths or licentious women - not secretively as Islamic mor­als required, but openly, ignoring blame which would arise from behaving in such a sinful and shameful way. In principle it ought not to go beyond words, but of course it did. Nonetheless, mujun texts undoubt­edly went far beyond practice and there­fore have to be used very carefully when drawing conclusions about reality. But fan­tasies, especially when they are popular, give us insight into a social reality which exists next to official Islamic morals.
For the most part, sexual and scatological humor of this kind would be covered only in the language of the people, and not in literature. Only in periods of cultural bloom and a high level of social tolerance did it acquire a place in litera­ture.
In the ninth and tenth centuries mujun was highly popular with the ruling elite of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. Learned and religious people became fasci­nated by it, as for example the vizier Ibn 'Abbad (ca. 936-95). The most popular mu j un writer of that time was Ibn al-Haj jaj (ca. 941-1001), whose work consisted of obscenity and scatology in its purest form. He compared his poetry with a sewer and with an involuntary emission from the anus: "When I speak the stench of the privy rises up towards you." Ironically, he himself served for some time in Baghdad as the official in charge of public morals!
Mujun was also used in an educa­tional sense, rationalized by the idea that humor would stimulate and refresh the mind. Highly learned and respectable theologians and lawyers suddenly diverted their readers by digressions of mujun. Shaykh Salah addin as-Safadi for example wrote an essay about the size of the body-openings of women and boys in the middle of a very serious juridical work. Probably the best mujun, written with style and wit, can be found in the work of Abu Nuwas. One also finds mujun in Arab erotic works like Al-Tifashi's Les délices des coems (thirteenth-century Egypt) and Al-Nafzawi's The Perfumed Carden (fif­teenth-century Tunisia). Most mujun, however, is not yet translated, which is most regrettable, because it would provide a major source of information, especially in regard to homosexual behavior.
Maarten Schild

MUKHANNATH
This Arabic and Persian word (plural mukhannathun] denotes boys or men who dress and behave effeminately. In particular, the term refers to those who work as homosexual prostitutes, and who combine this trade with singing, dancing, or domestic chores. Mukhannathun imi­tate women in their movements and voice, and also in their use of perfume, make-up, and ornamentation. While their hair-style and clothing are effeminate, differing from the male's, they are also distinct from female styles: this differentiates the mukhannathun from both sexes and symbolizes their social position. Socially, they are neither men nor women. Mukhan­nathun are not regarded as men, because their appearance is not manly. Moreover, their unmanly occupations (particularly homosexual prostitution, in which they take the passive, female role) make them even less suitable for a man's position in society. Because they are "inferior" to men and have renounced their manhood through their behavior, they are allowed to associate openly with women (Koran 24:31), and women treat them practically as equals. However, the mukhannathun have more freedom than the traditional Islamic woman, not being hindered by the female role. They are not accepted as women because of their provocative be­havior, and their occupations are just as unsuitable for virtuous women as formen. As a result, they find themselves in a position which might be called intermedi­ate, outside of the male/female dichot­omy. Neither the prescribed role behavior of men or women is applicable to them, and sanctions against them are not neces­sary because they are not judged as men or women. Since they have no social role at all, they are regarded as "outsiders."
The mukhannath can be viewed as a socially acknowledged form of effemi­nate behavior, and, in particular, passive homosexual behavior. Although the occu­pation of prostitute is considered shame­ful, the mukhannathun fulfil a social need by indirectly protecting the honor of women; because they do not have a de­fined social role, their behavior can be generally accepted. The reasons for be­coming a mukhannath are not clear, but probably result from a refusal of the mas­culine role or an inability to perform it, which may stem from a preference for passive homosexual behavior and/or a sort of psychological effeminacy which can result in transvestism or, in the extreme case, transsexualism. Economic motives can also play an important role in this process.
In former times, the mukhan­nathun had a bad reputation, probably as a result of their provocative behavior as singers and dancers, and, of course, their sexual behavior, which was no secret. From time to time, harsh action was taken against them, ranging from banishment to castration. Often they were the victims of mockery. In Sufism, the mystic current of Shi'ite Islam, mukhannathun were some­times considered as symbols of unreliabil­ity, since they alternately presented them­selves as men and women. The noted Sufi poet Rumi described them as ridiculous creatures, who thought like women and who were attached to worldly pleasures; he regarded them as caught up in "forms" and not in "meanings," the latter being the province of the truly masculine.
Western observers have tradition­ally been mystified by the phenomenon of the mukhannath, which they tried to de­fine as hermaphroditism or transsexual­ity; both terms are oversimplifications of a social role they clearly did not understand.
Contemporary examples can be found in Turkey (kocek) and in Oman [khanith), and probably throughout the entire Middle East. Other societies of the past and present have presented similar phenomena: the constellation of homo­sexual prostitution, cross-dressing, sing­ing and dancing is reported from Greece and China, and the hijra in India also appear similar. These transcultural simi­larities should be carefully studied, for the presence of general similarities may con­ceal more important differences.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Ahmad al-Tifachi, Les délices des coevas, trans, by Rene R. Khawam, Paris: Phébus, 1971; Unni Wikan, "Man Becomes Woman: Transsexualism in Oman as a Key to Gender Roles," Man, 12 (1977), 304 19, plus criticism and reply in Man, 13 (1978), 133-134, 322-333, 473^75, 663-671; and Man, 15 (1980), 541-542.
Maarten Schild

Munro, Hector Hugh (pseudonym saki; 1870-1916)
British fiction writer, playwright, and journalist. Saki is best known for his witty and exquisitely crafted short stories, which often satirize the mores of Edwar­dian society, or describe a world of super­natural horror underlying the tranquil English countryside.
Munro was bom in Burma, the son of a career officer in the British mili­tary police. Following the death of his mother when he was two, he and his older siblings, Ethel Mary and Charles Arthur, were sent to live with his grandmother and two aunts in western England. Though an old Scottish family with aristocratic pre­tensions, the Munros had only a modest income. Nevertheless, the boys were raised to be gentlemen, and throughout his life Munro thought and wrote as a Tory. The despotism and intolerance of the aunts informed a recurrent theme of his fiction: the tyranny of dullards over their natural superiors, and the eventual revenge and triumph of the latter.
Munro was educated at Exmouth and at Bedford grammar school. In 1887 his father retired from the military, re­turned to England, and took his three chil­dren on a series of travels throughout Europe. In Davos, Switzerland, Hector Hugh, then eighteen years old and uncom­monly attractive, was a frequent visitor at the home of John Addington Symonds, a prominent British writer who was the foremost authority on "masculine love" among the ancient Greeks. Munro appears to have accepted Symonds as his mentor in matters of literary style as well as sexual philosophy.
In 1893 Munro joined the mili­tary police in Burma. Here he observed the exotic customs of the inhabitants, and acquired a collection of animals, including a tiger cub. He discovered the advantages of having a houseboy, and throughout the rest of his life was seldom without one. Contracting malaria, he was invalided out of the service. He then turned to journal­ism, writing satirical pieces for the West­minster Gazette. He adopted the pen name, Saki, a word with esoteric homoerotic connotations. (Poems by Hafiz and other Sufi writers, as well as by Goethe in his collection, West-östlicher Diwan, are addressed to the "saki" or cupbearer, a beautiful boy, the object of male desire.)
After a number of years as a for­eign correspondent for The Morning Post, Munro settled in London. Here he wrote a series of short stories: Reginald (1904), Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1912), and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914). The stories are in turn play­ful, cynical, uncanny, and hilariously funny - a singular blend of urbanity and paganism. At their best, they represent the highest of high camp.
Though Munro's penchant for young men was well known, he was nei­ther secretive nor blatant. The short sto­ries contain numerous sly allusions to the "unmentionable vice" and occasional flashes of homoeroticism. The two most prominent characters, Reginald (no last name) and Clovis Sangrail, are dandies. Reginald is a vain and good looking young man, with nice eyelashes, who compares himself with Ganymede, wears "a carna­tion of the newest shade", and takes spe­cial delight in shocking people. A few of his epigrams have become famous ("To have reached thirty is to have failed in life."). At the same time that Reginald is courted by both men and women, he himself has an interest in lift boys, gar­dener boys, choir boys, and page boys. Clovis Sangrail, a bit older and more so­phisticated, frequents the Jermyn Street baths (as did Munro himself) and is an admirer of male beauty, in others as well as himself.
Among the gayer stories are Gabriel-Ernest (a masterpiece which can be read on at least three different levels: a werewolf horror story, a comedy, and a parable of pederastic temptation), Adrian, The Music on the Hill, Reginald's Choir Treat, The Innocence of Reginald, and Quail Seed. A central figure in Quail Seed is a boy, "about sixteen years old, with dark olive skin, large dusky eyes, and thick, low-growing, blue-black hair" who works as an "artist's model"; the story concludes with the artist's statement: "We enjoyed the fun of it, and as for the model, it was a welcome variation on posing for hours for 'The Lost Hylas.'"
When World War I broke out, Munro, then 43 years old, enlisted in the army. Rejecting several offers of a com­mission, he remained in the ranks. His two years at the front, in the company of young working class men, were appar­ently the happiest time of his life. He was killed by a sniper's bullet in 1916, his last words being: "Put that damn cigarette out!"
His sister Ethyl, in her Biography of Saki, wrote his epitaph: "He had a tre­mendous sympathy for young men strug­gling to get on, and in practical ways helped many a lame dog."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. A. J. Langguth, Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.
John Lauritsen

Murderers
More homosexuals have been the victims of murder than its instigators, but the popular imagination has seized on certain sensational exceptions to promul­gate the legend of the lust-driven, anti­social sadist preying on young men. Cheap fiction likes to show the homosexual murderer as effete and flamboyant, but this is seldom true in reality. Occasion­ally, as in the case of Kenneth Hailiwell, lover and slayer of the playwright Joe Orton, the violent act is a domestic crime of passion, the culmination of longself-loathing and humiliation. More often, the motive is profit, as when a hustler kills a John in his apartment: the files of the European police are packed with such cases going back to the eighteenth century. Homosexual Lustmord or sexual murder is less common than believed, and its practitioners rarely carry on lengthy tor­ture sessions. Serial killers are generally closeted, with an emotional life arrested in childhood; their murders may be violent, but are often prompted by an inability to make emotional contact with another human being. They are unilateral in their taking of sexual pleasure and unimagina­tive in the recurrent patterns of their crimes.
The earliest criminals on record to mix homicide and homosex are monarchs or nobility, whose power enabled the crimes and whose prominence lent them notoriety. Zu Shenatir, fifth-century ty­rant of El-Yemen, enticed young men and boys to his palace, sodomized them, and tossed them out of windows. He is alleged to have died, stabbed through the anus by the youth Zerash. Tipu Sahib (1751-1799), the Sultan of Mysore in India, convinced that he was the chosen servant of Moham­med with a mission to destroy infidels, would customarily sodomize every Euro­pean he captured, including General Sir David Baird; their children would be burned over slow fires, or sodomized while drugged, or defenestrated, or castrated and trained as catamites.
Gilles de Rais. Gilles de Rais (1404 - 1440), companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc and one of France's richest noble­men, a youth of "rare elegance and star­tling beauty," was renowned for piety and courage. After Joan's death, he separated from his wife, retired to his castle at Tiffauges, and gave himself over to extrava­gance and dissipation. To repair his for­tunes, he had recourse to alchemy and under the influence of Prelati, a comely Italian sorcerer, commenced torturing and murdering young boys, to use their blood for pacts and spells. Hundreds of children in his territories disappeared (up to 800 according to some authorities). At his trial in 1440, he and his confederates confessed that he used the children sexually as he tortured them and en j oy ed orgasms as they died, arranging beauty contests of their decapitated heads. Although sentenced to be strangled and burned, his body was retrieved by his family and given a Chris­tian burial. Gilles de Rais has achieved mythic status and is the subject of a study by Henry Bataille, a play by Roger Planchon, and a novel by Michel Tournier. But one may question whether the trial testi­mony, extorted from underlings, was au­thentic or fabricated by the civil and eccle­siastical authorities in order to seize the holdings of a lord who had grown too independent and powerful. As an emblem of divine good turned diabolically evil, the image of Gilles de Rais still exercises a powerful hold on the imagination.
Bdthoiy. Erzsebet Bathory (1560-1614), the "Blood-Thirsty Count­ess" of a family which long showed a strain of madness and cruelty, is credited by legend with the death of more than 600 girls and young women. An adept in witch­craft and alchemy, with the aid of her handmaiden-lovers Barsovny and Otvos, she kidnapped local girls and imprisoned them in her castle in Csej, northwest Hungary. Here she fattened and regularly bled them to provide beauty baths for her white skin. She would then have herself licked dry by virgins and anyone showing disgust would be tortured in various in­genious ways. Although her cousin was prime minister, he could not protect her castle from being raided and she was ar­rested and tried. Her accomplices were burned and decapitated, but in view of her high birth Bathory herself was immured in her apartments, where she died after four years of this living tomb.
The Rise of the Common Mur­derer. A signal difference between these slayers of the past and those of the present is that of rank. Royal or aristocratic mur­derers were in a position of privilege; their sexual tastes were considered as out of the ordinary as their crimes. The rise of the common man seems also to herald the rise of the common murderer, whose depreda­tions and lusts must berationalized within his society. With the emergence of foren­sic psychiatry and "criminal anthropol­ogy," the connection between sexual in­version and homicide has been studied in considerable, often obtuse, detail. It does seem certain that the anonymity of sexual promiscuity in the modern metropolis is both a temptation and a facilitation of mass murder.
The first "Romantic everyman" murderer was Pierre Francois Lacenaire (1800-1835), who wrotehis memoirs while awaiting the guillotine. Although Lace­naire admitted to homosexual liaisons during earlier prison terms, he denied that he continued them in "civilian" life,- nev­ertheless, police authorities were con­vinced that he and his accomplice Avril were more than good friends. Their last victim was a notorious tante ("auntie"). But, except for his self-aggrandizement and pretensions to literature, there was little to distinguish Lacenaire's criminal career from that of any heterosexual felon. The same might be said of Joseph Vacher (1869-1897), the "Ripper of Southeast France," who raped and ripped both sexes without discrimination; or of Ronald Kray (b. 1933), who with his twin brother Reg­gie terrorized the London underworld in the 1960s: Ronald was gay, his brother straight, but their records for brutality and viciousness were almost identical.
Although the number of hetero­sexual mass murderers is high, the homo­sexual serial killer exercises a special fas­cination for alienists and journalists alike. However, social taboos have prevented the homosexual murderer from being ideal­ized by the media, with the exception of Wayne Williams, whose guilt was ques­tioned in a TV special; so far, even homophobes have boggled at exploiting the crimes of Dean Corll and Dennis Nilsen. The most celebrated cases of murder by homosexuals in modern times are the fol­lowing.
Haarmann. The German Fritz Haarmann (1876-1924) was an escapee from an asylum to which he had been sent because of child molestation. Once an exemplary soldier in a Jäger regiment, he turned petty criminal and police informer. In Hannover during World War I he be­came a successful smuggler, aided by his police connections. During the postwar inflationary period, Haarmann, posingas a detective, would pick up unemployed lads at the railway station, take them back to his room, and murder them, often by bit­ing their throats during the sexual act. He would dismember the body and dispose of it in the river that ran outside his lodgings; charges that he sold the flesh for butcher's meat were never proven, but it is a strong likelihood. Infatuated with a petty thief and hustler, Hans Grans, who encouraged his activities, Haarmann stepped them up and may have been responsible for over 50 deaths of good-looking youths from 13 to 20. Despite complaints from parents, po­lice were very slow to take action until bones and clothes too numerous to ignore began to turn up. Haarman and Grans were indicted for 27 murders in 1924; the for­mer behaved with remarkable insouciance during the fortnight's trial and wrote a confession that revealed his delight in his sexual tastes and homicidal practices. He was decapitated; Grans was sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment. Haarmann's career formed the inspiration for the film, Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (1973), made by Fassbinder's disciple Ulli Lommel.
Seefeld. Adolf Seefeld (1871-1936), a German tramp and religious fa­natic, killed boys with natural poisons. When arrested and tried in 1936, he con­fessed to 12 murders, committed at ever-decreasing intervals between April 16, 1933, and February 23, 1935. (There may have been more, since he had been charged with a murder as early as 1908.) The Nazi court moralized over his deeds and sen­tenced him to be executed.
Leopold and Loeb. Nathan Leo­pold, Jr. (1905-1971) and Richard Loeb (1906-1936), brilliant scions of wealthy Jewish families in Chicago, were lovers who, under the influence of Nietzsche's "superman" philosophy, decided to com­mit a "Raskolnikovian" crime. In 1924, they kidnapped a younger acquaintance, Bobbie Franks, battered in his skull with a chisel, drowned him in a culvert, disfig­ured his face with hydrochloric acid, and hid the body in a drainpipe, before phoning ransom demands to the parents. They were traced by eyeglasses Leopold dropped at the culvert and, under police interroga­tion, Loeb confessed; both men accused the other of wielding the chisel. At their trial, they were defended by Clarence Darrow, who argued they were paranoid schizophrenics, thus irresponsible for the crime. They were both imprisoned for life plus 99 years; in the Joliet prison shower-room, "Dickie" Loeb was stabbed to death in a brawl; "Babe" Leopold, believed to be the mastermind of the Franks crime, was paroled in 1958 and served as a health worker in San Juan, Puerto Rico, until his death.
Corona. Juan V. Corona, Mexican labor contractor, was convicted in 1971 of killing 25 vagrants and migrant workers, whom he buried in the fruit orchards near Yuba City, California. The motive was apparently sexual, since most of the vic­tims had their pants off or down, and one had gay pornography in his pocket; they had been stabbed and hacked about the head with a machete. Corona's defense tried to argue that he was a married man with children and therefore not a homo­sexual, whereas his half-brother Natividad, convicted of an earlier attack on a young Mexican, was a homosexual who returned to Mexico. Corona was sentenced to 25 consecutive life terms, although doubt remains as to whether he had an accom­plice or was in fact the guilty party.
Corll. Dean Allen Corll (1939-1973) was the child of a broken home, a "mamma's boy" who allegedly "came out" during his service in the U. S. Army. In 1969, while living in Houston, he began to exhibit signs of moroseness and hypersensitivity, organized glue-sniffing parties, and indulged in sadistic activities. He would pick up boys for sex, torture and murder them; eventually he enlisted two youths, Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks, as procurers and assistant torturers. The victims were often tor­mented for days at a time, occasionally castrated, before being despatched and buried in beaches and boathouses. Henley later claimed there were 31 victims, but only 27 bodies were recovered. The end came in 1973 when Henley made the mistake of bringing a girl to a party; the enraged Corll threatened to kill him, and Henley shot him. Henley and Brooks were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Toole. Otis Toole of Jacksonville, Florida, ex-hustler and arsonist, claims to have committed his first murder at the age of 14. Between 1975 and 1981, he and his close friend Henry Lee Lucas killed ap­proximately 50 persons, including a six-year-old boy they beheaded; the victims were often tortured before death and sexu­ally molested afterwards. Toole concen­trated on the boys, Lucas on the girls. Although they confessed to some 700 crimes, they have since repudiated their confessions; Toole is serving a life sen­tence in Florida State Penitentiary, Lucas is on Death Row in Texas.
Cooper. Ronald Frank Cooper (1950-1978) was an unemployed laborer in Johannesburg who recorded in his diary in 1976 the intention to "become a homosex­ual murderer... [I] shall get hold of young boys and bring them here where I am staying and I shall rape them and then kill them. I shall not kill all the boys in the same ways." He then went on to list the ways, planning 30 murders, following which he would begin a campaign against women. After three unsuccessful attacks, he managed to throttle a 12-year-old, failed at raping him and, with a change of con­science, sought to loosen the rope. Identi­fied by another boy he had molested, he was soon arrested, convicted with the aid of the diaries, and hanged.
MacDonald. William MacDonald was responsible for the murder and muti­lation of four men in Sydney, Australia, in 1961; one of them was found castrated in a bathhouse, another castrated in a public toilet. MacDonald passed himself off as his last victim, Allan Brennan, but was picked up from Identikit descriptions. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was later transferred to a home for the crimi­nally insane.
Bartsch. Jiirgen Bartsch (b. 1946) was a West German butcher's apprentice who between 1962 and 1967 lured four boys from a carnival in Langenberg, slaugh­tered them in an abandoned air-raid shel­ter, attempted anal intercourse, cut them up like beef carcasses, and masturbated over their bodies. On trial, he declared attempts to abduct 70 more. The fact that Bartsch had confessed his first crime to a priest shortly after committing the mur­der and that the priest had observed the confidentiality of the confessional occa­sioned debate about the sacrality of such confidence. Bartsch was condemned to life imprisonment.
Gacy. John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (b. 1942), Chicago salesman and contractor, may have suffered a personality disorder when struck on the head at the age of eleven. A man desperate to be liked, often serving as a clown at children's parties, he was a sorry mythomaniac, pretending to be a precinct captain and a friend of Presi­dent Carter. Twice married and twice divorced, Gacy, who had a history of forc­ing sex on young men, lured at least 33 of them to his house in Des Plaines, sod­omized them, often with violence, before murdering them. The bodies were buried there until he ran out of space and dumped the last five in the Chicago River. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1980.
Bonin. William G. Bonin (b. 1947) was a truck driver. Occasionally accompa­nied by friends, he cruised the streets and freeways of Los Angeles in his self-styled "death van," pickingup young men. Inside the van, the victims were robbed, raped, tortured, and killed, their bodies strewn along the highway. Bonin varied his tech­niques, strangling with T-shirts, punctur­ing with an icepick, castrating, and stab­bing endlessly. Altogether 44 bodies were recovered in the "Freeway Killings," which began in the mid-1970s. Bonin stood trial for ten of them in 1980, four more subse­quently. He was sentenced to death and is awaiting execution.
Williams. Atlanta's Wayne Ber­tram Williams (b. 1958) is a problematic case: many are persuaded of his innocence and James Baldwin, in The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), writes: "It is un­likely, as well as irrelevant, that he is homosexual." For 22 months, between 1979 and 1981, 28 corpses of poor black children, two of them girls, were found murdered, shot, stabbed, bludgeoned or strangled. The spoiled and arrogant Wil­liams, himself black, was charged with the murders of two grown men, Jimmy Raye Payne and Nathaniel Cater; the prosecu­tion relied heavily on circumstantial evi­dence and innuendo, implying that the children's murders could be put down to Williams as well. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and the police declared the earlier cases closed.
Nilsen. Dennis Nilsen (b. 1945), a Scottish civil servant, holds the record for multiple murder in Britain. After a career in the army and the police, Nilsen became known as an excellent worker in the Lon­don Manpower Services Commission; a frequenter of gay bars, he often took young men, both homosexual and heterosexual, home for the night. Overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness and convinced that only death could keep his companions from leaving him, Nilsen began to strangle many of them, finishing them off by drown­ing in the bathtub. He would sleep beside the corpses, occasionally masturbating, or retain them on his premises, until corrup­tion or overcrowding compelled him to dissect them and dispose of the remains under the floor-boards, in bonfires, or, in his last residence, down the toilet. It was the clogged drains which led to his discov­ery. On his arrest in 1983, he made a full confession, later amplified by circumstan­tial diaries,- in prison, awaiting trial, he fell in love with David Martin, the bisexual murderer of a policeman. Nilsen was sen­tenced to life imprisonment. Of all homo­sexual serial killers, although he conforms in some respect to the standard profile, Nilsen seems the most intellectual, the most questioning of his own motives: these appear to be a profound need for affection, combined with a sense of the permanence and stillness to be found in death. It is significant, though not exculpatory, that he always committed his murders when thoroughly drunk, the alcohol releasing his inhibitions and permitting the sup­pressed violence in his nature. He seems to have finally located his identity as a re­viled mass murderer.
Paulin. Thierry Paulin (b. 1963), a black cabaret performer from Martinique, appeared in drag as Diana Ross in Parisian night clubs. In tandem with a Guyanian boyfriend Jean-Thierry Mathurin (b. 1965), he brutally murdered 29 elderly widows betwen 1985 and 1987, until he was iden­tified by a survivor. His motive was appar­ently mere robbery.
See also Violence.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. J. P. de River, The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytic Study, Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1949; Laurence Senelick, The Prestige of Evil: The Murderer as Romantic Hero from Sade to Lacenaire, New York: Garland, 1987; Colin Wilson and Patricia Pitman, Encyclopedia of Murder, New York: Putnam, 1962; Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman, The Encyclopedia of Modern Murder 1962-1982, New York: Putnam, 1983.
Laurence Senelick

Muret, Marc-Antoine (1526-1585)
French Renaissance humanist. Born at Muret in the Limousin, he was an autodidact who became a professor at the age of eighteen. Recommended by Julius Scaliger to the magistrates of Bordeaux, he taught literature at the college of Guienne. Among his pupils was the young Michel Montaigne, who later boasted that he had played the lead in the Latin tragedies composed by his teacher. Settling in Paris, Muret taught at the college of Cardinal Lemoine, delivering lectures so brilliant that Henri IT and Catherine de' Medici attended them. By 1552 he was giving courses on philosophy, theology and civil law all at the same time, while publishing his poetic Juvenilia. But accused of un­natural vice, he was imprisoned at the fortress of Chatelet, and would have died of self-starvation had his friends not inter­vened to secure his release. Disgraced in Paris and reduced to poverty, he fled to Toulouse, where he eked out a living by giving lessons in law. He was accused a second time of having committed sod­omy, in this instance with a young man named L. Memmius Frémiot, and on the advice of a councilor in the parlement he absconded once more. He was sentenced to death in absentia and burned in effigy with Frémiot in the Place Saint-Georges as a Huguenot and sodomite. He crossed the Alps in disguise and was warmly received for a time in Venice, while in France his memory was ceaselessly vilified. Theodore de Béze remarked that "For an unnatural penchant Muret was expelled from France and Venice, and for the same penchant he was made a Roman citizen."
Muret found his fortune only under the patronage of the princes of Fer­rara, in whose palace everything was at his disposal: several libraries, the precious manuscripts of the Vatican, and his protector's villa. In Rome he lectured on Aristotle, taught civil law, and was one of the first to apply it to the study of history and philosophy. His Latin was judged so perfect that his auditors believed that they were hearing the voice of another Cicero. In 1576 he entered religious orders and there conducted himself in a manner that won the approval and generosity of Pope Gregory XI1T. As a defender of the Catholic party he even composed a eulogy of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew's eve. In addition to works on law he wrote numer­ous Latin commentaries on the Greek and Roman classics.
Muret was a type of Renaissance scholar and intellectual who had his brushes with the law because of his homo­sexual activity, but thanks to his enormous talent and the protection of influential friends managed to escape the penalty which the law then decreed and even to have a distinguished academic career. His mastery of Latin and his commentaries on the ancient authors belonged to an age that saw as its main task the recovery and assimilation of classical antiquity rather than original scholarship.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Charles Dejob, Marc-Antoine Muret: un professeur français en Italie dans la seconde moitié du xvi' siècle, Paris: E. Thorin, 1881.
Warren Johansson

Music, Popular
Popular music is not only of inter­est in its own right as an important area of popular culture, but in times for which major documentation of homosexuality and attitudes towards it on the part of the lower and middle classes is lacking, it is one source of value to historical inquiry.
In the broadest sense, popular music includes everything that is not funded by elites for an elite, usually upper class or ecclesiastical, audience. This is usually art music (that is to say, sonatas, symphonies, lieder, operas, etc., and their equivalents in non-Western music). It is, moreover, useful to distinguish "popular" music from folk music - the older forms of anonymous, noncommercial expression. Popular music made use of mechanical means of reproduction of musical scores and text, beginning with song books and sheet music in the Renaissance. The commercialization of popular music ap­pears first in cabaret and concert perform­ances to which tickets are sold to a general audience, later in the sale of recordings.
Although some scholars believe that they can detect erotic motifs in in­strumental music, this is certain only in the few cases where the composer has so indicated, as in the "Love Death" music from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde-, it has been suggested that Tchaikovsky's Symphonie Pathétique has a homosexual theme. But the field of inquiry is in prac­tice limited to songs with words, and the texts are the principal criterion of interpre­tation. In practice intonation (broadly defined to include lilt, timbre, and accen­tuation) is also important as a second level of meaning, which may supplement or even contradict the denotative one; sound recordings largely retain these intonational registers.
Early Indications. A fourteenth-century ordinance from Florence bans the singing of "sodomitical songs." Although the words and music of these are lost, the need to prohibit them attests that homo­sexuality was part of the bawdy repertoire of urban life as early as the late Middle Ages. The arrival of printingmade possible the diffusion - no doubt with establish­ment encouragement - of a counterf low of antihomosexual songs. A characteristic example is an English single-sheet folio of a ballad, "Of the Horrible and Woefull Destruction of Sodom and Gomorra, to the Tune of the Nine Muses" (London, ca. 1570). In France during the time of Louis XIV satirical songs pilloried the homosex­ual peccadillos of Jean-Baptiste Lully, master of the king's music, and other notables.
In the nineteenth century the music hall saw a vogue for both male and female impersonators, leading to drag performances of songs appropriate to the opposite sex. In 1881 Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, incorporating a character based on Oscar Wilde, created the archetype of a gay man in popular music - though the character (Bunthorpe) was officially sim­ply an "aesthete." In the inner cities of Europe and North America a few clandes­tine gay establishments offered sung en­tertainments, a tradition that survived into the second third of the twentieth century with the performances of Rae Bourbon.
Modem Commercial Popular Mu­sic. At the turn of the present century, the English-speakingworld saw the emergence of a new category of music with mass appeal, the commercial popular song. What made this music distinctive was its broad availability through phonograph record­ings, radio, and eventually sound motion pictures and television. Suggestive ele­ments had been present in the nineteenth-century music hall, in vaudeville and minstrelsy, but these live entertainments lacked the standardization of style, tempo, and intonation found in songs diffused by a New York-centered grouping of highly professional songwriters, collectively styled Tin Pan Alley, that were fixed in form and sold by the millions in record­ings. Of course eachrecorded version would have its own standardization, but many songs retained in the popular mind the qualities given by the first major record­ing. Erotic suggestiveness appears in these songs not only in the lyrics, where the innuendo may be subtle, but in intona­tion, which served to bring out any under­lying ambiguities. Consequently, it is necessary to listen to the audio recordings themselves to obtain the full effect.
A surprising number of examples escaped the tacit censorship that prevailed until the 1960s. One category is that of songs intended for one sex to be sung by a singer of the other - without benefit of the drag disguise as seen in the music hall. As early as 1898 John Terrell recorded "He Certainly Was Good to Me," and in 1907 Billy Murray longed for his absent sailor "Honey Boy," while in the 1930s Bing Crosby was to essay "There Ain't No Sweet Man (Worth the Salt of My Tears)." Ruth Etting sang a 1927 song about the charms of a woman friend, "It All Belongs to Me" (1928), and Marlene Dietrich became cele­brated for such renditions as "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face." There has been a tendency to interpret the female-to-male songs as more threatening than the male-to-female ones (as shown by censorship in later versions), corresponding to the fact that the sissy is more disapproved than the tomboy.
Some songs, such as Bing Crosby's 1929 "Gay Love," simply refrained from revealing the sex of the love obj ect, leaving it to the listener's imagination. A few others were more explicit, such as Ewen Hall's thirties tune "Delicate Cowboy," who not only sang "gay" but preferred to ride side-saddle.
America's wars helped to stimu­late a certain interest in buddy songs. Thus in 1922 the singer of "My Buddy" laments the departure of his comrade, reminiscing about "gay" times. As World War II ap­proached this song was revived by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and others.
Other songs show mockery of gender conventions. The 1938 story "Ferdi­nand the Bull," about an animal that pre­ferred sniffing flowers to fighting, became a Disney film and song. In The Wizard of Oz Bert Lahr played and sang the part of the cowardly Hon, a dandified incompe­tent.
The interwar years saw the rise of a special category known at the time as "race records." These songs, whose verve made them increasingly attractive to white audiences, drew upon an existing genre of very frank black folk music, which they to some extent bowdlerized. Nonetheless, blues singers Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith recorded a number of clearly lesbian songs. In 1928 Rainey sang: "Went out last night,/ with a crowd of my friends,/ they must be womens/ Cause I don't like mens" ("Prove It on Me Blues"). As confinement was a common part of the black male experi­ence, blues songs frequently dealt with jailhouse life, and occasionally referred to the necessarily homoerotic sexuality therein. Thus in one old song the prisoner asks the jailer to "put another gal in my stall," "gal-boy" being one of many South­ern black slang terms for a sexually passive prisoner.
Stephen Foster (1826-1864), who began the tradition of distinctively Ameri­can popular songs, was almost certainly gay - he ran away with another composer, George Cooper - but his lyrics sedulously avoid any hint of his orientation.
Such concealment is hardly char­acteristic of the work of Noel Coward (1899-1973) and the uncloseted Cole Por­ter (1893-1964). Thewitty lyricist of Broad­way musicals Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) seems to have been gay, but it has not been possible to confirm rumors about George Gershwin (1898-1937). Although bisexual composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918-) aspires to renown in the classical field it may be that his most lasting work is the music for West Side Story (1957).
The 1959 Broadway musical The Nervous Set featured an indirect but widely understood "Ballad of the Sad Young Men," which despite its gloomy perspective be­came popular in gay bars. Although musi­cals were much patronized by gay men, in order to retain their heterosexual audience they tended to be circumspect about sex­ual references. (Later, after the Stonewall Rebellion, the Reverend Al Carmines was to create a series of openly gay musicals in Greenwich Village, beginning with The Faggot in 1973.)
No survey of gay-related music would be complete without a mention of the phenomenon of "conscription," whereby a song without ostensible gay reference would become adopted by gay people as special to them and be widely played in gay bars as well as at home. Often such songs would deal with furtive love, such as The Lettermen's "Secretly," but the most famous one of the sixties was interpreted by homosexuals to deal with cruising and eye-contact: Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" (1966).
Rock and Roll. A new, youth-oriented popular music, rock and roll, developed in the United States in the mid-1950s out of a fusion of black rhythm and blues, gospel, doowop harmonic singing, white rockabilly, and other elements.
One of the black pioneers of rock and roll was the singer Richard Penniman ("Little Richard"), who appeared onstage wearing mascara eyelashes and a high, effeminate pompadour, having been kicked out of his home at age 13 for homosexual­ity. His cleaned-up 1956recording of "Tutti Frutti" sold over three million copies, leaving an indelible mark on the new genre. A year later, however, Little Richard left rock and roll to become a Seventh Day Adventist and later denounced his own homosexuality, claiming to have "re­formed" to heterosexuality.
When white singers such as Elvis Presley started recording black rock and roll tunes, radio took up the new music and it quickly came to dominate the commercial mass market, displacing to a large extent the old Tin Pan Alley hege­mony.
In its origins, however, rock and roll was a type of "underground" music. As such, it was not aimed at widespread radio airplay and was therefore less subject to censorship. This, however, does not explain the widespread airplay of Presley's big hit, "Jailhouse Rock" (1957), which contained a hardly disguised allusion to homosexuality in the context of a song containing black codewords for sex, most notably "rock" itself: "Number 47 said to Number 3/ 'You're the cutest jailbird I ever did see./ I sure would be delighted with your company/ come on and do the jailhouse rock with me!'" With the com­mercial breakthrough of rock and roll, such uncensored references quickly disap­peared and were not to reappear until broadcast censorship standards had been seriously weakened in the upheavals of the late sixties and early seventies.
In the 1960s, rock and roll broad­ened out into "rock," incorporating such diverse elements as electrified quasi-folk music (among whose stars were the pub­licly bisexual or lesbian/gay singers Janis Joplin, Donovan, and Joan Baez), political protest songs, and complex "psychedelic" constructions. The decade was dominated by the British, who invaded American rock starting in 1964, led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The Beatles released the sexually ambiguous "Obladie Oblada" on the "White Album" in 1968, while the Stones included some esoteric but clear self-ascribed references to homosexual prostitution in "When the Whip Comes Down" and some references (slightly dis­guised through the use of British slang) to oral sex by transvestites in "Honky Tonk Women" (1969). The very popular Doors opened up the previously taboo subject of anal intercourse in 1968 when Jim Morri­son lyrically proclaimed "I'm a Backdoor Man."
The Explicit Seventies. In 1970 the Rolling Stones, trying to get out of a contract with their record company, Decca, recorded "Cocksucker Blues"; Decca did refuse to release it, but the song became well known to the legions of Stones fans through bootlegrecordings and discussions in the music press. Lyrics asked " Oh, where can I get my cock sucked? Where can I get my ass fucked?"
Following in the wake of "Cock-sucker Blues" came a wave of explicit songs in the rock genre, some of which managed to get mass airplay and thus becomemajorhits. Therelaxation of broad­cast censorship standards was no doubt related to the explosion of homosexual visibility which began with the 1969 Stone­wall Rebellion and which brought discus­sion of homosexuality into all the mass media.
Among the first of these was "Lola" from the very popular British group The Kinks (1971). In this hit, which reached the number nine position on the best­seller charts, Ray Davies sang of a virgin boy who takes a fancy to Lola, only to discover that "I know I'm a man/ and so is Lola"; the discovery doesn't seem to lessen the boy's ardor at all. This eye-opener was followed by the American Lou Reed's 1972 Top Ten hit, "[Take a] Walk on the Wild Side," which recommended not only male prostitution but also transvestism. The campy Reed (who was presumed homo­sexual but who got married in 1980) and his producer on this record, the androgy­nous, married, and (according to a 1972 statement he later qualified) homosexual David Bowie, were major figures in a rock movement of the early seventies called "glitter rock," which was frequently asso­ciated with homosexuality in the music press. Another notable feature of the glit­ter movement was the New York Dolls, who appeared in drag and female makeup.
More in the mainstream of com­mercial rock was Rod Stewart's popular 1976 song, "The Killing of Georgie," an outright attack on "queerbashing." Elton John, who "came out" as bisexual in 1976, achieved considerable commercial success with a 1972 homoerotic love song, "Daniel." In France Charles Aznavour's "Ce qu'ils disent" (1972) was a somewhat mournful ballad about a transvestite en­tertainer who lives with his mother. And at the end of the decade Peter Townshend, lead singer for the supergroup The Who, was ready to release a solo album with a song called "Rough Boys" describing his erotic attraction to young toughs.
A footnote to the seventies was the 1978 "coming out" of Mitch Ryder, who had become a Top Ten singer in 1966 and 1967, and now discussed his experi­ences with anal intercourse in his album "How I Spent My Vacation."
Disco, Punk, and New Wave. Even as rock music was turning its atten­tion to homosexuality, however, the gay audience was turning away from rock. As early as 1972, disc jockeys in gay bars and clubs were putting bits and pieces of black dance music together into a new genre, disco, which at first had little appeal to heterosexual whites. Disco music featured mechanical studio productions using canned rhythm tracks overlaid with a live singer, and thus did away with the neces­sity of hiring bands either for clubs or for recording purposes. Even as disco swept rock off the airwaves in 1977, it retained many of its previous associations with the gay subculture.
Most notable of the gay-associ­ated disco performers was a group (in itself rare for the genre) of New Yorkers called The Village People, which dressed like a collection of gay stereotypes. With songs like 1978's "Macho Man," "YMCA" (a number two hit in 1979), and "In the Navy," The Village People appealed with little indirection to the gay disco audience, but found themselves becoming a mass commercial success as well. The United States Navy at one point agreed to use "In the Navy" as part of a recruiting campaign, but quickly dropped the idea when it was pointed out to them that the song was full of only thinly disguised homoeroticism. The openly gay black disco singer Sylvester, based in San Francisco, managed a fairly successful career for some years (he suc­cumbed to AIDS in 1988). Generally, however, the mass commercial success of disco, which lasted into the early eighties, discouraged producers from including frankly homosexual themes in their lyrics.
In reaction to the dominant posi­tion of disco in the mid-seventies, there arose in 1975 a new underground move­ment with inspirations going back to the rock and roll of the fifties: punk rock. As an underground, with little hope for substan­tial airplay, the punks were able and en­couraged to break all the taboos they could find, protesting against the "safe" homo­geneity of disco lyrics.
Both founders of punk, singer Patti Smith (a bisexual) and the group The Ramones, sang about homosexuality in their debut albums. When the movement reached Britain in 1976, it sparked a simi­lar reaction with groups like the Sex Pis­tols and the Buzzcocks singing about explicitly homosexual themes; punk ideology opposed homophobia. Rather than frequent the disco-oriented gay bars, homosexual rockers went to punk clubs and made their presence notable in an atmosphere of general acceptance.
Punk began to make an impres­sion on the wider gay audience when gay punk singers began to move out of the genre and into the wider "new wave" musical movement; in this fashion Lon­don gay activist Tom Robinson and ex-Buzzcock Pete Shelley became widely known. Robinson's 1978 "Glad to Be Gay" drew wide attention even as a punk song, perhaps the only widely successful song to treat homosexuality as a political issue; the telephone numbers of the New York and Los Angeles gay switchboards were listed on the inner sleeve of his "Power in the Darkness" album. Shelley's "Homosapien" love song became a commercially successful (especially in England) dance song in 1981 despite explicit lyrics. Mean­while, punk has continued as a thriving, if "underground," music through the eight­ies, and it is still notable for producing explicitly homoerotic songs and singers.
The trend towards musical diver­sification led to women's music sung by lesbians. As early as 1969 Maxine Feldman was proudly singing "Angry Atthis," which became the first example to be issued as a 45 rpm single. Later, Holly Near, Meg Christian, and Cris Williamson were to become long-term favorites, frequently performing in cabarets and women's festi­vals. The firm of Olivia Records was cre­ated to record and market this music. No one of comparable stature appeared from a purely gay-male context, but in the 1970s gay (and lesbian) choruses sprang up in major cities of North America, spreading to Europe as well.
Early in the 1980s, radio program­mers and mass audiences began to tire of disco, opening the way for the popular acceptance of the once-underground "New Wave," which evolved into "electropop" by incorporating synthesizers and other electronic music. In Britain a number of new wave figures such as the androgynous Boy George and the Culture Club and the outright gay groupsBronskiBeat, Soft Cell, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood achieved widespread commercial success; Bronski Beat in particular produced a string of popular gay-oriented songs. Towards the end of the decade this tradition was carried on by singers in the bands Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys. The Broadway version of La Cage aux Folies showed that even a musi­cal about transvestites could be success­ful, but it did not start a trend. By and large, explicit gay music retreated from the American mainstream in the 1980s as AIDS put a damper on gay romanticism.
Conclusion. As we have seen, the forces of censorship often operated to keep gay elements in mainstream popular songs on the level of ambiguity and innuendo. Yet this need for covertness bonded with the homosexual talent for camp humor to produce examples that are not only crea­tive but throw light on the consciousness of gay men and lesbians in earlier as well as recent times. For a brief time in the 1970s it looked as if explicitly gay-related music was successfully breaking into the com­mercially successful mainstream of popu­lar music. Nevertheless, for examples of explicit treatment of gay/lesbian themes the contemporary listener must often turn to relatively uncommercial sources such as the feminist groups or the punks.
Stephen Donaldson

Musicians
The mythical archetype of the homosexual musician is the figure of the Greek Orpheus, noted for his magical art in music and poetry. After the loss of his wife Eurydice, Orpheus gathered together an entourage of young men, whom he wooed with song. In some inventor leg­ends he is regarded as the discoverer of pederasty itself. A more humble ancestor is Corydon, the love-sick shepherd of Vergil's Second Eclogue, who poured out his unrequited affection for the youth Alexis in song, accompanying himself on the pipes.
Baroque Music. Opera, arising at the start of the seventeenth century in southern Europe where the Counter-Ref­ormation had its baleful sway, nonethe­less provided an umbrella for a certain amount of nonconformity. For musical reasons, many of the most important roles were sung by eunuch males, the castrati, who sometimes became the objects of male devotion among the rich and cultivated devotees of the art.
For Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), a native of Florence who dominated music-making at the French court of Louis XTV, scholars have been able to piece to­gether a complex picture of the trials and triumphs of a major gay musician. After composing numerous ballets, in 1672Lully obtained a patent for the production of opera and established the Académie Royale de Musique, which he used to ensure a virtual monopoly of the operatic stage.
Skillfully adapting the conventions of Ital­ian grand opera to French taste, he set the pattern for French opera down to the late eighteenth century. His homosexual con­duct generated endless gossip, which he forestalled temporarily by marrying in 1661. In the end he owed his survival to the support of the king, who could not do without the sumptuous entertainments Lully provided.
Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782) was by far the most important librettist of baroque opera. The son of a Roman grocer, Pietro was adopted at the age of eleven by a noble who was undoubtedly in love with him and who provided the classical educa­tion needed for his career. His tempestu­ous later career was marked by dramatic involvements with women as well as with men, including the famous castrato Carlo Broschi (better known as Farinelli; 1705-1782).
George Frederick Handel (1685-1759), bom in Germany, but active mainly in Italy and in England, wrote many operas and oratorios. In striking contrast to his great contemporary JohannSebastianBach, Handel never married or had children. His associations point to homosexual inclina­tions, but if he exercised this taste, he covered his tracks so successfully that modem research has not been able to find the evidence.
Romanticism and After. The key figure for musical romanticism was the great Viennese composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828), whose unique melodic gift enabled him to reach the heart of every musical task he attempted. In Vienna Schubert moved in bohemian circles, which teemed with homosexual and bi­sexual lovers of the arts. Schubert never married, rejecting suggestions that he do so with outbursts of temper. His romantic attachments to men appear in veiled form in a short story he wrote in 1822, "My Dream." The composer died of syphilis just after reaching the age of thirty.
The sexual tastes of Schubert's lesser French counterpart, Camille Saint-
Saens (1835-1931) transpire from a quip attributed to him: "I am not a homosexual but a pederast!" However, it is uncertain whether this pleasantry reflected real ac­tivity, though in his later years the com­poser took up residence in North Africa where opportunities were legion.
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was the greatest Russian composer of the nineteenth century. His attempt at marriage was a complete failure, and his closest emotional relations were with men. His sixth symphony, the Pathétique (1893), was dedicated to his beloved cousin Bob Davydov, and was the fullest outpouring of the emotions he had felt during a life­time. In the Soviet Union, where the composer's musical achievement is deeply revered as a national treasure, an impene­trable veil of silence has been drawn across his homosexuality, but in the West it is generally acknowledged. There seems to be no truth, however, in the claim that he was forced to commit suicide because of his homosexuality.
The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937), who became di­rector of the Warsaw Conservatory, had a passion for handsome young men. He also wrote a homosexual novel, though it was never published.
Dame Ethyl Smyth (1858-1944) achieved more success in Germany than in her native England. In addition to full-scale choral and orchestal works, she wrote and produced six operas. An strong-willed, sometimes flamboyant personality, Smyth threw her energies into to the British movement for women's suffrage, for which she wrote a "March of the Women." She fought for equal treatment of women as artists, chivying conductors and perform­ers, and staging grand scenes of tempera­ment. After a number of affairs with women, at the age of seventy-one Smyth fell in love with Virginia Woolf.
In the United States, Stephen Foster (1826-1864), who wrote such popu­lar songs as "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Come Where My Love Lies Dream­ing," and Edward MacDowell (1861-1908), composer of many symphonic poems, were probably homosexual. The picturesque wanderer Francis Grierson (1848-1927), who resided for a time in France, achieved success as both a pianist and a singer. The gay life of Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920), perhaps America's first cos­mopolitan composer of distinction, is well attested. Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1929], the Boston professor who wrote the text of "America the Beautiful," was lesbian.
Modern Music. Twentieth-cen­tury musical life has witnessed a number of famous gay couples, including the French Francis Poulenc (composer) and Pierre Bemac (tenor), the English Benjamin Brit­ten (composer) and Peter Pears (tenor), and the Americans Samuel Barber and Gian-Carlo Menotti (both composers). The major avant-garde composer John Cage has long shared a residence with the influential choreographer Merce Cunningham. Henry Cowell (1897-1965), a pioneering Ameri­can modernist composer, was convicted on a morals charge in California and im­prisoned at San Quentin. Charles Ives, who had been a close ally, reacted with virulent homophobia, suggesting that Cowell should kill himself. In his several volumes of Diaries, Ned Rorem has been frank about his homosexuality, both dur­ing his early career in France and his later one in New York. Other American com­posers of distinction are Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Lou Harrison, and Char­les Wuorinen.
Among performers the high cor­relation of homosexuality and the instru­ment of choice is particularly striking among organists. Many contemporary pianists are also gay. What is the reason for this link? Surely, it cannot be simply that touching the ivories has some special af­finity with homosexuality. The explana­tion of why most organists are gay, and many pianists are, appears to reflect the fact that both instruments are normally played solo. Only on special occasions is an organ or piano used in conjunction with a symphony orchestra. Contrast the vio­lin. Although this instrumentcanbeplayed solo, the vast majority of violinists earn their living playing in string ensembles in orchestras. This contrast between solo and group activity has its counterpart in the world of sport, where swimmers and run­ners are more likely to be homosexual than baseball and hockey players. Like all such generalizations, this one has excep­tions. Nonetheless, gay musicians and and athletes seem more drawn to individual performance than to team participation.
Many contemporary gay pianists and organists, for understandable profes­sional reasons, have chosen to keep their sexual orientation private. This is not the case with the great Russian virtuoso Vladi­mir Horowitz [1904- ), who has not ob­jected to Glenn Plaskin's frank biography of 1983. A child prodigy, Horowitz' homo­sexuality became evident in his early maturity in Russia and Germany. In the 1930s the pianist came under the influ­ence of the charismatic Arturo Toscanini, who encouraged him to marry his daugh­ter Wanda. Despite the husband's resort to psychoanalysis, the marriage proved troub­led, and Wanda objected toHorowitz' close relationships with a series of young men. The pianist's temperament became legen­dary: he would cancel concerts at the shortest notice, sometimes apparently in order to complete a sexual rendezvous. In the 1970s, responding to New York's upscale version of the counterculture, Horowitz became more gregarious, and his sexual tastes became widely known. Accompanied by his lover, the aging pian­ist essayed frequent trips to gay bars and clubs.
Less clear is the instance of the distinguished harpsichordist Wanda Landowska (1877-1959), who revolutionized the aesthetics of baroque music. Her companion seems to have been lesbian, but Landowska's own orientation is un­certain.
There is one exception to the solo-group contrast. Homosexuality has long been particularly decried in the field of conducting, where the role seems to call for macho assertiveness. Nonetheless, the Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) quietly defied the ban, at the same time taking risks in championing avant-garde music. His protege, Leonard Bernstein (1918- ) has broken the mold altogether, insisting on his right to live openly as a gay man. Active also as a composer and educator, Bernstein has probably also attained the status of the most successful conductor of all time - certainly the wealthiest. His achievement is a beacon of light to countless young musicians.
See also Music, Popular; Opera,-Punk Rock.
Wayne R. Dynes

Mystery and Detective Fiction
The impression that homosexual and lesbian characters and situations are rare in mystery and detective fiction is true for earlier decades, but not for more recent ones. Lesbian characters can be found in some British mysteries of the late 1920s, including Dorothy L. Sayers' Un­natural Death and Strong Poison, and gay male characters began to appear in the next decade. In most of the early fiction, however, the homosexual characters are incidental, often introduced to complicate the plot.
The "Hard-Boiled" Novel and Af­ter. Gay male characters begin to appear in the work of those American writers classi­fied as "hard-boiled" because sexuality of all sorts along with drugs, alcohol, and violence were displayed without moraliz­ing in these naturalistic novels. The first examples is in Rex Stout's 1933 novel Forest Fire. The protagonist is a macho forest ranger who is sexually attracted to a summer helper. Stout then proceeded to the Nero Wolfe novels where homosexu­ality seems sublimated in misogyny, gour­met meals, and cultivating orchids. More typical of the hard-boiled school treat­ment of gay men is the work of three of its leading practitioners, James Cain, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler. Gays are effeminate (often cross-dressers) and unhappy. Cain's Serenade features a bi­sexual hero and a homosexual villain who is killed in the end. Chandler's The Big Sleep and Macdonald's Dark Tunnel in­clude weak and psychologically impaired gay men, but the extreme examples of effeminate gay men and masculine women occur in the works of Mickey Spillane, especially I, the Jury.
About the only exception to these negative views in the earlier detective fiction are three excellent whodunits by Gore Vidal, written under the pseudonym of Edgar Box. Death in the Fifth Position (1952) includes the first attractive gay men in mystery fiction and also includes some realistic pictures of the gay subculture. However, other works of the 1950s such as Margaret Millar's Beast in View, Meyer Levin's Compulsion, and Anne Hocking's A Simple Way of Poison show the influ­ence of psychoanalytic ideas of homosexu­ality as an illness that can lead the unbal­anced individual into murder.
The number of homosexual char­acters in mystery fiction grew enormously in the 1960s, and the picture was slightly less negative. Lou Rand's Rough Trade is an early example of a novel with a gay detective and a gay setting published for a gay readership. George Baxt's three Phar­aoh Love novels reached a general audi­ence. Love was a black gay detective and the novels included other gay characters and pictures of the gay subculture pre­sented in a comparatively positive man­ner. Several novels by Patricia Highsmith in the fifties and the sixties including Strangers on Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley include gay men as their main characters, but the homosexuality is so cunningly described that it was often avoided by those who did not care to see it. However, in most mysteries homosexual men and lesbians were still pictured as emotionally deformed killers and villains. Such works as Ellery Queen's The Last Woman in His Life and Roderick Thorp's The Detective are examples.
After Gay Liberation. After the advent of the modern American gay liberation movement, there was a radical change. Joseph Hansen had written his first gay mystery novel, Known Homosex­ual, in 1968, but in 1970 he published Fadeout featuring David Brandstetter, a gay detective in Los Angeles drawn in the hard-boiled tradition of Phillip Marlowe and Lew Archer. The enormous success of the work led to a series numbering about ten novels as of 1987. Within a few years there were also excellent whodunits pub­lished by openly gay writers Richard Hall [Butterscotch Prince) and John Paul Hudson [Superstar Murder). These works depicted the gay subcultures of New York and Los Angeles as well as any fiction of the time, in addition to being excellent representa­tives of the mystery genre. A popular novelist who was less gay identified, James Kirkwood, Jr., published the successful P.S. Your Cat is Dead in 1972. The novel had a gay man as a protagonist. At the end of the decade Felice Picaño utilized the secret agent concept in The Lure, and Paul Monette recreated the secret panels and hidden caves of older adventure novels in the brilliant satire of Hollywood, The Gold Diggers, all within a highly professional whodunit.
The success of these works led to an explosion of mystery fiction featuring gay characters and settings in the 1980s. At least three writers followed Hansen's plan of a whodunit series featuring the same gay detective. Richard Stevenson's Don Strachey novels are set in Albany, New York; Nathan Aldyne's Daniel Val­entine books take place in Boston and Provincetown, and Tony Fennely's Matt Sinclair novels utilize a New Orleans background. All these whodunits present an accurate picture of the gay subculture in the area and a range of gay characters. Probably intended for a mainly gay audience, they are all such good examples of the genre that they reach a much broader cross-section of readers. Many other mys­teries intended for gay audiences (usually of a far less professional character) have appeared. Gay and lesbian characters are also much more prominent in the general mystery fiction of the two decades after 1970 in both the United States and Britain, their numbers far too numerous to men­tion. Such well known authors as Ian Flem­ing, Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, Josephine Tey, John MacDonald, and Amanda Cross have included both lesbian and gay charac­ters in their novels. In most cases the gay characters are far more well-rounded and emotionally balanced individuals than those created in earlier decades.
The success of mystery novels with gay male detectives has also led to an increase in novels with lesbian characters and at least one series with a lesbian detec­tive. Three novels by Heron Carvic pub­lished between 1968 and 1971 featuring Miss Seeton as the detective have lesbian characters, as do three mysteries by Peter Dickinson published between 1972 and 1976, and three well-received works of P. D.James published between 1971 and 1980, includingDeatii of an Expert Witness. The well known mystery novelist Robert Parker wrote about lesbian characters and the lesbian subculture in his 1980 work Look­ing for Rachel Wallace. In the early 1980s, Vicki P. McConnell started a series of whodunit novels featuring the lesbian detective Nyla Wade.
See also Novels and Short Fic­tion.
James B. Levin

Mythology, Classical
The concept of mythology in Greek civilization refers not merely to the gods, but to the demigods as well - the heroes renowned in song and story. Nine­teenth-century German scholars, revers­ing the formula that "God created man in his image," held that man had created the gods in his own image, endowing them with his attributes and passions. Since paiderasteia was institutionalized in Greek civilization, boy-loving gods and heroes figure prominently in Greek mythology, in contrast with the suppression of the homoerotic theme in the Judeo-Christian scriptures.
The Loves of the Gods. Zeus, the father of the gods, is renowned principally for his love of the Phrygian boy Ganymede, the fairest of mortals, whom the god car­ried off to make him his cup-bearer. By the time of Pindar Ganymede is enshrined as the eromenos, the beloved boy of his heav­enly patron. In earlier myth Ganymede is abducted by a whirlwind, but from the fourth century B.C. onward he is seized by Zeus in the form of an eagle. This later became a common theme of literature and art, despite the unlikelihood that an eagle could carry an adolescent boy in its talons. The name Ganymede was also extended in time to any handsome boy with a male lover and protector. Moreover, Ganymede never ages,- he is the mythical embodi­ment of the puer aeternus, the pederast's dream of the beloved lingering forever in the prime of his adolescent beauty. An­other theme that appears in the following centuries is the rivalry of Ganymede and Hera, which suggests that in the Greek household the eromenos and the wife could find themselves competing for the husband's favors. Ultimately the opposi­tion served for debates over the merits of homosexuality (boy-love) and heterosexuality (woman-love). By contrast, Zeus has no heavenly mistress,- his amorous adven­tures with mortal women are conducted solely on earth.
The pederastic affairs of the other gods, while mentioned sporadically in classical literature, never attained the celebrity of Zeus' passion for Ganymede. However, Poseidon, according to Pindar, preceded Zeus in loving Pelops, the son of Tantalus, the ancestor of the Atrides. Tradition had it that his father cut the boy into pieces and served him to the gods, but only Demeter, famished and distraught, consumed a shoulder. The gods recognized him and repaired his body with a shoulder of ivory, of which the city of Elis boasted that it had the relic. Pindar himself re­jected the myth that ascribes cannibalism to the gods and instead had the boy carried off by Poseidon in a golden chariot. Later the boy invoked the aid of the god of the sea as recompense for his amorous favors.
Apollo, himself of exquisite beauty, had one unhappy affair after an­other - twenty in all - even if, aspaidezastes, he was worshipped as the ideal and patron of man-boy love, and his image accompanied those of Hermes and Her­acles in every Greek gymnasium. The most prominent of his eiomenoi were Cyparissus and Hyacinth. The former was the son of Telephos who dwelt on the isle of Ceos. The boy was especially fond of the tame stag with golden horns who was his com­panion at play. On a hot summer day the boy accidentally killed his pet with his javelin, and wishing to die, he had himself transformed into a cypress in order to sympathize eternally with the grief of others.
Hyacinth had a tragic death when struck by a discus thrown by the god while the two were playing on the shores of the river Eurotas. In Ovid's version of the story Apollo is driven to despair when he sees that he is powerless to heal the wound, yet he exclaims: "My only crime is that of having loved!"
Dionysus, the god of the vine, is given a lover named Ampelos, who is the vine itself. First treated by Ovid, this epi­sode was further elaborated by Nonnus of Panopolis in the Dionysiaca, where in the course of a march to India Ampelos is carried off by a homicidal bull, but is re­born metamorphosed into the fruit of the vine.
Another story reflecting the homosexual aspect of ancient fertility rites has Dionysus, to descend into the nether world, ask the way of a peasant named Polymnus, who as a reward wished to be penetrated anally by the god. Dionysus promised to grant the favor on his return, but in the meantime Polymnus died. Dionysus then carved a branch of a fig tree in the form of a phallus and thrust it into the tomb, thus symbolically performing the sexual act that would have gratified the deceased.
Hezos. The story of Laius and Oedipus has a pederastic background that is often overlooked or suppressed in mod­em treatments of the myth, including the psychoanalytic derivatives. The first au­thor who treated this affair was Pisander of Cameiros, who lived late in the seventh century B.C. Laius, bannished from Thebes by Zethus and Amphion, took refuge at the court of Pelops, where he fell in love with Chrysippus, the son of his host and the nymph Axioche, and abducted him. Defiled by Laius, Chrysippus took his own life with his sword. Because the Thebans did not punish the perpetrator of this out­rage, Hera avenged the crime by sending them the Sphinx. Pelops for his part ut­tered the fateful curse on Laius: that he would have a son who would "kill his father, marry his mother, and bring ruin on his native city." In the tragedy of Euripides entitled Chzysippus, Laius is made to express his pederastic desires openly, while in a later version of the story, Laius' mo­tive for becoming a boy-lover is exactly to avoid having the son who would fulfill such a dire curse. In Plato's Laws, 836, Laius is held to be the inventor of ped­erasty, while before him the law "in ac­cord with nature" had forbidden such rela­tions. The deeper meaning of the legend suggests that the Greeks were ambivalent on the subject of sexual aggression be­tween males: Laius' violence against Chry­sippus is avenged, in accordance with the principle of the lex talionis, by the mur­derous act of his own son that Sigmund Freud chose as the symbol of the rivalry of the son with the father, the conflict be­tween theyoungergeneration and the older one. Oedipus compounds his crime by marrying his own mother Jocasta in viola­tion of the incest taboo.
Hercules, the very model of the Greek hero, is the lover of Hylas, whom he teaches everything that he needs to fulfill the ideal of the noble warrior, including the military arts that the young squire had to master in order to play his role in com­bat. His most faithful companion, how­ever, is Iolaos, the son of Hercules' twin brother Iphicles. In the version of Hercu­les' combat with Cycnos, in the Aspis of pseudo-Hesiod, Hercules is clad in the conventional costume of the warrior of the period, while Iolaos is to him the "dearest of mortals," just as Patroclus was to Achilles. Iolaus was to be chosen by Edward Carpenter as the title of his 1902 anthol­ogy of homoerotic passages from world literature.
Orpheus figures in the list by virtue of his having invented male love after losing Euridice; his eiomenos was Calais, the son of Boreas, who had also taken part in the expedition of the Argo­nauts. This novelty so angered the Thracian women that they murdered him and severed his head from his body; but at­tached to his lyre it was carried by the waves to the isle of Lesbos. Those who found the head buried it together with the musical instrument.
Orestes and Pylades were another pair of faithful lovers who accomplished great feats because of the erotic bond be­tween them. After they kill Clytemnestra as if they had both been the sons of Agam­emnon, Orestes is pursued by the Erynies, but Pylades supports him in his great trial against the avenging furies.
Androgynous Themes. Highly developed in Greek mythology was the myth of the androgynos, the man-woman. Ovid tells the story of Hermaphroditus, a dazzlingly handsome boy, who at the age of fifteen kindled the love of Salmacis, the nymph of a spring of the same name in Caria,- against his will she enticed him down into the water and forced him to copulate with her; the gods granted her plea never to be separated from her lover by uniting them into a single being of two sexes. But Hermes and Aphrodite granted the wish of Hermaphroditus by giving it the magical property of turning every man who bathed in it into a semivir, an effemi­nate half-man. In Hermaphroditus the Greek mentality expressed its conscious­ness of the androgynous unconscious of human beings who worship in an artisti­cally refined and perfected guise as the good spirit of the household and private life. The importance of Hermaphroditus for plastic and pictorial art was enormous: after the fourth century B.C. rooms in private houses, gymnasia, and baths were adorned with statues or painting repre­senting him, and especially beautiful are the numerous sleeping hermaphrodites that have survived from antiquity. Openly sensual and even obscene are the depic­tions of Hermaphroditus having sexual connection with Pan or with Satyrs, shown in a half or wholly completed embrace.
The figure of Tiresias has an androgynous motif. Hesiod asserts that Tiresias once watched two snakes copu­lating in Arcadia and wounded one of them, after which he became a woman and had intercourse with men. But Apollo told him that when he again watched the serpents and wounded one, he would be turned into a man again. This happened; and so when Zeus and Hera were disputing whether man or woman experiences greater pleas­ure in orgasm, they asked Tiresias, who answered that the male experiences one-tenth of the pleasure, the female nine-tenths. Offended by the reply, Hera made him blind, but Zeus compensated him with the gift of prophecy and long life.
All the homoerotic myths of ancient Greece pertain to male homosexu­ality; lesbianism was invisible to the mythopoetic consciousness of the Helle­nes. The figures of antiquity associated with lesbianism were all historical, the poetess Sappho being merely the most celebrated among them.
Plato in the Symposium has Aris­tophanes relate a myth that is meant to explain the origin of the differences in sexual orientation among human beings. The first such creatures were double beings, male-female, male-male, and female-fe­male; to weaken their potency Zeus cut them in half, then refashioned them so that each half could find and unite with the other. The members of the androgy­nous pair would accomplish the act of reproduction. Deriving from a Babylonian myth reported by Berossus, this fanciful account of the cause of homosexuality shows that the ancients, aware of the phenomenon, invented an etiological leg­end that covered all the facts of sexual attraction, unlike the Judaic version in the book of Genesis that leaves only the proto-heterosexual pair.
Afterlife. The suppression of the homosexual element in the anthropology of Biblical Judaism later contributed to the defamation of homosexuality as "contrary to the will of the creator," but since the classical texts preserved into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance kept alive the homosexual mythology of Greco-Roman paganism, this offered an inexhaustible source of inspiration for writers and art­ists, and also a code by means of which tabooed and unnamable subjects could be raised with subtlety and double entendre. Although the conventional treatments of Greek and Roman mythology, especially in school texts, bowdlerized homoerotic themes, they persisted in the literature which those versed in the ancient lan­guages were always free to consult. Allu­sions to heroes of homosexual love affairs were enough to suggest to the initiated the author's intent, as in the case of Whitman's Calamus poems; the language of Aesop conveyed the message despite Christian and then Victorian censorship. So the af­terlife of the Greek myths undercut the heterosexual bias of Judeo-Christian the­ology, and for the sophisticated modern reader these legends revive the profoundly homoerotic ambiance of the "glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Félix Buffiére, Eros adolescent: la pédérastie dans la Grece antique, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1980; Hans Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932; Bernard Sergent, Homosexu­ality in Greek Myth, Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Warren Johansson

Myths and Fabrications
Prejudice against any human group manifests itself in stereotypes. Male homosexuals are said to be effeminate, superficial, and clannish, while lesbians are accused of being mannish, homely, and aggressive. Apart from these characterological ascriptions, however, historical study brings to light antihomosexual myths - purported true stories which are invented and propagated to validate big­otry.
Myths of Judeo-Christian Origin. The most ancient and influential of these myths is the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Genesis 14, 18 and 19 tell of these arrogant cities and of their destruc­tion by a rain of brimstone and fire. Over and over again, Christian statesmen and preachers have used the tale to demon­strate that if people do not renounce their wicked acts, they will go the way of Sodom and Gomorrah - whose historicity mod­em critical scholarship has utterly rejected and consigned to the realm of geographical legend.
According to a medieval legend, on Christmas eve, at the very moment of the Nativity of Jesus, all mankind guilty of homosexual sin died a sudden death. Unless human nature were purged of unnatural vice, the Savior could not be persuaded to assume human flesh. Although the story is often ascribed to St. Jerome in the fourth century (and in part to his contemporary, St. Augustine), in fact it cannot be traced back in manuscript sources before the Biblical Commentary of Hugh of St. Cher (about 1230-35), who claimed to have learned it from Peter the Chanter of Paris.
It may have been inspired by a Jewish midrash on the death of the Egyptians in the last of the ten plagues (Exodus 12:29). The tale reached a wide public through an uncritical compilation of saints' lives known as the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus of Voragine (1290). For a long time no one cared to challenge this homophobic ab­surdity, and it was repeated by such wor­thies as St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), Roberto Caracciolo (1425-1495), and the Viennese preacher Abraham a Sancta Clara (1644-1709), who was apparently the last to take it seriously.
Another cluster of legends pres­ents sodomites not as the victims of disas­ters but as their cause. Primitive cultures associated rainwater with the fertilizing effusions of the gods. Hence an equation of semen with rain water: if the males of a community waste their semen, the conse­quence will be a shortfall of rain and ensu­ing drought and famine. Homosexuals are the Jonahs who endanger the common­wealth; in the interest of public safety they must be eliminated, otherwise droughts and other injury to crops will follow. Then in Byzantium in the sixth century the Emperor Justinian proclaimed that un­checked homosexual activity provoked the wrath of God to visit earthquakes on dis­tricts where it was rampant - the supersti­tious echo of the Sodom legend. A millen­nium later folk accretions had increased the number of sodomy-caused disasters to a roster of six: earthquakes, floods, fam­ines, plagues, Saracen incursions, and large field mice. Such superstitions might be thought safely dead, yet in 1976 the enter­tainer and crusading homophobe Anita Bryant produced a version of her own, alleging that droughts in Northern Cali­fornia had been caused by the gay mecca of San Francisco. And in the 1980s moralists have insisted that AIDS is the revenge of Mother Nature - or of the godhead itself - on unnatural practices.
Notions of Decadence. There are also myths about the course of universal history and the fate of nations within it.
Those do not learn from history, it is said, will be condemned to repeat it. One of the things learned from history, purportedly, is that the decline and fall of Greece and Rome were caused by their tolerance of homosexuality. More careful study of the development of these civilizations fails to substantiate this charge. The institution of pederasty is documented in the Greek city states almost from their inception. The training that a boy received was held to be character building in that it prepared him for service to the state. The military successes of the Greeks, especially in de­fending themselves against the Persians, would be unthinkable without the loyalty of male comradeship and the skills that it fostered. Only after the inception of the Hellenistic age in 323 did pederasty de­cline as an institution; and only after the neglect of this ancient institution did Greek civilization succumb to Roman conquest. Among the Romans themselves homosex­ual behavior is most clearly evident in the first and second centuries, which are gen­erally regarded as the most flourishing period of the Empire. Only after the Chris­tian emperors tried to repress homosexual behavior in the fourth and fifth centuries did the Western empire disintegrate and collapse in the wake of barbarian inva­sions. Furthermore, ancient authors them­selves disagree as to whether "luxury and effeminacy" invaded Rome from the con­quered provinces of Asia, or the Romans corrupted the subject peoples by introduc­ing their lavish and ostentatious way of life to the Eastern regions of the empire. Historiography has witnessed a long de­bate over the causes of Rome's decadence, and a definitive answer has yet to be found.
A claim that recurs in the writ­ings of heterosexual observers of society is that homosexual behavior is increasing, dangerously so. This notion has been documented from so many authors over the last several centuries that it is a virtual commonplace, yet it probably reflects at most the ability of the particular author to discern the presence of homosexual activity that is not immediately evident to the outsider. The implication is that a growing number of individuals are renouncing marriage and family obligations, and that if this trend persists the end result will be race suicide, because homosexual activity is intrinsically sterile, is a form of biologi­cal "death in life." This belief ignores the well-attested fact that superfetation can­not occur in homo sapiens, which is to say that nature has already set a limit on the number of children a women can bear: once impregnated, she cannot conceive again until she has borne the child. Where "natural" fertility prevails, and nothing is done to check the results of sexual inter­course, a very small amount of heterosex­ual copulation would be enough to keep the entire female population of childbearing age continuously pregnant. Of course, no modern society could tolerate such a level of fertility; in a nation where 95 percent of all children born live to matur­ity, this would mean that in a mere two generations the population would increase 80 times! In point of fact, the fall of the birth rate in the last hundred years can be mainly ascribed to economic factors: the economic burden and liability that a child represents in urban middle-class society, where the cost of educating a child for a future career can consume a large portion of a family's financial resources. Only a few percent of the population is exclu­sively homosexual - not enough to have an appreciable effect on demography. Subsidies and other incentives for middle-class families have not succeeded in alter­ing the negative ratio of births to deaths, and even the pronatalist policies of the National Socialist regime yielded a marked increase in births only in rural areas. Moreover, less developed areas of the globe are today afflicted with overpopulation that in the coming decades may lead to political crises as the demand for food­stuffs and public services makes it impos­sible for these countries to export enough of their natural resources or products of cheap labor to service their debts to the lending nations, while advanced countries close their doors to immigration because the market for unskilled labor is dwin­dling.
Homosexuals as Antisocial. There is also the notion that homosexuals form a secret society, a freemasonry whose rites of initiation exclude "normal," mor­ally righteous members of society. Gay people are alleged to prefer one another for employment and advancement and to demand sexual favors from subordinates, especially young ones, in return for fur­thering their careers. Further, homosexu­als are purportedly "uncomfortable" in the presence of normal people and prefer to be among their own as much as possible. But homosexual circles make the contra­dictory observation that "closet cases" deliberately shun and reject others of their ilk as a means of protecting their own covert identity.
Myths Originated by Homosexu­als. These several myth types are the crea­tion of societies seeking to rationalize discrimination and persecution of homo­sexuals. Gay people themselves have propa­gated others. The venerable archetype is the explanation of the source of sexual orientation presented in Plato's Sympo­sium positing that human beings are in reality the sundered halves of original dual persons. Those who trace their origin to a male-female combination are heterosex­ual, yearning for union with a member of the opposite sex, while those who derive from male-male or female-female conjunc­tions are male homosexuals or lesbians, respectively. While Plato is not likely to have taken it seriously, this tale has a background in a Babylonian myth of pri­mordial human androgyny. Imagined or not, for some today androgyny has a re­newed appeal as a solution to the problems of gender identity.
A more sinister myth, invented and spread only in recent decades by homosexuals, is that the word faggot re­calls the supposed medieval practice of using male homosexuals as kindling at the public burning of witches and heretics. There is no historical record of such a practice, and the slang use of the pejorative term faggot (originally applied to a fat, slovenly woman) cannot be traced before American English of the twentieth cen­tury. Yet the myth, which may reflect an unconscious longing for martyrdom, has now taken on a life of its own, and will be hard to eradicate, particularly as dictionar­ies that list the several meanings of the word are not likely to include an explicit refutation of the false etymology.
A few homosexuals cherish the belief that a majority of the members of society would prefer same-sex acts if it were not for the pressures for conformity that are deployed to prevent this result. This view seems clearly a case of projec­tion, for there is no indication that in an erotic "free-market" situation such choices would prevail, though it may be that bisexuality of some sort would be followed by the majority. But here one is dealing with hypothetical - and unlikely - scenar­ios, since no society yet known has re­nounced its capacity for social melding by seeking to channel sexual behavior. The social sciences do not know, and are un­likely soon to learn, how people would behave in a hypothetical free market, unaffected by external conditioning. A related phenomenon is the gossip, once particularly common among gay men, claiming this or that noted figure in public life as a secret homosexual. The underly­ing assumption is that such instances could be multiplied ad infinitum.
Conclusion. The eighteenth-cen­tury Enlightenment bequeathed to edu­cated society a hope of eliminating social myths that stood in the way of human happiness. Regrettably, the expectation that such a goal could be totally achieved is probably Utopian: new myths spring up as others fade. Myths that flourished under Christian auspices survive under the aegis of officially atheist Communist states. Yet by exposing the myths, and the processes that lead to their formation, to the light of reasoned examination, the critical scholar may seek to limit their spread and noxious effect.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Wayne Dynes, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality, New York: Gay Academic Union, 1985.
Wayne R. Dynes