P


Pacific Cultures
The immense territory of the Pacific islands is customarily divided into three major regions: Melanesia, Microne­sia, and Polynesia. Culturally related to the Melanesians are the aborigines of Australia. In the present state of our knowledge, which requires sensitivity to far-flung relationships, some parts of the Philippines and Indonesia, as well as as­pects of Korea, Japan, and Siberia, are also significant.
Age-Defined Patterns. Volumi­nous descriptions of homosexuality in Pacific cultures exist in several languages. To start arbitrarily from the south, Gilbert Herdt (1984) noted explicit reference to ritualized homosexual practices of Aus­tralian aborigines, especially those of Kimberly and Central Desert. Intriguing, though suspect, are early Western Austra­lian reports that, until pledged young wives attained the marriage age, their brothers would be used as their surrogates. Later, more detailed reports of Nambutji and Aranda exogamous homosexuality are somewhat more reliable.
Although
Géza Roheim (pp. 70, 324-37) argued that the Australian data mirrored the Melanesian, Melanesian homosexual intercourse is prescribed, not just condoned. Moreover, the male cult and its practices are supposed to be un­known to women. Although male infor­mants probably overestimate this igno­rance, it is difficult to picture the women freely discussing ritualized homosexual­ity in highland New Guinea cultures, let alone reporting who was linked to whom. Moreover, the partners in New Guinea seem to show less tendency to pair off.
Nevertheless, in both areas, homosexual­ity is clearly age-defined - it is not just that the insertees are younger, but that the insertors are young men in transit to marriage, marriage being a hallmark of adult status.
Melanesian ritualized homosexu­alities in their cultural context have been analyzed in sometimes florid detail by Herdt. These cults co-occur with intense gender antagonism and fears of semen depletion (apparently applying only or mostly to coitus with women). A number of Melanesian tribes "share the belief that boys do not become physically mature men as a result of natural processes. Growth and attainment of physiological maturation is contingent on the cultural process of initiation, and this entails in­semination because it is semen which ensures growth and development" (Kelly, p. 16). In the native views, "Semen does not occur naturally in boys and must be 'planted' in them. If one does not plant sweet potato [a diet staple throughout the area] then no sweet potatoes will come up in the garden, and likewise semen must be planted in youths if they are to possess it as men" (ibid.). Since boys lack semen and men who have all gone through the initia­tion process can produce it, the native theory is verified anew with regularity. The means of insemination vary: oral for the Etero studied by Kelly and the Sambia studied by Herdt (1981), anal for the Kaluli and by masturbation and the smearing of semen over the bodies of the initiates among the Onabasulu. Despite the shared belief in the necessity of inseminating boys if they are to grow into men, and the whole complex of beliefs about pollution by females and the life-threatening loss of semen to them, the differences in means of insemination used are ethnic markers, used to justify warfare with tribes that employ differing means.
Melanesian work is of obvious import for questioning the contention that there are lifelong homosexual preferences in all societies, as well as the notion wide­spread in American culture that homo­sexuality is "incurable": once a youth is involved ("corrupted"), he can never marry. (Of course one need not look so far away as Melanesia to learn that.)
The Melanesian evidence also challenges the still popular theorizing about the diseased effeminate "essence" of homosexuality. As Herdt (1984, p. 39) explains, Melanesian homosexuality is masculinizing for both participants: "The boy believes that this act will make him grow and strengthen. He is demonstrating his desire to be masculine, to act in accord with ritual ways, to be unf eminine. On the other hand, his counterpart, the postpubescent inseminator, demonstrates his superordinate maleness [and recently achieved sexual maturity] by the homo­sexual act of masculinizing the boy. More­over, both (along with their elders) are participating in a cult of masculinity, af­firming its superiority to feminity, and helping both inseminators and inseminated to achieving warrior masculinity."
Gendez-Defined Patterns. In Australian and Melanesian cultures homo­sexuality was and is age-defined, and often mandatory. In Polynesia it is gender-de­fined, and, while not punished, it is also not prestigious. From the time of Euro­pean contact until the present, most Tahitian villages have a mahu. There is never more than one, one informant explained, "because when one dies, then another substitutes. God arranged it like that.... Only one mahu and when that one dies, he is replaced" (Levy, p. 132).
Cross-dressing is not an invari­able concomitant of the mahu role, and there is some native disagreement about whether homosexuality is essential either, though younger men in the village where Levy lived claimed the village mahu serv­iced most of the young males. "Males describing their relationships with mahu tend to stress their passive participation in the relationship and the lack of symmetry ... [e.g.] 'He ate my penis. He asked me to suck his. I did not suck it.'" (Levy, p. 135). Social tolerance was summarized as fol­lows: "It is stated that there is nothing abnormal about this as far as the male
taureaiea bachelors are concerned. Some adults in the village found the idea of homosexual relations with the mahu 'disgusting,' but they did not seriously stigmatize those males who engaged in them. Sexual contact with the mahu tends to be treated in conversation as a standard kind of sexual activity." (Levy, p. 134).
The reported sexual activity of the mahu is invariably reported to be '"ote moa' (literally, 'penis sucking'). Anal sod­omy is categorically denied as a mahu Activity. Intercourse between the thighs is said not to be done" (ibid.). As in other gender-defined systems, such as those in Latin America and the Mediterranean, mahu concur "that a male who engages as a partner with a mahu is not at all a mahu himself, nor in any way an abnormal man" (ibid., 138). That some men are "like that" is accepted as natural, both by the mahu who reports no shame about his sexual behavior or by non-mahu.
In the Tahitian capital city of Papeete, in addition to the mahu role, a non-gender-defined role appears to be emerging: the
raerae. A man who lives a female role in the village and who does not engage in sexual activity would be a mahu but not a raerae, whereas somebody who does not perform a female's village role and who dresses and acts like a man, but who indulges in exclusive or preferred sexual behavior with other men would be raerae but not mahu.
When Levy made his study in Tahiti (1962-64), the mahu role was one of a limited number of cultural forms which still persisted in
Tahitian communities. In those years, the tradition of there never being more than one mahu to a commu­nity still held. These days, that rule no longer applies, for in some communities such as Vaitape on the island of Bora Bora, several mahu now live in close proximity to one another. When elderly mahu die, no more will emerge to take their place. In­stead, they will be replaced by raerae.
Although it is somewhat periph­eral to the main Pacific area, the Sulu archipelago of the Philippines offers some relevant comparisons. Nimmo reported that few, if any of the major communities of Sulu lack male homosexuals. Some of these are transvestites who assume the dress and sexual role of women, and some are men who retain male attire but prefer other men for sex. Some islands are known locally for their large numbers of homo­sexuals, whereas others are known for having few. A group of male transvestites, renouned throughout southern Sulu as the
dahling-dahling dancers, are professional entertainers who travel among the islands, singing and dancing at major festivals and ceremonies (p. 92).
Nimmo's paper discusses exog­amy for homosexual relations between ethnic groups. Although the case may have more to do with "Islamic accommoda­tions" than with Polynesian cultural traits, Nimmo (p. 94) reported, "None of the five acknowledged Bajau male homosexuals I interviewed admitted to having sexual relationships with Bajau males. . . . Nu­merous non-Bajau males are available in Sitangkai [the port which was the site of his research]."
Also from the Sulu archipelago, Kiefer reported a professional niche for "sensitive men"
\bantut) among the Tausug. Professional musician [mangangalang] is a role providing "opportunities for temporary sex-role reversal in an expres­sive situation, female-like voice and mannerism, expressive bodily move­ments," especially in pagsindil, a popular performance of stylized courtship repartee in which the bantut takes the female role (p. 108].
Returning to Polynesia, the iso­lated, deviant, feminine mahu role stands in marked contrast to the Melanesian prescription of homosexual insertee be­havior as a necessary part of any warrior's masculinization. Explaining how this great contrast arose is an interesting task that will not be attempted here, beyond sug­gesting that Polynesian societies were slave societies with all-powerful chiefs, whereas Melanesian warriors were not subordinated to a divine chief. Rather than look for ecological-geographical differences, differ­ences in social structure (which are quite considerable) should be the starting point for such explanation.
An Intermediate Pattern: Profes­sion. Continuing the overview of the or­ganization of homosexuality in Pacific cultures, a somewhat intermediate type between the Melanesian and Polynesian organizations of homosexuality (but not located between the two areas) is offered by several sets of warriors. Javanese warri­ors' kept boys [gemblakan] were young and effeminate, whereas the Korean hwarangvrere age-stratified, but apparently not effeminized.
In Japan there has been (and remains) the gender-defined role of kabuki actors. Especially during the Tokugawa period "love between comrades" flour­ished among samurai warriors. Mahayana Buddhist monks had their own forms of relationship with novices.
The classic exemplar of profes­sion-defined homosexuality is the Chukchi
shaman of Siberia, but as Bogoras' classic study reveals, the shamans are not just homosexual, but occupy a cross-gender role - one quite like the berdache in tribes down the Pacific coast of North America. These tribes presumably crossed from Northeast Asia to Northwest America more recently than Indian peoples further south and east, so there are close genetic connections of cultures across the North Pacific.
There are also reports of cross-dressing shamans scattered elsewhere (Borneo, Vietnam).
Lesbians. The only relatively clearly documented instance of institu­tionalized lesbianism in Melanesia comes from Malekula Island in the New Hebr­ides. A. B. Deacon was able to learn that among the Big Nambas of the northern part of the island lesbianism was "com­mon": "Between women, homosexuality is common, many women being generally known as lesbians, or in the native term nimomogh iap nimomogh ('woman has intercourse with woman'). It is regarded as a form of play, but, at the same time, it is clearly recognized as a definite type of sexual desire, and that women do it be­cause it gives them pleasure" (p. 170).
Blackwood suggested something close to ritualized lesbian behavior: homo­sexual play during the coming-of-age (menstruation) celebration in the Solomon Islands. Such reports are uncommon. One should be wary of the general lack of data on lesbian behavior, however, since most Melanesianists have been males studying males. Whether lesbian activity existed elsewhere in Melanesia will probably never be known because of the increasing tempo of westernization.
From the Philippines, Hart de­scribed females who cross-dressed and engaged in male occupations. These fe­males were sometimes referred to with the term for male cross-dressers
[bayot], some­times with their own: lakinon, and some­times pass as men away from their natal village (pp. 223-26).
In Tahiti, "Transient homosex­ual contacts between women are said to be frequent. These are said to involve mutual mouth-genital contact or mutual mastur­bation. These contacts are not considered particularly abnormal or signs of altered sexuality. They involve women who also engage in ordinary heterosexual behavior" (Levy, p.
141). There is lesbian behavior, but "no evidence for a full homosexual role corresponding to the mahu. Mahu [as a term] is considered by many to be misused for describing female homosexu­als" (Ibid.). The term raeiae [see above] is sometimes used, also vahinepa'i'a which means "woman rubbing together genitals without penetration" (Levy, p. 140). Scattered, inconclusive reports from the Indonesian archipelago exist but contain nothing that would parallel the profes­sion-defined male homosexuality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Beatrice Blackwood, Both Sides of the Buka Passage, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935; Waldemar Bogoras, "The Chukchi of Northeastern Asia," American Anthropologist, 3 (1901), 80-108; A. Bernard Deacon, Malekula, London: Routledge &. Kegan Paul, 1934; Donn V. Hart, "Homosexual­ity and Transvestism in the Philippines," Behavioral Science Notes, 3 (1968), 211-48; Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981; idem, Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; Raymond Kelly, Etero Social Structure, Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press, 1977; Thomas M. Kiefer, "A Note on Cross-sex Identification among Musicians," Ethnomusicology, 12 (1967), 107-09; Robert I. Levy, The Tahitians, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973; H. Arlo Nimmo, "The Relativity of Sexual Deviance: A Sulu Example." Papers in Anthropology, 19 (1978), 91-97; G6za Roheim, Social Anthropology, New York: Boni &. Liveright, 1926.
Stephen O. Murray

Painting
See Art, Visual; Nude in Art.

Paleo-Siberian Peoples
Several anthropological accounts of the indigenous peoples of eastern Sibe­ria and Alaska describe a widespread prac­tice of same-sex marriage between gender-mixed and gender-consistent males, and to a lesser extent, females. Sexual rela­tions between men and between women fall into the berdache pattern common among circum-Pacific cultures from Indo­nesia and Polynesia to North and South America, but the Paleo-Siberian peoples also associate gender-mixed individuals with shamanism. Though not unique to this cultural area, in that gender-mixed shamans have been noted among the Araucanians of Chile, the Sea Dyaks of Kali­mantan, and the Sami of Lapland, these Siberian and Alaskan people present a consistent cultural pattern.
The transition to gender-mixed or cross-gender status may take the form of a profound spiritual-psychological ex­perience at any point during the life course from childhood to old age or may be an identity experienced virtually from birth. The form of the transition varies as well from assuming a token trait of the other gender to a complete shift in comport­ment, dress, and location in the division of labor. Waldemar Bogoras noted the ex­ample of a Chukchee widow of middle age with three children who cut her hair, as­sumed masculine attire and speech, and learned to use a spear and a rifle. She subsequently married a girl who bore two sons. A male may make a similar gender transition, then "seeks the good graces of men, and succeeds easily with the aid of 'spirits.' Thus he has all the young men he could wish for striving to attain his favor. From there he chooses his lover, and after a time takes a husband." (1909, p. 450).
The association of special powers with interstitial or ambiguous persons is a widespread human idea and among forag­ing societies where the division of labor is often only by gender, it is gender-mixed individuals who present occupational innovations often as proto-artist or intel­lectual. Mircea Eliade notes that "the poetic vocabulary of a Yakut shaman contains 12,000 words, whereas the ordinary lan­guage - the only language known to the rest of this community - has only 4,000. [The shaman is] singer, poet, musician, diviner, priest, and doctor, appears to be the guardian of religious and popular tradi­tions, preserver of legends several centu­ries old." (p. 30). Just as gender-mixed individuals bridge gender boundaries, they are called to bridge between the sacred and the profane. Chukchee shamans show virtuosity in ventriloquism, spells, and divination in calling forth spirit voices. The Koryak and Kamchadal berdache is regarded as a magician and interpreter of dreams, who is "inspired by a particular kind of guardian spirits called
eien [?], by the help of which he treats patients, struggles with other shamans, and also causes injury to his enemies." (Jochelson, p. 420).
Homosexuality is a frequent but not indispensable socially recognized component of the shaman identity among the
circumpolar Samoyed, Ostyak, Tungus, Buryat, Aleut, Kodiak and Tlingit. It is noteworthy that in keeping with the gen­der cosmology, the gender-consistent marital partners of berdaches and shamans are not thought peculiar or worthy of dif­ferentiation from their counterparts who marry heterosexually.
Homosexuality among Paleo-Siberian peoples, then, is culturally recog­nized as an element in a social constella­tion of characteristics including "mixed" or anomalous placement in the division of labor and gender expectations, which sets certain persons apart as "special," "des­tined," or "gifted."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Waldemar Bogoras, "The Chukchee," Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, 11 (1909); idem, "The Chukchi of Northeastern Asia," American Anthro­pologist, 3 (1901), 80-108; Marie Antoinette Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914; Mircea Eliade, Shamanism, New York: Pantheon, 1964; Vladimir Jochelson, "The Mythology of the Koryak," American Anthropologist, 6 (1904), 413-25.
Barry D. Adam

Panic, Homosexual
The condition known as homo­sexual panic was first posited by Edward J. Kempf in the book Psychopathology (1920) and hence is sometimes styled Kempf's disease. In the moralizing language of the period, he there defined it as "panic due to the pressure of uncontrollable perverse sexual cravings," ascribing its importance to the frequency with which it occurred whenever men or women had to be grouped apart from the opposite sex "for prolonged periods, as in army camps, aboard ships, on exploring expeditions, in prisons, monas­teries, schools and asylums."
According to Kempf, the homo­sexual cravings threaten to overcome the individual's ego, his sense of self-control, which has been weakened by fatigue, debilitating fevers, loss of love object, misfortunes, homesickness, the seductive pressure of some superior, or erotic com­panions. The affective homosexual desires cause delusions about situations, objects, and persons that tend to gratify the crav­ing, or even hallucinations of them. When the erotic hallucination is felt to be an external reality and the subject can find no defense, panic ensues. The erotic affect may be symbolized as visions, voices, electric injections, "drugged" feelings, "poison" and "filth" in the food, seductive and hypnotic influences, irresistible trance states, crucifixion, and the like. It may be more or less severe, lasting from a few hours to several months, and the meta­bolic disturbances attending such disso­ciations of the personality, because the autonomic reactions produced by fear may be quite serious. When the subject's com­pensatory striving to retaliate or escape increases his liability to punishment, a tendency to lowering of blood pressure, irregularity of pulse, difficulty in breath­ing, and a tendency to assume a catatonic attitude seem to follow, as in young monkeys, puppies, terrified soldiers, and catatonic patients. Further, the individual incarcerated in a mental hospital may be caught in a vicious circle, because the deteriorating, monotonous existence forced upon him reduces his powers of adaptation and social competition. The panic state may be the first acute episode in schizophrenic disorders, and is more frequent in males than in females. The prognosis in such cases depends largely upon the extent of the defensive systematization of the delusions, and whether or not the patient is reacting with hatred. The presence of hatred is always to be considered as dangerous and certain to prevent the development of insight. In­stead of overt sexual delusions, the indi­vidual suffers anxiety on account of fears of undue malignant influence, physical violence, or impending death. Such an episode is termed
acute aggression panic. Prognosis is usually favorable, but a re­lapse is liable to occur if the individual does not make a successful heterosexual adjustment. The recurrence of panic re­sults from inability to control or repress the homosexual tendencies, which may eventually become dominant and incur­able. Such was the psychiatric discourse generated to deal with a problem that, in the socially repressive atmosphere of the period, undoubtedly possessed a certain reality.
It is significant that the concept of homosexual panic emerged in the United States just after World War I, when for the first time since 1865 large numbers of men were brought together in training camps and military bases with no members of the opposite sex present. While homophobic literature makes much of the alleged ten­dency of one-sex institutions to cause homosexual behavior, just the opposite reaction can and does occur. The fear of being socially defined as "homosexual" was in the past so intense that the percep­tion of homosexual desires within oneself could precipitate the symptoms described above, particularly since the popular mind failed to grasp the psychiatric distinction between exclusive homosexuality and homosexual attraction of a sporadic or episodinal kind, and the religious sanc­tions could attach even to erotic desires, independent of any overt activity. The anxiety created by this confusion and by the affective character of the imagined homosexual identity was demoralizing for the patient and perplexing for the thera­pist. The phenomenon of homosexual panic stems in no small part from the internalization of society's futile attempt to stigmatize and prohibit homosexual behavior.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edward J. Kempf, Psychopathology, St. Louis: C. V. Mosby Company, 1920.
Warren Johansson

Papacy
Given the custom of monastic sex-segregation and the extension of celi­bacy to the priesthood in the Western church beginning in the eleventh century, it is not surprising that a number of Roman pontiffs should have been involved in homoerotic sentiments and behavior. Details of the personal biographies of the early Christian popes are scanty, but be­ginning with the so-called dark age of the papacy (ninth-eleventh centuries) we begin to find information on wayward and self-indulgent behavior on the part of the bish­ops of Rome.
John XII (938-964) was the son of Alberic
n, the civil ruler of the eternal city, and connected to other patrician families. On being elected pope at the age of eight­een, he modeled himself on the scandalous Roman emperor Heliogabalus, holding homosexual orgies in the papal palace. To counter opposition to his rule, he invited the German ruler Otto the Great to Rome, where he was crowned emperor in 962. John was thus instrumental in establish­ing the Holy Roman Empire, an institu­tion that lasted in a formal sense until 1806. Benedict IX (1021 - ca. 1052) was the son of the count of Tusculum. He imitated John XII in staging licentious orgies. These and other excesses caused such indigna­tion that Benedict was deposed in 1045, but then reinstated, only to be deposed again. He disappeared into such deep ob­scurity that his actual date of death is unknown. John's activities may have helped to incite the reaction of the puri­tanical theologian Peter Damián (1007-1072), whose Liber Gomorrhianus is an attack against all kinds of sexual irregularities among the clergy. Under his associate Pope Gregory VII (ca. 1021-1085) reform ideas triumphed, and clerical celi­bacy was made obligatory for the Catholic priesthood, an injunction that remains in force to this day. The licentious "Pope Joan," who is supposed to have lived dur­ing this period, is entirely mythical.
As might be expected, it is the Renaissance period, with its revival of classical antiquity and love of art, that sees the greatest number of sexually active popes. The Venetian Paul II (1417-1471) was so vain that he had originally intended to take the name Formosus ("beautiful"). He was a collector of statuary, jewelry, and (it was said) of handsome youths. Given to the most sumptuous ecclesiastical drag, he was lampooned by his enemies as "Our Lady of Pity." His successor, Sixtus IV (1414-1482), is remembered for his art patronage, which included the erection and first decorations of the Sistine chapel. Among the artists most prominent in his reign was the Florentine homosexual
Bot­ticelli. This pope favored his scheming nephews, one of whom himself became pope under the name of Julius II. However, Sixtus was most devoted to another nephew, Raffaele Riario, whom he made papal chamberlain and bishop of Ostia. He elevated to the cardinalate a number of other handsome young men.
The Borgia pope, Alexander VI (1431-1503) was believed to have reduced Rome to unparalleled depths of depravity, and the city teemed with assassins and prostitutes of both sexes. Alexander was himself much given to womanizing, hav­ing sired eight or more children, but he was apparently not averse
to the charms of young men as well. His successor Julius II (1443-1513) positioned himself for high office during the reign of his uncle Sixtus IV. A lover of art, he patronized both Mich­elangelo and Raphael, and in 1506 he laid the foundation stone for the magnificent church of New St. Peters. However, Julius' military conquests caused friction with the king of France and the German em­peror. At their behest a council met in Pisa in 1511 to consider his deposition. Ar­raigned as "this sodomite, covered with shameful ulcers, who has infected the church with his corruption," Julius none­theless managed to prevail by calling his own council, which was still in session when he died in May 1513. His successor, the Medici Leo X (1475-1521), was also a great patron of the arts, so much so that his extravagance is said to have helped bring on the Reformation. Like several of his predecessors he was involved in intrigues to advance favorite nephews, an expensive hobby that strained the treasury to the utmost.
Before becoming pope, Julius HI (1487-1555) had presided over the Council of Trent, which was to result in the Counterref ormation and a new sobriety at the papal court. However, Julius HI was granted one last Indian summer period of licentiousness. He was often seen at offi­cial occasions with a catamite,
Innocente (Prevostino), whom he created a cardinal, together with a number of other teenage boys.
The dour Pius V (reigned 1566-1572) issued two constitutions, the first (V, Cum
primum) of which turned sodo­mites over to the secular courts and or­dered degradation of members of the clergy who were guilty of the vice; a second (LXXII, Horrendum) provided that reli­gious found guilty be deprived of the bene­fit of clergy, but only if the sodomitic acts were frequent and repeated, as it were from habit; this presumably exempted individuals who had only occasionally strayed.
Little is known of sexual irregu­larity of modern popes, at least during their pontificates. According to Roger Peyrefitte, John XXDI (1881-1963) and, more plausibly, Paul VI (1897-1978) con­ducted homosexual affairs. The Polish pope, John Paul II (1920- ), had enounced conservative views on sex and marriage long before his election in 1978. After becoming pope he encouraged Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to issue a statement reaffirming disapproval of homosexuality, terming it an "intrinsic moral evil" (letter of the Vatican Congregation for the Doc­trine of the Faith, October 30,1986). Also under this pope the American gay Catho­lic organization Dignity was forbidden to use church premises for its activities, and gay Catholics would appear to have en­tered a phase of banishment
extra ecclesiam, as least as far as the practice of their sexual preference is concerned.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. J. N. D. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Wayne R. Dynes

Paragraph 175
This was the notorious article of the Imperial Criminal Code [Reichsstrafgesetzbuch] that was adopted in 1870 for the newly-formed North German Confederation and then took effect on January 1, 1872 on the entire territory of the empire, replacing the criminal codes of the 36 sovereign entities that had existed in Germany since 1815. Paragraph 175 penalized widematurhche Unzucht, "lewd and indecent acts contrary to nature" between males (but not between females), and provided for a maximum penalty of two years' imprisonment. Although the original scope of the law had been solely anal intercourse, it was subsequently expanded by the appellate courts until it covered all "acts similar to coitus" [beischlafsähnliche Handlungen), but not mutual masturbation. The major aim of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld and his collaborators on May 14, 1897, was to secure repeal of the offending paragraph, and to that end a petition was circulated among prominent and cultured figures of Wilhelmine and then Weimar Germany. The petition was in the course of more than three decades signed by some 6,000 Germans from all walks of life, a number of them world-famous to this day.
The arguments against Paragraph 175 included: the injustice of stigmatizing as criminal the sexual activity of those whose homosexual orientation was inborn and unalterable; the danger of blackmail to which it subjected those who engaged in homosexual activity; the futility of at­tempting to penalize activity that in any case occurred in private and was thus inaccessible to police surveillance; and the number of illustrious figures of past and present whose homosexual inclina­tions would have made them
hable to prosecution and social ruin.
Despite the support given to the campaign for repeal by the Social Demo­cratic (and later by the Communist) Party, beginning with a speech in the Reichstag by August Bebel in 1898, the conservative opponents of repeal retained a majority on the commissions appointed to revise the penal code, and a 15-13 victory in 1929 proved hollow, as the National Socialist assumption of power led to an even more punitive version of the Paragraph in the novella of June 28, 1935, whose constitu­tionality was later upheld by the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe on May 10,1957 on the pretext that "homosexual acts indisputably offend the moral feelings of the German people." In line with this reasoning the government of the Federal Republic has denied all compensation to those who during the Nazi period were for violations of Paragraph 175 interned in concentration camps, where they were forced to wear the pink triangle that later became a symbol of gay liberation.
Hirschfeld's vigorous campaign against Paragraph 175 made it a household word in Germany, and a slang expression for homosexual is
geboren am 17.5, liter­ally "born on the 17th of May." Only in 1969 did a Social Democratic government in Bonn repeal that portion of the law which penalized consenting homosexual activity between adult males. Even in the Nazi period Paragraph 175 was not extended or applied by analogy to lesbi­ans. But it had taken 72 years of struggle, interrupted by the renewed persecution under National Socialism, to secure the abolition of a criminal law that in France the Revolution had stricken from the books in 1791.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Günther Gollner, Homosexualität: Ideologiekritik und Entmythologisierung einer Gesetz­gebung, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974; James D. Steakley, The Homosex­ual Emancipation Movement in Germany, New York: Amo Press, 1975.
Warren Johansson

Paranoia
In current usage the word para­noia has two senses. The older meaning, stemming from nineteenth-century psy­chiatry, is that paranoia is a psychosis characterized by systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur. Hallucinations may be present, though they are not neces­sary for a diagnosis. Recent popularization of the term - a consequence of the general diffusion and vulgarization of psychiatric concepts characteristic of our society - has tended to reduce its meaning to a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive and irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness.
As part of his overall concern with mental conditions that impaired function­ing, Sigmund Freud had sought to grapple with paranoia in the original psychiatric sense. From his mentor in the 1890s, Wilhelm Fliess, Freud took the notion that paranoia was dependent on repressed homosexuality. Only later, in 1915, did he formulate this interpretation as a general rule. He believed that the paranoic with­drawal of love from its former object is always accompanied by a regression from previously sublimated homosexuality to narcissism, omitting the half-way stage of overt homosexuality. This claim of a spe­cial link between paranoia and (male) homosexuality has been one of the most thoroughly examined of all Freudian con­cepts. Although some psychoanalysts cling to it, the results of a variety of investiga­tions make the conclusion inescapable that it is untenable.
It may well be that, for reasons independent of the Freudian system, a somewhat larger proportion of homosexu­als and lesbians incline to paranoia in the clinical sense. This finding would not be surprising in view of the homophobia to which they have been subjected. How­ever, noserious or sustained consideration has been given to the matter.
In recent decades members of some gay organizations have also shown paranoia in the more ordinary sense of collective tearfulness that some sectors of society, primarily the government, are out to get them. To some extent these fears came in the baggage of the leftist sects who were influential in the years of gay libera­tion following the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969. They were not entirely groundless, inasmuch as the Federal Bureau of Investi­gation did engage in surveillance of gay groups. Nonetheless such fears can take exaggerated form, as in the belief that the ADDS virus was deliberately spread by some governmental agency. Prudence requires that one be on guard against inimical ac­tivities by state agencies, but - in the ab­sence of any real evidence - this is a belief that clearly illustrates the possibilities of exaggeration and panic that lie in wait for those who are overly eager to detect con­spiracies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Gary Anton Chalus, "An Evaluation of the Validity of the Freudian Theory of Paranoia," Journal of Homosexuality, 3 (1977), 171-88; Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality, New York: Simon &. Schuster, 1988.
Wayne R. Dynes

Parents, Lesbian and Gay
Society has traditionally treated parenting as the exclusive prerogative of heterosexual couples whose union is sanc­tioned by marriage. Of course when chil­dren were born outside of wedlock, both parents and children have been made to feel the stigma of illegitimacy. In advanced industrial countries, however, recent so­cial changes have eroded the dominant position of the nuclear family, and made single-parent units virtually of equal sig­nificance. In this context families headed by lesbians and gay men have become more numerous and more visible.
Origins of Lesbian and Gay Pa­rental Units. Some persons, who eventu­ally come to acknowledge their homo­sexuality, marry while still under the impression that they are bisexual or that their homosexual feelings are merely a phase that they will leave behind once they enter a stable union with a member of the opposite sex. Although they may be­come uneasy as the feelings emerge or persist, nonetheless children may be con­ceived and born in the initial years of the marriage. A few persons, mainly gay men, discuss their homosexuality with their fiancees before the wedding and, with candor and mutual understanding, the marriage may hold. However, increasing numbers of parents who become aware of their different orientation seek and obtain a divorce. In keeping with the tradition of allowing the parents to remain with the mother, lesbian parents then raise the children. It is much less common for a gay father to retain custody of the children. In other instances childless lesbians and gay men may adopt children, though this has led to some controversy.
Some lesbians have conceived and given birth as a result of artificial insemi­nation by donors. Since many doctors frown on this practice, associations have been formed to help prospective parents to accomplish the insemination themselves. As in the case of childless heterosexual couples seeking artificial insemination, the potential donor must be screened for genetic and health reasons. In many in­stances a gay man is the semen donor, and in a few cases both parents agree to bring up the child together ("coparenting"). In the latter situation it is essential for the parties to sign an agreement drafted by a lawyer, so that custody battles do not occur later. Some potential lesbian moth­ers prefer to obtain the semen from a sperm bank - where the donor renounces all rights - so as to avoid the possibility of a custody dispute.
After establishing a new house­hold, the lesbian or gay male parent will date others of the same sex, which often leads to a permanent arrangement. There are then two persons of the same gender to raise the child. Sometimes the lover is called "aunt" or "uncle," but many chil­dren accept calling both "mother" or "daddy."
The Children. It is generally considered advisable for the lesbian or gay parent to "come out" to the children at an early age, indicating that she or he is "different." If the child learns of his or her parent's homosexuality through hostile remarks of playmates and relatives, they may have a negative reaction. In general girls accept the news of the orientation with some ease; boys initially resist, but then also usually come to accept.
Studies have shown that children of lesbian and gay parents are no more likely to become homosexual than those of heterosexual parents. Many lesbian and gay parents raise their children in tradi­tional sex roles, others in less determinate modes. Sometimes boys are subject to "reverse sexism" on the part of lesbian separatist parents, or this result may occur indirectly, as when a lesbian mother is told to leave an all-worn en commune when her son reaches the age of twelve. On the whole, however, lesbian mothers and gay fathers - despite the economic difficulties that they often face - prove loving and supportive parents for their children.
Custody Problems. For the last hundred years, the usual position has been that when divorce occurs the mother is the best person to raise the children. With the current general questioning of sex-based privileges, this principle too is less firmly situated than formerly. Hence the hetero­sexual father in a divorce case is more likely to contest the granting of custody to a lesbian mother. In many instances the court battles that ensue are the result of bitterness that has accumulated over the course of an unhappy marriage. Such pro­cedures are expensive for the litigants and often disturbing to the children. Inasmuch as custody decisions are never final, a les­bian mother may later have her right to keep her children challenged. In some cases the lesbian or gay parent is simply seeking visitation rights, but these too may be contested. Gradually a body of law is being developed which makes custody and visi­tation decisions more predictable, if not always more just.
To deal with these and other problems support groups of lesbian moth­ers and gay fathers have been formed. Many members find, however, that they derive benefit from these groups even when they are not experiencing any problems. Being a homosexual parent is a life situation all its own, and sharing experiences in a posi­tive atmosphere is rewarding.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Joe Gantz, Whose Child Cries: Children of Gay Parents Talk about Their Lives, Rolling Hills Estates, CA: Jalmar Press, 1983; Donna J. Hitchens and Ann G. Thomas, eds., Lesbian Mothers and Their Children: Annotated Bibliography of Legal and Psychological Materials, 2nd ed., San Francisco: Lesbian Rights Project, 1983; Joy Schulenburg, Gay Parenting: A Comprehensive Guide for Gay Men and Lesbians with Children, Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1985.
Evelyn Gettone

Paris
From the high Middle Ages on­ward Paris was the political and cultural capital of France. After the religious and political turbulence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the city emerged in the eighteenth century with its modern role as the ville-lumière, a major interna­tional center of intellectual endeavor and tastemaking.
The Eighteenth Century. Al­though the philosophes, the era's influen­tial intellectuals, did not always reside there, Paris was the natural fulcrum of the Enlightenment's effort toward social re­form. Significantly, the last public execu­tions for sodomy, those of Bruno Lenoir and Jean Diot, were carried out in the Place de Grève in 1750. Despite the advance of the new ideas, the Old Regime remained an uncertain environment for sexual ex­perimentation, as the Marquis de Sade's twenty-six years of imprisonment, much of it in the Bastille, attests. As early as the eighteenth century, it is clear that the Paris police kept records of the "infâmes," as they were called, even if no individual or mass arrests ensued. Certain areas of the city, notably dark and dead-end streets, were cruising grounds and even the scene of orgies after nightfall. The safest path to pleasure was membership in an erotic club. In 1777 L'Espion anglois of Pidansat de Mairobert carried an account of the So­ciété des Anandrines, a group of lesbians who assembled for mutual gratification. A few years later the novel Le Diable au corps by Andréa de Nerciat, published only in 1803, described the doings of an aristocratic orgy club.
Denounced by the
philosophes as relics of medieval barbarism, the old laws against sodomy were swept away in the wake of the French Revolution, and a brief epoch of freedom of the press ensued, as illustrated by two surviving pamphlets, Les enfans de Sodome and Les petits bougres au manège, which implicate sev­eral prominent members of the National Assembly.
TheNineteenth Century. The Na­poleonic period and the Restoration saw the emergence of a new bourgeois capital­ist culture, by definition amoral and pleas­ure-seeking - an ethos well captured in the many volumes of Honoré de Balzac's Comédie humaine which has as its back­drop the France of the July Monarchy. In the 1840s the bohemian subculture of the Latin quarter emerges fully into view. A subculture characterized by freedom from family ties and restrictions, and there­fore by erotic licence, it was immortalized in Henry Murger's Scenes de la vie de Bdheme (1847-49). Also, at this time the first studies of the criminal underworld of Paris were published, with information on the blackmail that could still be prac­ticed against wealthy and prominent homosexuals because of an intolerant public opinion.
It was the Second Empire ¡1852-1870), in the massive urban reconstruc­tion projects of Baron Haussmann, that created the modern visage of the Paris of the great boulevards. Behind their showy facades lurked a fascinating underworld - a second city as it were. The contrast between the wealth of the aristocacy and haute bourgeoisie and the poverty of the masses favored prostitution in different forms, especially on the part of the hand­some and well-built but poorly paid pro­fessional soldiers. It was this type of sexual commerce that underlay such groups as the
Société des Emiles, a circle of promi­nent figures of the Second Empire who were discovered by the Paris police in 1864 to have members of elite regiments of the French army at their disposal. Other rec­ords kept by the police showed how young men who had prostituted themselves could then drift into crime as a profession. While homosexual activity as such was not a crime, the authorities could still intervene when they saw fit under statutes that loosely penalized sexual "immorality" {déhts contre les moeurs).
From 1871 to 1945.
Under the Third Republic, Paris did not lose its repu­tation as a center of vice; it even became a haven for wealthy homosexuals and lesbi­ans who chose or were forced into exile from the English-speaking world with its prudery and intolerance. Englishmen such as Oscar Wilde could find Paris an inviting haven for their pleasures, while the bohe­mian quarter could shelter Paul Verlaine, whose poems include a series that frankly celebrate homosexual love. Lesbians from the English-speaking world, such as the wealthy Natalie Barney and her lovers Renée Vivien (Pauline Tarn) and Romaine Brooks, as well as the modernist Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, found Paris a congenial home. The world of the upper-class French homosexual was recorded on the immortal pages of Marcel Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe, in which the character of the Baron de Charlus is supposed to have been modeled on Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac.
Under the Third Republic erotic publishers such as Isidore Liseux and Robert Carrington could produce their wares in both French and English, reprint­ing the classics and bringing out new vol­umes, including translations of the early studies on "sexual science" that had be­gun to appear in Germany and Austria but could not be sold openly in England. French erotic literature flourished at the turn of the century, with lesbian love as a fre­quent theme, though usually from the standpoint of the male voyeur. One of a series of novels celebrating the adventures of a fictional Club Gérando even ascribed a different sexual practice to each of the Cities of the Plain, with sodomy as the starting point.
Interwar Paris remained a mecca for the foreign homosexual, some with literary pretensions ("the lost generation"). For foreigners and locals alike, a clandes­tine gay subculture existed unknown to the average citizen. Each Mardi Gras there was a Magic City gay costume ball on the left bank which thousands of people at­tended following an old tradition. How­ever, the attempt to create a homosexual monthly entitled
Inversions (1924-25) foundered when a prosecution inspired by the interpellation of Catholic deputies triumphed in court. The Paris of the 1920s lagged behind Berlin in the extent and openness of its homosexual activity.
The Depression years were far more sombre, but one significant event occurred whose homosexual background has not been fully appreciated: the 1938 assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a secre­tary at the German Embassy, by a young Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, who had met him at the
café Tout va bien in the capacity of a pimp arranging encounters with French hustlers. This event served as the pretext for "Crystal Night," Novem­ber 9, in which Jewish synagogues and businesses in Germany fell victim to po­groms organized by the Nazis that spelled the virtual end of Jewish community life in that country. Paradoxically, the mur­derer fell into the hands of the Germans when France fell in 1940 but could never be tried because Hitler feared the humili­ating exposure of the "martyr" vom Rath as a homosexual.
Af ter World War II. Postwar Paris saw the appearance of the first French homophile organizations and their publi­cations. An early journal named Futurs (1952-55) had contacts with the move­ment organized around the C.O.C. group in the Netherlands, but expired after 17 issues. Longer lived was Arcadie, a monthly that began in 1954 and lasted into the early 1980s. Its pages carried the most serious and intellectual discussions of that period, when the German movement was barely reviving and the American one was young and inexperienced.
The coming of the Fifth Republic was a setback, as the De Gaulle regime had its clerical-authoritarian overtones of puritanism, but the radical demonstrations of May 1968 and after saw the dam break, and Paris sprouted a diversified gay sub­culture inspired by that of the United States, with its network of organizations, bars, bathhouses, and erotic bookstores, some with incongruous American names such as Fire Island and The Broad. Gay political groups spanned the spectrum from far left to far right. Beginning in 1979 the journal
Gai Pied, explicit in its illustra­
Archives,"
Eighteenth-Century Life, 9, 1985) 179-91.
Warren Johansson

Particular Friendships
This term has been applied mainly to the emotional attachments of adoles­cents, particularly in closed institutions such as boarding schools, monasteries, and convents, who are passing through the "homosexualphase" of their development, but it is sometimes extended to the affec­tionate pairings of adults. Used in French as early as 1690 in a text entitled Examen des amitiés particulières, it was adopted by Joseph-François Lafitau to describe male-male relationships among the members of Amerindian tribes. In 1945, the novelist Roger Peyrefitte adopted the term for the title of his novel [Les amitiés particulières-, in English, Special Friend­ships] about the tragic love affair of two schoolboys at an exclusive Catholic board­ing school in France on the eve of World War I. Internationally famous, the work has become a classic of adolescent male love and so consecrated the term in that specific meaning.
The text of 1690 describes those involved in a "particular friendship" as constantly seeking each other's company, sharing their most intimate cares and griefs, and covertly violating the rules of the institution, while keeping others at a dis­tance and excluding them from their con­versation. The authors who recount such friendships agree that physical intimacy may, but need not be part of the mutual affection. Such writers include the novel­ists
Honoré de Balzac [Louis Lambert], PaulBonnetain [Chariot s'amuse), Camille Ferri-Pisani (Les pervertis - Roman d'un potache), Jehan Rictus [Fil de fer), Alain-Foumier (Le grand Meaulnes), and Amédée Guiard (Antone Ramon).
The British public school has an analogous phenomenon, but far more strongly tinged with sadomasochistic ele­ments because of the system of "fagging"
tions and advertising, became the leading French gay publication, covering life in both Paris and the provinces. Homosexu­ality became a respectable theme in the world of the literary salons and publishing houses whose debates set the tone for the intellectual life of France and many other countries. After the decline of the influ­ence of Jean-Paul Sartre and his existen­tialism, new sets of intellectuals, structu­ralist and post-structuralist, took the stage in Paris, attracting followers at home and abroad; prominent among them were Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.
The steadily increasing prosper­ity of France as a whole has brought the consumer society within the reach of many gay Parisians, who have not spurned the pleasures of fine clothing, entertainment, and foreign travel. A gay radio station, Future Génération, broadcasts twenty-four hours a day, and the Minitel system makes computer dating possible. Paris hosts the only successful gay church that originated in Europe, the Centre du Christ Libérateur. Less favored by the new prosperity is the large section of the working class of North African origin, known colloquially as "les Beurs." Retaining a strong sense of family solidarity and aspects of Mediterranean homosexuality, these mainly Muslim French citizens are subject to stereotyping by the majority, a situation complicated by the fact that many hustlers are Beurs. An attempt to establish a gay mosque in Paris failed. Although the French capital is less renowned as a gay center than Amsterdam and Berlin, the overall attrac­tions of Paris still suffice to draw enor­mous numbers of foreign gay and lesbian visitors.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Gilles Barbedette and Michel Carassou, París Gay 1925, Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1981; Catherine van Casselaer, Lot's Wife: Lesbian Paris, 1890-1914, Liverpool: Janus Press, 1986; Guide Homo, Paris: Gai Pied Hebdo, 1989; Michel Rey, "Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700-1750: The Police (not related to the modern American meaning of faggot/fag], in which a younger boy had to serve an upperclassman as his menial. The diaries of John Addington Symonds and other sources portray the Harrow of the 1840s as a virtual jungle where adolescent lust and brutality reigned unchecked. Every good-looking boy was given and addressed by a female name, and was regarded either as public property, in which case he could be forced into (often public) acts of incredible obscenity, or else made the "bitch" of an older boy. On the other hand, there could also be romantic friendships at public schools, in which one boy was younger, handsome, in another house, and in need of protection; such relationships were usually left asexual, to preserve the romantic glow. The partici­pants would probably have liked to give them physical expression but were re­strained by the pressures of the milieu. A modern classic novel on this theme is Michael Campbell's Lord Dismiss Us (1967); an American counterpart, John Knowles' A Separate Peace (1960), has a tragic ending.
The analogous relationships in girls' schools were named
crushes or smashes. Because the sexual element in these feminine attractions is often deeply sublimated, the pattern appears unmis­takably in books written for adolescents themselves, even in the era of Victorian prudery. Just because intense emotion between girls was less interdicted and more overt physical expression allowed, the lesbian equivalent of particular friendship could be delineated more clearly. Colette depicts such an attachment in her early work Claudine à l'école (1900), Dmitry Merezhkovsky another in his The Birth of the Gods (1925). In the film Mädchen in Uniform (1932), based on the novel The Child Manuela by Christa Winsloe, a les­bian "special friendship" ends in terror and tragedy.
For many participants in special friendships, the whole experience was a moment of adolescent romance and ideal­ism which they would leave behind as they matured into the heterosexual affairs of adulthood. For a few, it was an initiation into the realm of homosexual experience that would remain forever tinged with the afterglow of youthful tenderness and mutual devotion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Marion Zimmer Bradley, "Feminine Equivalents of Greek Love in Modem Fiction," International Journal of Greek Love, 1/1 (1965), 48-58; Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of the British Public School, New York: Viking, 1978; Martha Vicinus, "Distance and Desire: English Boarding-School Friendships," Signs, 9 (1984), 600-22.
Warren Johansson

Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1922-1975)
Italian novelist, poet, filmmaker, playwright, and polemical essayist.
Life. Born in Bologna, during World War U he took refuge in rural Friuli, where he remained until 1949, becoming a member of the Communist Party. In 1949 anticommunist political enemies made his homosexuality public, creating a scandal that led to his expulsion from the Party, ruining his career as a teacher, and causing him to move to Rome.
In Rome Pasolini came into con­tact with the world of the slums on the outskirts of the city, which he portrayed in his novels
Ragazzi di Vita (1955) and Una vita violenta (1959). His novels were ac­companied by poetry of high quality, as seen in the volumes Le ceneri di Gramsci (1957), La religione delmio tempo (1961), and Poesia in forma di Rosa (1964). These publications brought him fame, but also a series of prosecutions (often for "obscen­ity") that were to dog him periodically throughout his life.
By the early 1960s Pasolini's name had become one of the best known in postwar Italian culture. He had also pub­lished essays and anthologies which served to keep him in the public eye. Interna­tional renown came, however, not from his literary works, but from his activity as a filmmaker, which began in the sixties. Alongside this work Pasolini wrote plays, which were published in 1973 and 1979. The seventies represented the height of his fame. His political and journalistic work found easy entry into the Italian press, stimulating major debates.
On November 1, 1975, Pasolini was murdered at Ostia by a male prosti­tute with whom he had just had sexual relations. The slayer was a street tough ("ragazzo di vita") of the type he had so often portrayed in his works.
Critical Evaluation. Probably no contemporary author has so fully incar­nated the cultural and social contradic­tions of Italian homosexual life as has Pasolini. Catholic by upbringing and Communist by conviction, throughout life he was tormented by the conflict between a lay and progressive concept of life and a conservative one laced with Catholic sex­ual guilt.
The 1949 scandal had a major impact on this conflict inasmuch as it forced him to "come out" before he was psychologically prepared to do so, when he was in fact traumatized. From these cir­cumstances stemmed a certain diffidence, sometimes tinged with paranoia, in his relations with society in general and the homosexual world in particular. In fact the homosexuals who appear in such works as
Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta axe stereotypically effeminate, distasteful caricatures. Their role is to be victims.
The conception of sexuality that emerges from Pasolini's works is a nostal­gic one, linked to traditional Mediterra­nean homosexuality, and hence inimical to the sexual revolution that was taking place in Italy as in the rest of the industri­alized world. A good example is the fa­mous "trilogy of life" that is made up of the films
Decameron (1971), The CanterburyTales (1972), and The Arabian Nights (1974), in which Pasolini sought to capture an innocent, "pure" sexuality, untouched by the Catholic conditioning and sense of guilt. He sought it sentimentally in the peasant society of the past, or in Third World countries that remain outside the orbit of Western civilization and Christian morality.
Toward the end of his life Pa­solini repudiated this trilogy of films, publicly confessing that the sexuality he had been in search of had no existence - not in the past and not in the Third World. From this crisis came his last, posthumous film
Saló, which is shot through with desperation. As in the work of Sade which inspired it, sex here is an instrument of power and oppression.
Despite his conflicts, Pasolini several times started debates on sexuality which were discussed throughout Italy, including the famous one on abortion. In these acts of setting forth his position one sees his love of being scandalous and of going against the tide, even at the cost of contradicting himself. His willingness to shock did not prevent him from withhold­ing much of his homoerotic writing from publication, an abstention that reflects his prudery on the subject, together with his diffidence.
With
Pasolini's consent, however, theatre works in which homosexuality was important were released, including Orgia (performed in 1968) and Calderón (1973), to which was added Affabulazione after his death (1977). Entirely posthu­mous were the long autobiographical stories Amado mio and Atti impuri (both 1982), sensitive evocations of his adoles­cent turmoil and of Pasolini's first loves for young peasants of the Friuli region. These last are probably the works in which homosexuality is evoked with the greatest serenity, and with a gentle lyricism absent elsewhere.
Although individual love poems appeared in Pasolini's works, his specifi­cally homoerotic production remains unpublished, including for example the cycle known as
L'hobby del sonetto, written for Ninetto Davoli, the smiling, curly-haired actor who starred in several of his films.
After Pasolini's death a veil of obscurity descended in Italy to cover the "embarrassment" of his sexual "devia­tion." Hence the effort some of his friends made to have his murder treated as a politi­cal rather than as a sexual crime; though the evidence was flimsy, this hypothesis was considered more respectable. Only recently, however, through the initiative of the Italian gay movement, has an analy­sis been undertaken of the enormous in­fluence that Pasolini's homosexuality exercised on his achievements.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Stefano Casi, ed., Cupo d'amore: l'omosessuahta nell'opera di Pasolini, Bologna: II Cassero, 1987; Enzo Siciliano, Pasolini: A Biography, New York: Random House, 1982.
Giovanni Dall'Orto

Passive
See Active-Passive Contrast.

Pater, Walter (1839-1894)
British writer and critic. Born the third child of a surgeon in the London slum of Stepney, Pater lost his father at an early age. \ le overworked himself to the point of illness to win a scholarship to Oxford. Pater early attempted writing in verse; yet lacking any poetic instinct or command of rhythm, he abandoned poetry to become a master of English prose style, a highly refined, allusive and personal style that gave him a potentially stirring instrument of self-expression. At Oxford he heard lectures by Matthew Arnold, appreciating their wide, topic range of literary refer­ences and the author's serious belief in the importance of culture. He learned French and German, studied the literature of both countries, and acquired a combination of French aestheticism and German learn­ing, yet he never became a profound thinker or a conventional scholar.
In 1864 he won a classical fellow­ship at Brasenose College, Oxford - the beginning of his career. A discrete essay on the homosexual archeologist
J. J. Winckelmann (written for Westminster Review in 1867) betrayed to discerning readers a sympathy for Greek paideiasteia. Pater's marked preference for the company of young and good-looking men, joined with the intellectual currents in his work and the personality of several of his friends, was enough to win some admirers and make some enemies. Added to this hetero­doxy was Pater's rejection of Christianity and affinity for paganism; and over him these aspects of his character cast a shadow that later efforts at hiding his private self never dispelled.
A friendship with Charles Lance­lot Shadwell, a former pupil of his who became a fellow of Oriel College in 1864, inspired an essay entitled
Diaphanéité (1864), and to him was dedicated the fruit of Pater's first visit to Italy, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). This was not a true history, but a study of a set of chosen personalities whom he recog­nized as kindred spirits in subtlety, sophis­tication, and love of beauty. Collected and read together, the essays in the volume sounded a sensuous verbal music, adum­brating a novel view of life that made the tone of the work more fascinating than its contents. But even more provocative to Pater's contemporaries was the Conclu­sion, ending with the words "To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." Nothing could better have summed up the repugnance provoked by the volume than the pungent characterization of the au­thor - attributed to Benjamin Jowett - as a "demoralizing moralizer."
In the second edition of
The Ren­aissance (1877), he deleted the Conclu­sion, but revised the first chapter by add­ing passages on The Friendship of Amis and Amile, a thirteenth-century French romance centered on male friendship. As part of the plot Amis lays down his Ufe for Amile by taking his place in single com­bat, while Amile in turn lays down his life in proxy by slaying his children so that Amis may be healed. In the discussion of the tale Pater made both more explicit and more nuanced his appreciation of the libidinal aspects of human culture and spe­cifically of the Christian culture of the Middle Ages.
Two others who appealed to Pa­ter were Algernon Charles Swinburne, protodecadent poet, and Simeon Solomon, a Pre-Raphaelite painter, frankly homo­sexual, whose career was destroyed when a morals charge revealed his proclivities to Victorian society. From 1869 to his death, Pater lived in Oxford with his two spinster sisters in a curious sort of household that took the place of a conventional marriage.
In 1885 Pater published a novel entitled
Marius the Epicurean. It was a sustained portrait of an invented, non-historical figure, a fictitious biography in two volumes set in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, when the alternatives of pagan­ism and Christianity coexisted. In writing the book the author shifts from sensations to ideas, as the hero Marius replaces his love for the poetic and pagan Flavian with friendship for the Christian soldier Cor­nelius. Marius - with whom Pater strongly identifies - dies at the end of the novel, but since he intervenes to set Cornelius free when both are taken captive, the Chris­tians with whom he has associated deem his death a sort of martyrdom.
Other works of his were in the field of literary criticism, such as
Appre­ciations: with an Essay on Style (1889). Though containing nothing that could not have been read before, it elicited highly favorable reviews, with the recognition that the author was "beyond rivalry the subtlest artist in contemporary English prose." Pater was famous at the end of his life, when he published Plato and Platonism (1893), in which, however, there are only a few neutral and scholarly references to homosexuality, while the book closes with an admonition to love the intellec­tual, disciplined, patiently achieved "dry beauty" which Plato recommends and is shown to have achieved against his own instinctual urgings. In the spring of 1894 he became ill and died suddenly just before his fifty-fifth birthday.
Heterosexual love and marriage receive scant attention in his work, and the attitude toward Christianity in his early writings contained more animosity than wit. In a review of William Morris' poetry in 1868, he commented that medie­val religion "was but a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses." With intimates he could engage in a provocative mockery and sarcasm that he rigorously suppressed from his published writings and even more from his private letters, which reveal none of the arcana of his existence.
The refined and academic hedon­ism of Walter Pater mark him as a type of homosexual with profound aesthetic sen­sibilities who functions both as a critic of art and as a creator, in this instance, of a prose style whose formal perfection and musicality make it one of the highwater marks of nineteenth-century English lit­erature. Only subtly does his fascination with male beauty betray the real focus of his interests, while he kept his private self deliberately elusive and hidden in his life­time. His career as a lecturer at Oxford followed a path distant from the one trod­den by "decadent" contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde whose unconventional sexu­ality he secretly shared.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Richard Dellamora, "An Essay in Sexual Liberation, Victorian Style: Walter Pater's 'Two Early Prench Stories,'" Journal of Homosexuality, 8/3-4 (1983), 139-50; Michael Levey, The Case of Walter Pater, London: Thames and Hudson, 1978.
Warren Johansson

Patristic Writers: The Fathers of the Church
The Patristic writings are usually defined as the surviving texts of the Chris­tian teachers from the end of the first century - when the New Testament was being completed - until the seventh cen­tury. Some would extend the term to the thirteenth century, when the tradition of Scholasticism took hold. Although the New Testament itself properly precedes the Patristic texts, the latter presume it as a canonical source, so that some attention must be given to it at the outset.
The New Testament. The Secret Gospel of Mark (as reconstructed by Mor­ton Smith) may have treated Jesus' im­plied homoerotic relationship with a male catechumen before the theme was ex­punged from the surviving text of canoni­cal Mark. As we know them, the gospels are so reticent that disputes still rage over whether Jesus recommended the chastity he apparently practiced over the marriage he praised, although subsequently disciples abandoned wives as well as parents to follow him.
Jesus criticized those who fol­lowed the letter of the law instead of the spirit of love. More than any other evan­gelist, St. Luke portrays Jesus as contra­dicting rabbinical conventions on sex, for example by teaching that to follow him a man must reject his wife's love or that celibacy might be necessary for salvation. In the early church, before tradition took shape or the texts of the gospels were fixed, though praising and practicing every vari­ety of sexuality from virginity to promis­cuity, most Christians, conscious of stand­ing apart from and above pagans in sexual mores, accepted the Judaic view that homosexuality, like infanticide, was a sin.
Deemed the second founder, St. Paul, whose epistles are the earliest of preserved Christian writings and came to comprise one-third of the New Testament when its canon was established about
a.d. 200, was explicit about sex. He prescribed marriage only for those too weak to re­main chaste, but forbade divorce, avail­able at the whim of Jewish, Greek, and Roman husbands, as well as polygamy, then common among Jews, and levirate marriage, which had been mandatory, of a brother's widow. In other ways, however, greatly influenced by the Old Testament, by pharisaic Judaism, and by the melange of ascetic Platonism and theosophical Judaism best exemplified by Philo Judaeus, he forbade sex outside of marriage. This included concubinage, and he singled out homosexuality, even between females, for special condemnation, as well as transves­tism of either sex, long hair on males and other signs of effeminacy or softness, and masturbation. Romans 1:18-32, Titus 1:10, Timothy 1:10, and I Corinthians 6:9 all emphatically condemn male homosexu­ality.
Greek (and Coptic) Fathers. The earliest post-Biblical (non-canonical) Chris­tian homophobic writing that has been preserved, the Epistle of Barnabas, ex­plained that the Mosaic law declared the hare unclean because it stood for sodo­mites. The Acts ofPauland Thecla claimed that Paul demanded total renunciation of sex. The Acts of Andrew the Apostle told a lady that her renunciation of sex with her husband would repair the Fall. In the Acts of John Christ thrice dissuaded the apostle from marrying. By the mid-third century, the Acts of Thomas were enthusiastic about the sexless life. The Gnostic Gospel According to the Egyptians argued that Adam and Eve by introducing sex brought about death.
On returning to the Near East from Rome in 172, Tatian, a student of Justin Martyr (who had even approved another young man's wish to be castrated), enjoined chastity on all Christians. Many Syrian churches allowed only celibate males to be baptized. By the second and third centuries, certain heretics argued that marriage was Satanic. Marcionites de­scribed the body as a nest of guilt. The
Gospel According to the Egyptians had Jesus speak of paradise in which the sexes had not been differentiated. Libertine sects were exceptional in this period. Thus the second-century Alexandrian heretic Carpocrates' teen-aged son Epiphanes, who succeeded him as head of the sect, allowed women and goods to be held in common.
St. Clement(ca. 150-ca.215),who studied at Alexandria under Pantaenus, whom he succeeded as head of its cat­echetical school until he fled the persecu­tion of 202, combined the Gnostic belief that illumination brought perfection with the Platonic doctrine that ignorance rather than sin caused evil. Borrowing phrases from neo-Platonism and Stoicism, Clem­ent condemned homosexuality as contrary to nature and idealized a sexless marriage as between brother and sister. After him most Christians wrote far less positively of themarriedlife. Pseudo-Clement opined that one had to look far away to the
Sinae (to China) for a people who lived justly and moderately in sex and thus were not afflicted with famine or disease [Recognitions, 8, 48).
The learned Origen, prevented from seeking martyrdom by his mother in 202, succeeded Clement as head of the catechetical school in Alexandria. Fasts, vigils, and poverty he reinforced with self-castration, which he understood Matthew 19:12 as recommending. Deposed as head of the school, he left Alexandria in 231 for Caesarea, where he founded a rival school. He succumbed a few days after being re­leased from torture during the persecution of 250. Some of his many works, including commentaries on almost every book of the Bible emphasizing the allegorical interpre­tation open only to the enlightened, were destroyed after their condemnation in 400.
From 235 to 284 the "Thirty Tyrants" rapidly succeeded one another as emperors of Rome, only one dying peace­fully, to the accompaniment of invasions, plagues, and famines. These catastrophes undermined trade and cities' wealth, par­ticularly in the west, causing gymnasia, bathhouses, and symposia to diminish or fail. Thus these disasters undermined ped­erasty while driving the majority to seek salvation in Oriental mystery religions. In desperation several tyrants unleashed great persecutions against the scapegoat Christians.
In 257 St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, opined that the plague had the merit of letting Christian virgins die in­tact, but no Christian invoked medical arguments about the benefits of virginity or (as frequently among late pagan physi­cians) of moderation. The third-century forgeries made by a Syriac author but ascribed to St. Clement, bishop of Rome, worried about the abuses and perils from unmarried females besetting the celibate male virgin traveling from one commu­nity to another.
The Coptic St. Anthony (ca. 251 -356), father of Christian monasticism, gave away his inheritance at the age of 20 and devoted himself to asceticism, retir­ing first into a tomb and then in 285 into the desert, in both of which he fought with hordes of demons. When the Devil failed to seduce him alone in the guise of a woman, he reappeared as a black boy. Around 305 Anthony organized the com­munity of hermits he had attracted under a loose rule. He lent Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, who wrote St. Anthony's life, crucial support against a priest of Alexandria, Arius, founder of the greatest Trinitarian heresy. The end of the persecu­tions gave ascetics the glory formerly gained by martyrs for the faith and spawned Christian monasticism. Like St. Anthony, other anchorites found sexual desire the most difficult bodily urge to control and ordained severe fasts to weaken it. The success of monasticism increased the sexual negativism of the rest of the church.
Converted after his discharge from the army in 313, the Copt St. Pachomius (ca. 290-346) founded a monastery near the Nile in the Thebaid about 320. By his death he ruled over 9 such institutions for men and 2 for women as abbot general. His rule, the first for cenobites, influenced those of St. Basil, John Cassian, Caesarius of Aries, and Benedict, as well as that, anonymous, of "the Master." Pachomius said that "no monk may sleep on the mattress of another" (Ch. 40) or come closer to one another "whether sitting or standing" than one cubit (about 18 inches) when they had meals together. It was only about 500 in Gaul that a common dormi­tory was instituted in place of the solitary cells (Benedict, Ch. 22) after the old build­ing burned.
The Cappadocian Fathers defined orthodoxy and defended it against the Arian heresy in the mid-fourth century: Sts. Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. St. Basil the Great, brother of Greg­ory of Nyssa, forsook the world, having received a classical education in Con­stantinople and Athens, where he had been a fellow student with Julian the Apostate under the pagan rhetorician Libanius. After a stint with ascetics in Syria and Egypt, he settled as a hermit in Pontus, renewing his friendship with Gregory of Nazianzus, third of the Cappadocian fathers. In 370 Basil became bishop of Caesarea, a post earlier held by Eusebius, the friend and biogra­pher of emperor Constantine the Great and historian of the church (ca. 260-ca. 340). After 313, as a moderate Arian rather than a puritan, Eusebius advised Constantine's Arian sons, who first de­creed capital punishment for passive homosexuality in 342, two years after their mentor's death. Basil was much influenced by Origen, most brilliant of the theologi­ans of Alexandria, which remained an intellectual center even after Christians murdered Hypatia and began to burn books. Basil continued to fight the Arians and also composed the liturgy still used by the Eastern church. His monastic rule, though strict, eschewed the more extreme aus­terities of the hermits of the desert. As revised by St. Theodore of Studios (died 862), Basil's rule still regulates Orthodox monasteries.
First of the pillar ascetics, St. Simeon Stylites (ca. 390-459) lived on a column for about 40 years working mir­acles near Antioch. These "athletes for Christ" mortified the body more than any Olympic athlete improved his, but the lack of discipline of Simeon and other hermits, and scandals about them, encour­aged the growth of monasteries. In these, repression of homosexuality became an obsession.
With Eusebius, Athanasius, the Patriarch of Alexandria (who authored the Nicene Creed against the followers of Arius), and the Cappadocian fathers, John Chrysostom, the most influential of the Desert Fathers, closes the list of the most important Greek Fathers. He also set in motion the intensifying of Christian homophobia from Jesus' "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" to "How many hells shall be enough for such [sodo­mites] ?" in Homily IV on Romans 1:26-27, and to the assertion of Luca da Penne (ca. 1320-ca. 1390) that "sodomy is worse than murder" because the murderer seeks to destroy only a single human being, but the sodomite means to destroy the entire human race by frustrating its reproduction.
Latin Fathers. Spreading west­wards, the Church won its earliest con­verts among urban Jewish and Greek communities. All the early bishops of Rome were Greek. The long struggle with the synagogues, which St. Paul had begun in the heartland of Christendom, Asia Minor, continued in Rome and North Africa, leaving a stain of anti-Judaism in Christianity. Like the eastern churches, the western ones flourished in cities rather than in the countryside and drew non-Jewish or non-Greek converts more often from oppressed urban minorities: the poor, women, and slaves. The first surviving Christian writing in Latin was Tertullian's Apologeticum of 197. The Latin church was thus later than and modeled on the Greek, and the earliest translation of the Gospels or Epistles from Greek to Latin was done in North Africa at the end of the second century (the so-called Afra).
Just as Latin Christians borrowed anti-Judaism from Greeks, who had long clashed with them in Alexandria, as well as from Copts and Armenians, oppressed ethnic minorities in the east whose urban representatives turned early and eagerly to Christianity, they also borrowed ho­mophobia from the Jews which they reinforced with the hostility of Rome to effeminacy. The disapprobation of the an­cient Romans, which persisted under the Roman emperors, helped the Catholic Church to become even more homopho­bic than the Orthodox, which grew upon the more tolerant soil of ancient Greece.
Made head of the church in Lyons in 177 after the martyrdom of its bishop Pothinus, St. Irenaeus attacked Gnosti­cism, especially as advanced and practiced by Valentinus. Perhaps the most influen­tial Gnostic, Valentinus was said to rec­ommend free love for the "pneumatics," spiritual men freed from theLaw by
gnosis. Unlike his eastern contemporary Clement of Alexandria, who condemned sodomy as "against nature," a Greek concept, and brandished other Platonic arguments, Ire­naeus fought Gnosticism by emphasizing tradition, the canon of Scriptures, and the episcopate.
Reared a pagan in Carthage and educated in liberal arts and law, Tertullian, father of Latin theology, converted in 197 but eventually joined the Montanist sect. His apologies and controversial and ascetic tracts were written in Latin and occasionally in Greek. He rebutted accu­sations of immorality, including homo­sexuality and cannibalism. Ironically, Christians were soon to hurl these charges against heretics. Tertullian demanded separation from pagan society to escape its immorality and idolatry. He may have edited the
Passion of Saints Pcrpetua and Felicitas, whose virginity he made central. Following Irenaeus in stressing tradition and attacking the Valentinians, he pes­simistically dwelt on the Fall and original sin. Eschatological expectations led him to asceticism and perfectionism. In the 220s in De pudicitia, as a Montanist he condemned Pope Callistus' and a bishop of Carthage's laxity toward sexual sinners, urging a legalistic system of rewards and punishments. He probably used a Latin version of the Bible and, though influ­enced by Stoicism, stressed the literal and historical interpretation of revelation. Another Latin author, probably Novatian, wrote about 250: "Virginity makes itself equal to the angels."
Son of the Pretorian Prefect of Gaul, St. Ambrose, after practicing law and beinggovernor, became bishop of Milan in 374. First of the four Latin "Doctors of the Church" with Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great, this famous preacher and upholder of orthodoxy against pagans and Arians converted St. Augustine in 386. A familiar of emperors, as Bishop of Milan, which had replaced Rome as the Western capital, Ambrose upheld the indepen­dence of the church and made Theodosius the Great, who in 390 issued the second imperial law ordering death for homosexu­ality, do penance for a massacre at Thessalonica. Knowing the works of Cicero and other Latin thinkers, as well as Greek Christians, many of whose ideas he intro­duced to westerners, Ambrose wrote a treatise on clerical ethics,
De Officiis, which encouraged asceticism and Italian monasticism.
After studying at Rome, St. Jer­ome devoted himself to asceticism with friends in his native Aquilea. In 374 he departed for Palestine but tarried at Antioch for further study before retreating as a hermit to the Syrian desert for 4 or 5 years, during which he learned Hebrew. Back in Rome, he was secretary to Pope Damasus, who ordered him to revise the Latin text of the Bible on the basis of the Hebrew and Greek originals. Finally settling in a monastery in Bethlehem, Jerome dedicated his life to study. The best patristic scholar, he produced many commentaries on the books of the Bible, of which his Latin version became authoritative in the West­ern church (in a late medieval edition known as the Vulgate). Attacking here­tics, he advised extreme asceticism in
Against Helvidius and Against Jovinian.
He asserted that "Christ and Mary were both virgins, and this consecrated the pattern of virginity for both sexes."
St.
Augustine, who towered over all the Greek and Latin fathers, developed doctrines that held sway throughout the Dark Ages, were challenged and modified by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, but revived again by Protestant­ism in the sixteenth century. Leaning heavily on the Old Testament and rejecting Manichaeanism to which Augustine had once adhered, he taught that all non-procreative modes of sexual gratification were wrong because pleasure was their sole object.
St. Benedict of Nursia withdrew from the licentiousness at Rome, where he was educated, for a cave at Subiaco. He organized the monks attracted to his her­mitage into twelve monasteries but in 525 moved to Monte Cassino where the "Pa­triarch of Western Monasticism" com­posed his rule by altering and shortening "The Rule of the Master" and also drawing freely upon those of Sts. Basil, John Cassian, and Augustine. Chapter 22 of his Rule prescribed that monks should sleep in separate beds, clothed and with lights burning in the dormitory; the young men were not to sleep next to one another but separated by the cots of elders.
From a noble family that fled Cartagena when it was destroyed by the Arian Goths, St. Isidore (d. 636), who had entered a monastery ca. 589, succeeded his brother as Archbishop of Seville in 600. Presiding over several councils in Visigothic Spain, the only Germanic realm whose laws punished homosexual acts, he founded schools and convents and tried to convert Jews. His often fanciful
Etymolo­gies (such as miles quia nil moile faciat, "miles [soldier] because he does nothing moile [effeminate]") became the encyclo­pedia of the Dark Ages. In his theological writings, Isidore borrowed from Augustine and Gregory the Great, condemning non-procreative sexuality and approving mar­riage hesitantly and solely for the beget­ting of children.
Adopted
in toto from such Helle­nistic Jewish authors as Philo Judaeus and Flavius Josephus, the homophobia of the early fathers was never contradicted or opposed by any Christian thinker accepted as an authority by later generations. The Third Lateran Council in 1179 prescribed for sodomitical clerics only degradation or penitential confinement in a monastery. This was carried out according to canon law, but secular legislation under clerical influence usually prescribed burning alive. Gratian in the Decretals devoted little space to homosexual and other "unnatu­ral" sex acts but clearly considered such sins more heinous than fornication or adultery. The final triumph of homopho­bic thought and practice within the West­ern church occurred only in the thirteenth century, when at the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III (1215) the Church attained its all-time height of power and influence over European society. From the close of the century onward, all expres­sion of homosexual feeling and activity was forbidden and penalized not just by criminal sanctions, but by ostracism and social infamy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, New York: Knopf, 1987; Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, New York: Random House, 1988.
William A. Percy

Pederasty
Pederasty is the erotic relation­ship between an adult male and a boy, generally one between the ages of twelve and seventeen, in which the older partner is attracted to the younger one who re­turns his affection, whether or not the liaison leads to overt sexual contact. It is probably the most characteristic, if not normative, form of male homosexual rela­tionship in the majority of human socie­ties throughout history, though not in Western Europe and North America in modern times.
In contemporary writings on the subject of age-asymmetrical relationships there is an increasing tendency to merge pederasty into a larger context of pedo­philia, comprising all adult-child relation­ships. Although it is common today, this trend has the disadvantage of suggesting that the adolescent partner in a pederastic relationship is a child, with all the conno­tations of vulnerability and innocence that such a term conveys. However this may be, it is best to examine the phenomenon, at least initially, in a nonjudgmental manner.
There is also reason to consider the attraction to young men of ages roughly eighteen to twenty-one as a separate phe­nomenon, termed ephebophilia.
Phenomenology. In tribal and premodern societies pederasty occurred chiefly as a form of initiation into the world of male adulthood through sexual intimacy between the older partner who serves as patron, protector, and mentor, and the younger, who is the pupil or protege. Like marriage, the pederastic relationship may assimilate the junior partner to the status of the senior one, may incorporate him into the structure of a society domi­nated by aristocratic families and their clients and servitors. In terms of psycho­logical functioning, the liaison can allow the younger male to experience sexuality in a nonprocreative mode (the "homosex­ual phase"), as it were a "dry run," before he masters the heterosexual aggressive­ness of adult rmnhood, and at the same time to erotici , the tasks of the mature male in such a way that they are experi­enced not as a chore and a burden, but in a context of sexual pleasure and fulfillment. It also allows the older individual to trans­mit his cultural identity to the younger one in a manner paralleling the bequest of genetic identity through marriage and fatherhood.
Traditionally, the pederast begins to lose sexual interest in his adolescent partner with the first signs of the growth of the beard. Some modern pederasts also report aversion to the inception of adult male pheromones, the "man scent" that the boy still lacks. Finally, some are erotically concerned with the hip-shoulder ratio, which is more nearly equal in the willowy adolescent youth than in the well-developed adult male with his V-chest configuration. Choosing adults as his sex­ual objects, the androphile typically likes prominent pectorals; the pederast does not.
In its most archaic forms, ped­erasty was an outgrowth of the comrade­ship in arms of warrior societies in which the older male instructed the younger in the arts of combat and self-defense. Even now in many primitive cultures the rite of passage into manhood entails pederastic activity that is obligatory for every mem­ber of the tribe. This aspect of pederasty is in itself a proof of the capacity for homo­sexual arousal and activity that is part of the macroevolutionary heritage of homo sapiens. Pederasty has also flourished in a number of high cultures, including ancient Greece, medieval Islam, Japan, and Korea.
Ancient Greece. The most cele­brated model of man-boy relationship is the paiderasteia of the ancient Greeks, whose culture was thoroughly permeated by the institution. The pederastic element in Hellenic culture was part of the whole system of paideia, the education that is intended to make a boy a good soldier, a good father, a good citizen, a good states­man - to endow him with the combina­tion of qualities which Greek civilization cherished and admired in the adult. While the Greeks practiced several varieties of pederasty, a particularly admired form was that of Sparta with its military culture; Plutarch's life of Lycurgus mentions edicts of that archetypal lawgiver to the effect that a man was obligated to form such a union, and that a boy was disgraced if he could not find an honorable lover who was in turn held responsible for his conduct on the battlefield. The actual origins of the pederastic institution in Greece are lost in the mists of prehistory. At the point that our sources allow us to monitor the phe­nomenon (the sixth century b.c.), pederasty flourished in the Greek city-states with varying degrees of emphasis on the con­tent of the ethical/educational basis, from mere athletic prowess to training for lead­ership in the boy's later public career.
The myth of the abduction of Ganymede by Zeus served as the proto­type of such a relationship, which was commemorated in Crete by a symbolic ravishment of the youth who then spent two months in the house of his lover, finally being sent home with legally pre­scribed gifts symbolic of the liaison. Such an attachment supplemented the rather limited content of the education imparted in school, which was confined to rotelearning reinforced by severe discipline. The principal concern of the Greeks was that the youth should choose a worthy lover and ever after be faithful and devoted to him, instead of engaging in the selfish conduct typical of the kept boy or "hus­tler" of today. It is worthy of note that a slave could not be a pederast, just as he could not contract a legal marriage: the older party had to be a free citizen who could inspire the boy to perform his duties to the city-state in an outstanding manner.
The aesthetic emphasis in ped­erasty, then and now, was on the ephemeral, androgynous quality of the youth that is lost the moment he crosses the developmental threshold of manhood - the negative event to which the Greek poets devote no little attention. The tran­sient "bloom"
(anihos) of the adolescent is a union of male and female beauties, a work of Eros and an object of adoration. The pederast, it should be stressed, has no interest in proselytizing for androphile (adult-adult) homosexuality,- he is nor­mally repelled by adult males and has no wish to be the object of their sexual atten­tion. It is solely the charm of the youth in his mid-teens that attracts and captivates him.
While allusions to pederasty are found in many of the surviving works of Greek literature (distinct from the clearly negative attitude toward effeminacy in the plays of Aristophanes), the largest single collection of such writings is the twelfth book of the Greek Anthology, the so-called
Musa paidike (Boy-Love Muse) of Strato of Sardis, who lived in the middle of the second century of the present era. The 250 poems of this work - and others scattered throughout the Anthology - reveal the customs of pederasty down to the smallest detail. It is remarkable that in the face of this unambiguous evidence - supple­mented by the countless works of art consecrated to the beauty of the adoles­cent male - some recent authors have tried to claim that the "boy" (pais] of Greek literature was the adult male courted by the homosexual of today.
As known to us in literary sources, the Greek institution presents pederasty in a particularly elaborate form, with not only aesthetic and personalistic dimen­sions, but also those of state-building and military preparedness. Because of the last­ing prestige of Greek civilization this type of pederasty has continued to occupy schol­arly attention, though modern sensibili­ties sometimes present it in an altered version that is not true to the historic reality. Still the Greek phenomenon, however misunderstood, has been a tracer element revealing the permutations of the Western tradition of male same-sex love.
Cross-Cultural Manifestations. Comparative study discloses many socie­ties in which the principal homosexual love object for males is the adolescent boy. The Far East provides the closest parallels to the elaborated form of Greece. In Korea in the first millennium the hwarang were pages chosen for their beauty and military prowess alike. In Japan the samurai class, arising in the late twelfth century, fostered an idealized love between the older war­rior and his young protege. There are many accounts of one partner dying to preserve the other's honor. Japanese Buddhism also permitted the admission of young novices who became the lovers of older priests. In China a more aesthetic variety of ped­erasty flourished, and there are a number of accounts of royal favorites, as well as everyday boy prostitution. The seclusion of women in Islamic countries led to an almost universal diffusion of boy love. Yet only in some regions of that civilization - as in Mamluk Egypt and modern Afghani­stan - did the practice take on a military and state-building character.
Evidence from tribal cultures, though often obscured by inadequate re­ports, suggests that several modes approxi­mating pederasty were prevalent. In New Guinea, as among other Pacific cultures where the matter has been carefully stud­ied, a number of tribes believe that younger boys can become men only if their bodies are "primed" through the ingestion or insertion of the semen of older partners. In most cases the active partners seem them­selves to be boys in their late teens, who were then expected to marry and lead a totally heterosexual life. A participant may be a receiver one year and the giver the next. Thus this initiatory homosexuality fits the pederastic pattern somewhat imperfectly, since the sexual connection is not truly intergenerational.
Modern Perspectives. The domi­nance of androphilia, the erotic relation between two post-adolescent males, is of comparatively recent origin, emerging among the Germanic-Celtic populations of northwestern Europe. Its characteristic subculture - the bars, bathhouses, and similar trysting places that flourish in the anonymity of the large city - lacks the educational/initiatory function of ped­erasty. The merits attaching to the latter are, however, the theme of much tradi­tional apologetic literature on behalf of homosexuality. In harking back to ancient Greece, the androphile advocate of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries ap­pealed to the glories of a tradition which his own culture did not share or continue. As a recurring trait of Western civiliza­tion, Neo-classicism involves much edit­ing and refashioning of the Hellenic sources. Such adaptive changes are usu­ally ignored by the modern Hellenist, who insists that he is following the ancient models with complete fidelity. The evoca­tion of Greek pederasty has not been immune to this process of adaptation and idealization - a process that makes it diffi­cult to understand the character of ancient and modern pederasty alike. Ironically, Western civilization ultimately derived its negative official attitude toward homo­sexuality from the "evil empire" with which the Greeks had to wage their heroic wars - the Persia that had Zoroastrianism as its state religion. As a client-ethnos living under Persian rule, the Jews adopted an antihomosexual moral code which they exported in the guise of Christianity to the Greco-Roman world that had tolerated if not glorified pederasty.
The modern pederast suffers from the double obloquy that is visited not just upon the homosexual, but also upon the age-asymmetrical relationship in which he is implicated. From the very outset of the modern homophile movement, its leaders sought to distance themselves from the pederast (not without criticism, for example, from the Youth Committee of the North American Conference of Homo­phile Organizations at its 1969 conven­tion), even urging an age of consent so high as to exclude the boy-lover from any bene­fit accruing from the law reform which was their goal. Hence the pederastically oriented part of the movement has had to found its own organizations, beginning with the
Gemeinschaft der Eigenen [Community of the Exceptional) in Wilhelmine Germany, and create its own literature. The first writer of note in this field was the anarchist John Henry Mackay, who from 1905 onward under the pseudonym of Sagitta composed a whole series of works (Die Bucher der namenlosen Liebe) in defense of man-boy love. Others who defended the pederastic tradition were Adolf Brand and Benedict Friedlaender, and to a lesser extent Hans Bliiher, who laid stress upon the role of homoerotic ties in what he called the "male society," as opposed to the family with its basis in procreative heterosexuality. He singled out the Wandervogelbewegung (the German equivalent of the Boy Scout movement) as a modern expression and institutionaliza­tion of the initiatory relationship.
In the English-speaking world the pederastic ideal inspired a whole coterie of minor poets in Late Victorian England (the Calamites), where the public school had a curiously pederastic ambience that under­cut the official taboo. But the first major treatment of the subject was
J. Z. Eglinton's Greek Love (1964) which, in contrast to the defense of homosexuality "between consenting adults" that followed the pub­lication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957, reasserted the right of the pederast to the love-object of his choice and affirmed the value of the man-boy relationship in modern society. In Italy, the Netherlands, West Germany, and other countries, ped­erasts have formed their own groups, sepa­rate from the androphile organizations that dominate the gay movement at the pres­ent day. Yet even if the pederast cherishes the aristocratic ideal of being the lover and mentor of a promising youth, he remains obliged to live in a furtive, clandestine, semi-criminal subculture, hiding his at­tachments with chance partners from the prying eyes of the neighbors and the po­lice. Although the police may no longer prosecute androphile homosexuals, they can still engage in frequently questionable tactics to deliver the pederast to courts that can impose draconian sentences for what is consensual behavior, if the adoles­cent has not yet reached the artificially high "age of consent."
It is also a curious fact that indi­viduals attracted to prepubescent chil­dren - pedophiles in the narrow sense - have tried to ally themselves with ped­erasts, as if to claim shelter under the ideological umbrella of pederasty that historically excluded them, since the man-boy relationship was strictly defined by the membership of the latter in the appropriate age cohort. This conflation has even led to the demand for abolition of all age-of-consent laws, a step which would presumably sanction heterosexual pedo­philia as well - the activity that provokes the maximum of public condemnation and censure. By and large, organizations with such an impractical program have been rejected by the mainstream homosexual-rights movement and excluded from its coalitions.
Modern society has yet to make the effort to understand the historical and phenomenological significance of ped­erasty as a mode of human behavior. Having accorded a grudging tolerance to andro­phile homosexuality, public opinion would still deny it to the boy-lover, ostensibly in the interest of the younger partner. Al­though genuine ethical questions do arise, much confusion has stemmed from equat­ing intergenerational sexual relations with child abuse per
se, and the latter with physical mistreatment and neglect. The resolution, if at all possible, of the entire complex of issues - empirical and politi­cal - will be a task for future decades.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Prits Bernard, Paedo­philia: A Factual Report, Rotterdam: Enclave Press, 1985; Edward Brongersma, Loving Boys, New York: Global Academic Publishers, 1986; Felix Buffière, Eros adolescent; la pédérastie dans la Grèce antique, Paris: Société d'édition "Les Belles Lettres," 1980,- J. Z. Eglinton, Greek Love, New York: Oliver Layton Press, 1964; Hans Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932; Parker Rossman, Sexual Experience between Men and Boys; Exploring the Pederast Underground, New York: Association Press, 1976,- Theo Sandfort, Boys on Their Contacts with Men: A Study of Sexually Expressed Relationships, New York: Global Academic Publishers, 1987.
Warren Johansson

Pedophilia
This article refers to mutually consensual affective relationships betwen adults, on the one hand, and pre-pubertal children, those undergoing puberty, and adolescents, on the other, occurring out­side the family, and which include a sex­ual component. The adult participant in such a relationship is termed a pedophile by the authors. While various forms of such relationships (distinct from those within the family, which are properly incest), with various social meanings, have existed throughout history and world­wide, the term "p[a]edophilia" was first used in English only as recently as 1906, by Havelock Ellis. It had previously ap­peared as a specific form of sexual pathol­ogy in a German article of 1896 by Richard von Kafft-Ebing.
Because the term "pedophilia" originated in a medical context and today connotes disease, efforts have been made to replace it. Pederasty is sometimes used as a synonym, or as a term restricted to post-pubescent adolescents, but in the present writers' view, it should properly be restricted to the Greek custom it origi­nally designated, which, though a form of pedophilia as we understand it, is not congruent with it. Apologists for homo­sexual relations with adolescents who seek to separate "pederasty" from "pedophilia" in hopes that the former might share the social tolerance gained by and r op
hile (adult-male-to-adult-male eroticism) homosexuality, and who appeal to the Greek model for support, err in their un­derstanding of it, for these relationships often began before the boy entered pu­berty. The earlier average age for puberty within the last century also means that classical texts (and even more recent ones) which speak of relations with mid-teenage boys were not necessarily referring to sexually mature individuals. (The term ephebophile has been used to describe erotic attraction to boys in their late teens, who are considered adults in many if not all cultures.) Similar problems are encoun­tered with the expression "Greek love." "Man/boy love," which posits a symme­try in the relationship and stresses its affective nature, refers to only one variant of pedophilia (the homosexual one), and for that reason is rejected by those who seek terminology inclusive of man/girl, woman/boy, and woman/girl (or "korophile") relationships. "Child molestation" or "abuse," terms current in the media, and in psychological and legal discourse, are neither descriptive of the phenome­non, nor value-free, as academic discourse requires.
That variant of pedophilia occuring between men and boys - male homosexual pedophilia - will be the chief focus of this article. This choice is dictated by several considerations, including the context of the article, the dearth of re­search on korophile relationships, and the fact that until very recently man/boy rela­tionships were accepted as a part, and indeed were a major part, of male homo­sexuality.
Comparative Perspectives. Before beginning a cross-cultural survey of male homosexual pedophilia, Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg's thesis ("The Paedophile Impulse," Paidika 1 /3, Winter 1988) about the etiology of pedophilia should be men­tioned. Based on her survey of animal behavior studies and anthropological lit­erature, she proposes that pedophilia might be considered a remnant, more evident in some persons than others, of the instinct to nurture and protect the young of the species, which in human development has come to serve an educational (including sex-educational) or initiatory purpose in some societies. The attempt to root pedo­philia in man's biological inheritance is controversial, but a cross-cultural survey of man/boy pedophilia at least suggests that it is a universal phenomenon, which,
when accepted by a society, generally carries a socially constructed meaning related to the acculturation process for boys.
Several studies of the Melanesian societies of the Pacific describe the role played by institutionalized sexual rela­tions between pubertal boys and the man or men responsible for the boys' prepara­tion for initiation into full participation in these societies. Several of these societies believe that without receiving the man's semen through fellatio the boy cannot physically mature.
In pre-modern Japan, among the Samurai warriors, knights took boys as pages and trained them in their ideology and military arts. The popular literature of the day idealized such relationships, which included a sexual component.
A military pattern similar to that of the Samurai was found in Central Africa among the Azande, where warriors took boy-wives who accompanied them during military campaigns, and were in return trained and provided with military equip­ment by the man upon their "graduation" to adult status in the late teens.
In the above instances, where pedophilia exists in relation to education, initiation or acculturation for boys, it is generally not an exclusive sexual orienta­tion for the adult, but co-exists with the fulfillment of marriage and family respon­sibilities. In other societies, including our own, man/boy relationships - not sanc­tioned by the society and viewed with various degrees of intolerance - reflect affective choices of the individuals in­volved. These relationships may have a generalized educational function, but can be constructed around companionship, substitute parenting, recreation, or simply sexual pleasure. While for some of these pedophiles these relationships do not exclude marriage and family responsibili­ties, where pedophilia is a personal rather than a socially sanctioned phenomenon, for a higher percentage it will be their only form of sexual contact.
Man/boy pedophile relationships have taken many forms in Islam, includ­ing religious significance among the Sufis. Arabic, Persian, and Urdu literature con­tain a rich tradition of man/boy love in both sacred and secular forms.
The West. Western cultural tradi­tions were heavily influenced by ancient Greece, a society in which man/boy love was the normative form of male homo­sexuality. Classical scholars, examining the oldest strata of Greek mythology, have established that Greek pederasty originated in a situation where a man was responsible for preparing the boy to fulfill his adult civic and military responsibilities, through a relationship which involved both educa­tional functions and sexual activity. After the initial military necessity for the prac­tice receded, it remained a central cultural institution; the role it played, the social system surrounding it, and its influence on Greek art and thought have been amply documented. Although relations between males of the same generation existed - what Bernard Sergent calls "Homeric love" and defines as "homosexuality in all but name" - man/boy relationships were clearly the dominant form of same-sex relations, and rhetorical criticism of or comic attacks on individuals who per­sisted in such relations beyond the cultur­ally sanctioned age limits make it clear that androphile (adult-adult) relations were dimly regarded.
Pederastic traditions remained influential through Hellenistic and Ro­man times, though freer from educational goals and more oriented to pleasure. It is symptomatic of this shift that while by law in Greece only free-born boys, who could attain citizenship, could be the younger partner in a relationship, in late Roman times it was illegal for a free-born boy to be the object of the relationship. Yet, as shown by the case of Hadrian and Antinous(arelationship which began when the boy was eleven or twelve), man/boy relationships retained much of their vigor and meaning as late as the first two centuries of the Christian era. As the function of same-sex relationships increasingly became hedonistic, the age limits broke down: we find increasing references to homosexuality between men (particularly in the satiric poets, who make it clear that this was still scorned) and, to a lesser extent, to the sexual use of very young children.
By the beginning of the Middle Ages a pattern of pedophilia was in place which remained until rather recent times. Despite strong attempts of the church, and later, at the behest of the church, of civil law, to suppress all homosexuality, man/ boy relationships continued to exist both in forms reflecting the Greek pederastic model (attested in medieval Latin poetry written to their pupils by Alcuin, Hilary, Baudri, and other monastic figures), and in relationships outside of lofty educational contexts, often between masters and ap­prentices. That the latter remained a fre­quent form of male homosexuality among common people, coexisting with androphile relations, is demonstrated by the persistence of legal charges involving such activity on into the nineteenth century, in Venice, the Netherlands, and England and its maritime empire.
During the Renaissance, the cul­ture temporarily became more open to pedophile relationships. The symbol of Ganymede in literature and art reflects this development. Re-entering European culture with the rediscovery of the clas­sics, both love between men and boys and the Ganymede image burst forth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, appear­ing in the work of such varied figures as Michelangelo, Correggio, Parmigianino, and Cellini in Italy, and Richard Barnfield and Christopher Marlowe in Tudor Eng­land. By the time the symbol lost its power by the end of the seventeenth century, there had been a flowering of boy imagery in the work of artists including Pontormo, Caravaggio, and the Flemish sculptor Jer6me Duquesnoy. That Ganymede was more than an artistic convention is shown by the number of artists who were charged with sodomy with boys, especially their studio assistants. Histories of the Renais­sance record similar charges involving popes, poets, and nobles.
The Romantic Movement. A "Grecian" ideal of friendship, as inter­preted by the German idealists, also influ­enced the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twenti­eth centuries. In addition to the cult of friendship between males, the movement's orientalism also exhibited strong pedophilic influences.
Although also found in androphile figures, these currents were expressed by, among others, Lord Byron, with his rela­tions with young teenagers. William Beckford was ostracized from society for the scandal of his relationship with Wil­liam Courtenay, commencing when the boy was eleven.
André Gide, although today regarded as androphile, is revealed in his diaries as a pedophile. Stefan George, a Symbolist poet, was leader of an aesthetic cult centered around the fourteen-year-old Maximin. The pioneer photographers Wilhelm Baron von Gloeden, whose im­agery was not restricted to adult male nudes, and F. Holland Day both produced highly romanticized images of boys.
Besides individuals there were the circles of writers and artists, such as the Uranian poets in England, the circle that produced
Men and Boys (America's first anthology of homosexual poetry), and the circle around Adolf Brand's magazine Der Eigene, all of which included androphiles and pedophiles alike. ; Between 1880 and 1920 there was a flowering of boy imagery in painting and sculpture, including work by H. S. Tuke, Lord Leighton, Georges Minne, Charles Filiger, Ferdinand Hodler, Joaquin Sorolla, and Elisàr von Kupff er. In education, pedo­philia contributed to the formulation of pedagogical eros, with its discussion of the role of a m an's erotic love in nurturing and educating boys. Perhaps symbolic of the destruction of all of the Romantic notions of "friendship" by the growing intellec­tual and political power of forensic medi­cine and its theories of sexual pathology was the 1920 trial of the German educator Gustav Wyneken. He and his supporters defended his actions as expressions of Pedagogical Eros, based on cultural mod­els, but the trial ended in his conviction for sexual indecency, based on the medical model.
Activism. Arising within the Romantic movement, but in sharp con­trast to it, was "Sagitta," John Henry Mackay, the German anarchist, poet, and propagandist for man/boy love in his Bucher der Namenlose Liebe ¡1913). Re­fusing to drape his love in a toga, Mackay's was the first voice to speak for liberation for "the love of the older male for the younger" (and, by extension, of all sexual orientations) in political terms, and for its own sake, rather than offering any cultural justifications. Although his publications were suppressed, and it would be half a century before pedophiles began to organ­ize as pedophiles, his work prefigured present pedophile activism.
The homosexual movement has had an ambiguous relation to pedophile activism. On the one hand, since Mackay's time it has served as an inspiration for pedophiles and, in both the Netherlands and pre-Stonewall America, provided a supportive context; in 1969, the Youth Committee of the North American Con­ference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO), chaired by Stephen Donaldson, issued a manifesto calling for the elimina­tion of all age-of-consent limitations, though the adults at the NACHO plenary session rejected it. On the other hand, there has been a tendency on the part of some "respectable" homosexual leaders to sacrifice and denounce pedophiles for political goals. It has been particularly obvious in contemporary American gay politics, but present from the earliest days in Magnus Hirschfeld's efforts, denounced by Mackay, to trade an age of consent for legalization of adult homosexuality. This rejection has served to spur independent pedophile organizing.
Among the earliest separate pe­dophile organizing attempts were those in the Netherlands, beginning in the late 1950s, a decade later developing into still ongoing national and local workgroups for pedophiles and the sexual emancipation of youth within the Netherlands Associa­tion for Sexual Reform, and the Vereniging Martijn, with its information and support publication
O.K. (Ouderen-kinderen-relaties). Similar groups have been formed in Scandinavia, West Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. The North American Man/ Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), formed in response to prosecutions and hysteria in Boston in 1978, has been successful in fighting off attempts by American authori­ties to suppress it, and continues to pub­lish its Bulletin and to organize. Other groups were less fortunate. The Pedophile Information Exchange (P.I.E.), organized in England in 1974, was crushed by vicious press attacks and the conviction and imprisonment of its leaders for conspiring to corrupt public morals, and disbanded in 1985.
Incarcerated pedophiles continue to be subject to coercive procedures to alter their sexual interest or reduce its level. Although surgical castration is no longer employed, chemical dosages and aversion therapy may be used without the subject's consent.
Research Perspectives. Much of the "research" that exists on pedophilia today reflects a predetermination that adult-child sexual contacts are evil or pathological, and merely documents the point of view with which the authors began. There has been no lack of evidence by which such negative pre-suppositions could be supported, because in the same way that studies of homosexuality until quite recently were limited by the source of their research subjects, resulting in a portrayal of homosexuals as criminal, troubled, and unhappy, most studies of pedophilia examine only cases which have come before either courts or psychiatriasts, precisely those where the subjects are most under stress or disturbed. In many countries, research into pedophile rela­tionships under other circumstances is legally impossible: if a researcher should find a healthy, quietly functioning rela­tionship he or she would be required to report it for prosecution under "child protection" laws. These factors, plus the sensationalism surrounding the topic, assure that much of what is written on the subject is, and will continue to be, worthless.
The first multi-disciplinary study in English of pedophilia was J. Z. Eglinton's
Greek Love |New York: Oliver Lay ton Press, 1964). As indicated by the title, the author views man/boy relation­ships in light of the Greek model, and the book is limited by a "pederast" politics that defends relationships with teenagers while declining to consider them for younger boys. Nonetheless, it remains the starting point for study of the cultural history of pedophilia, and a vital source of information. The fullest edition of Frits Bernard's study Pedophilia is available in German [Kinderschdnderl Padophilie - von der Liebe mit Kindern, Berlin: Foerster, 1982); the Dutch original was not updated, and the English version (Rotter­dam: Enclave, 1985) is only a summary. His study concentrates on the psychologi­cal dimensions of the phenomenon, with attention to both partners. Parker Rossman's sociological study Sexual Ex­perience Between Men and Boys (New York: Association Press, 1976) is less aca­demically rigorous and more popular in its presentations; it is however reliable and far superior to other popular books by Banis or Dodson. In Dutch, Monique Moeller's Pedofielerelaties (Deventer: van Loghum Slaterus, 1983) is a fair and thor­ough sociological treatment. The first volume of Edward Brongersma's Loving Boys (Amsterdam: Global Academic, 1986), like Eglinton's book, is as much a defense as a study, and has the largest bibliography to date, which provides starting points for further study. Though his conclusions about "sickness" seem gratuitous, Morris Fraser's Death of Narcissus (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1976) is a perceptive Jungian analysis of images and themes in pedophile literature. Kenneth Plummer's article "Pedophilia: Constructing a Socio­logical Baseline" (in Adult Sexual Interest in Children, M. Cook and K. Howells, eds., London: Academic Press, 1981) reviews the sources available at the time and ar­gues for an assessment of pedophilia free from prejudice and stereotyping. Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia, which began publication in Amsterdam in 1987, is a scholarly, cultural magazine examining the phenomenon from the perspective of various disciplines.
Three studies of pedophiles which are both academically rigorous and value-free can be recommended. In Dutch, there is Monica Pieterse's
Pedofielen over Pedofilie (Zeist: NISSO, 1982), a survey-study of the background and attitudes of a sample of Dutch pedophiles, including women. The Child Lovers, by G. D. Wilson and D. N. Cox (London: Owen, 1983), was the result of personality tests administered to 77 English pedophiles contacted through P.I.E. They found that the men were not notably more neurotic or psychotic than any other sample of the general popula­tion; nevertheless, their conclusion, based on "moral considerations," is that pedo­philia should be suppressed. Australian sociologist Paul Wilson is author of The Man They Called a Monster (North Ryde, New South Wales: Cassell, 1981), a study of the case history of Clarence Osborne, a 61-year-old court clerk who committed suicide upon public exposure of his more than two thousand sexual contacts with boys, which he had thoroughly docu­mented. After studying Osborne's history and relationships, and interviewing some of the boys - now adults - Wilson con­cludes that the condemnation that drove Osborne to suicide was entirely unwar­ranted.
In addition to Dr. Bernard's work, there are two major sources dealing with the experience of the younger partner in pedophile relationships. The work of the Dutch social psychologist Theo Sandfort, presented in
The Sexual Aspect of Pedo­phile Relations (Amsterdam Pan/Spartacus, 1981) and Boys on their Contacts with Men (Amsterdam: Global Academic, 1987), collects and analyzes the attitudes of 25 boys during their participation in pedophile relationships. R. H. Tindall's "The Male Adolescent Involved With a Pederast Becomes an Adult" [fournal of Homosexuality 3:4 [1978]) presents data from longitudinal studies. Though the evidence assembled by these sources is slim, they establish that these relation­ships can be, both at the time and in retrospect, considered consensual, and of­ten beneficial, by the younger partner, and disprove the assumption that such rela­tionships are invariably harmful in either the short or long term. The latter conclu­sion is supported by "The Effects of Early Sexual Experiences," by L. L. Constantine (in Children and Sex, Constantine and F. M. Martinson, eds., Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), a survey of literature concerning childhood sexual experiences (including incest), in which he notes that many stud­ies have reported neutral or even positive reactions to intergenerational sexual ex­periences, and suggests that the positive evaluations correlate with the degree of mutuality and voluntariness of the child's participation.
Issues. A number of themes recur in debates about pedophilia. Several obvi­ously involve issues the significance of which is not limited to pedophilia.
It is generally recognized that the possibility for adults to have sexual rela­tionships with children is dependent on the right of children to make choices about expressing their sexuality. Pedophile or­ganizations have linked their arguments to support of the rights of children. While emphasizing that these rights most cer­tainly include the power to say no to any unwanted sexual contact as well as the opportunity to say yes to contacts children desire, some groups go further than others in espousing a broad range of children's liberation issues.
Related to the question of legal rights for children is the issue of the child's consent in pedophile relationships. Those speaking for the protection of children frequently assert that children are inca­pable of consenting to such sexual rela­tionships, sometimes justifying this asser­tion by the child's lack of experience or knowledge of long-range consequences of an act. It has been answered that children can and do consent, or at least are quite capable of rejecting experiences they find distasteful, and that the proper response is to empower children to be able to say no effectively. This impasse raises the issue of what consent means - freedom to ref­use, simple assent, or an "informed" con­sent that is probably not realized in most human relationships. Closely related to this is the issue of power, and the assertion that the power imbalance between the adult and the younger partner in a pedo­phile relationship is so great that it inevi­tably leads to coercion and exploitation. Various responses have been made: either that the power imbalance is not so clear-cut as the critics state, particularly citing the power of the child to terminate the relationship; or that while power imbal­ances are inherent in all human relation­ships, they do not necessarily lead to ex­ploitation, but can be used for benevolent ends, and the real issue is not the power imbalance but the use of power.
"Child pornography" is the sharp­est point of attack on pedophilia and pedo­philes. Included in this attack are the imputation that children are always abused in the production of such images, and the fear that such images will stimulate the abuse of children. It has been shown that this issue has been exploited for political purposes, and the statistics on the amount of such material exaggerated beyond pro­portion. Despite rhetoric, it has not been demonstrated that any more connection exists between pedophilia and child por­nography than between any other sexual­ity and its pornography: either to show that pedophiles are more likely to create or use pornography than other persons, or that child pornography encourages sexual contacts with children. Indeed, the Kutschinsky study of the Danish experience with pornography, which has never been refuted, demonstrated that sexual assaults on children declined with the availability of pornography. Pedophiles who have re­sponded to this issue have noted that there is no reason that depictions of children nude or even engaged in sexual actions should be any more or less objectionable than such depictions of adults, and argue that the true issue, as with all pornogra­phy, is whether coercion actually is em­ployed in making it.
The issues of child prostitution and the sexual exploitation of children in Third World countries have also been used to attack pedophiles and, by implication, pedophilia. Once it is acknowledged that pedophiles are by no means the only per­sons who engage in "sex tourism" or pa­tronize prostitutes, the debate again seems to resolve itself into issues of power and consent. A defense has been offered that the right of self-determination in sexual behavior for the individual choosing pros­titution should apply here. Poverty, how­ever, may diminish the individual free­dom of choice in these situations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY (in addition to references in the text). Tom O'Carroll, Paedophilia: The Radical Case, London: Peter Owen, 1980; Daniel Tsang, ed., The Age Taboo: Gay Male Sexuality, Power and Consent, Boston: Alyson, 1981.
Joseph Geiaci and Donald H. Mader

Peladan, Josephin (1859-1918)
French novelist and mystic. Pela­dan was the son of a schoolmaster who edited a fanatically Catholic and royalist paper called Le châtiment and was con­stantly trying to find new meanings in the Apocalypse. His elder brother Adrien, a homeopathic physician and student of the Kabbala, introduced him to the literature of mysticism. As early as 1880 Péladan's Catholic convictions brought him into conflict with the law, when he was arrested for demonstrating against the prohibition on unauthorized religious congregations, but fined a mere fifteen francs because his action was ascribed to eccentricity.
In 1883 he arrived in Paris where he quickly penetrated literary circles. His criticism of the Salon of 1883 created a sensation with its text "I believe in the Ideal, Tradition, and Hierarchy." His aes­thetic ideas, though akin to those of the pre-Raphaelites in England, were attuned to their own time and place. He declared that "all artistic masterpieces are religious, even among unbelievers" and "for nine­teen centuries artistic masterpieces have always been Catholic, even among Protes­tants." Both in the aesthetic and in the occult worlds he stood squarely at the extreme of Catholic reaction. His first book,
Le Vice suprême (1884), prefaced by Barbey d'Aurevilly, prophesied the fall of the Idea into materialism. The hero, Merodack - a name culled from Assyrian my­thology - is a magician whose vocation compels him to conquer all natural vices.
Péladan further developed his mystical and anti-materialist philosophy in a vast "éthopée" of nineteen volumes called La Décadence latine (1885-1907), of which the eighth and ninth volumes (1891) were entitled L'Androgyne and La Gynandre. In the occult circles where Péladan reigned as sâr (king), the figure of the Androgyne possessed a recondite sig­nificance. Part of the seventh treatise in Péladan's Amphithéâtre des sciences mortes expounds the theory of the An­drogyne under the heading Erotologie de Platon-, the Androgyne is the artistic sex par excellence, realized in the creations of Leonardo da Vinci, "it confounds the two principles, the masculine and the femi­nine, and balances one against the other. Every exclusively masculine figure is lack­ing in grace, every exclusively feminine one is lacking in strength." The women in Péladan's novels are generally of the an­drogynous type; he asserted that "the number of women who feel themselves to be men grows by the day, and the mascu­line instinct leads them to violent ac­tions." Péladan never wearied of androgy­nous and lesbian themes in his monumen­tal "éthopée," and in Typhonia (1892), the Journal d'une viergeprotestante is a tale of lesbian love. His own marriage, in 1895, was a failure, and he gained the homopho­bic nickname of "La Sar pédalant," but there is no evidence that he ever had an active sexual life.
In 1885
Péladan had declared himself Grand-Master of the Rose+Croix on the death of his brother Adrien, who had been initiated into a branch of freema­sonry, by that time moribund, that claimed succession from the legendary Rosicrucians. In 1888 he and Stanislas de Guaita revived the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose+Croix, in whose occult carryings-on there was a great deal of foolishness and self-importance. Péladan himself fused a real sense of mission with an exhibition­ism and a flair for the dramatic - with transvestite overtones - worthy of an Oscar Wilde. His dress ranged from the medieval to oriental robes with a nuance of the androgynous and from ecclesiastical vest­ments to the traditional raffish garb of bohemia. His hair and beard were luxuri­ant and remarkable. Péladan's work is a veritable encyclopedia of Decadent taste permeated by his obsession with the Androgyne. The novel of this name he resumed as "a restitution of Grecian ephebic impressions by way of Catholic mysticism," and wrote: "Intangible Eros, uranian Eros, for the coarse men of moral epochs you are but an infamous sin; you are named Sodom, the celestial despiser of all beauty. This is the need of hypocritical ages to accuse Beauty, that living light, of the darkness contained in vile hearts."
The work of
Péladan, blending the occult and the homoerotic, is a curious reaction to the prevailing naturalism of the late nineteenth century. Péladan himself is a striking example of the flam­boyant, eccentric leader of a cult strongly tinged with evocations of a legendary past and claiming to possess a unique mystical tradition, in contrast with the mundane religion of the conventional believer. He is the prototype of later homosexual figures in the religious life of the twentieth cen­tury, and even of certain leaders on the mystical fringe of the gay churches of today.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert Pincus-Witten, Occult Symbolism in France: foséphin Péladan and the Salons de la Rose+Croix, New York: Garland, 1976; Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, London: Oxford University Press, 1951 James Webb, The Occult Under­ground, La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1974.
Warren Johansson

PENITENTIALS
The penitentials are Western Christian confessional manuals whose origins can be traced as far back as the sixth century, and which were used until the twelfth century. The purpose of the penitentials was to aid the priest or spiri­tual guide of the lay Christian by providing descriptions of various sins and prescrib­ing appropriate penances. Many of the manuals go far beyond mere lists of sins and penances, containing introductions and conclusions for the instruction of the confessor that remind him of his role as spiritual healer and urge him to appreciate the subjective mentality of the patient. Modern scholars do not know exactly how these manuals were used in practice, but in all likelihood they served as works of reference, informing the priest of the dif­ferent kinds of sin, of aggravating and mitigating circumstances, and of the appropriate penance to impose. Most of the penitentials are brief enough to be com­mitted to memory, so that the material amounted to a questionnaire for interro­gating the penitent - an important aspect of early medieval penance. Such interroga­tion was designed to ensure that penitents knew what grave sins were and would confess all of them. In fact, a ninth-cen­tury theologian had to warn priests not to corrupt the minds of penitents by suggest­ing sins which their simplicity had never imagined.
Sexual Aspects. The penitentials have long been recognized as valuable sources for the study of the social, legal, and moral institutions of the early Middle Ages. They mediated between the formu­lations of Christian theology and concrete practice in the everyday life of the lay Christian. One of the most striking fea­tures of these documents is the breadth and detail of their treatment of human sexual behavior. Recent works make some use of these manuals for the study of homosexuality in the medieval period.
The general principles of the Christian sexual ethic hadbeen established long before the sixth century, indeed they were adopted in their totality from the Hellenistic Judaism of the first century. The testimony of such different personali­ties as Philo Judaeus and Flavius Josephus confirms that the prohibition of male homosexual activity was absolute and uncompromising. Sexual intercourse was morally permissible only between a man and a woman who were married and for the purpose of procreation. At the beginning of the fifth century St. Augustine reiterated this principle and made it normative for Latin Christendom. All forms of sexual expression falling outside these limits were to be deemed immoral and grievously sinful. The debates over sexuality within the early Church, moreover, led to a stan­dard of sexual morality that set virginity above marriage and idealized an asexual way of life as embodied in monastic orders and in priestly celibacy. For five hundred years the penitential literature was the principal agent in the formation and diffu­sion of the Christian code of sexual moral­ity. Hence these texts are crucial to the history of the social attitude toward homosexual behavior in that period. They supplement the law codes of Theodosius and Justinian as well as the tribal legisla­tion of Western Europe that dealt with sexual offenses, since these did not cover many areas of individual conduct and were far removed from the interpersonal sphere of confession and penance and the private realm of everyday life.
It cannot be denied that the treat­ment of sexual behavior in general in the penitentials tends to be authoritarian, apodictic, legalistic, and sex-negative. This ascetic approach to sexuality left its im­print upon Western attitudes in the course of time - and that is what the penitentials were meant to do, to shape the collective consciousness of sexual morality along the lines formulated by the church. They failed to provide a parallel reflective and critical discussion of human sexuality: this they were not meant to do. The peniten­tials and those who consulted them were engaged in a strenuous - and ultimately futile - combat with urges and drives in the human personality that were regarded as evil and demonic in origin. The peoples of Western Europe, many of them brought into the fold by the missionary campaign initiated by Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century, remained at­tached to a more diverse, overt, and freely expressed pagan norm of sexuality than Christian ethics could ever countenance. This archaic morality underlay and under­cut the superstratum of ascetic teaching which the clergy sought to inculcate. By comparison with earlier rigoristic prac­tice, the introduction of penitentials con­stituted an injection of pastoral realism - what almost might be called plea bargain­ing in modern terms. By bringing forgive­ness for even grave sins within reach of the ; believer, the system was relieved of its most dire aspect, that of automatic eternal damnation, but only in order to make the underlying morality more effective.
Homosexuality. Modern apolo­gists for Christianity have dealt with the attitude of the penitential literature to­ward homosexuality and with the specific contributions of Regino of Prüm, the Peni­tential of Silos, and Burchard of Worms, claiming that the pénitentials are not "an index of medieval morality" and that their treatment of the homoerotic implies "a relatively indulgent attitude adopted by prominent churchmen of the early Middle Ages toward homosexual behavior." The pénitentials are an index of what the medieval church - if not the entire laity - thought morally reprehensible on the basis of the Christian revelation.
All the
pénitentials have at least one canon condemning what later came to be designated sodomy, and many offer a relatively extensive treatment of the sub­ject. Two factors influence their analysis: the specific character of the offense and the participants. The types of homosexual behavior distinguished in these manuals may be grouped as follows: (1) general references to males copulating with other males, (2) specific mention of sodomites or of a sin or practice labeled sodomitic, (3) references to relations in teiga, mainly with reference to adolescent behavior, (4) references to specific practices other than anal penetration, (5) references to simula­tions of sexual intercourse by very young boys, (6) references to cases in which an older boy violates a younger one, (7) sexual relations between natural brothers.
The range of persons addressed or implicated shifts the focus of the canons: (1) those addressed to unspecified persons censure all of the specific forms of homo­sexual intercourse, (2) those addressed to church dignitaries and religious speak only of "acting as did the Sodomites" and grade the penance according to the ecclesiastical rank of the offender, the higher position meriting the higher penance, (3) canons addressed to adolescents censure all forms of homosexual activity but vary the allu­sions to the Sodomites.
There is a striking consistency in the weighting of the different offenses. In canons whose subjects are unspecified male persons, the general, not further specified practice of sexual relations between males usually carries a penance of ten to fifteen years; censures using a variant of
sodomite usually carry a penance of ten years but may range from seven to twenty; relations in terga (involving the posterior) invari­ably carry a penance of three years; inter-crural relations are censured with one to three years' penance; mutual masturba­tion, mentioned only three times, carries a penance from 30 days to two years; oral-genital relations carry a penance ranging from three to seven years, most often the former.
Lesbian relations are almost as neglected in the penitentials as they are in the Judeo-Christian tradition generally. However, they are mentioned, and provide an interesting confirmation of a text from Hincmar of Reims who says: "They are reputed to use certain instruments of diabolical function to excite desire," pre­sumably single or double dildoes. Several penitential reproaches directed at lesbian relations mention such devices.
It should be borne in mind that the penitentials are cumulative works, each compiler incorporating into his own work previous texts, often excerpted without change. The rather explicit descriptions of homosexual acts in Burchard of Worms seem to reflect a personal view of such behavior. Another significant point is that "sodomitical" acts had in Christian think­ing come to include bestiality, for obvious reasons a common enough practice among rural populations constantly exposed to the sight of animals copulating or prepar­ing to do so. If homosexuality was to a certain degree tolerated in the early Middle Ages, it was not because of the church but in spite of it. Fundamental moral attitudes are not altered overnight, and a substra­turn of pagan belief and practice undercut the new religion imported from the Medi­terranean world. A situation prevailed that in Russian historiography is termed
dvoeverie, "dual belief" - the Christian doc­trines and practices coexisted with the older heathen ones for several centuries, until the teachings reiterated generation after generation became the folk ethos of Western Christendom.
The penitentials, and the canoni­cal collections into which they were incor­porated, enjoyed wide circulation for some four centuries or more, and in the course of time shifted moral judgment in the direc­tion of Christian asceticism. The evangeli­zation of Western Europe involved the inculcation of the moral teachings of Christianity as well as the preaching of its myths and dogmas, and sexual morality from the outset was a significant part of its theology, if not the very cornerstone of its ethical system. The creative elaboration of the material found in decisions of the church councils and in papal letters was accomplished by the middle of the eighth century; after that time the penitentials simply copy previous manuals. This tradi­tion in its Irish, Frankish, and Anglo-Saxon variants is comparatively unanimous both in range of content and manner of treat­ment. Even original contributions such as those of Burchard of Worms are simply added to an existing penitential tradition, the end result of which
was the moral outlawry of homosexual behavior and the marginalization of those engaging in it as criminals and outcasts with no rights that a Christian society needed to respect.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Moral Code, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.
Warren Johansson

Penna, Sandro (1906-1977)
Italian lyric poet and prose writer. Born in Perugia, where he took a degree in accounting, Penna moved at the age of twenty-three to Rome, where helived until his death. Shy and diffident, he led a highly private existence for most of his life, refus­ing invitations to elegant gatherings to be with his fanciulli ("lads"), and making a living in various ways, including the gray market during the war and art dealing afterwards. Yet he did show some affinity for the company of such homosexual writ­ers as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elio Pecora, and Dario Bellezza.
Penna was "discovered" by an­other great twentieth-century Italian poet, Umberto Saba (1883-1957). Thanks to Saba's help he was able to publish even during the fascist period (the first book is from 1939), despite the homoerotic and pedophile content of his work.
Alongside his exiguous poetic production - the compositions up to 1970 are collected in
Tutte le poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1970) - he also wrote fiction, some of which appears in Un po' di febbre (Milan: Garzanti, 1973). Love for boys is omnipresent in the delicate lyrics of Penna. To critics who, while acknowledging his high artistic quality, found his insistence on homosexual themes "inappropriate," Penna replied with scorn: "The sexual problem/ engages my whole life./ Is it good, is it bad?/ That's what I keep asking myself." Provocatively, he styled himself a "love poet." He was so proud of his eros paidikos that in one interview he made his own the saying attributed to Camille Saint-Saens, "I am not a homosexual, but a pederast."
In his poems - which are usually brief, four lines or a few more - Penna used only a few strokes to sketch a situation, a thought, or a portrait. The source of inspi­ration was his "lads," adolescents or young boys; his desires (which had a physical dimension) were stated with extraordi­nary delicacy and a circumspection amounting almost to prudery. Even the poems that he did not want to release because he thought them "pornographic, " have been found, after their publication, to be quite chaste.
Sandro Penna ranks among the most significant Italian poets of homosex­ual love, and is particularly significant in the twentieth-century context. In recent years his work and personality have under­gone an unceasing process of critical
réévaluation, though this had begun be­fore his death. Penna's influence on young Italian homosexual poets is clearly evi­dent today, so that it is not excessive to speak of his formative influence on con­temporary Italian gay poetry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Gualtiero De Santi, Penna, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1982; Elio Pecora, Sandro Penna: una cheta follia, Milan: Frassinelli, 1984.
Giovanni Dall'Orto

Pérez,
Antonio (1540-1611)
Spanish author and political fig­ure. Antonio was publicly the son of King Felipe IPs secretary, the priest Gonzalo Pérez, although he may really have been the son of a court noble; he was probably of Semitic ancestry, as were many thinkers and administrators in sixteenth-century Spain. Antonio was well-educated, espe­cially at the universities of Venice and Padua, and was further tutored by Gonzalo for a career in government. He succeeded Gonzalo in the powerful position of royal secretary, and was especially charged with Italian affairs. His hobby was perfumery, and he is also remembered for advances in dental hygiene.
The victim of conservative courti­ers,
Pérez was arrested on charges of mur­der and heresy; charges of sodomy were later added. He escaped from prison and fled to Aragon, terrifying the king because of Perez's possession of documents con­taining official secrets, probably assassi­nations. After popular demonstrations prevented the king from immediately recapturing Pérez, he fled to France. His wife and children, whom he was never to see again, were kept as hostages in Madrid to ensure that he did not reveal secrets. In exile in France and England, surviving assassination attempts, Pérez wrote and published on Spain, beginning the long tradition of study of Spain's problems. His works have had considerable influence on Spanish reformist and anti-clerical thinking.
The testimony of the witnesses against
Pérez, which has been published only in heavily censored form, speaks of a homosexual underworld among the Span­ish nobility. Perez's cousin Juan de Tovar, also implicated in the scandal and one of the witnesses, is presumably the same Juan de Tovar who composed the first known work in Spanish in which homo­sexual love is presented positively. This is a lengthy Eclogue first published, minus a page torn from the manuscript, in 1985. In it, a boy dies rather than reveal the identity of the man he loves.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: José J. Labrador, C. Angel Zorita, and Ralph A. DiFranco, "La Égloga de Juan de Tovar: extenso poema del Siglo de Oro sobre el amor 'que no quiere decir su nombre,'" El Crotalón - Anuario de Filología Española, 2 (1985), 365^100; idem, '"A su albedrío y sin orden alguna' [Quijote, II, 69), Autor y coincidencias con la Égloga de Juan de Tovar," in Cervantes and the Pastoral, Cleveland, 1986, pp. 213-33; corrections to their text in Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pela yo, 63 (1987), 105-06; Gregorio Marañón, Antonio Pérez, in his Obras completas, VI, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1970, Chapter 13. For the censored testimony, Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, XII, Madrid, 1848, pp. 190-95, 224-42, 255-59.
Daniel Eisenberg

Peru
See Andean Societies.

Perversion
Historically, perversion may be the most affect-laden, ambiguous, and misleading term in the whole lexicon of the study of sexual behavior. "Some form of sex gratification... preferred to hetero­sexual coitus and habitually sought after as the primary or only form of sex gratifi­cation desired" is the definition offered by Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961). Although the original negativity of the word has weakened in recent decades, it still retains the conno­tation of a departure from the norm. For­tunately, most serious researchers recog­nize the problematic character of the word and use it - if at all - with caution.
History of the Term. Perversion entered the semantic field of sexuality only in the last third of the nineteenth century. Until then it had meant simply "any qualitative alteration of a function in disease." Against this background, "per­version of the sexual instinct" meant a change in the direction of the sexual de­sires, as opposed to a quantitative change (satyriasis and nymphomania on the one hand, impotence and frigidity on the other). The medical criteria for perversion were its involuntary exclusiveness and fixation. It was never asserted, as many laymen were to assume, that all "perverse" behav­ior stemmed from pathology, but only that certain individuals were in the grip of an abnormal sexual orientation beyond their control.
It was Richard von Krafft-Ebing's ill-fated notion that the etiology of per­verse (= non-procreative) sexual acts
{per­verse Handlungen] could be ascribed ei­ther to Perversion (pathology) or to Perver­sität (vice). This novel distinction was important for the forensic psychiatrist because it separated persons accused of sexual offenses who were unwilling vic­tims of inner compulsions from others who willfully embraced illicit behavior and were therefore responsible for their actions. Though popularized in Krafft-Ebing's best-selling Psychopathia sexualis ¡1886; 12 editions in his lifetime), the dis­tinction eluded the public mind, all the more as there had been in classical Latin the phrase perversio morum that left its imprint on the modern languages in the form of "moral perversion." Worse still, in English the word pervert had from the middle of the seventeenth century pos­sessed the meaning "(religious) apostate," so that in the mind of the English speaker the word easily took on the sense of "one who willfully and obstinately departed from the moral norm of sexual behavior."
To complicate matters still fur­ther, the Italian physician Paolo Mantegazza had in his best-seller
Gli amori degli uomini (1885) used the word pervertimento in the meaning that Krafft-Ebing assigned to Perversität, and in Emilien Chesneau's French translation of Mantegazza's book, L'Amour dans l'humanité (1886) the word was rendered by perversion. Richard Francis Burton in the "Terminal Essay" appended to his translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1886) then wrote of "the wide diffu­sion of such erotic perversion, and its being affected by so many celebrities." Havelock Ellis, having both Krafft-Ebing and Burton before him when he wrote his pioneering Sexual Inversion (1897), used the word alternately in one and the other sense. On one page he could state: "We have no reason to suppose that this physician prac­ticed every perversion he heard of from patients" while on another he wrote that Krafft-Ebing's treatise "contained over two hundred histories, not only of sexual in­version but of all other forms of sexual perversion." Thus the all too subtle dis­tinction conveyed by the two suffixes was confused at the source, and a physician who used the word in one sense could unwittingly be understood by a layman in the other. The final stage was reached by Canon Derrick Sherwin Bailey in his book Homosexuahty and the Western Chris­tian Tradition ¡1955), where he employs the word perversion in exactly the sense that Krafft-Ebing had allotted to Perversitât. He thus ratified the error that had been made by the very Havelock Ellis whom he berates for his supposed anti-clericalism.
However, Bailey's confusion only repeated the misuse of the word that was especially characteristic of two groups of writers: the authors of pornographic novels and the clergy. In Louis Perceau's
Bibliographie du roman erotique au XIXe siècle (1930), the entries in booksell­ers' catalogues from 1907 onward show the word perversion used consistently in the sense of plaisir raffiné, a "refinement of erotic pleasure." And understandably the Christian clergy seized upon the new term as a pseudo-scientific weapon with which to castigate the practice of "un­natural vice."
Results of the Development. The upshot of this imbroglio is that homosexu­ality has had to bear the further stigma of being a "sexual perversion" (however ambivalently understood) whose spread "threatened to corrupt the youth of the nation," "undermined the moral fabric of society," "raised the spectre of race sui­cide" and the like, while abusive letters addressed to gay organizations abound in affronts such as "You filthy perverts." Through its inherent ambiguity and ac­quired sinister penumbra, the word per­petuated the semantic confusion that enveloped the subject, hindering the emergence of a rational attitude toward homosexual behavior - and indeed of all conduct that departed from the ascetic norm of Christian theology. Since the underlying assumption of moralizing psy­chiatry was that nonreproductive sexual activity was somehow "perverse," it served to reinforce the normative edict of Scho­lastic theologians that sexual acts are le­gitimate only when performed within marriage and for purposes of procreation. If a scientific term is to be employed for such a deviation of the sexual instinct, then the elegant neologism parhedonia would be the logical choice.
An A ttempted Reformulation. In recent years several professional philoso­phers have proposed a redefinition of the concept of perversion. Thomas Nagel, for example, argues that perversion is more psychological than physiological, and that perversions are "truncated or incomplete versions of the complete figuration. " Thus bestiality, where there is lack of reci­procity, would be perversion, while homo­sexuality is not. Unfortunately, these philosophers' discussions are conducted in the afterglow of the earlier history of the set of terms - the adjectives perverse and perverted, the nouns perversity and per­version, and the verb to pervert - render­ing problematic their intended reconstruc­tion of it.
Warren Johansson

Pessoa, Fernando (1888-1935)
Leading modem Portuguese poet. Born in Lisbon, he was educated in Dur­ban, South Africa, where he became fluent in English and acquired a good knowledge of English literature. He returned to Portu­gal in 1905 and led an outwardly unevent­ful life, earning a modest but comfortable living as a translator of commercial corre­spondence until his death in 1935.
Though active in Lisbon's liter­ary circles, Pessoa published only a small amount of poetry and some literary criti­cism during his lifetime. Since his death, however, he has been recognized as the greatest Portugese poet after
Camôes and a major European writer. Pessoa is most famous for his invention of the heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Âlvaro de Campos, poetic creations with distinct personalities, philosophies, and styles, which were intended to add a dra­matic element to his writing. Pessoa wrote poetry in both Portuguese and English, revolutionizing the use of the Portuguese language through his classical English education and his f amiliarity with English literature. The influence of Walt Whitman can be seen in some of his major poems.
Pessoa's verse is intellectual and metaphysical rather than emotional or confessional. His poems are a constant reflection on the meaning of life and on different attitudes to the mystery of living. They convey states of mind and the mani­fold dimensions of experience, suggesting possibilities rather than certainties. Even in his lyrical moments Pessoa remains detached, an observer of life rather than an active participant.
Although there is no conclusive proof that Pessoa was homosexual, the fact that he never married, the extreme reserve he maintained about his private life, and his friendship with the openly gay poet Antonio Botto point in this direction. Three episodes in his literary career have a homosexual theme. The Portuguese poems "Ode triunfal" ("Triumphal Ode") and "Ode maritima" ("Maritime Ode"), both published in 1915 under the heteronym
Alvaro de Campos, have overtones of sado­masochistic fantasy. Antinous (1918), a long poem written in rather stilted English and published under his own name, com­memorates the relationship between the Roman emperor Hadrian and his beloved Antinous; the passages in which Hadrian recalls their physical love-making are unusually sensuous and explicit. In 1921, a revised version appeared under the title English poems, I-II, in which Pessoa sys­tematically removed all words expressing shame or wrong-doing in the relationship. Finally, the publication under Pessoa's Olisipo imprint of Cancoes ("Songs") (1922), a book of openly gay poetry by Antonio Botto, led to a controversy in which Pessoa took a prominent part in Botto's defense. Underlying all Pessoa's work, however, are themes of particular relevance to gay readers, such as the multi-faceted aspects of personality and the m any levels of perceived experience.
Among the writers in Pessoa's circle, two are also worthy of note. Mario de Sa-Carneiro (1890-1916) was more subjective in his poetry than Pessoa, writ­ing on the crisis of personality and the sense of frustration, regret, and inadequacy which eventually led to his suicide. He also wrote a short novel,
A confissao de Lucio ("The Confession of Lucio") (1914), with a thinly-veiled homosexual theme open to various interpretations. Antonio Botto (1902-1959) published poems on the themes of love, passion, sexual desire, disillusionment, longing, regret, humili­ation, and shame. The poems are generally addressed to males and deal with the pleas­ures and disappointments of physical love and casual encounters, reflecting on the impossibility of complete fulfillment in any relationship. Botto's narcissism is pervasive and his poetic talent is frequently not equal to his themes, but his work is refreshing for its openness in dealing with gay male love.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jose Blanco, Fernando Pessoa: esbogo de uma bibliografia, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda/Centro de Estudos Pessoanos, 1983; Joao Gaspar Simoes, Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa, third ed., Lisbon: Bcrtrand, 1973.
Robert Howes

Petronius Arbiter (d. a.d. 66)
Roman satirist. Petronius is usu­ally identified as a high official and Nero's favorite, "arbiter of taste" at the court, whose career and then suicide when he lost the Emperor's good will are recorded by Tacitus: "His days were passed in sleep, his nights in social engagements and the pleasures of life. The fame which other men attain by diligence he won by his use of leisure." The lengthy extant fragments of the fifteenth and sixteenth books of Petronius' Satires (usually called the Satyricon) amount to about one-tenth of the original.
Claiming that it had Hellenistic antecedents or models (in addition to the obvious borrowings such as the "Milesian Tales," the widow of Ephesus, and the boy of Pergamon), some scholars deny the origi­nality of the
Satyricon. Some modern authorities believe that there were two prominent men named Petronius who lived at the time of Nero, and that they have been wrongly conflated. Others have maintained that this novel may not have been composed before the third cen­tury. Yet the overwhelming majority believe it the highly original creation of Petronius Arbiter.
In a famous set piece, the rich parvenu freedman Trimalchio stages an ostentatious feast of many courses to be vomited up in turn, accompanied by garish entertainment, all in the worst possible taste - a classic literary example of "life as it ought not to be." Set mostly in Southern Italy, Magna Graecia, and involving slaves or freedmen of Greek descent, the work is a veritable gold mine for students of Roman manners and of colloquial language and idiom. The disreputable youth Giton, a freedman of Greek extraction, deflowers a seven-year-old girl in full view of an amused audience. One of his lovers, the hero or anti-hero Encolpius, considers castrating himself when temporarily impotent (in a public bath) "and while the boys just ridi­culed me as a lunatic ... a huge crowd surrounded him with applause and the most awe-struck admiration. You see, he had such an enormous sexual organ that you'd think the man was just an append­age to his penis." Made-up eunuchs, transvestites, prostitutes of both sexes abound.
Typical of the casual attitudes is the inserted story of the boy of Pergamon. A visitor to the boy's father's home offered progressively more expensive gifts to the boy, who feigned sleep, in exchange for sexual favors. However, the boy was disap­pointed when the visitor failed to deliver the final present, a Macedonian stallion.
Petronius thought that most la­dies were fascinated by and preferred low-life lovers. In spite of titillating scenes, the language is less coarse than Catullus' or even Horace's. The speech varies with the rank and education of the character: slave, freedman, aristocrat, foreigner, or Roman. Each episode is almost an independent mime, stage-managed by the author.
No ancient work survives as per­verse, bizarre, and titillatingly amusing as this one, which with allusions to Epicure­anism ridicules the pompous
"gravitas" of the leading contemporary courtier Seneca, the philosopher of Stoicism, litterateur, and tragedian. Doubtless Petronius con­tinued the tradition of Varro's lost Menippean Satires, interspersing prose and verse, perhaps in parody of the Pharsalia of Lucan, Seneca's nephew. The Satyricon is often considered a forerunner of the picaresque novel in which adventurous episodes fol­low one another without rhyme or reason.
Historians of eroticism have found the
Satyricon rich in meaning not only for its portrayal of total sexual aban­don with equal interest in homosexual and heterosexual escapades, but also as the best ancient documentation of voyeurism, exhibitionism, scopophilia, scopomixia, as well as of castration fantasies, and sado­masochism, all erotic penchants found much more in Latin than in Greek litera­ture. Petronius thus bequeathed to later ages an imperishable record of the sexual life of the early Roman Empire with its unabashed and overt homosexuality.
The "sexual revolution" of the 1960s saw a revived interest in the author.
Federico Fellini's extravagant 1969 film Satyricon, though only loosely based on the original, documents this intersection.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Joachim Adamietz, "Zum literarischen Charakter von Petrons Satyrica," Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 130 (1987), 329-46,-Charles Gill, "The Sexual Episodes in the Satyricon," Classical Philology, 68 (1973), 172-85; J. P. Sullivan, The Satyricon of Petronius: A Literary Study, London: Faber and Faber, 1968.
William A. Percy

Philippines
The Republic of the Philippines comprises over seven thousand tropical islands off the mainland of southeast Asia, settled by approximately fifty million predominantly Roman Catholic people; a Muslim minority is found in the South.
History. Colonized by Spain in the mid-sixteenth century, the islands passed into American control as a result of the Spanish-American War (1898). A three-year armed revolt against the new Ameri­can colonial power was crushed in 1901. During World War II, Japan occupied the islands between 1942 and 1944 - 45. Fol­lowing the war, the United States granted the Philippines independence in 1946. The post-independence history of the Republic has featured a series of guerrilla wars and considerable civil strife.
Homosexuality and Transves­tism. The Philippines enjoys a reputation as one of the contemporary societies most tolerant of homosexuality. Philippine criminal law is silent on the subject of consenting same-sex relations and there is little or no prosecution under other statutes. Filipinos tend to hold benign attitudes toward homosexuals and in certain areas of the country transvestic (cross-dressed) homosexuals even are ac­corded special status. In Bacolod, for ex­ample, a sugar-cane capital of some300,000 inhabitants, cross-dressed homosexuals traditionally participate as dancers in the main social event of the town, the Christ­mas Eve pageant, held in the city's princi­pal hotel. The queen of the Christmas pageant is usually a cross-dressed male homosexual.
Transvestic homosexuals are well-known for their fashion shows or beauty pageants which are presented in all parts of the Philippines for the general public and frequently sponsored by civic clubs such as Rotary or Kiwanis. Such drag presentations are regarded as family enter­tainment and are popular with children as well as adults. Philippine children are socialized to regard homosexuals as inter­esting and amusing people. Many Tagalog movies contain homosexual comic char­acters often portrayed as friends of the leading men. The appearance of homosex­ual characters in Philippine movies inevi­tably elicits claps and shouts of approval from the many children in the audience.
Terminology. While it is the cross-dressed male homosexuals in the Philip­pines who are most conspicuous, mascu­line male homosexuals and masculine and feminine lesbians are also found. Because of the rather complex language usage pat­terns in the Philippines it is somewhat difficult to generalize about terminology referring to homosexuals. While Tagalog is the official language, English is widely used in the universities and among edu­cated Filipinos as a second language. Sev­eral other major regional languages are commonly used. The most widely known terms for male homosexuals probably are bakla (Tagalog) and bayot (Cebuano). These terms may be used as general terms for male homosexuals and may apply to masculine, non-transvestic homosexuals or may refer to effeminate or cross-dressed homosexuals.
While the Cebuano term
lakin-on is sometimes used to refer to lesbians, the more universally understood term in most parts of the Philippines is the Eng­lish-derived term tomboy. As the term implies, some lesbians are viewed as mannish and some cross-dress and hold traditionally male occupations. Like male homosexuals, they are well-treated. Lesbi­ans, for example, may flirt with neighbor­hood girls, sending them small presents and love notes without provoking the hostility of parents and neighbors, who are likely to joke and tease about such "crushes." Lesbians tend to lead more private lives than male homosexuals and have no developed social organizations such as bars, networks, coffee shops, or clubs. They tend to pair off relatively early sometimes with a partner, usually a hetero­sexual female, called a "live-in." Because of widespread crowding, unmarried homo­sexuals - both male and female - usually are not able to set up households inde­pendent of extended families unless they are affluent.
"Callboys." Courtship patterns of male homosexuals are characterized by the "callboy" system, wherein heterosex­ual males usually between 15 and 25 engage in sexual relations or in more per­manent relationships with homosexuals in exchange for money and sustenance paid by the homosexual. Callboys may be found in all parts of the Philippines and it is estimated that as many as 80 percent of the young males from the working and lower middle classes at some point in their youths work as "callboys." In some areas the callboy system has become institu­tionalized. In Pagsanjan, for example, a resort town of 3,000, practically all of the heterosexual males between 15 and 25 work as "callboys." Male homosexuals have few sexual relationships with other homosexuals. Most sexual relations of homosexual men are with bisexual or heterosexual youths.
The Roots of Tolerance. Despite its many social and economic problems the Philippines has been able to develop a society which is relatively democratic in terms of sex and gender. Filipinos often say "We don't need women's liberation; we have had it for years." There is consider­able truth in this statement. The Philip­pines has a long tradition of egalitarianism with regard to the sexes. Many women hold positions regarded as traditionally male occupations. For example, 60 per­cent of accountants, 67 percent of chemi­cal engineers, 70 percent of dentists, and 52 percent of physicians in the Philippines are estimated to be women. Tolerance for homosexuals may well be related to these more general patterns of gender equality. Philippine attitudes are part of the benign system of attitudes prevailing in southeast Asia and the South Pacific and may well be a long-standing aspect of Philippine soci­ety as suggested by the pervasive presence of such attitudes in rural areas and small towns as well as in the cities. That homo­sexuals were indigenous to the Philippines before the the arrival of the Europeans is suggested by the observations of Father Juan de Plascencia, who wrote in 1589 that the native Filipinos had among their priests, "bayoguin... a man whose nature inclined toward that of a woman." In a list of "ministers of the devil" of the pre-Spanish religion practiced by the natives, the Span­ish friar Juan Francisco de San Antonio, writing in 1738, includes the bayoguin, who was "an effeminate man... inclined to being a woman and to all the matters of this feminine sex." These scant passages suggest that effeminate homosexuals held places of honor in pre-literate, pre-Hispanic Philippines, a fact which may be related to widespread attitudes of toler­ance accorded contemporary Philippine homosexuals.
Crackdowns on Prostitution. By the spring of 1988, two crackdowns oc­curred to compromise the picture of idyl­lic tolerance, although both applied only to prostitution: widespread raids on bars in the tourist district of Manila (the capital), and the arrest and deportation of homosex­ual pedophiles in Pagsanjan.
The spring and summer of 1988 saw the emergence of a moral crusade against prostitution, pornography, and live sex shows (both heterosexual and homo­sexual) in Manila's famous
Ermita tourist belt. The most highly publicized aspect of this crusade was a series of raids led by Manila police chief Brigadier General Al­fredo Lim against nearly 300 bars which allegedly were operating as fronts for pros­titution. Some two thousand prostitutes, including some male prostitutes catering to homosexuals, were involved in theraids. While most establishments remained open during this period, one of Manila's most famous homosexual establishments "the Retiro 690 Club," a disco with male pros­titutes and sex shows, was closed. By May, 1988, a power struggle developed between police chief Lim and Manila Mayor Mel Lopez, who opposed the raids. President Corazón Aquino, who approved the raids, stepped in and called Lim and Lopez to Malacanang Palace to mediate the dis­pute. While homosexual establishments were not singled out, they were conspicu­ously included in the generalized attack on "vice" in Manila.
For years the town of Pagsan jan in the province of Laguna has been a favorite of both tourists who visit Pagsanjan Falls and foreign pedophiles who form liaisons with the many boys in that town who readily (and usually with the knowledge and approval of their parents and towns­people) make themselves available for money. In late February, 1988, a surprise raid on Pagsanjan was conducted by con­stabulary agents, police, and immigration officials, and 22 foreign pedophiles were arrested. The raiding team left Manila early in the morning, arrived in Pagsanjan at 7 A.M., entered the Pagsanjan Lodge and eight private houses without warning or warrants, finding those arrested sleeping with or in other compromising positions with pre-pubertal Filipino boys. Those arrested (from the United States, Germany, Belgium, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and Can­ada) were fined 1,000 pesos ($50) each and deported. Four of them remained to con­test their deportation on the grounds that they had done nothing illegal in view of the absence of an "age of consent" for males in Philippine criminal law.
These events are probably related directly or indirectly to the threat of AIDS, coupled with a new government charac­terized by a growing sense of xenophobia fed by unfavorable international publicity describing the Philippines as a sexual marketplace.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Donn V. Hart, "Homosexuality and Transvestism in the Philippines," Behavior Science Notes, 3 (1968), 211-48; Frederick L. Whitam and Robin M. Mathy, Male Homosexuality in Four Societies: Brazil, Guatemala, the Philippines, and the United States; New York: Praeger, 1986.
Frederick L. Whitam

Philo Judaeus (ca.
20 B.C.-CA. A.d. 45)
Jewish thinker and exegete. Philo belonged to a wealthy Hellenized family of Alexandria in Egypt. In 39 he took part in an embassy to Rome, described in his Legation to Caius-, otherwise little is known of the outward circumstances of his life. Philo's fusion of Greek allegory and moralizing with biblical Judaism made his work appealing to Christians; signifi­cantly, his extensive writings - all in Attic Greek rather than in Hebrew - owe then-survival to Christian copyists.
Philo discusses homosexuality in three passages of some length (On
Abra­ham, 133-41; The Special Laws, III, 37-42; and The Contemplative Life, 59-63). These texts disclose a tripartite classification of male same-sex behavior, affording us a glimpse of social reality in a great Helle­nistic-Roman city at the time of Christ. The three modes, which to some extent overlap, are those of (1) the latterday Greek adherents of paiderasteia, which changed political circumstances had shorn of its positive state-building character, making it an easy target for caricature by hostile observers such as Philo as mere love-sickness; (2) the ostentatious effeminates, whom Philo dubs "men-women"; and (3) the galli, or religious-ecstatic castrates. Although it is edged throughout with hostility, Philo's account showed that cosmopolitan Alexandria had a more var­ied panorama of homosexual lifestyles than did earlier communities, anticipating the variety of "scenes" of gay life in more recent times.
The larger significance of Philo, however, stems from his historical posi­tion at a pivotal junction of religious and ethical thought. Born into a wealthy and cultivated Jewish family in learned Alex­andria, he benefited from a thorough edu­cation in the Greek classics. Having ab­sorbed both the allegorical techniques of the literary critics of Homer and the ethi­cal ideals of Middle Platonism, Philo resolved to write a series of apologias for Judaism as he knew it. He had scarcely any Hebrew or Aramaic and much of the tone and fabric of his work is strongly Greek, so that when later normative Judaism came to assume its classical form his writings were rejected by the Synagogue. Con­versely, their very synthesis of the Judaic and Hellenic worlds made his texts appeal­ing to Early Christian theologians and apologists. Through this adoption his ideas passed into the mainstream of medieval and early modern European thought.
Central to Philo's project is the notion that the Law of Moses is cotermi­nous with the Law of Nature. On the Hellenic side, the elevation of nature as a universal norm of human conduct had for some centuries been a major preoccupa­tion of the Platonic tradition. By reinter­preting the prohibitions of male homosex­ual conduct in Leviticus 18 and 20 as not simply the ordinances of a particular people - the followers of the god who had revealed his law to Moses on Mount Si­nai - and functioning in fact to set them apart from other nations, but as a categori­cal imperative for all of mankind, Philo made the repression of homosexual behav­ior virtually a state duty. Thus an ideal of continence, which had been largely a matter of individual choice and the mark of an educated elite in Stoic philosophy, became a moral obligation for all. Follow­ing the Mosaic texts, Philo affirms that homosexual conduct among males de­serves death, and interprets the legend of the destruction of Sodom as God's judg­ment upon the wicked. In this way he foreshadows the penal sanctions enacted by the Christian emperors of the fourth century, which were renewed by Justinian and many later authorities and embel­lished with allusions to the Cities of the Plain, whose destruction Philo attributed to homosexual vice.
Some other
antihomosexual motifs found in Philo also echoed through the centuries. In his view, homosexual activity is so disgusting that it scarcely bears mention, foreshadowing the later Christian view of "that horrible sin not to be named amongst Christians." Philo claimed that if homosexual conduct were to spread it would depopulate whole cities, even imperilling the very survival of the human race. Sodomy, in a view reiterated by bigoted jurists as late as the beginning of the twentieth century, is implicated in a plot to murder the human race. Last of all, Philo put into circulation two hostile metaphors that were to have a long life: the idea that homosexual conduct is equiva­lent to a farmer's sowing on stony ground; and the image of the sodomite as one who debases the sterling coin of nature. The latter notion is a cousin to the medieval identification of usury, lending at interest, with sodomy. Philo's blending of Judaic and Hellenic arguments thus supplied nascent Christianity with a sophisticated rationale for interdicting homosexual ac­tivity among its followers.
Although they were virtually contemporaries, Philo and the New Testa­ment authors wrote independently of one another. Nonetheless, they reflect a similar stage in the development of antihomosexual beliefs derived from bib­lical Judaism and integrated into the syn­ergistic mind-set of the early Roman empire. These negative ideas were to play a major role in Early Christian and medie­val homophobia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Richard A. Baer, Jr., Philo's Use of the Categories of Male and Female, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970; Samuel Sandmel, Philo's Place in ludaism: A Study of Abraham in Jewish Literature, Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1966.
Wayne R. Dynes

Philosophy
From the Greek word meaning "love of wisdom or knowledge," the defi­nition of philosophy has varied over the ages. It includes logic, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics - and formerly comprised physics, cosmology,
and psychology as well. Concepts from India, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, if not yet from China, influenced the Greeks. Greek philosophy itself - like its close ally Greek science under the Ionian physicists - be­gan in Ionia, on the coastal fringes of Anatolia, just when pederasty was intro­duced there and to the Ionian islands from Crete and Sparta, and intellectualized to provide each beloved boy a loving inspirer.
The Pre-Socratics. From the time of Thales of Miletus (flourished ca. 585 b.c.) Western philosophy has its own dis­tinct history; however, many foreign in­fluences may be traced, from the neo-Platonists down to Schopenhauer and even the New Left. Although Western philoso­phy embraces, as do the others, material­ism and idealism, atheism and pantheism, monism and dualism, pragmatism and mysticism, it adheres more strictly to logic as developed by pederasts in late archaic and classical Greece.
The Ionians conceived nature as operating in a non-mythological, imper­sonal manner. Reflecting the maritime setting of Greece, Thales thought water the basic element, which Anaximander expanded to air, earth, fire, and water. The Persian conquests ended such speculations and apparently also finished institutional­ized pederasty, as when the conquerors crucified Poly crates of Samos in 521, with the consequent flight of the pederastic poets Ibycus and Anacreon who had been drawn to his court.
Having already fled Polycrates' tyranny, Pythagoras returned to Southern Italy ca. 530 and founded his brotherhood at Croton, something between a college and a cloister, being pederastic, stressing form rather than matter. Study of music taught him the value of proportions and the necessity of numbers, often conceived geometrically. The correct proportions of hot and cold, wet and dry became funda­mental to medicine.
Another refugee from Ionia, Xenophanes of Colophon, who attacked Homer and Hesiod for their anthropomorphic conceptions of the immortals, founded the Eleatic school at Elea in southern Italy, the first metaphysical school: "But if oxen or horses had hands, oxen would make gods like oxen and horses would make gods like horses." His
eromenos (beloved) Parmenides of Elea (d. ca. 480) regarded the cos­mos as eternal, uncreated, and imperish­able. Zeno of Elis (d. ca. 420) contradicted the Pythagorean notion of multiplicity, arguing instead by paradoxes for monism.
Heraclitus (ca. 540-475
b.c.) saw fire as the primary element: "This one order of all things was created by none of the gods" but is always changing and always moving. Anaxagoras (d. 428) believed that "intelligence" and "reason" had brought order out of chaos in the universe, a theory adopted by Aristotle. Empedocles of Agrigentum proposed two principles, love and hate or attraction and repulsion, which organized the four elements. The atomists opposing the Eleatic concept of reality as an immutable static one, culminated in Democritus (d. 370), whose mechanistic explanations of a materialistic universe underlay the Epicurean school.
The significance of these advances in philosophy is that they broke decisively with the notion of a universe created by the gods, presumed by late Babylonian cosmology, that furnished the starting point for Greek philosophical and scien­tific speculations. But incorporated into Genesis and the other books of the Old Testament, this Semitic mythology, al­beit in a monotheistic guise, became the patrimony of all three Abrahamic relig­ions. The incompatibility between the divinely created universe of these revealed faiths and the mechanistic model of the cosmos, which evolved into the world picture of modern physics and astronomy, predetermined the conflict between reli­gion and science that reached its peak in the late nineteenth century and still ech­oes in the antagonism between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the secular ideals of the gay liberation movement a hundred years later.
The Golden Age. After defeating the Persians in 480, the confident Greeks accelerated the building of their unique culture, with greater material wealth and more democracy, and with Athens as the center of commerce and innovation. Knowledge was sought as a good in itself as well as a way to win trials and public office. Sophists, "wise men," lectured for fees. Often in the gymnasia, Protagoras, Georgias, Hippias, and Prodicus taught debating skills, how to make the best of even a bad case and how to defend lost causes or strange and even absurd theories. As the conservative Aristophanes la­mented, they could "make the better seem the worse case," demoralizing some Athenian youths and bringing into ques­tion established norms and ethics. Pro­tagoras proclaimed: "Man is the measure of all things," denying universally valid knowledge.
Regarded by some of his contem­poraries as a sophist, Socrates like them educated the young by dialectic, proving that the "experts" knew as little as he about ethics, but he did believe in the possibility of discovering truth through the inductive method of elimination of falsehood by constant questioning. No man knowing good would do evil. Sticking to his guns he was condemned to death by an Athenian jury in 399, the first martyr to philosophy, accused of "corrupting the youth and questioning the existence of the gods." His protege Alcibiades had betrayed Athens to Sparta, and another disciple Critias had tyrannized Athens as one of the "Thirty Tyrants" installed by the Spartans from 404 to 403, when they were expelled and the democracy Socrates so criticized restored.
The most important of Socrates' disciples was Plato, who met him at the age of 20. After the master's death he traveled to Italy, where he encountered the Pythagoreans. He opened his school, whose elitism reflected the Pythagorean brotherhood and like it encouraged "love" - at least male bonding - among members. The Academy, in Athens in387, had inscribed on the doorway "Let no one who knows no geometry come under my roof," echoing the Pythagorean emphasis on harmony. He adapted Heraclitus' belief that all matter is in constant flux, un­knowable, hence one may only formulate opinions about it. Plato changed his views during his long life, repudiating in the
Laws, his last work, many of his earlier, more open principles, including pederasty. His earlier dialogues, masterpieces of style almost like the dramas so popular at Athens since Aeschylus, reflect opinions then discussed at symposia and gymnasia.
Aristotle was Plato's most impor­tant pupil. Even in the imperfect form in which we have them, often as notes taken by students, his treatises articulate every branch of philosophy, gathering up more systematically and comprehensively than Plato all the best arguments of the prede­cessors. Having studied twenty years in Plato's Academy, he founded after travels abroad his own school, the Lyceum. He was more realistic and empirical than his master. A biologist, Aristotle emphasized becoming from potential to actual, from seed to final form, more teleologically than Plato, the geometrician concerned rather with eternally static truth. In his "scale of nature" things were ranked, the highest being God, the unmoved mover who in­duced preexisting matter to develop its potentialities by taking on higher forms. Not hailing from the pederastic high soci­ety of Athens, as Plato did, but from the provincial bourgeoisie, Aristotle was less inspired by the pederastic lyrics of Ibycus, Anacreon, Theognis, and Pindar, and be­ing more biologically oriented, felt that pederasty, natural to some, was a vice acquired by others and limited the teleological potential of reproduction. But pedagogy in Greece, since the late Archaic Age, rested on pederasty, which flourished among philosophers, many of whom broke the taboo that made marriage almost mandatory for the upper class: Plato, Dio­genes the Cynic, and all the early Stoics.
The latter kept eromenoi to the age of 28, at least a decade after the eromenoi were customarily abandoned.
Later Greek Philosophy and Rome. The troubles and tyranny that en­sued after Philip of Macedon conquered Epaminondas of Thebes at Chaeronea in 338 rendered people more anxious for individual ethical guidance, upon which Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics, three principal schools concentrated.
The Epicureans valued knowledge only for its usefulness. Knowledge of na­ture emancipates man from superstition and baseless fear and study of human na­ture aids in self-control. They preferred Democritus' mechanistic materialism to the idealism and teleology of both Plato and Aristotle. Even the soul was composed of atoms "hence those who call the soul incorporeal talk foolishly." In late republi­can Rome Lucretius (d. 55
b.c.) composed On the Nature of Things, the classic ac­count, to preserve their teaching. It was neglected and even banned by Christians who disapproved of the hedonism the Epicureans had adopted from the Cyrenaics, although they ranked mental pleas­ures, especially those deriving from the practcie of virtue, higher than any others.
Likewise denying the intrinsic value of knowledge, Zeno of Citium and the Stoics valued it only as it aided virtue. They substituted "body and soul" for the Aristotelian "matter and form." Reason providentially directs the organic universe by natural law, leavingnoroom for chance, or
Tyche, so dear to their Epicurean rivals. Life should conform to a pantheistic na­ture. Rational self-control, the only good, rendered one free of external forces and hence content. Appealing to old-fashioned Romans like the Catos, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius, these trends tended to uphold the mos maiorum, the ancestral peasant customs which stood against the degener­acy of the Hellenizing gilded youth exem­plified in Lucullus, Sulla, and Caesar in the Republic, all of whom employed Ep­icureanism to justify hedonism. In the Empire Caligula used Epicureanism to rationalize his extreme excesses such that he helped to discredit it. Stoicism was used by Christian Fathers, especially after Clement of Alexandria who set the fashion, but Patristic literature every­where reveals merely superficial borrow­ing to shore up an anti-rational, anti-sex­ual mystery religion influenced by Gnosticism.
Unlike Stoics and Epicureans, Pyrrho and other Skeptics stressed epistemology, asserting that things cannot be calculated or accounted for sufficiently to warrant any conviction whatever. By re­nouncing attempts to acquire knowledge one might attain peace of mind.
Not one of these pagan philoso­phers failed to practice pederasty, except perhaps Musonius Rufus (ca.
a.d. 30-101), the only one to condemn it in his writ­ings - if one excepts the Laws, the last of Plato's dialogues, which so contradicts the Phaedrus and the Symposium, where he had Eros alone excite knowledge and virtue.
The Confluence of Judaic and Platonic Trends. The Macedonian con­quests had thrown the Greeks together with other ethnic groups in the Hellenistic monarchies, making them more cosmo­politan, especially in Alexandria, which replaced Athens as the intellectual center, and its rivals Antioch, Seleucia, Pergamon, and Beirut (Berytus), all of which created libraries, schools, gymnasia, and symposia, all of which fostered pederasty. But the Jews, especially numerous in Alex­andria, felt scandalized. Chief of a learned group of Jews seeking in the early decades of the first century to harmonize the Bible, allegorically interpreted, with reason, Philo Judaeus combined this religion with Platonism, the most religious of the Greek philosophies. This line of thought formed a school known as neo-Platonic under Plotinus (d. 270), who proclaimed God the ultimate source, who created the Spirit who created the world-soul and so forth on down to the lower kind of material things.
Thus creation emanates from God. Asceti­cism and mysticism can help the soul escape from its body after a series of successive goals. Adapted to support paganism, neo-Platonism encouraged polytheism and credulity in spirits and spectres, giving paganism a new lease on life and criticizing Christianity's exaggera­tion of man's place in the universe and the efficacy of prayer without work. Julian the Apostate (r. 361-363) revived neo-Platonism in his losing struggle against Christianity.
Patristic Thinkers. Moralists now determined right conduct from Scripture as jurisconsults interpreted a law code, with ultimate sanctions in the next world and immediate ones in this by penance or excommunication so that canon law evolved along Jewish models. Christians substituted faith and love for knowledge and wisdom as sources of virtue, giving ethics a theological instead of a philo­sophical base, an arbitrary, inscrutable law, and an aversion to impurity regarded as a defilement. Deriving more from Plato, neo-Platonists, and Stoics than from the Ionians, Aristotle, Skeptics, and Epicureans (the last being their bete noire), the fathers of the Church were more theologians than philosophers. Patristic writers from the second to the seventh century warned against the philosophical schools which Justianian closed in 529, ending both the Academy and the Lyceum which had flour­ished in Athens for almost a millennium.
Although Clement of Alexandria began borrowing phrases from pagan phi­losophers, St. Jerome, far more educated and brilliant, released the incompatibility between Athens and Jerusalem. Extreme intolerance, however, began with Theodosius the Great (r. 379-395), who banned rival religions and reiterated the death penalty against sodomites prescribed by the sons of Constantine the Great in 342. Whereas Anaxagoras, Socrates, and Aris­totle had been persecuted for their hostil­ity to popular religion, philosophy now became the handmaiden of religion. The authority of the Book and of tradition subordinated Western philosophy throughout the Middle Ages to religion in Christianity as in Judaism and Islam. When these Abrahamic religionists of the Book did not denounce or ignore philosophy, they fitted bits and pieces of it borrowed from Greek and Roman writers into a mosaic to buttress the "true faith." Around 400 St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine absorbed into Christianity the asceticism of the desert fathers and the goals of monasticism, making blind faith in in­scrutable providence the guide for the chaste hermit.
The Middle Ages. In the early Middle Ages that descended on the Latin West after Pope Gregory the Great (r. 590-604), nothing worthy of the name philosophy was composed in Latin. Penitentials and the beginnings of canon law reflect the absence of analysis even during the "Renaissance" under the Carolingians (751-887), when Alcuin, head of Charlemagne's cathedral school, and John Scotus Eriugena actually attempted phi­losophy. But the triple invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries, by Saracens, Magyars, and Northmen, swept away almost all of the cathedral schools the great Charlemagne had ordered every bishop to establish.
After 1000 invasions ceased, Scan­dinavians, Magyars, and Slavs converted to Christianity, and Europe revived. Teach­ing the seven liberal arts divided into trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astron­omy, and music), the
doctores scholastici also broached philosophy in the revived cathedral schools more than did their ri­vals in the monastic schools, the mainstay of the early Middle Ages. Out of these and municipal schools - stronger in Italy, where trade had never as completely de­clined and sooner revived than in the north - there grew during the twelfth century the universities of Paris and Bolo­gna, which dispute primacy. Paris soon sent offshoots to Oxford and Cambridge, which also claim twelfth-century origins, while Bologna branched out to Padua, Naples, and Salamanca. The university as an institution of higher learning was cre­ated in Europe by the Roman Catholic Church; the Byzantine and Islamic cul­tural spheres produced nothing compa­rable in the way of a hierarchical course of instruction with examinations leading to ever higher academic degrees. The Univer­sity of Nalanda in India taught Buddhist philosophy throughout the first millen­nium, but was unknown in Europe.
During the Renaissance of the twelfth century ideas flowed into Catholic Europe from
Spain and other Muslim lands, often through Jewish translators. While Christians languished in ignorance and proscribed homosexuality, Muslims kept philosophy (and pederasty] alive: al-Kindi (d. 870), Alfarabi (d. 950), Avicenna of Baghdad (d. 1037), and Averroes of Cor­doba (d. 1198) - knowing nearly all of Aristotle's and several of Plato's extant works. Avicenna struggled to relate universals to particulars and Averroes, most Aristotelian of the Moslems, asserted the eternity of matter against the creation myth of the Koran, claiming that the soul died with the body but that man's immortal reason rejoined after his death the univer­sal "active reason." In Spain the kingdom of Granada long served as a bridge to west­ern Christendom.
The two principal texts of Jewish mystical teaching, the Kabbala, were completed in Muslim lands: the
Book of Creation ca. 900 and the Zohar (The Shin­ing Light) in 1290. Alongside such specu­lations, sensual philosophy influenced by Plato and Aristotle as well as by Alexan­drians such as Philo appeared, especially in Cordoba and Toledo, but also in Baghdad and Cairo between the tenth and the four­teenth centuries, when tolerated Jews flour­ished in a Muslim world then at its intel­lectual zenith: Maimonides (d. 1204), Gersonides (d. 1344), andCrescas (d. 1410). Like the Muslims they influenced the scholastics directly and through their trans­lations of the Greek philosophers from Arabic into Latin. Doctrines absorbed by the scholastics, such as the Latin Averroists combatted at Paris by Thomas Aqui­nas, made the universities rivals in dis­putes between Franciscans and Domini­cans and between them and the secular hotbeds of heresy, as well as foci of the dogmatic orthodoxy imposed by the In­quisition. Other "students" often wander­ing from university to university preferred the wine, women, and song celebrated in the Goliardic poems.
Gerbert of Aurillac, pope from 999 to 1002, who had imbibed deeply of Moslem learning in Spain and had made the cathedral school at Reims preeminent when archbishop there, may have begun scholastic thought by emphasizing that reason can aid faith. St. Anselm, promoted from Abbot of Bee in Normandy to Arch­bishop of Canterbury in 1110, recom­mended light penalties, especially for young sodomitical clerks in opposition to the growing homophobia fanned by Peter Damian. As a philosopher Anselm logically explained why God became man
[Cur deus homo}.
From the start scholasticism at the medieval schools and universities was tainted with undercurrents of heresy, heterodoxy, sexual license, sorcery, and homosexuality. Clerics all, most in minor orders, students and faculty were forbid­den to marry, a tradition abolished only by the French Revolution but continued at Cambridge and Oxford until 1877, at least for the dons. Some students entered the universities as early as the tender age of 13, since their curriculum overlapped with that of the modern preparatory school. The public schools like Eton and Harrow where rich boys came to be prepared for the universities in the later Middle Ages on the models of the Italian theorists Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino da Verona eventually also became hotbeds of ped­erasty.
Renaissance and Reformation. Unlike the ancient Greeks, medieval Western man subordinated thought to authority. Scholars fleeing the sack of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 brought manuscripts with them to Italy where, since affirming its independence from Milan in 1402, Florence had exuber­antly developed its arts, ideas, and democ­racy, initiating the Italian Renaissance. Already devoted to the later classics, Florentines eagerly studied the Greek origi­nals that lay behind their cherished Latin imitations. At the suggestion of the Greek exile Pletho, Cosimo de' Medici founded the Platonic Academy in Florence. There Marsilio Ficino with the help of Pico della Mirandola helped to revive Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy, undermining the Aristotelianism of the scholastics, while Lorenzo Valla criticized their poor literary form. Paracelsus and Jan Baptista van Helmont denounced "authority" as a source for knowledge of nature and Bernar­dino Telesio's academy at Naples studied nature scientifically. Although Giordano Bruno, who was burned by the Inquisition in 1600, has been hailed as a forerunner of modern skepticism, recent research has shown that he was deeply involved in the hermetic (magical) tradition - illustrating the complex interplay of science and specu­lation in that period. MontaigneandTomas Sanchez pleaded for toleration, skeptically attacking dogmatism. The Renaissance was more given to poetry than to philoso­phy, which was in any case soon threat­ened by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.
The Protestants were as hostile to secular philosophy as to sodomy. Lu­ther dubbed reason the devil's mistress. John Calvin condemned Michael Servetus to the flames in 1553. Ulrich Zwingli was only a bit more reasonable. But the terrible quarrels, mutual denunciations, persecu­tions, tortures, and religious wars helped to undermine Christian authority. Sir Francis Bacon is credited with heralding modern science, though like Bruno he was sensitive to the hermetic tradition.
Early Modern Philosophy. Hos­tile to scholastic dependence upon author­ity, René Descartes (1596-1650) posed instead the mathematical method by which one reasoned by axioms as in geometry deductively to unchallengeable conclu­sions. Like Augustine, he found that the only thing that could not be questioned was existence of his own doubt. "It is easy to suppose that there is no God, no heaven, no bodies. I think, therefore I am." Like his contemporary Galileo, who was si­lenced by the Inquisition, Descartes ex­plained natural phenomena mechanically. At the end of his life he became an adviser to Queen Christina of Sweden, whom he may have subtly counseled to understand her erotic proclivities.
In the Netherlands, Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) also vindicated rea­son against every type of authority, includ­ing the scriptures. He set in motion the Higher Criticism of the Old Testament that was ultimately to discredit the Mo­saic Law as a supposed "revelation" made by God on Mount Sinai and therefore eter­nally binding upon mankind. His panthe­ism appealed to "Deus sive Natura," bring­ing the Renaissance love of nature to a culmination as opposed to the characteris­tic medieval Christian equation of "the world, the flesh, and the devil."
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) denied the reality of matter, which can be infinitely divided into an infinity of monads which God had created. Thus each had an end as in medieval tele­ology: "The best of all possible worlds." He also conceived of "infinitely minute sensations" inaccessible to consciousness in the way that microscopic phenomena were invisible to the naked eye, and so adumbrated the concept of the uncon­scious (discussed in Buddhist philosophies in India two millennia previously) that beginning with SigmundFreud would play an enormous role in the discussion of sexual psychology and of the determinants of homosexuality.
The Enlightenment. In 1690 John Locke (1632-1704) revolutionized West­ern epistemology with his Essay Concern­ing Human Understanding, rejecting in­nate ideas and tracing all mental activity to experience. Each man was convinced of his own and God's existence.
Pushing Locke's theories to the extreme, Hume advocated skepticism in philosophy and positivism in science. He rejected mental substances and mental causes. He reduced even mathe­matical knowledge from certainty to mere probability.
British skepticism helped inspire the French
philosophes who had begun with Pierre Bayle and Bernard Fontenelle to disprove miracles and denigrate the church, and to criticize monarchy as well as all other established institutions and received morality. Montesquieu (1689-1755) offered a subtle new interpre­tation of the European legal tradition. In his Persian Letters (1721) he laid the groundwork for a criticism of Western civilization from an exotic point of view, an idea subsequently pursued by Diderot. In a tireless stream of polemical and imagi­native works, Voltaire attacked abuses of church and state, including the persecu­tion of sodomites. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), a more ambiguous figure, has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of modern totalitarianism. The most radi­cal offshoot of the French Enlightenment was the bisexual Marquis de Sade, who anticipated Nietzsche and other modern nihilists.
German Idealism and After. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the founder of transcendental idealism, denigrated all his predecessors as dogmatic philosophers. He sought to prove the a priori existence of pure reason. While in ethics Kant is best known for his "categorical imperative," the belief that each person should act as if his own conduct were a universal rule, he also set forth the bases of the modern critique of sexual objectification, for he held that sexual relations should be a matter of two loving persons and not just bodies.
Founding a logical idealism, G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) - who like Plato elaborated a philosophy of the state - in­sisted that the whole universe "can be penetrated by thought." He also held that "the real is the rational and the rational is the real." The philosopher's followers divided into Right and Left Hegelians; among the latter were Marx and Engels, so that indirectly Hegel came to have a great influence on political radicalism. Marx­ism was also affected by the revival of Enlightenment materialism that took place in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Associated with "voluntarism" and "pessimism," Arthur Schopenhauer identified reality with an irrational will. He advocated a kind of neo-Buddhist prin­ciple of renunciation. Unmarried like many major philosophers, Schopenhauer offered perceptive remarks on pederasty (which he does not seem, however, to have prac­ticed). His sexual ethic began a separation of erotic expression from procreation that was to be carried further by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). The radical skep­ticism expressed with biting irony by Nietzsche was to prove a corrosive solvent of many seeming certainties that had bol­stered established institutions. Often banished to the outer margins of profes­sional philosophy, his writings have shown remarkable staying power, influencing Michel Foucault in the 1970s.
Pragmatism and Positivism. Fol­lowing Locke and his empiricist predeces­sors, English and French philosophy di­verged in the nineteenth century from German thought which, as has been seen, flowed from Kant. Jeremy Bentham went from the public school of Westminster to Oxford, where he was hazed for lack of robust manliness. He derived his principle of utilitarianism, especially the so-called "felicific calculus" (the greatest good of the greatest number) from the Italian reformer Count Beccaria. Bentham did not dare to publish his papers recommending the decriminalization of sodomy during his own lifetime (they began to appear only in 1931).
The creator of positivism, Auguste Comte (1798-1857) thought, like the British empiricists, that knowledge was acquirable only by observation and experience, but agreed with Kant that the ultimate principles were unknowable. Generally regarded as the founder of soci­
ology, Comte emphasized human improve­ment through the application of ostensi­bly objective social laws. One of a number of thinkers sometimes known as the "prophets of Paris," his ideas about society have been ambiguous in their relation to sexual variation since they tend to empha­size uniformity and universality, rather than pluralism. However, Comte's eccen­tric contemporary Charles Fourier did not hesitate to include both lesbianism and male homosexuality in his Phalansteries, Utopian cells of a new society.
Son of Bentham's friend James Mill, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who may be called a positivist, empirically stressed logic, utilitarian ethics, liberal politics, and laissez-faire approach to eco­nomics (which he derived from Adam Smith). His
On Liberty (1859) sets forth the most eloquent defense of freedom of speech that has ever been devised, and has proved of enormous value in combatting censorship of both political and erotic materials.
Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Idealism, in the form of Hegelianism, lin­gered in Britain and North America in the early years of the century. Related to this trend are the individualist works of George Santayana, which are today read more for their literary qualities than for their tech­nical acuteness.
A break with the idealist tradi­tion was signaled by the Cambridge thinker, G. E. Moore (1873-1958), who though not himself homosexual was widely influential on several prominent gay men in the Apostles group, who then went to shine in Bloomsbury. Also a student at Cambridge was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who is arguably the most influential thinker of the twentieth century. His followers, fear­ing damage to his reputation, continue to deny Wittgenstein's homosexuality, but it is well established.
Although it has earlier roots in such thinkers as Kierkegaard and Husserl, existentialism is generally associated with the Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre, who was also active as a novelist and political po­lemicist. An atheist, Sartre held that exis­tence precedes essence, and that we are therefore radically challenged to embrace the freedom that is inherent in our situ­ation. Although he seems never to have had a homosexual experience, Sartre was familiar with gay men and women through his left-bank circle in Paris, and included them in his overall concern with margi­nalized groups.
In Britain and America at mid-century the most visible philosophers adopted the austere credo of "analysis," which excluded most traditional themes from its purview. By about 1970, however, philosophers began to descend from the mountaintop to address themes of life and death, human destiny, and moral dilem­mas. Such topics as capital punishment, abortion, incest, and homosexuality be­came accepted - at least in some academic philosophy departments. Feminism also made a strong impact, and women phi­losophers began to address what they held were the distortions of androcentric thought. It was even debated whether men and women might have fundamentally different styles of thinking that admit of no common denominator. Other thinkers, especialy such neo-Marxists as Herbert Marcuse and Louis Althusser, addressed questions of political theory. All these currents came to have a considerable, though indirect, influence on the ideas of gay liberation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert Baker and Frederick Elliston, ed., Philosophy and Sex, second ed., Buffalo: Prometheus,
1984; Vem L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1976; Laurence J. Rosin, "Philosophies of Homophobia and Homophilia," in The Gay Academic, L. Crew, ed., Palm Springs: ETC, 1978, pp. 255-81,- Alan Soble, ed., Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings, Totowa, NJ: Littlefield and Adams, 1980.
William A. Percy

Phone and Computer Sex
Phone sex is masturbation while communicating by telephone with another person. It is an emerging pastime and industry, with franchises and telephone equipment designed for it. An offshoot of the pornography industry, phone sex has built its legal base on the freedom ac­corded to pornographic utterances and shows signs of attracting a significant frac­tion of its revenues. A number of small, non-profit clubs facilitate obscene phone calls among their members.
History. Dirty talk over the tele­phone is nearly as old as dial telephones, on which no one could eavesdrop, and has a precedent in obscene letters exchanged by lovers. Also helpful was the telephone industry's early stand in favor of confiden­tiality of communications, which soon became law. As a commercial phenome­non, though, it originated in the 1970s with recorded tapes of dirty talk sold by Old Reliable and a number of smaller publishers. Beginning in the early 1980s advertisements appeared in sex publica­tions for phone sex services, in which for a fee of $10 to $40, usually paid via credit card, a voice at the other end creates fanta­sies or discusses any topic that will stimu­late orgasm in the customer.
"976" phone services were intro­duced in the United States in the mid-1980s; the number refers to a telephone company prefix. They provided recorded messages of short duration for a fee of $2 or less, billed through the telephone com­pany. An important legal ruling stated that providers of sexual messages should have equal access to this facility, and the pri­mary use of the "976" capacity was for masturbatory sexual messages, gay and straight. The unrestricted availability of these recorded messages to minors led to such a parental outcry that they were ef­fectively ended by the late 1980s. They were also a. problem for businesses, which were faced with charges for surreptitious calls by employees. So many calls were made from Mexico to 976 numbers that international access was discontinued at the request of the Mexican telephone company.
Various adaptations of this highly profitable service were tried: the use of access codes furnished upon validation of age; changes in telephone company pre­fixes and equipment so that parents could remove access to such services from their phones; a requirement of payment by credit card, which few minors could effect. The adaptation which seemed to meet with the most immediate success was the abandon­ment of recorded messages altogether in favor of simply connecting callers to one another, in pairs or groups, or providing contact advertisements via telephone. Thus the service provider could disclaim responsibility for, and indeed remain igno­rant of, the message content.
Computer Sex. An offshoot of phone sex is computer sex or compusex, in which the connection is made by modem, parties being linked over telephone lines with a host computer. This began with mainframe-based services such as Com­puServe and American PeopleLink, which have been friendly to their numerous gay customers. Computer sex then spread to smaller, exclusively gay services operated by individuals; while they started as hob­bies, several have outgrown that status. Providers of computer communication services encourage callers, in private messages or when connected in private with one or more other callers, to be as explicit as they wish; part of the appeal is that one can converse anonymously using a pseudonym or "handle." They also provide contact advertisements and gay news and commercial advertisements. Main­frame-based services offer popular "party line" type discussions; services usually have a gay conversation line, accounting for a third to a half of the party line conver­sations, and on which a cruisy atmosphere sometimes develops. Computer commu­nications are quickly being given the same legal rights to privacy as telephone mes­sages. In France, since the national tele­phone system distributed simple computer terminals to all customers, sexual mes­sage services, called messageries roses, have been highly successful; indeed, the sexual message services have ensured the success of home computer terminals in France, just as X-rated videos made a hit of the video tape recorder in the United States.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Dave Kinnick, "From Floppy to Hard: Computer Dating at Home,"
The Advocate, 516 (January 17, 1989), 42-45.
Daniel Eisenberg

Photography
"Gay" or "homosexual" photog­raphy is an ambiguous concept. While a person can be described as homosexual because of sexual activities, or as gay be­cause of sexual preference or expressing a certain consciousness, an inanimate, unconscious object cannot. Nonetheless, to the extent that a photographic image reflects a particular consciousness on the part of the photographer, it might be termed gay, though that consciousness is notori­ously hard to define. Thus images by gay or homosexual photographers are sometimes described as "gay photography," although not every image by a gay person is neces­sarily marked by gay sensibility. On occa­sion the term is used to describe the docu­mentation of gay events or meeting places, or of homosexual behavior. At still other times the term is used almost as a syno­nym for male nudes, though feminist-in­spired male nudes (while a gay man may appreciate the images) could not be called gay images. Yet in each case there is some justification for the usage, if "gay" or "homosexual photography" is defined as those images which consciously or uncon­sciously portray or evoke homoerotic as­sociations shared by the creator and viewer. Homosexual photographers would be most likely to express such associations, the places or behaviors to be charged with such meanings, and certainly the male nude is the central focus of such homoerotic references.
Until recently, such expression of homoerotic interests had to be masked by a "top dressing" of one sort or another - artist's reference studies, ethnological studies, mythological or classical subjects, nudism, and physical culture. While these cover categories provided an area of safety in which homoerotic photography could exist in the face of social hostility, they also imposed artificial limits on what the photographer could create and how he could present his work, and contributed to a sense of the marginality of the work.
Pioneers. From the very earliest processes - daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and the like - very few images of male nudes exist, even as compared with the number of female nudes, and those are rare. It was not until the development of albumen paper and, later, of dry plate negatives, that any significant number of homoerotic images were created.
Photography, in its earliest phases, was not considered as an art form in itself, but as a technique for recording reality in the service of science or art. It was this rationale that provided the cover for the first major development of photographic images expressing homoerotic intentions, in the form of "etudes," nude studies of men and boys ostensibly for the use of artists who were unable to obtain the serv­ices of live models. Such studies flour­ished in the years 1875-1900, from studios such as Calavas in France, but were also produced in other countries. As in images of women and girls created for similar purposes, the subjects are displayed in "statuesque" poses against studio back­drops. Contemporary reports of their availa­bility, and the number that still exist, indicate that the clientele for these was far wider than the artists.
Among the first to treat photogra­phy as an independent art form was a German living in Sicily, Wilhelm Baron von Gloeden (1856-1931), whose aesthetic reflected the academic school of painting in which he had been trained. The classi­cal allusions that were standard in this academic art - though certainly used quite sincerely by von Gloeden, at least most of the time - provided a cover for his homoeroticism. While conservative in his aesthetic, he was a technical innovator in moving his models outdoors. His work - including but not limited to his well-known "classical" male nudes - made him one of the best known and best selling photographers in the world at the turn of the century. Similar nudes were produced by von Gloeden's cousin Wilhelm Pluschow, and by the Italians Vincenzio Galdi and Gaetano d'Agata.
Photography as an art, however, did not follow von Gloeden's academic aesthetic. Another important homosexual photographer, the American F. Holland Day (1864-1933), figured in the develop­ment of pictorial photography, which modeled itself on impressionism. His New School of American Photography, a prede­cessor to the Photo-Secession movement, promoted an aesthetic "soft-focus," ma­nipulated prints, and narrative themes. Day's "Grecian" subjects of nude boys and men remain key pictorialist images.
Surrealist photography, though strongly dominated by heterosexual eroti­cism, also included homoerotic images in the work of the German photographer Herbert List (1903-1975). Another impor­tant figure who explored the erotic mean­ings of the male body was the American photographer George Piatt Lynes (1907-1955). Although he did exhibit male nudes, influenced by surrealism, in which mythological references cover the ho­moerotic subtext, his precisely observed studies of the male form, in which the body itself becomes an object for contem­plation, were created primarily for a close circle of acquaintances or published pseudonymously in a European homophile magazine. Another American photogra­pher who shared this interest in the erotic implications of the closely regarded male body was Minor White (1908-1976), while the German Herbert Tobias (1924-1982) produced homoerotic work which shares Lynes' more dramatic vision.
Popular Aspects. Two popular expressions of homoerotic photography, which had no pretentions to art, also de­veloped between 1900 and 1950. Physique photos originated with publicity photo­graphs of Eugene Sandow, Bernarr McFadden, and other turn-of-the-century health and physical culture practitioners. With the 1930s images of Tony Sansone and movie stills of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, these developed into an equiva­lent of the contemporary pictures of glam­orous actresses. The naturist (nudist) movement, flourishing particularly in Germany between 1920-1933, contributed outdoor studies of relentlessly healthy, active male groups. The display of the male body inherent in both these genres became explicit by the late 1950s as they intermingled in the work of photographers like Alfred Heinecke (1915-1975), who had been involved in German nudist pho­tography before coming to America, and later, in more overtly homoerotic images of Anthony Guyther's New York-based Capital studio, Bob Mizer's California-based Athletic Model Guild, and Bruce Bellas ("Bruce of Los Angeles," d. 1974), who still used physique studies or naturism as a cover while acknowledging the increasing distance between what the image purported to be and what it really was by adding such "camp" references as cowboy hats, motorcycle jackets, and construction equipment.
The habit of covering real inten­tions for the sake of safety, of "things-
being-what-they-aren't," is perhaps one of the elements that fed into camp sensibil­ity, with its elevation of the artificial, of appearances, style, and the theatrical. A number of homosexual photographers, including Baron de Meyer (1868-1946) and Lynes, have been involved with fashion and theatre, but perhaps the "campiest" photographer was Sir Cecil Beaton (1906-1980), known for his exquisitely superficial (in the sense of being abso­lutely concerned with surface appearances) portraits of society and theatre figures.
Contemporary Trends. With the climate of sexual liberalization in the 1960s, gay photographers found themselves increasingly free to explore overt homoerotic themes without the excuses previously necessary, and stripped of the formulas that provided cover in the past, they also have been more able to explore their personal visions. Healthier social attitudes and more positive self-percep­tions among homosexuals that followed the rise of gay liberation have also encour­aged personal expression.
In the years since 1970, homoerotic photography has become both more personal and more intimate. Ex­amples of the former are explorations of private imagery by such stylistically di­verse photographers as Duane Michaels, Arthur Tress, Bernard Faucon, and David Lebe. The uncovering of personal intimacy is a common thread which connects the work of such photographers as George Dureaux, Peter Hujar, Erwin Olaf, and Hans van
Manen, whose friends or ac­quaintances are often their subjects. In addition to exploring the erotic meanings of the male body, their nudes frequently also explore the implications of the photographer's relationship with the sub­ject of the photograph. Robert Mapplethorpe (1947-1989), whose reexamination of the studio techniques of the 1930s and 1940s, often with homoerotic or sadomaso­chistic subjects, led to a rethinking of the possibilities of the studio nude and por­trait, is the central figure in this develop­ment.
Lesbian Elements. Although there are isolated figures such as Viscount­ess Clementis Hawarden (1822-1865) and Alice Austen ¡1866-1952), owing largely to the historical underrepresentation of women in the photographic profession lesbian photography has no broad heri­tage. What lesbian images exist may be characterized as more concerned with af­fective relationships, and less concerned with erotic meanings, than their male counterparts. An important figure in this tradition is the American "JEB" (Joan E. Biren), noted for her portraits of lesbian women. The last few years have seen the emergence of photographers like Diana Blok and Mario Broekmans (The Nether­lands), whose imagery more openly ex­plores women's eroticism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Judith Schwartz and Joan Biren, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, Washington, D.C.: Glad Hag Press, 1979; Tom Waugh, "Photography, Passion and Power," Body Politic, 101 (March 1984), pp. 29-33; Peter Weiermair, The Hidden Image: Photo­graphs of the Male Nude in the Nine­teenth and Twentieth Centuries, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
Donald Mader

P
indar (518-438 b.c)
Ancient Greek poet of Thebes. Pindar's works exemplify the classical Greek tradition of male devotion to the kouros, or beautiful young man, witnessed also in surviving statuary and vase paint­ing, and in the poetry of Pindar's near-contemporary Theognis of Megara. Pindar's epinician odes, or songs of victory, were commissioned to celebrate the exploits of athletes at the great games, the most famed of which were the Olympian (in Elis) and the Pythian (in Delphi), held every four years; and the Nemean (in the northeast Peloponnese) and the Isthmian (on the isthmus of Corinth), held every otheryear.
The express purpose of these odes, classi­fied by the festivals they celebrate, was praise both of the victor and of the noble who paid for the composition and perform­ance of these lavish choral works.
Pindar's patrons included the wealthy families and military aristocrats throughout Greece and Sicily, notably Hieron of Syracuse and Theron of Akragas. Although the poet lived in a time of politi­cal upheaval and social democratization, particularly at Athens, following the Per­sian Wars, his outlook, in accordance with that of his patrons, remained conservative and unabashedly aristocratic.
The odes offer in fact a veritable paradigm of the noble Greek youth who best embodied that composite abstraction, so dear to the hearts of later Athenian eugenicists,
kalokagathia, that is a mix­ture of to kalon (physical beauty) and to agathon (valor). Indeed, the first quality already implied the second. The adoles­cent hero possessed quasi-divine strength and manly virtue,- he was an ideal man-boy, and thus could be compared to the mighty Heracles [Nemean 1), swift Achil­les [Isthmian 8, Nemean 3), or Ganymede, the archetypal ephebe (male in his late teens) snatched up to heaven by Zeus (Olympian 1).
Pindar normally incorporated into his epinician odes an illustrative myth meant to enhance further and to "immor­talize" the athlete's victory. These myths were naturally heroic, but often (homo)erotic, since praise of a youth im­plied, in the Greek mind, at least a meas­ure of love for and devotion to him. The fabled Ganymede
[Olympian 1) provides one example; but the most provocatively homosexual use of myth occurs, again, in Olympian 1, which celebrated Hieron of Syracuse, winner of the horse race in 476 b.c. There Pindar introduced a new myth of Tantalus and Pelops to show how dear he (Pelops and, by extension, Hieron) was to the gods. The poet, rejecting the grisly story of Pelops' dismemberment by his father Tantalus, explained Pelops' "disap­pearance" by his having been spirited away, like Ganymede, by the god Poseidon, who, once he saw the boy, fell in love with him. But the myths extolling youthful male beauty also had their darker side: Tantalus abused his divine privilege by stealing the gods' ambrosial food, and so suffered eter­nal punishment in Hades. His son Pelops, "cast out" by the immortals, had to re­sume his place among men, but, before his death, he gained glory for himself.
In a non-mythic context, youth could be looked on merely as an ephemeral glory, the prelude to old age and death. As Pindar succinctly moralizes in
Pythian 8:95, "Man lives but a day." Therefore, since everyone must die, what use is it to "sit in darkness" and to "cherish an old age without a name, letting go all lovely things" (Olympian 1:82-84). This carpe diem motif which, in the context of the Pindaric ode, urged young men to win a glorious name for themselves while they still could, was a staple of both Greek and Latin pederastic poetry meant to cajole an often petu­lant ephebe: normally a boy's best period encompassed those years immediately preceding the first growth of beard (cf. Nemean 5:5-6).
Pindar also composed poems in many other forms, notably
partheneia, or maiden songs, which survive only in frag­ments. These partheneia, sung by cho­ruses of women, praised the beauty and grace of young girls, sometimes in sexu­ally loaded descriptions strikingly similar to the lesbian verses of Sappho. The maiden song, like the male-oriented victory ode (and, like it, composed by men), appears to have been a popular genre,- a large fragment of a partheneion by the poet Alemán (sev­enth century b.c.) survives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. C. M. Bowra,
Pindat, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
Eugene M. O'Connor

Pink Triangle
In the Holocaust camps effected by the German National Socialist regime (1933-45), the prisoners in the concentration camps were obliged to wear markings that indicated the category into which they fell. The triangle was a piece of col­ored fabric, about 5 centimeters across, sewn on their clothing. The color scheme was: yellow for Jews, red for political of­fenders (Communists), green for profes­sional criminals, black for asocial indi­viduals (criminal psychopaths), violet for Jehovah's Witnesses, blue for illegal emigres, brown for Gypsies, and pink (in German rosa) for male homosexuals, This scheme was not applied uniformly, and other symbols could perform the same function: a yellow band on the upper arm with the letter A for "Arschficker" [Arse-fucker], or a large numeral 175 (the num­ber of the paragraph of the Reich Penal Code which the wearer had violated). However, the pink triangle was the most frequent badge imposed on prisoners who had been convicted of homosexual offenses.
The colored triangles could also be used to isolate prisoners and prevent them from playing a role as organizers of resistance within the camps, for example as when a Communist was labeled with the black triangle and relegated to the company of
asociáis in whose midst he could accomplish no political task. Also, many of those convicted under Paragraph 175 were not homosexual: some were opponents of the regime such as Catholic priests or leaders of youth groups who were prosecuted on the basis of perjured testimony, while others were street hus­tlers from Berlin or Hamburg who had been caught up in a police dragnet. The yellow star of David with the word "Jude" (or its equivalent in the language of the occupied country) was inspired by the medieval Jew badge that had been imposed on Jewish communities in Christian Eu­rope by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Under the Nazis it had to be worn by Jews in civil life and exposed them to all the discriminatory statutes and regulations, while the triangles were strictly confined to the concentration camps.
In the early 1970s the pink tri­angle was discovered by gay activists in the United States and adopted as a symbol of resistance and solidarity. Since then it has become, together with the Greekletter lambda, one of the worldwide emblems of the gay liberation movement, as well as a reminder of the homosexuals who per­ished in the Nazi extermination camps during the Second World War.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Richard Plant,
The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, New York: Henry Holt, 1986; Hans-Georg Stumke and Rudi Finkler, Rosa Winkel, Rosa Listen: Homosexuelle und "gesundes Volksempfinden" von Auschwitz bis heute, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981.
Warren Johansson

Pirates
Because pirates or buccaneers belonged to all-male organizations which tended to be isolated from women for long periods of time, situational homosexual­ity (as in prisons) has probably flourished in their midst over the centuries. For vari­ous reasons, however, there is little docu­mentation, let alone detailed accounts, of this conduct. It is known that homosexu­ality was widespread among the Barbary corsairs of the North African coast, but this may be better categorized as Mediter­ranean or Islamic homosexuality than as pirate homosexuality.
The Buccaneers of the West In­dies. Professor B. R. Burg has attempted to deal with homosexuality among the pi­rates of the Caribbean during the seven­teenth century. He was handicapped by the lack of documents, and sought to rea­son backwards in many cases from what is known today about the sexual behavior of men in all-male groups to the patterns of sexuality among the pirates.
In his research, Burg discovered only one book, of dubious authenticity, offering material on pirate homosexuality. This was the autobiography of a French. The institution of
matelot was also found to be widespread among the Caribbean pirates, with one pirate taking on a boy or man as a personal servant, either from a captured ship or from a port, and forming very close emotional bonds to him. The matelots even had inheri­tance rights in the event of the death (not uncommon among the pirates) of their masters.
In England of the Stuart period, according to Burg, attitudes toward homo­sexuality were relatively relaxed, and the practice flourished among those from whom pirates drew their crews: groups of vagabond youths, merchant mariners, and Royal Navy crewmen. In the absence of heterosexuality, one is left with the op­tions of sexual abstinence (which for many is scarcely credible), masturbation (which is not too plausible either), or widespread homosexuality. While it is easy to criticize the dearth of documentary material of­fered by Burg, his conclusions cannot be readily dismissed.
Pirates of the China Coast. Thanks to reports by Chinese governors to their emperors, there is a good deal more documentation for homosexual practices on the part of Chinese pirates operating in the South China Sea around the turn of the nineteenth century, when a confederation of six pirate fleets defeated the Chinese Navy and raided coastal villages between 1790 and 1810.
The chief of this confederation was first Cheng-I, who kidnapped the 15-year-old fisherman's son Chang Pao (1783-1822) and made him his lover and later his adopted son. It was common for Chinese pirates to rape anally their cap­tives of both sexes, and captured boys often became the lovers and/or adopted sons of the pirates. At the death of Cheng-I, Chang Pao inherited the chiefdom and married his adoptive mother to consoli­date his power.
Chang Pao terrorized all of south­east China, threatening to attack Macao and Canton, and even dreamed of becom­ pirate named Louis Le Golif, who said that he had engaged in passive sodomy when he was young. Beyond this, Burg found some legal records, and close friendships be­tween adult pirates, as well as consider­able affection between captains and their cabin-boys. Because of these methodologi­cal problems, Burg's reconstruction of a widespread, thoroughly homosexual soci­ety among the West Indies pirates has elicited scepticism.
Nevertheless, Burg's work does shed light on the subject. He establishes that the pirates did not show much inter­est in acquiring women, and often went to lengths to keep their distance from them even when the pirates could easily have procured them for sexual purposes. Burg infers that the pirates preferred the all-male society and its homosexuality. This conclusion departs from a strictly situa­tional model, such as is applied to prisons, boarding schools, and seafaring, where the participants express a preference for heterosexuality which is, however, unobtain­able. On the other hand, Burg paints a picture of impoverished youths growing up in all-male environments in which they were socialized to homosexuality from puberty onward and found it "normal" to continue such patterns in their careers as pirates.
Burg also found no evidence for effeminacy or for quasi-female roles among the pirates, in marked contrast to prison patterns in which the insertees are as­signed such roles; all the pirates, from the most aggressive sodomizers to the cabin boys, were considered thoroughly male.
According to Burg's analysis, the common members of the pirate crews practiced androphilia, that is the adults engaged in sex with each other; he also found a marked preference for anal sex and little or no reference to oral sex. Pedo­philia, however, could be found as a prac­tice of captains and certain other crew-members with specialized skills who were socially not integrated with the rest of the pirate crew.
ing emperor. However, his plans were forestalled by the governor of Canton in 1810 when the latter offered pardons and rewards to all pirates who would surren­der, and this pulled out the rug from under Chang Pao, who eventually settled for a colonelcy in the Chinese army.
Dian Murray's study of the Chi­nese pirates describes them as moving "easily and freely" between men, women, and boys as sexual partners. Unlike their West Indies counterparts, the top pirates usually carried women on board, with one captain noted for having five or six wives living on the ship with him. Murray sug­gests that forcible sodomy may have been used as a rite of initiation into the pirate crew. Certainly, to judge from Chang Pao's story, it was not considered a dishonor or a bar to future leadership, in marked con­trast to the contempt accorded by ancient Romans or modern prisoners to any male who has been sexually penetrated.
If the data on Chinese and Carribean pirates are both scanty and tantaliz­ing, there is even less information on other periods of great pirate activity, such as occurred in the late Roman republic or the sixteenth-century heyday of the Spanish Main. If any conclusion can be drawn from what is recorded, it is that the study of pirate lifestyles confirms earlier knowl­edge that patterns of homosexuality differ extraordinarily from one culture to an­other and resist easy generalization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. B. R. Burg, Sodomy and the Perception of Evil, New York: New York University Press, 1983; Dian H. Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
Stephen Wayne Foster and Stephen Donaldson

Platen-Hallermund, August von (1796-1835)
German Romantic poet. Born in Ansbach of one of the oldest aristocratic families of the city, he was by rank a count.
His outward life was uneventful, consist­ing mainly of brief military service, an extensive stay at the university, and some dozen years of residence or travel in Italy. The poet's inner life, however, was a pro­found psychological drama. He was at­tracted to the late adolescent or male in his twenties; and although he had lifelong friendships that lay outside the sphere of his homosexual tendencies, when his at­traction to another man began with a note of sexual passion, it remained so to the bitter end - and often meant intense tor­ment for him. In religion a Protestant, in character a sensitive, refined individual of idealizing temperament, Platen was virile in mind and body, yet only the male ap­pealed to his sense of beauty.
At the close of the Napoleonic wars Platen served in a Bavarian regiment in Munich and even accompanied it onto French soil, but returned home without a baptism of fire. He then studied foreign languages, literature, political history, and philosophy at the universities of
Würzburg and Erlangen, furnishing his mind with an encyclopedic knowledge of these subjects. Before his student days were over, Platen had attracted notice, even in high literary circles, by his poems and his brilliant sa­tirical dramas, and he understood that his calling was to be a writer. The oriental poems known as the Ghazels, the pro­found human feeling in the Sonnets, and the passion, rhythmic sense and melody of the Odes still command admiration. His comedies are precursors of the sort of social satire that Gilbert and Sullivan later immortalized for the British stage. After 1826 the poet was increasingly alienated from his German homeland, and his con­tempt for most aspects of its literary life grew biting. In part because of his homo­sexual interests, it was Italy that beckoned him, and he spent the last decade of his life there, a life prematurely ended by an out­break of cholera in Syracuse in 1835.
The clearest record of his homo­sexuality is in the diary, kept from child­hood, which he wrote not just in German,
but in considerable portions in French, Italian, and Portuguese. Meant for the writer's eyes alone, the diary records not only his intellectual growth and literary studies, but also his homosexual passions. During his lifetime he allowed no one else to read it, except perhaps in a single unfor­tunate instance that enabled one of his best friends to detect Platen's true sexual nature - with an ensuing painful scene in a public
circle of their acquaintances. After his death his literary executors were shy of publishing this revealing document, which was kept with restricted access in the Royal Library in Munich until in 1896-1900 the entire text was published in two large volumes of over 2000 pages. The entries chronicle the intense erotic friendships of his student days and later passions that tormented and thrilled him, as some of his innamoiati were wholly unresponsive to his overtures.
Toward the close of his life Platen became embroiled in mortal enmity with Heinrich Heine, who shared many of his political views and yet was his antipode as a poet. Heine maliciously seized upon the poet's homoerotic side to attack him in
The Baths of Lucca. Platen did in 1834 publish a poem with the code word "Vemünft'ge" [= gay] that to the initiated was a declaration of homosexual self-con­sciousness and solidarity ("Sollen ñámenlos uns lánger," written January 31, 1823). He is a classic example of the homosexual in whom talent is joined with an intensity of feeling that can betray him in his private and his public life, but also with a strength of character that enables him to surmount these vicissitudes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Xavier Mayne (pseudonym of Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson), The Intersexes: A History of Simihsexualism as a Problem in Social Life, Rome: Privately printed, 1908, pp. 563-620.
Warren Johansson

Plato (circa
429-347 b.c)
Greek philosopher and prose writer. He was the son of Ariston and Perictione, both Athenians of distinguished lineage. His writings show the enormous influence that the philosopher Socrates had upon him by his life, his teaching, and his death. The spectacle of contemporary politics, both during the ascendancy of his own supporters and under the democracy, gradually turned him away from the career of a statesman and forced him to the para­dox that there was no hope for cities until philosophers became rulers or rulers phi­losophers. After the trial and execution of Socrates in 399 he chose with other Socratics to leave Athens and reside for a time in Megara. In the next twelve years he traveled to many places, including Egypt. In 387 he visited Italy and Sicily, where he initiated lifelong friendships with Dion of Syracuse and the Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum. On his return he began teach­ing formally and continuously at a place near the grove of Academus about a mile outside the wall of Athens. This was his chief occupation during the last forty years of his life; he departed only to make two further visits to Syracuse, where he in­volved himself fruitlessly in its internal politics under Dionysius II.
Plato's writings consist of some twenty-five dialogues and the
Apology of Socrates. As a prose stylist in Attic Greek he is one of the great figures of classical literature. His style possesses infinite variety, his language is tinged with poetry and rich in metaphors, especially from music, to which he can return even when their implications seem exhausted. His sentences can range from the briefest to long, straggling periods, sometimes even more powerful than those of the orator Demosthenes, but quite different from them. His later style betrays traces of mannerism, including subtle interlacings of word order and affectations of asso­nance. No other author attains such sus­tained power and beauty in Greek prose.
The subject of homosexuality in Plato is primarily a question of
paiderasteia, the erotic attachment of an adult male for an adolescent boy that was the normative form of homosexual expression in the society in which he lived. Wherever he depicts or alludes to the power of sexual desire, the context is homosexual. The principal works in which he treats the matter are the Symposium and the Repub­lic, which belong to his middle period, and the Laws, which was probably written at the end of his life. Only secondarily does Plato, in the Goigias of his early period, deal with the kinaidos, the passive-effemi­nate male who accepts the role, seeks to be sexually possessed by other men, and so behaves like a woman. Though the partici­pants in the dialogue admit that the ki­naidos derives pleasure from his shameful practices, his disgrace reaches the level of taboo and so contaminates those who even allude to his existence. The example of the kinaidos proves conclusively that pleas­ure does not equal goodness. The stigma which even Hellenic society attached to passive homosexuality was for Plato a source of ambivalence that colored the negative evaluation even of paideiasteia in his last writings.
In the
Symposium, moreover, Plato is forced to deal with a non-Greek conception of the origin of homosexuality in the speech of Aristophanes, who relates a mythical account of the origin of the erotic attraction between members of the same sex. All human beings today are the halves of primordial ancestors who had two heads, four arms, four legs, and two sets of genitalia. At that time there were three genders: male-male, male-female, and female-female. To punish these creatures for their insolence, Zeus divided them in half, so that the sexual drive is the attempt of the original dual beings to reunite. The male-male halves are homosexual men, the male-female halves are heterosexuals, and the female-female halves are lesbians, to use .the modern terminology - which was not Plato's, it should be emphasized.
This myth echoes a Babylonian account of the origin of the sexes reported by Berossus, and to some extent underlying the story of the separation of Eve from Adam in Genesis, in which of the three only the heterosexual pair remains.
In the
Symposium Pausanias holds that pederasty is justified, but that admiration for the physical beauty of the boy should be paralleled by concern for his moral qualities and their development. The dialogue further develops the notion that there are two forms of love: the vulgar one, Aphrodite Pandemos, can be that of a male subject for either women or boys, while the heavenly one, Aphroditeliranios, is directed solely toward males and rises above the desire for physical gratification. The lover cherishes the vigor, the intelli­gence, and the potential for maturation of the eromenos, the beloved youth to whom he remains devoted throughout life. Thus paideiasteia is accepted as a fact of social life, but the philosopher seeks to orient the man-boy relationship toward non-sexual goals.
In the
Republic Plato's attitude toward pederasty is more negative,- he finds males who have sexual relations with other males, even in age-asymmetrical pairs, guilty of "vulgarity and lack of taste." The ideal of chastity in the life of male society is coupled with the notion that love of the soul should replace that of the body. Then in the Laws, probably written at the end of his life and in a mood of bitterness, Plato condemned pederasty as paia physin, "contrary to nature," and called for com­plete suppression of the homoerotic drive by defaming it so continuously that it would, like incestous desire, vanish from consciousness. The feeble argument that supports this doctrine is that "one cannot know in advance how boys will turn out," so that the efforts of the pederast to edu­cate his beloved boy are futile. In the Hellenic society of Plato's own time, and even later, this teaching found no reso­nance, but when fused with the condemna­tion of male homosexual relations in the book of Leviticus - of which the Greeks of the Golden Age knew nothing - it became the nucleus of the intolerance of homo­sexuality that has characterized Western civilization since the Roman state adopted Christianity as its official religion.
Plato's influence has been mani­fold, and cannot be reduced to a simple formula. The enemies of homosexual expression have used Plato's arguments selectively and have even tried to depict the more negative ones as typical of the whole of ancient Greek society - which they never were. On the other hand, homosexual apologists have over the cen­turies looked to the
Symposium as justify­ing and ennobling sexual liaisons between males and even exalting them above hetero­sexual ones in their utility to society, and at times have conveniently disregarded the crucial point that these are age-asymmetricalrelationships with an educational purpose - of which modern androphile homosexuality has none. Just because of his importance in the history of philoso­phy and his mastery of Greek prose, Plato has for more than twenty-three centuries been read, studied, and translated. His ambivalent legacy has shaped and even today informs the attitudes of Western man toward love of beauty and its sexual expression.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Félix Buffière, Eros adolescent: la pédérastie dans la Grèce antique, Paris: "Les Belles Lettres," 1980; David M. Halperin, "Plato and Erotic Reciprocity," Classical Antiquity, 5 (1986), 60-80; Cregory Vlastos, Platonic Studies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Warren Johansson

Plautus, Titus Maccius (d. ca. 184 b.c.)
The greatest Latin comic play­wright and earliest Latin of whom sub­stantial writings survive. Of the 130 plays attributed to him, the 21 that have come down from a second-century collection are certainly his. Modeled on plays by Menander, greatest of the Greek New Comedians, who wrote at the very end of the Golden Age of Athens, Plautus' come­dies are not merely translated from the Greek, but also incorporate new material not only from other Middle and Late comedies but from Roman life as well. Nowhere is this combination clearer than in his treatment of homosexuality, which the Middle and Late Greek comedies, in marked contrast to Aristophanes' and others' Old Comedies, tended to avoid in favor of marriage and slapstick heterosex­ual street scenes.
Plautus featured pederasts and pathics and portrayed relationships, pri­marily between masters and slaves, a dominance-submission pattern that was the normal practice in Rome, far removed from the mentor-disciple paradigm of Greek pederasty, which was theoretically (and of ten in practice) between upper-class males for pedagogic aims. Likewise in
Pseudolus (The Confidence Man), Plautus transformed the refined hetaira of a Greek original into the coarse inmate of a low Roman brothel. Slaves in general figured far more in his plays than in the Greek models, presumably because after the wars of expansion, they represented a much greater part of the Roman than of the classical Athenian population. Plautus portrayed the stereotypical characters from Greek comedies with a distinctively Roman twist.
His successor Terence (ca. 190-159
b.c.) stuck closer to the Greek origi­nals, especially to Apollodorusof Carystus, a disciple of Menander, and to Menander himself, and consequently made few allu­sions to homosexuality (only three have been detected). Perhaps this dearth ex­plains why Terence, more than Plautus, was assigned to Roman schoolboys and enjoyed greater vogue in the Middle Ages.
In Greek comedy it is always the effeminate male who is satirized, whereas Plautus portrays macho characters such as braggards and soldiers in
Miles Gloriosus who lust in their bisexual aggressiveness. His adult males are bisexual as a matter of course. Thus Plautus reveals the preva­lence and character of homosexuality in the Roman Republic at the close of the Punic Wars, when, although the civilizing role of Hellenism was just beginning, homoerotic relationships already flour­ished in uncouth, indigenous forms.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. lane m. Cody, "The senex amatoi in Plautus' Casina," Heimes, 101 (1976), 453-76,- Saara Lilja, "Homosexuality in Plautus' Plays," Aictos, new series, 16 (1982), 57-64; Amy Richlin, The Gaiden ofPriapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humoi, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
William A. Percy

Plethysmography
According to Masters and Johnson, sexual arousal consists (among other things) of the engorgement of the blood vessels in the pelvic region. Scien­tists can directly measure this physiologi­cal engorgement using a technique called plethysmography. A vaginal photoplethysmograph records an electronic signal that measures the reflectivity of the vagi­nal wall, which is correlated with the amount of engorgement of the blood ves­sels in the region. A penile strain gauge Plethysmograph records a signal that re­flects the circumference of the penis it encircles. A volumetric penile Pleth­ysmograph reports the total volume of air around a penis it encloses. A groin tem­perature thermocouple reports the tem­perature at the surface of the skin on the inside upper thighs, a temperature that reflects the rise in warm blood pooling in the groin during sexual arousal in either sex.
The scientific validity of penile plethysmography is no longer much in dispute - it is, after all, practically valid prima facie - though it is not settled which of the two kinds of device is more accurate. Vaginal photoplethysmography has almost attained the same status. Groin tempera­ture reading is a new technique which has not yet been completely tested.
Origins and Basic Procedures. Plethysmography was first applied to the study of sexual orientation issues by Kurt Freund, a Czech researcher, who was conducting studies of aversion therapy to change the sexual orientation of gay men who came to him for such help. Freund found that these patients' self-reports of "cures" due to the aversion therapy did not last long, and that plethysmography failed to confirm these cures. Accordingly, he stopped performing such aversion ther­apy and, in Canada, he has popularized the technique in basic research on sexual topics. Other researchers (notably Natha­niel McConaghy of Australia) have also discovered, through plethysmography, that it is very difficult to change sexual orien­tation in men.
In research on sexual orientation, plethysmography is useful because it as­sesses which stimuli cause sexual arousal independent of a person's conscious knowl­edge or reporting thereof. Age preferences can also be roughed out in cooperative subjects.
In a typical experiment, subjects wear a plethysmograph while they watch a screen and/or listen to an audiotape involving a variety of stimuli: some sexu­ally neutral stimuli (as controls), and some depictions or descriptions of situations or objects thought to be sexually arousing. A mixed bag of plethy smographic results will give the flavor of the kinds of experiments conducted. (1) Male cross-dressers who have been erotically aroused by women are also somewhat aroused by stories of themselves wearing women's clothes, while cross-dressers never aroused by women (i.e., homosexual "drag queens") are not. (2) Ordinary heterosexual men who are
most aroused by pictures of naked adult women sometimes show small but measurable arousal to pictures of naked prepubescent girls, but ordinary homosex­ual men who are most aroused by pictures of naked adult men apparently do not show measurable arousal to pictures of naked prepubescent boys. (3) Very few if any men show significant amounts of sexual arousal both when viewing naked adult women and when viewing naked adult men. (4) Substantial numbers of heterosexual women can be aroused by descriptions of group sex. (5) The best stimuli for separating homosexual from heterosexual men are those in which several members of the preferred sex are shown participating in sexual behavior. Thus, pictures of two women are typically more arousing to groups of heterosexual men than pictures of heterosexual copulation are.
Implications. The use of such studies and techniques in political or so­cial contexts of course cannot be ignored. It is hotly debated among sexologists whether plethysmography is scientifically valid if used on nonconsenting subjects (i.e., pedophiles or others whose sexual fantasies involve acts that remain illegal). Masturbating several times just before the procedure would, of course, make it use­less in men and nearly useless in most women. Repressive regimes would also have difficulty using it surreptitiously. Nevertheless, the potential for abuse is clear, and it is fortunate that so many of those who used it in dangerous ways have now disavowed those uses.
Erotic Taxonomy. Scientifically, plethysmography's best successes have been in erotic taxonomy. It has helped show that male-to-female transsexuals can be dichotomized into two groups: those sexually attracted to men and those sexu­ally attracted to women, and that those sexually attracted to women always or almost always have been aroused by cross-dressing. (Asexual and bisexual male-to-female transsexuals are now considered subtypes of the group attracted to women.) It has helped sharpen definitions by show­ing that certain types of bisexuality are very uncommon in men but not rare in women. In theory, it could be used over time to establish precisely how (and whether) one's erotic inclinations change as one gets older, and to throw light on situations where one's genitals are doing one thing and one's mind is doing another. And perhaps most important, it has estab­lished the validity of talking about one's sexual orientation, since it can establish that it exists independently of what one consciously reports. In so doing, it has challenged the notion that one's sexual proclivities are mere preferences on the level of what route one prefers to drive to work, even as it has made explicit the dangers and consequences of assuming that one's sexual orientation is far more important than one's handedness or one's leggedness.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Ray Blanchard, I. G. Racansky, and Betty Steiner, "Phallometric Detection of Fetishistic Arousal in Heterosexual Male Cross-dressers,"
Journal of Sex Research, 22 (1986), 453-62; Kurt Freund, F. Sedlacek, and K. Knob, "A Simple Transducer for Mechanical Plethysmography of the Male Genital," Journal of the Experi­mental Analysis of Behavior, 8 (1965), 169-70; Kurt Freund, "Male Homosexu­ality: An Analysis of the Pattern," in J. A. Loraine, ed., Understanding Homo­sexuality, New York: Elsevier, 1974, pp. 27-81; idem, "Should Homosexuality Arouse Therapeutic Concern?" Journal of Homosexuality, 2 (1977), 235-40; Peter W. Hoon, "The Assessment of Sexual Arousal in Women," Progress in Behavior Modification, 7(1979), 1-61; Nathaniel McConaghy, "Is a Homosex­ual Orientation Irreversible?" British Journal Of Psychiatry, 129(1976), 556-63.
James D. Weinrich

Plutarch (ca.
50-ca. 120)
Greek eclectic philosopher and biographer. Widely traveled in the Medi­terranean, this noble, who became a priest at Delphi but resided at his native Chaeronea in Boeotia, knew many leadingGreeks and Romans and may have received ap­pointments from Trajan and Hadrian. He advocated partnership between Greeks and Romans. An ancient catalogue of his works listed 227 items, of which 8 7 survive, most lumped together under the title Moralia, in addition to 50 biographies in Parallel Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans. His "On Moral Virtues" is Aristotelian and anti-Stoic: piety being a mean between superstition and atheism. In his dialogues, Plutarch, essentially aPlatonist, discussed the fate of the soul after death. His anti­quarian works are a mine of information about paganism, music, and education.
Plutarch's "Dialogue on Love" presents an imaginary debate (an example of contest literature), between a pederast and an advocate of the love of women. Declaring that "the one true love is the love of youths," the pederast, reciting a list of famous heterosexual lovers, attacks heterosexual love as self-indulgent, vul­gar, and servile. The advocate of the love of women, equally cutting, condemns ped­erasty as unnatural and innovative in the bad sense. With passionate arguments on both sides, this example reveals that the days when the superiority of pederasty could be taken for granted had long passed.
In a vivacious sketch, Plutarch sets forth a conversation between Odys­seus and one of his men who, through enchantment, has been turned into a pig (Gryllos). To the hero's surprise the pig who was once a man does not want to return to his human state: he prefers to remain a beast because, in his view, ani­mals live a life in conformity with nature, while human beings do not. According to Gryllos, one evidence of the superiority of animals is the supposed fact that they do not practice male or female homosexual­ity. While this claim has been disproved, over the centuries Plutarch's little dia­logue exercised a good deal of influence as a touchstone of the "happy beast" conceit (see Animal Homosexuality), which ar­gued that human conduct could be re­formed for the better by adopting the "natural, healthy" standards of animals.
In his vivid and gripping
Lives, Plutarch stressed the vices and virtues in the personalities of the great as well as their family, education, personality, and changes of fortune. Their accuracy varies according to the sources available to him. Many portray pederasty flatteringly, par­ticularly in the case of heroes of Sparta and Thebes, sometimes unflatteringly as in Otho and other Roman emperors, and amusingly as in the case of Demetrios Poliorcetes. They were extremely influen­tial and much read from the Italian Renais­sance through the Napoleonic era, when they were central to the Exemplar Theory of history - the concept that history teaches through the lives of great men who ex­celled either in virtue or vice. With the emergence of the idea of history as a supraindividual process, the accomplishment above all of the nineteenth-century Ger­man school, the centrality of Plutarch's biographies faded.
Plutarch shows that if pederasty was an ambivalent and disputed subject in late pagan antiquity, still no general taboo on the discussion or even more, the prac­tice of it existed before the Christian church began to exert its influence on law and public opinion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. R. H. Barrow,
Plutarch and His Times, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967; Curt Hubert, De Plutarchi amatoria, Kirchhain: Max Schmersow, 1903.
William A. Percy

Poetry
Through most of history, poetry has been a vital form of literature, and one which has often lent itself to the expres­sion of erotic or romantic sentiment. At the same time, poetry displays an inherent capacity for ambiguity which has provided a cover for homoerotic elements which might otherwise never have reached the printed page. In light of these considera­tions, and the long period during which the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome (often pederastic) has been held up as a model and inspiration, it is not surprising to find an abundant homoerotic tradition expressed in poetic form.
Traditionally, poetry has been classified as epic, dramatic, and lyric. While some homosexual elements appear in early epics, most relevant poetry belongs to the lyric genre, which permits expression of individual feelings.
Antiquity and the Earher Middle Ages. The history of homosexual poetry begins with the epic theme of the loving friendship between two warriors. In Meso­potamia, this theme was exemplified by the love between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and in Greece between Achilles and Patroclus, depicted respectively in the anonymous Epic of Gilgamesh, and Homer's Iliad. David's "Lament for Jon­athan" in the Old Testament (II Samuel 1:17-27) contains the famous phrase "surpassing the love of women," although it has never been explained whether this means that Jonathan's love for David sur­passed a man's love for women, or woman's love for men.
The first lesbian poems were the ones that ultimately gave lesbianism its name, the intense lyrics of Sappho of Lesbos, a Greek island. Theognis of Megara introduced pederastic ideals into Greek poetry, establishing a long-lived tradition, and many of the leading poets of ancient Greece dealt with the love of boys. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Greek poets turned to this subject in large numbers. Theocritus excelled as an expo­nent of the pastoral conventions for such poetry. The twelfth book of the Greek Anthology is the
Mousa Paidike ("boyish muse") edited by Strato of Sardis, a collection of over 250 brief pederastic poems expressing a remarkable range of sentiment.
Among the Romans, most of the leading poets dealt with homosexuality at some point. Vergil wrote a pastoral poem about Corydon, which gave Andre Gide the title for his modem defense of ped­erasty. The sardonic Martial composed many poems on this subject. Catullus wrote several which were so explicit that only recently have they been honestly translated into English.
After the fall of the Roman Em­pire, there were a few poets who treated this theme and whose works have sur­vived, including Luxorius in Vandal North Africa and the Greek Nonnus in Egypt; the latter's
Dionysiaka counts as the only surviving "Byzantine" poem to deal ex­tensively with homosexuality. The later Byzantines reputedly burned the poetry of Sappho, but preserved the Mousa Paidike.
The central Middle Ages (elev­enth and twelfth centuries) saw the ap­pearance of a number of medieval Latin poets, mainly clergy in France, who wrote homosexual works, including Abelard, Baudri of Bourgueil, Hilary (an English­man), Marbod of Rennes, and Walter of Chatillon. The "Debate Between Helen and Ganymede," an imitation of the ancient contest literature, concerns the relative merits of women and boys. The early Portuguese-Galician cantigos de amigo were poems written by men in which a female persona describes her love for a man; some of these poems must have been written by homosexuals.
Non-Western Poetry. It was not long after Islam spread across much of the world that pederastic poems began to appear, especially in Iran (Persia) and Andalusia. The Persian poets were generally Sufis, mystics whose love for youths was disguised as an allegorical love for God; these included such famous poets as Hafiz, Rumi, and Sa'di. One of their favorite themes was the love of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna for the boy Ayaz. Omar Khayyam mentions this topic in his Rubaiyat ("where name of Slave and Sul­tan is forgot, and peace to Mahmud on his golden throne"). The Andalusian poets of Granada who extolled pederasty were too numerous to mention, but it must be noted that the Jewish poets of Spain also wrote such poetry, including the most famous of them, JehudaHalevi (see Judaism, Sephardic). The Turks also cultivated pederastic poetry, drawing upon the earlier rich Is­lamic tradition. In India, Hindu poets avoided it, but Islamic poets, including Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, addressed it.
Outside Arab North Africa, only two "African" poets are known to have been homosexual, Roy Campbell of mod­em South Africa, and Rabearivalo of the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, the latter writing in French. There is little record of homosexual poetry in Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.
Although pederasty was wide­spread in Japan, and often expressed in short stories and other works of fiction, the only Japanese poet noted for dealing with it is the modem Matsuo Takahashi.
China is a different matter. Arthur Waley once observed that there were an enormous number of Chinese poems deal­ing with male friendships instead of hetero­sexual love. Unfortunately, very few of them have been translated into English. One pederastic poet has been the subject of a biography by Waley, Yuan Mei (eight­eenth century). Some homosexual items appear in
New Songs From a Jade Tenace, a anthology of Chinese love poems com­piled in ancient times. This has been trans­lated into English, and is the best introduc­tion to Chinese homosexual poetry avail­able. As a large portion of all homosexual verse is probably Chinese, it is to be regret­ted that so little of this heritage is acces­sible to Westerners.
Europe in the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The later Middle Ages were a dry period for homosexual poetry. There are sections of Dante's Di­vine Comedy and brief passages in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales which bear on homosexuality; there were brief men­tions of homosexuals in some of the eddas and sagas of Scandinavia. Some of the friendships between warriors in medieval narrative poems seem to have homosexual overtones. These, however, are merely bits and scraps to be found over a long period of time.
With the coming of the Renais­sance and its rediscovery of the classic poetic tradition, homosexual poetry began to flourish anew. Antonio Beccadelli wrote elegant scurrilities in Latin about sodomites. Poliziano described the homo­sexuality of Orpheus in
La Favola di Or-Jeo. The sculptor Michelangelo expressed his passion for handsome young men in sonnets and other forms. The homosexual poetry of Italy during this period is vast in quantity, and much of it, including work in the Bemesque and Burchiellesque gen­res, has never been translated into English.
In England, Richard Barnfield composed openly pederastic poems, but stopped when he was condemned for this ("If it be sin to love a lovely lad, oh then sin I"). Shakespeare wrote his famous son­nets to a youth mysteriously known as "Mr. W. H." Christopher Marlowe and Michael Drayton both dealt with Edward II. In France during this period, there were some poets who wrote about homosexual­ity, especially Denis de Saint-Pavin, the "king of Sodom."
Most of the seventeenth century showed a dearth of homosexual poetry. There were poems about beautiful boys written by Giambattista Marino in Italy and by Don Juan de Arguij o in Spain, but it is a long haul until the Restoration in England, when John Wilmot (Lord Roches­ter) wrote about pederasty, only to be fol­lowed by an even longer silence.
Modem Times. From the Roman­tic period, the number of poets increases until the present day, so that it becomes more and more difficult to evaluate the extant material. Numerous poets must remain unmentioned in order to concen­trate on some of the more important or interesting figures.
Russia discloses only one poem by Pushkin, but it does boast Vyacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, and the modern poetry of Gennady Trifonov. The Nether­lands and the Scandinavian countries produced a few minor poets, especially Vilhelm Ekelund of Sweden. Spain and Latin America gave us Federico Garcia Lorca, Porfirio Barba-Jacob, and Luis Cernuda. Portugal rejoices in the lyrical Antonio Botto and Fernando Pessoa, who ranks as one of the greatest modernist poets in any language. Italy claims Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mario Stefani, and Sandro Penna, all pederastic. Alexandria, Egypt, hosted Constantine Cavafy, a Greek and arguably the finest openly homosexual poet of the twentieth century. Canada produced E. A. Lacey, Ian Young, and some other poets. There are also homosexual poems written in little-known languages such as Basque, Lithuanian, and Friulian.
Britain. Though most of the Brit­ish homosexual poetry has come from England, it was a Scot, Lord Alfred Douglas, who created oneofthemost famous poems on this theme, the one which calls it "the Love that dare not speak its name." George Gordon, Lord Byron wrote a number of covert love poems to his boyfriends, and to him was (falsely) attributed the author­ship of Don Leon (ca. 1836), a verse defense of pederasty which is a masterpiece of its kind. The true author may have been Thomas Love Peacock, but this cannot be proven. Shelley was also interested in homosexuality, as is seen in his transla­tions of Plato. Alfred Lord Tennyson cre­ated the great In Memoriam after the death of his beloved Hallam, and Queen Victoria loved it in spite of the condemnation that came from homophobic critics ("It is bet­ter to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all."). Thomas Lovell Beddoes wrote one of the most beautiful of homosexual love-poems, also on the theme of the lost lover, "Dream-pedlary."
The latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century saw a tremendous amount of homosexual [mostly pederastic) poetry produced in England. The full details of this golden age appear in Brian Reade's
Sexual Heretics (London, 1970) and in Timothy d'Arch Smith's Love in Earnest (London, 1970), but some overview of this material must be given here. The British public school system, along with the sexual segregation at the universities of Cambridge and Ox­ford, stimulated a vast outpouring of love poems aimed at (mostly) boys. A few of these compositions, such as those by John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpen­ter, concerned working-class men in then-twenties. The pederastic poets included John Gambril Nicholson, Edward Cracroft Lefroy, Frederick Rolfe ("Baron Corvo"), Aleister Crowley, Edwin Bradford, Edmund John, and many others. A place apart among these writers is reserved for Ralph N. Chubb, who created extraordinary privately-printed books illustrated by himself.
This flourishing was somewhat interrupted by the uproar over the "deca­dents," especially Oscar Wilde, at the end of the nineteenth century. This uproar started with Theodore Wratislaw's poem "To a Sicilian Boy" and Douglas' poem [noted above) and culminated with Wilde's going to prison. However, this poetic movement continued after things had calmed down, producing such lyric mas­terpieces as Edmund John's "The Seven Gifts" and Richard Middleton's "The Bathing Boy." James Elroy Flecker trans­lated a Turkish poem, "The Hammam Name"
[name, Turkish for "piece of writ­ing"), into English.
This traditional poetry gradually gave way to modernist poetry, among the practitioners of which may be counted such homosexuals as Wystan Hugh Auden, Thorn Gunn, and others. Auden moved to America and fell in love with young Chester Kallman. James Kirkup wrote a poem about a Roman soldier who was sexually attracted to the naked, dying Christ, and when this was published in London's
Gay News in 1976, the British government prosecuted the publisher for violating the law against blasphemy. However, the pornography laws were meanwhile liberalized to the point where explicit poems could be published, such as Auden's pornographic "Platonic Blow."
The United States. There were some American romantic poems written before the Civil War on homoerotic themes, such as Henry David Thoreau's "The Gentle Boy," which were protected from public outrage by the pre-Freudian belief that it was possible for two men or two women to love each other in a non-sexual manner.
Outrage did greet the publication of Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass in 1860 with a homosexual section, "Cala­mus." Whitman defended himself by claiming he was heterosexual, but the poems speak for themselves; a group of English minor poets called themselves "Calamites" in his honor. Whitman had a tremendous influence on American po­etry in general and on homosexual litera­ture in particular, and he is often mistak­enly considered the only American homo­sexual poet of the nineteenth century, but there were a host of minor, now largely forgotten, versifiers (see Stephen W. Fos­ter, "Beauty's Purple Flame"). Many of these poets, such as the unlucky James Bensel, tended to deal with the Tennysonian theme of the lover who has died.
The most important of these writers was the pederastic George Edward Woodberry. Another interesting poet was the highly precocious Cuthbert Wright, whose volume of homosexual verse,
One Way of Love (1915), completed when he was only sixteen years old, was published both in America and England. George Sylvester Viereck also wrote "decadent" poems.
After World War I, the chief modernist poet in America was the homo­sexual Hart Crane, who preferred sailors and young Mexican boys. The painter Marsden Hartley also produced poetry.
Lesbian Poetry in English. After classical antiquity, little lesbian poetry worth noting was written until the end of the nineteenth century in Europe and America, and no lesbian poetry at all is known from Africa, Asia, or Latin Amer­ica. There was a brief flourishing of lesbian verse among educated women in England during the seventeenth century ("The Matchless Orinda" and some others), but it is not until Emily Dickinson that the theme reappeared. In England, there had been "lesbian" poems written by Swinburne (from the male point of view) and Christina Rossetti ("Goblin Market"), but the apogee of lesbian poetry was reached by the international (part Hawaiian, among other strains) poet Pauline Tarn, who wrote in French under the pen-name of Renée Vivien, and who had a love affair with Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris.
An attentive reading of the lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was bisex­ual, shows them to treat tender feelings for young women. Some other American les­bian poets who should be mentioned are Amy Lowell, the imagist and literary impresario, and Katherine Lee Bates, a professor at Wellesley College. Bates produced
Yellow Clover, a sort of lesbian version of In Memoriam, and she also wrote "America the Beautiful," which almost became the American national anthem.
Germany. Count August von Platen was a homosexual poet who was the victim of a homophobic attack by Heinrich Heine. Xavier Mayne wrote a long study of Platen and Platen's sonnets have been translated into English. There appears to have been a tremendous up­surge of homosexual poetry in Germany at the same time as in England, but very few of these poets have been rendered into English, and in any case most of them were minor. In the midst of a vast amount of inferior homosexual poetry, there appeared a giant, Stefan George, whose Seventh Ring was written in honor of his boyfriend, Maximilian Kronberger, a teenager known poetically as Maximin - a quasi-divine figure who died young. There has not been another German homosexual poet of simi­lar stature since George, but there has been no dearth of poets, except during the Nazi period.
France. Charles Baudelaire (along with Swinburne) introduced intimations of lesbianism into poetry written by men, and founded the "decadent" school of lit­erature, which caused French and English poets to explore sexual themes hitherto taboo, including homosexuality. Some of these writers seem to have been hetero­sexuals experimenting with "horrifying" themes, and it must be noted that some of the poets who wrote about homosexuality also wrote about necrophilia, for example. Their aim was to create shudders, not to express their personal feelings. Isidore Ducasse, called Lautréamont, created the phantasmagoric Les chants de Maldoror before dying young; this has some pederastic scenes.
Arthur Rimbaud stoppped writ­ing at the age of twenty, after having had a tempestuous love affair with Paul Verlaine; both were major poets. Some of their poems deal with homosexuality, especially in the volume
Hombres/femmes. Pierre Louys devised Les chansons de Bilitis, a volume of lesbian poems supposedly trans­lated from the Greek. This book provided American lesbians with the name of their first organization, the Daughters of Bilitis. A host of other French poets at this time ("fin de siécle," end of the nineteenth century) wrote decadent or pseudo-deca­dent poems and even song lyrics (Aristide Bruant's songs about boy prostitutes, sung in the Moulin Rouge). Much of the French homosexual poetry of the twentieth cen­tury has been produced by writers more famous for other things, such as novels (Crevel, Cocteau, and Genet). Contempo­rary French poetry in general lacks great names, and this is also true of homosexual poetry.
Postwar American Poetry. After World War n, some new homosexual po­etic voices were heard in America, such as Paul Goodman, Jack Spicer, and Allen Ginsberg, with the latter attaining world­wide fame in the context of the beat gen­eration. Honesty increased as more and more poets "came out" at the same time that pornography laws were being struck down by the courts. There are now numer­ous homosexual poets in North America, such as Edward Field, Richard Howard, Dennis Kelly, James Merrill, and James Schuyler. Of the lesbian poets associated with the second wave of feminism possi­bly the most important is Adrienne Rich, author of the volumes Of Woman Born (1976) and The Dream of a Common Lan­guage (1978). Rich has also been influen­tial as a critic. Catherine R. Stimpson has characterized Rich's major themes as "the analysis of male power over women; the rejection of that power; the deconstruction of dominant images of women,- the need for women to construct their own experi­ence, history, and identity; and the tension between two possible futures" - androgy­nous and separatist. Other lesbian poets have written from the black, Chicana, and American Indian experiences. The cultures from which these poets stem retain a loy­alty to poetry that has been eroded else­where.
The Present Situation. This flour­ishing of gay literature has taken place at a time when poetry as such has moved out of the cultural mainstream. Most of the public no longer reads poetry at all, its function being usurped in part by popular music lyrics, and as a result the writing of poetry is not financially viable. In a sense, poetry has "gone underground," claimed by cultural minorities for whom commer­cial success is not an expected result. In a crude form, it continues to demonstrate vitality, if not much originality, among the uneducated, as seen in the emergence of "rap" rhyming, metrical verse from the inner city. But there is little incentive for highly talented writers to write poetry.
The rise of the gay liberation movement stimulated the appearance of numerous small-circulation publications aimed at an exclusively homosexual or lesbian audience, and these provide gay poets with an outlet for their work, since what remains of "mainstream" poetry periodicals show little interest in publish­ing homosexual material. The problem is that most of this material is published because of its theme rather than its liter­ary merit. Furthermore, it has fostered a ghettoization of gay literature: homosex­ual writings aimed at an exclusively homosexual audience.
Heterosexual Americans do not buy or read homosexual poetry, with the exception of classics from the past like Whitman. One would think that if homo­sexuals can appreciate heterosexual love stories, heterosexuals could relate to homosexual love stories (or poetry), espe­cially since thousands of heterosexuals never noticed that A. E. Housman was writing about boy and boy, not boy and girl. But modern homosexual poetry is no longer about love as a human universal, expressed in homosexual terms; it is spe­cifically about homosexuality as such.
Conclusion. For better or worse, this is a prosaic, not a poetic age. Much of the current spate of gay male poetry may be attributed to the retrospective, nostal­gic side of homosexual taste, as seen in the predilection for antique furniture and grand opera. Formally, however, much of the current gay male poetry reflects a shallow modernism of omission - it lacks rhyme, meter, significant imagery. In his exalta­tion of everyday experience, the pioneeer of this kind of work was the New York writer Frank O'Hara. Yet despite its seem­ing casualness, O'Hara's poetry shows the impress of his study of models from the French tradition. By contrast, much of current gay male production seems to display little acquaintance with the his­tory of literature. Instead, it is a "home brew" purveying, all too frequently, a bald, explicit recitation of some recent sexual experience - lurid exhibitionism of a not very interesting sort.
Lesbian poets, such as
Olga Broumas, Judy Grahn, Joan Larkin, and Audre Lorde, are more concerned both with the demands of craft and the address­ing of subject matter of weight and sub­stance. Inasmuch as their work forms part of the literary currents associated with feminism, it transcends the lesbian/gay paradigm, and deserves to be addressed in a different, larger context.
As has been noted, heterosexuals do not read homosexual poetry. Generally speaking, male homosexual poems are not read by lesbians, and lesbian poems are not read by male homosexuals. This tribalism and subtribalism rob homosexual poetry of universality. It is perhaps a hopeful sign that similar restrictions that once nar­rowed the audience for black literature have been largely overcome - though gain­ing the attention of white readers was accomplished only after a considerable effort on the part of critics of both races. It may be that the AIDS crisis and the wan­ing of the sexual revolution have slowed, but not blocked, a similar critical enter­prise on behalf of gay and lesbian litera­ture. In the 1980s mainstream acceptance has been gained for the work of a few gay and lesbian novelists (e.g., David Leavitt and Rita Mae Brown). The prospects for poetry of same-sex concerns are probably dependent on a revival of interest in poetry as such, which would require the deploy­ment of factors not now on the horizon.
As poetry has been losing its general audience, it is being chosen as an art form by homosexuals in a sort of cul­tural "hand-me-down" syndrome; yet even among homosexuals it reaches only a very small segment of its target audience. Under such circumstances, it is questionable how much longertraditional printed-page verse can survive as a meaningful literary ve­hicle for the expression of homoerotic sentiment. Perhaps the future lies in mixed-media combinations, spoken poetry with sound and/or visual images (as in Laurie Anderson's work) or other sensual dimen­sions yet to be explored (smell, taste, feel).
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Paula Bennett, My Life a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Politics, Boston: Beacon Press,
1986,- Anne Birrell, edv
New Songs from a fade Terrace, London: Penguin, 1986; Stephen Coote, ed., The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, London: Penguin, 1983; Jeannette H. Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature, 3d ed., Tallahas­see: Naiad Press, 1985; Stephen Wayne Foster, "Beauty's Purple Flame: Some Minor American Gay Poets, 1786-1936," Gay Books Bulletin, 7 (1982), 15-17; Barbara Grier, The Lesbian in Literature, 3ded., Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1981; Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980; Carl Morse and Joan Larkin, eds., Gay e¿> Lesbian Poetry in Our Time: An Anthology, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988; Brian Reade, ed., Sexual Heretics, New York: Coward-McCann, 1971; Timothy d'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970; Gregory Woods, Articulate Plesh: Male Homoeroticism and Modern Poetry, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987; Ian Young, The Male Homosexual in Literature, 2nd ed., Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982.
Stephen Wayne Foster

Poland
This major nation of east-central Europe has undergone many vicissitudes. The western Slavs who occupied the area of present-day Poland were first united under the Piast dynasty and Christianized beginning in 966. The crown passed to the Jagiello dynasty, under which Poland, having lost its western territories, then expanded eastward, so that by 1568 the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth em­braced not just those two nations but most of Belorussia and the Ukraine as well. The confluence of the Renaissance and the Reformation brought Poland to the zenith of its political and cultural greatness, while a policy of toleration in religion not only spared the country the Protestant-Catholic wars that ravaged Western Europe but also allowed Polish Jewry to enjoy its golden age, while dissenting groups such as Socinians and Unitarians found refuge within its borders. Declining from the mid-seven­teenth century onward, Poland after 1718 was virtually a protectorate of the great powers. Between 1772 and 1795 the coun­try was thrice partitioned by Russia, Aus­tria, and Prussia. Under the oppressive rule of the tsars the Poles twice rebelled, while Catholicism kept a grip on the masses as a symbol of opposition to the Lutheran Prussians and the Orthodox Russians. Na­tionalism ultimately triumphed in 1918 with the reconstitution of an independent republic as one of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. It was the discussion of nationality problems in central Europe that introduced the concept of an ethnic or religious minority to the English-speaking world. Interwar Poland was racked by economic problems and the inability to find a modus vivendi with the non-Polish components of its population. Once again partitioned by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in 1939, Poland was restored in 1945 with a new set of boundaries, the eastern territories having been annexed by the Soviet Union, with large areas of Prus­sia and Silesia being ceded to the country as compensation for its losses. The Com­munist regime that long ruled Poland has had to cope with constant unrest from a nation unwilling to be a Russian satellite.
Rehgious and Legal Background. Although the reception of Latin Christian­ity and of the medieval version of Roman law entailed the adoption of laws against sodomy, there is evidence that the anti-Trinitarian sects which found refuge in Poland were influenced by the Nicodemites and similar trends of thought in Italy to abandon the notion that homosexual sins were the "crime of crimes" which the Scholastic theologians had proclaimed them to be. Even if they did not proclaim this departure from orthodox Christianity openly, they influenced the Quakers in western Europe. Their heritage was still active in the thought of William Penn who reduced the penalty for buggery to a nomi­nal one in his law code for the colony of Pennsylvania (1682).
The partition of Poland meant that four separate codes - the German, the Austrian, the Hungarian, and the Rus­sian - all of which penalized male homo­sexual acts and the second and third of which also penalized lesbian acts before 1918, were in force on its territory when it was reunited. The discussion of a uniform code for the entire country led to proposals such as one by the physician Andrzej Mikulski in 1920: "Poland is waiting for a reform of these laws or rather their abroga­tion. Even those who advocate the need to penalize homosexual acts are forced to admit that Paragraph 516 of the Russian and Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code prove a total want of logic."
When the new Penal Code
{Kodeks kamy) came into force in 1932 under the authoritarian regime of Marshal Pilsudski, the model of the Code Napoleon prevailed: homosexuality ceased to be criminal on the entire territory of the Polish Republic, and the age of consent was uni­formly fixed at 15 for both heterosexual and homosexual acts. The revised Penal Code introduced by the Communist re­gime on April 19,1969 did not depart from this basic principle; its Article 176 con­demns only a person (regardless of sex) who engages in acts of a sexual character with a person under the age of 15 regard­less of the latter's degree of physical or psychological development.
Poland's homosexuals have to contend, not with legal repression, but with the long-standing prejudice and in­tolerance instilled by the prevailing Ro­man Catholicism of the country's popula­tion, a legacy that reached its peak in the Counterreformation. As in Cuba, this repressive tendency has been augmented by Stalinist homophobia stemming from the Soviet Union.
Cultural Aspects. The national­istic emphasis of Polish literature hin­dered writings that emphasized physical love. It was only in 1917 that a literary outsider, the homosexual composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937), composed a two-volume autobiographical novel, Ephebos, written in 1917 but published only in fragments; the manuscript was burned during the bombing of Warsaw in 1939. Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz (1894-1980) is cele­brated by the Communist regime as one of Poland's greatest contemporary writers. Though homosexual, he carefully main­tained a facade of conventional married life, and homoerotic themes are rare in his uneven work. It emerges most clearly in a story entitled "The Teacher," in which an aging, disappointed woman accuses a tu­tor of "unworthy acts" with a young gar­dener, whereupon he is dimissed and the oldest son of the family, platonically in love with the teacher, commits suicide.
Jan Lechon (1899-1956) was also unable to reveal the homoerotic side of his personality in his work, but in his
Diary, written in exile in New York in 1949-56, he justified his reserve, but at the same time composed interesting critical sketches on the homoerotic literature of France (Gide, Genet, Peyrefitte).
In the novel by Tadeusz Breza
Adam Grywald (1936) homosexuality was treated as a modern psychological prob­lem. The hero, at first enamored of a young woman who fails to reciprocate, then finds consolation in her brother. The Adlerian theory of homosexuality as an acquired, neurotic condition forms the theoretical background of the narrative.
The avant-garde writer Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) was far more overt in his treatment of the homoerotic, first in his
Diary of 1933 and then in The Happenings on the Brig Banbury, which deals with the sexual cravings of sailors that find expression in sexual contact between them. Inclined to mock the con­ventional patriotism and religiosity of his countrymen, he continued to write while in exile in Argentina during the war. His novel Trans-Atlantic, published in Paris in 1953, develops an amusing conflict situ­ation with a gay character.
Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909-1983) was at first a supporter of the Communist regime, and then a leading dissident. His
Gates of Paradise (1960), a historical novel about the medieval children's crusade, includes a love affair between two young men. In a short story he retells the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, with the boys as lovers. No One, a particularly explicit homosexualretelling of the Odysseus story, was published posthumously in 1983. De­spite the repressiveness of the military regime, other fictional works dealing with homosexuality have also been published.
The media have also shown a surprising openness. In 1974 Tadeusz Gorgol published a remarkably positive article in
Zycie literackie. At the end of the 1983 the Warsaw monthly Relaks began printinggay "contact" personal ads, though this policy was discontinued in July 1984. On November 23, 1985, Krzysztof Darski published in Polityka an article, "We Are Different," that called for a homophile organization. By 1988 informal gay groups had formed in Wroclaw, Lodz, Gdansk, and Warsaw. Information bulletins, how­ever, are limited to a printing of one hundred copies to avoid censorship.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Homosexuelle Initiative (HOSI) Wien, Rosa Liebe unterm roten Stern: Zur Lage der Lesben und Schwulen in Osteuropa, Hamburg: Frühlings Erwachen, 1984.
Warren Johansson

Police
The regulation of sexual behavior would be incomplete without an adminis­trative branch of government to enforce the laws on the statute books, and in Western society this task has traditionally fallen to the police. However, the police as an institution came into being only gradu­ally, between the second half of the seven­teenth century and the first half of the nineteenth.
The word stems from
pohteia, in turn derived from Greek polis, "city." Originally it referred to civic organization and administration as instruments for shaping citizenship andpolitesse. In French usage the meaning gradually narrowed from this broad sense to the more specific denotation of the corps of agents who carried out the instructions of the lieuten­ant of police. Among the special functions of this authority was the suppression or at least the monitoring of vice, the so-called pohce des moeurs, out of which the Eng­lish-speaking world developed the "mor­als squad" or "vice squad."
Functions and Practices. One of the primary tasks of this branch of the police force has always been the regulation of prostitution, at least to the extent that prostitutes had to be registered with the authorities and to confine their activities to certain areas of the city and particular times of day. Male prostitution far less often was controlled in this manner be­cause the acts in which the prostitute and his client engaged were ipso facto crimi­nal, quite apart from any payment which the hustler or call boy received, so that the whole relationship had to be exceedingly clandestine. And despite social disapproval and periodic campaigns aimed at driving sodomy out of existence, the principal cities of Europe from the late Middle Ages to the present have always had a homosexual subculture of parks, streets, taverns, and other places where men seek­ing partners of their own sex habitually congregated. These areas came under po­lice surveillance, and at least from the early eighteenth century onward, the Paris police kept lists of such persons, even if it did not proceed to arrest them. These "homofiles," to use a modern play on words, often included the names of thou­sands of individuals from all classes of society. In 1725 Lieutenant General Le­noir estimated that there were 20,000 sodomites in Paris, and in 1783 Mouffle d'Angerville gave an account of a ledger in which the names of 40,000 pederasts were inscribed, "almost as many as there were whores."
Another practice of the police was entrapment, whereby a plainclothesman would encourage the victim to make an advance and then - often with accomplices
hidden nearby - proceed to arrest him. Entrapment was to continue in many large cities down to the sixties of the twentieth century. And with fear of arrest and expo­sure came the danger of blackmail, which hung like a Damocles' sword over the head of every homosexual who led a double life. Since denizens of the homosexual subcul­ture often had to pay off the police in order to function unmolested, the police them­selves could be enmeshed in a network of bribery, extortion, and blackmail. The fact that Western society tacitly assigns sexual activity to the realm of the private and unseen has meant, moreover, that the police could maintain their surveillance only over sexual activity that occurred in public places or was implied by the at­tempt of a suspect to establish rapport with a prospective sexual partner. This last fell into the category of "loitering" or "disorderly conduct," an ill-defined con­cept that gave the authorities a free hand in dealing with anyone of whose actions they disapproved. Also, when national prohibi­tion was repealed in the United States (1933), premises serving alcohol came under the supervision of regulatory bodies with power to close them if "degenerates" were engaging in "disorderly conduct." The ambiguous status of the bars led to a continuing pattern of raids in which employees and patrons would be arrested; these culminated in the famous Stonewall tavern raid of June 27-28, 1969 in New York's Greenwich Village, when for the first time homosexuals fought back. Occa­sionally private parties were also raided and the guests hauled off to the police station.
Surveillance and the Morals Squad. It was only in the last third of the nineteenth century that a morals squad came to be a regular part of the metropoli­tan police force. Gustave Macé of the Paris Sûreté reported that in 1872 - thus at the beginning of the Third Republic - a bri­gade composed of eight agents was formed to maintain surveillance over the pederasts of the French capital, but that he had to disband it because the head of the squad began to keep dossiers on political figures as well as professional hustlers. Leo Taxil held that despite the reform of the penal code by the Constituent Assembly in 1791, every French government from that of Napoleon I to the 1880s had used the knowledge of the homosexuality of indi­viduals in public life for purposes of polit­ical blackmail. Thus the surveillance exercised by the morals squad served to increase the hold of the state power over those "to whom no crime could be imputed," as Gibbon said it had done since the time of Justinian.
The object was not to prosecute the culprits or to destroy their social exis­tence, but to monitor their activities and, it goes without saying, survey the func­tioning of the clandestine networks of homosexual contact and influence. In fact, the police authorities in the large cities of the Western world were aware that they should not proceed too vigorously in track­ing down "vice rings" because sooner or later influential and wealthy individuals were bound to be implicated. This truth was lost on the police in small towns and cities, where a campaign against "unnatu­ral vice," more often than not provoked by a member of the local clergy, could lead to a chain of arrests in which the most promi­nent families would be compromised. The most recent well-publicized example of such a chain is the "cleanup" undertaken in Boise, Idaho in 1955. Also, since the metropolitan police could not touch those who were privileged by their own social standing or by powerful protectors, they targeted for arrest or extortion the "small fry" who fell into their nets - the street hustler, the drag queen, the lower middle class denizen of the homosexual under­world. Lesbians were less often victims of police harassment except in connection with statutes against cross-dressing which they could be accused of violating.
Tensions between Homosexuals and the Pohce. Naturally the police were hated by the homosexuals on whom they preyed, and whom they in turn resented because their own superiors used discre­tion in proceeding against those guilty of the "crime against nature." At the same time homosexuals who were victimized by common criminals feared to turn to the police for help because they would en­counter no sympathy and even expose themselves to investigation or worse. So the absence of great numbers of prosecu­tions for sodomy attests to an ambiguous situation: comparatively few individuals were ever caught "in the act" and prose­cuted for the maximal offense, but many were entrapped or subjected to semi-legal forms of harassment such as raids on gay bars in which the patrons would be ar­rested and their identity - and the motive for the arrest - made known to family members, employers and the like, so that, even though they were charged with a misdemeanor at most, their careers and lives could be ruined by the simple act of disclosure. The police themselves could engage in "shakedowns" or outright black­mail.
The police thus functioned in three ways to embitter the existence of participants in the homosexual subcul­ture: (1) by harassing patrons of establish­ments known to be frequented by homo­sexuals, or individuals simply observed in cruising areas, (2) by allowing criminals, or private persons hostile to homosexuals, to victimize and assault them with impu­nity, and (3) by conducting campaigns of repression at the behest of politicians who wanted to impress the electorate with their zeal in "upholding morality." When an establishment failed to pay the sums demanded by the police for protection, or a crusading mayor or district attorney wanted the newspapers to report that he had "cracked down on vice," the arm of the law would descend in full fury. So long as the gay community was unorganized, powerless, and itself a "fugitive from jus­tice," nothing could be done to minimize or halt these practices. While the United States saw national waves of repression, especially in the 1940s and 50s, local vari­ations were considerable. A city with an energetically homophobic police chief (as was repeatedly the case in Los Angeles) could make life difficult for homosexuals, in contrast with one in which the authori­ties were more lax - and more susceptible to bribery.
Improved Relations. In the latter part of the twentieth century, with the rise of the homosexual liberation movement, gay and lesbian organizations have made efforts at establishing liaisons with urban police forces and at cultivating better rela­tions with the local police. Enlightened district attorneys and their counterparts in major European cities have been per­suaded to halt the practice of entrapment and to restrict their repressive activity to sexual behavior that caused public scandal or entailed corruption or abuse of a minor, and also to educate the members of the police force in a spirit of toleration for the gay subculture. In such cities as San Fran­cisco and New York the police have actu­ally begun to recruit gay and lesbian candi­dates for the force, while homosexuals who already belong have formed benevo­lent organizations of their own.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John J. Gallo, et al., "The Consenting Adult Homosexual and the Law: An Empirical Study of Enforce­ment and Administration in Los Angeles County," UCLA Law Review, 13 (1966), 643-832; Gustave Macé, Mes lundis en prison, Paris: Charpentier, 1889; Michel Rey, "Police et sodomie à Paris au XVIIIe siècle: du péché au désordre," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 29 (1983), 113-24; Steven A.Rosen, "Police Harassment of Homosexual Women and Men in New York City 1960-1980," Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 12(1980-81), 159-90.
Warren Johansson

Political Theory, History of
Political theory seeks to analyze and envision things political, originally of the pohs or city-state of ancient Greece. Thus the subject begins w ith the Greeks of Athens at the end of the fifth century b.c. in close association with philosophy.
As institutions and modes of thought have changed, so has political theory. While it may aspire to universal­ity, it is, among theories, particularly dependent on context. What counts as political is subject to continuing contro­versy. Thus pederasty was politically important in classical Athens, where it was a basic aspect of educating male citi­zens, while contemporary libertarians view it as politically neutral. What is political is not restricted to affairs of state; it extends to embrace all matters of legitimate public concern. Thus issues of morals, education, custom, language, and culture are politi­cally germane.
Homosexuality as a Topic for Political Theory. That homosexuality is a term of the second half of the nineteenth century is well known. To what extent it can be applied to earlier periods is an issue rightly debated. As with all phenomena over time and space, which are complex both conceptually and evidentially, so with erotic same-sex bonding: there are simi­larities and differences. Practices, norms, conceptualizations, and consciousness vary significantly. What is now taken to be homosexuality was not so viewed in ear­lier periods. No effort is here made to resolve the essentialist-social con­structionist dispute, which has addressed the issue of similarity vs. difference. It is assumed only that from the current van­tage point a sufficient family resemblance can be descried in discussions by major political theorists of pederasty, sodomy, the crime against nature, and so forth to yield some coherence.
The main course of political theo­retical discussion of homosexuality can be periodized: (1) the subtle discussion of pederasty in fourth-century
-b.c. Athens; (2) the long period of Christian condemna­tion,- and (3) the Enlightenment critique of received ideas. The extant writings are all by male authors, and they devote virtually all their attention to male homosexuality.
Greek Thinkers. Plato (427-347 b.c.), a student of Socrates, is the first great writer of political philosophy, notably in the Republic, Statesman, and the Laws. The Symposium and Phaedrus are his major dialogues on eros. The Greek prac­tice of pederasty - courtship and love of an adolescent (never child) by a somewhat older man - was the form of homosexual­ity on which he reflected. He viewed this not as a distinct category or problem in itself but rather in the context of discus­sions of appetite, desire, temperance, education, and law. Given Plato's use of dramatic dialogues, the difficulty in deter­mining which of the views that he attrib­utes to Socrates are his own, and the differ­ences between early and late dialogues, it is difficult to state Plato's views concisely. He clearly assumes that male homoerotic desire is ubiquitous.
The
Symposium is less a dialogue than an account of a banquet at which successive speakers praise and explain the nature of love, that is, eros. In the discus­sion Pausanias distinguishes between two loves, the heavenly, Uranian Aphrodite and the younger, earthly Pandemian Aph­rodite. The latter is the common love which seeks bodily pleasure only and per­tains to both sexes. Uranian love is en­tirely male and involves cultivation of the mind and spirit. Indeed, Uranian love is associated with political freedom and re­sistance to tyranny. Pausanias also notes a tension between Athenian support for the lover's [erastes] ardent pursuit as well as for resistance on the part of the beloved [eremenos). This he explains as supporting his distinction between noble and base love, which means that a youth should not yield too readily or for a reason other than gaining virtue. The nineteenth-century usage of "Uranian" (stemming from K. H. Ulrichs) to denote a male homosexual derives from this speech.
In the
Symposium Plato makes Aristophanes, the celebrated writer of Old Comedy, give a remarkable speech in which he develops the compellingmyth that once there had been three "sexes," who were spherical beings, solar double men, lunar double women, and earthly fused men-women. Zeus, angered at these creatures' arrogance, severed them in two; later, he rearranged their genitals. Ever after, each creature seeks wholeness in coupling with the lost half of its own kind. The women drawn to women are clearly lesbi­ans, and this is one of the rare references to lesbianism in the political-theory canon. The males attracted to males, the most virile, are as youths drawn to men and as men love youths; they marry and beget children only in response to social custom.
Socrates, however, in the con­cluding speech in which he recounts what the priestess Diotima had told him of love, rejects Aristophanes' view. Love is that which one lacks; love is not a god but a
daimon, a being halfway between a god and a man and also between wisdom and ignorance. It is an intermediary. Love begins with attraction to one particular body, but the truest love ascends a ladder, as it were, and culminates in a vision of beauty itself. Since beauty and goodness are the same, love is a longing for posses­sion of goodness eternally. Indeed, love's association with propagation reveals that love is really a longing for immortality. At the conclusion of this famous speech of Socrates, the drunken Alcibiades bursts into the party and tells the revealing story of how Socrates, his sometime lover, had resisted any physical gratification despite Alcibiades' best efforts.
The effect of the
Symposium on the western mind, a great one, has been deeply equivocal. While what is recog­nizably homosexual desire is unforgetta­bly celebrated, only a chaste, idealized expression of it is finally permitted.
In the late dialogue, the
Laws, Plato proposed outlawing physical homo­sexual relations, readily acknowledging that such a proposal was contrary to prac­tice and opinion. Indulgence in such prac­tice, it is held, leads to intemperance and effeminacy. It is suggested that a custom whereby the sanctions against incest would be extended to all "unnatural" sex would do untold good. Plato here uses unsound arguments from animal behavior and fatefully introduces the idea that sex between men is "against nature" [para physin).
While there are several scattered references to homosexuality in the prodi­giously learned Aristotle (384-322 b.c.), they convey no strong view. The existence of pederastic attraction is taken for granted; there arc several nonjudging references to such love affairs. Aristotle shares a com­mon Greek concern about the tension between friendship, which requires equal­ity, and the pederastic relationship, char­acteristically an unequal one. Reciprocity and constancy, though, can be attained through the mutual love of character.
A text from the Aristotelian school
(Problemata, IV, 26) engages the question, most puzzling to the Greeks, of how the sexually passive male could enjoy the sexual act. The somewhat confused discussion concludes that though such a pathic [kinaidos] acts contrary to nature, habit can become nature. Clearly the ancient Greek view of nature was ambigu­ous, and the arguments from nature were problematic, as they continue to be.
Christian Thinking. In the next period of political theory, that dominated by Christian thinkers, the figures of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas stand out. While each was deeply influenced by the classical heritage, what distinguishes them is the presence of Christian revela­tion as the decisive criterion for truth and rightness.
St. Augustine (354-430), after his conversion to Christianity, took a dark view of sexual activity generally. Lust, concupiscence was the shameful result of original sin. He viewed involuntary sexual arousal as a consequence of Adam and Eve's disobedience. Only intercourse for procreation was justified and that solely within marriage. In a famous passage in his
Confessions (111, 8, 15), he refers to detestable crimes against nature, such as those of the Sodomites, which "even if all nations should commit them" are con­trary to divine law. In Augustine we find a mixture, characteristic in Christian dis­cussions, of reference to the Bible, to na­ture, and to divine law.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), most influential and authoritative of Roman Catholic theorists, developed a complex, architectonic philosophic and theological system which included sig­nificant treatment of politics and morals. These are regulated by a structure in which four kinds of law intermingle: eternal, natural, divine, and human (or positive). The universe is an ordered whole carrying out a special plan; each entity within it is to carry out its appropriate ends within that plan. Each naturally seeks its own good: preservation for all substance, pro­creation for animals, an orderly social life and knowledge of God for human beings. "All things have a natural tendency to­ward activity befitting their natures." To seek good and avoid evil is the first prin­ciple of natural law. To sin is either to offend God or to injure men.
Sexual matters are discussed under the general category of temperance and that applied to matters of touch.
Sodomiticum vitium, the vice of sodomy, of which one form is intercourse between persons of the same sex, is carefully distin­guished from related sexual sins (Summa Theologiae, Ha-IIae. 154.11-12). Sodomy is peculiarly a sin against nature in that it is contrary not only to man's uniquely human nature but also to that which he shares with animals. Further, this sin against nature, the plan of which comes from God, is a sin against God: it is an affront to God, the ordainer of nature. On a scale of gravity, masturbation and non-missionary-position intercourse are lesser sins than sodomy, only bestiality is worse. Unnatural vice is worse than incest.
While the 1986 Vatican pro­nouncement on homosexuality
[Letter to the World's Bishops on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, by the Congrega­tion for the Doctrine of the Faith) relies more on biblical citation, the view devel­oped by Thomas Aquinas remains that of the Roman Catholic Church.
Early Enlightenment Thought. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the next great period of political thought with figures such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke addressing issues cen­tral to the emergent modern state: action, sovereignty, legitimacy, and consent. While they appear in law and literature, references to homosexuality in political theory in this period are scant.
In a characteristic remark, mod­ern, derisive, and reductive, the caustic Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), comment­ing on Socrates, suspects that platonic love was sensual, "but with an honorable pretence of the old to haunt the company of the young and beautiful"
(Human Na­ture, 17). Since multitude, increase of population, is a temporal good, the law of nature obliges the sovereign to forbid "unnatural copulation."
It is with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a broad move­ment of opinion rather than a doctrine, that the possibility of new views emerged. Enlightenment thinkers subjected received ideas and established authority, political, cultural, and especially religious, to scru­tiny. They raised doubt about existing categories, principles, and judgments, suggested new ones, and promoted practi­cal reform of laws, institutions, and taste.
The sage Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) exemplifies the cautious humanity of the early phase of the Enlight­enment. Montesquieu's attempt both to respect general principles of justice (natu­ral law) and to understand the needs of particular peoples in particular circum­stances led to confusion but also to crea­tive insight.
In his major work,
The Spirit of the Laws (XII, 6), he professes abhorrence of the crime against nature which "reli­gion, morality, and civil government equally condemn." He suggests that it gives to one sex "the weakness of the other," and he avers that where social custom does not promote it, the crime against nature will make "no great progress."
Yet he also expresses concern over "the tyranny that may abuse the very horror" that ought to be felt for the vice. He is distressed that in prosecuting the crime, the deposition of a single witness, a child, a slave, opens the door to calumny. Most tellingly, he notes the oddity that in contemporary France three crimes are "punished with fire": witchcraft, which does not exist; heresy, which is suscep­tible to infinite interpretation; and the crime against nature, which is "often obscure and uncertain." Despite the con­tinuing muddle of the concept of crime against nature, a cool scepticism begins to subvert it.
Bentham. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) represents at once the later, more radical phase of the Enlightenment and also the founding of nineteenth-cen­tury British philosophical radicalism. With Bentham the cautious questioning of re­ceived views, still couched in natural-law language, is replaced by the slashing cri­tique of utilitarianism. This influential doctrine posits judgment of morals and legislation by the consequentialist crite­rion of the greatest happiness of the great­est number, happiness considered as pleas­ure and calculable in terms of probability, duration, and so forth. Whatever its de­fects as philosophy, which are consider­able, this doctrine directed to the question of the crime against nature had the great merit of instantly demystifying it. Why is this crime (punished in England by hang­ing until 1861) treated so severely? Where­in lies the offense? Is this even a crime?
Given the few, brief, and oblique references to this topic in centuries of previous political theory, it is stunning to find that Bentham wrote over 600 manu­script pages on the subject, at several times during his long career. Yet none of these were published in his lifetime and most still have not been. (See J. Bentham, "Essay on Paederasty," Louis Crompton, ed.,
Journal of Homosexuality, 3:4, Summer 1978, and 4:1, Fall 1978, written ca. 1785. The best discussion of all Bentham's writ­ings on the subject is in Crompton, Byron and Greek Love, Berkeley, 1985.)
While Bentham expresses his own disapproval of homosexual practices ("preposterous," "unnatural," "odious"), he can find no basis in reason for the severity with which they are treated. "Let us be unjust to no man: not even to a paederast." With his accustomed thorough­ness, Bentham marches forth arguments against private consenting homosexual acts and finds them wanting.
They produce no primary mis­chief, only pleasure. It is not a crime against peace, nor an offense against security. If it is debilitating, as Montesquieu said, then it is an offense against oneself, but there is no physiological evidence that this is so, and historical evidence reveals the vigor of ancient Greek and Roman soldiers who practiced it. It cannot be argued that it is prejudicial to population (at this time Bentham assumed as did most that popu­lation growth was desirable), since "pro­lific venery" is quite adequate to that end. If this were a reason, why is not monkish celibacy outlawed? Nor can it be argued that it robs women; marriage remains popular.
Bentham goes on to explore "the ground of antipathy." He finds it to lie in the propensity "to confound physical impurity with moral," in "philosophical pride" against pleasure, and in religion. In his later unpublished nineteenth-century writings on this subject, Bentham goes even further. He abandons the conven­tional language of disapproval that he had used earlier; he saw actual merit in non-procreative sex.
With Bentham's effort to demys­tify this subject by rational instrumental and normative analysis, his considered arguments for decriminalization, and his pioneering attempt to explore the sources of hostility to homosexuality, one reaches, at last, a turning point in political reflec­tion. Yet this writing remained unpub­lished until recently, and the nineteenth century saw no further sustained, serious discussion of the subject by a major politi­cal theorist.
Conclusions. It has been remarked that the European philosophical tradition simply fails in its discussion of women, not just in the falseness of its conclusions but in the collapse of its usual standards of thought. The same is true for political theory's treatment of homosexuality. It is scarcely accidental that with Plato and, if not with Bentham, then with his intellec­tual grandson, John Stuart Mill, the treat­ment of women is considerably more in­telligent. Between Plato and Bentham there is scarcely a discussion of homosexuality instructive for other than historical pur­poses. Even here, the account focuses on the classical Greek male practice of ped­erasty, only a small part of what is now thought of as homosexuality. From the late Plato of the Laws through Mon­tesquieu, much of the intellectual confu­sion is rooted in the tortuous ambiguities of the concepts of nature, natural law, and the crime against nature. With Bentham's eventually effective assault on this mode of theorizing, largely a negative achieve­ment, the way was cleared for more search­ing views to be developed. In the twentieth century, the quest for an adequate account of that aspect of homosexuality which is of legitimate public concern remains far from complete.
See also Conservatism; Left, Gay; Liberalism; Liberation, Gay; Libertarianism; Marxism; Movement, Gay.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Richard D. Mohr, Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society and Law, New York: Columbia Univer­sity Press, 1988; Laurence J. Rosan, "Philosophies of Homophobia and Homophilia," in L. Crew, ed., The Gay Academic, Palm Springs, CA: ETC Publications, 1978, pp. 255-81; George H. Sabine and Thomas L. Thorson, A
History of Pohtical Theory,
Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press, 1973.
David f. Thomas

poliziano (politian), Angelo Ambrogini known as (1454-1494)
Italian Humanist and poet. Born at Montepulciano, he was taken to Florence at a tender age, where he received instruc­tion from outstanding teachers, including Marsilio Ficino. While still quite young he undertook a partial translation of Homer's Iliadinto Latin (1469-73), which attracted the attention of Lorenzo de' Medici, who gave him free run of the private library of the Medici family. In 1475 Lorenzo made Poliziano tutor of his children. Two years later he became prior of San Paolo, giving him the leisure and prestige he deserved.
Then friction with the Medici family, brought on partly by questions having to do with the education of the children, led him to abandon Florence in 1479, though he returned the following year. Henceforth he dedicated himself to teaching and to the philological study of the ancient classics.
In addition to his works in Italian, Poliziano wrote with ease in Latin and in classical Greek. Among his chief texts are the
Sylvae, the Stanze per la giostra di Giuhano (1475-78), the Detti piacevoH (1477-79), the secular drama La Favolo di Orfeo (1480), as well as historical works, translations from the Greek, and works of philology.
The theme of homosexual love emerged on at least three occasions in Poliziano's oeuvre. The best known is the above-mentioned
Orfeo, a theatre compo­sition which marks the transition in Italy from sacred to secular drama. In this play Orpheus, having lost Eurydice forever, swears that he will love no other woman and that he will turn to boys instead. He meets his death at the hands of a vengeful group of maenads. The story was culled from ancient mythology, which Poliziano simply clothed in elegant Italian words.
More extended is the treatment in the love poetry that Poliziano wrote in Latin and Greek (significantly, this sensi­tive theme does not occur in his Italian verse). In these poems he talks of a certain Chrysocomus ("golden locks") and a Corydon, extolling his love in the manner of prestigious Greek and Latin models.
Finally, a lighter note appears in the
Dettipiacevoli, the attribution of which has been disputed for some time, though recently the scholar Gianfranco Folena has restored them to Poliziano. This col­lection consists of jokes involving various Florentine figures, including homosexual motifs involving the artists Botticelli and Donatello.
Today it is difficult to say to what extent Poliziano's interest in homoeroticism went beyond that of the imitation of the antique, which was a common feature of the period. According to a story spread by some contemporaries (including Paolo Giovio, 1483-1552), Poliziano died of strain after having played the lute one night underneath the window of a Greek youth named Argo. Isidoro Del Lungo has col­lected several versions of the tale.
In any event, even during his lifetime Poliziano was accused of harboring homosexual tastes, as shown by the poems of Andrea Dazzi (which belong, however, to a vein of invective cultivated by the Humanists, and cannot be simply taken at face value). Some attestations, like those reported by Gustavo Uzielli, make Poliziano's position suspect, but do not take us out of the realm of speculation. Further uncertainty is cast on the subject by positions such as that maintained by Giovanni Semerano, who condemns all the homosexual poetry as being somehow unworthy of "Poliziano's true nature."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Isidoro Del Lungo, Plorentia, Florence: Barbera, 1897; Gianfranco Folena, "Sulla tradizione dei 'detti piacevoli' attribuiti al Poliziano," Studi di filologia italiana, 11 (1953), 431-48,- Giovanni Semerano, "La lirica greca e latina del Poliziano:
'Epigrammata,'"
Convivium (1951), 234-48; Gustavo Uzielli, La vita e i tempi di Paolo Dal Pozzo Toscanelli, Rome: Forzani, 1894, pp. 232-33.
Giovanni Dall'Oito

Polymorphous Perverse
This expression for a disposition toward multifarious sexual experience stems from psychoanalysis. In Three Es­says on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Sigmund Freud states: "[U]nder the influ­ence of seduction children can become polymorphously perverse, and can be led into all possible kinds of sexual irregulari­ties. This shows that an aptitude for them is innately present in their disposition." Children have not yet built up the mental dams that would guard them against such sexual excess. They also do not yet know to focus their sexuality on their genitals, but allow it to roam, as it were, over the entire body. Some adults, such as prosti­tutes, may deliberately revert to this in­fantilism for their own purposes. Thus, in Freud's view, the inclination to the polymorphous perverse is built into the plan of human development, and a more mature sexuality must be created out of it as a result of organic growth and the introjection of psychic inhibitions. In a like manner, psychoanalysis tends to assume that the adult homosexual orientation is a relic of an early bisexual disposition, and therefore amounts to an arrest of develop­ment. This notion implicitly reinforced the ascetic belief that sexuality had only a reproductive function and that mere pleas­ure-seeking fell short of the goal which "mature" individuals should attain.
In the 1960s, owing in part to Freudian revisionists such as Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, a more posi­tive version of the idea came into circula­tion. The internalization of repressive mechanisms was no longer regarded as essential for the maintenance of civiliza­tion. Hence there was room for sexual experimentation, even for excursions into the polymorphous perverse. Yet orthodox psychoanalysis continued to assert that polymorphous perverse adults were either psychotic or unable to form stable human relationships, and therefore driven from one sexual episode to the next. With the gradual decline of the influence of psycho­analysis the term no longer occurs in general writing with any frequency, being replaced by more neutral designations, such as "sexual pluralism."
Wayne
R. Dynes

Polynesia
See Pacific Cultures.

Poppers
See Drugs.

Pornography
Originally referring mainly to writings, today pornography includes a whole range of sexually explicit cultural artifacts intended to produce immediate sexual arousal. The term first appeared in eighteenth-century France, a coinage from Greek pornegraphos, "a painter of prosti­tutes." It is documented in English from the mid-nineteenth century.
Definition. Considerable thought has been devoted to the definition of por­nography. Proposed definitions are of three types. The first is by content: the portrayal or discussion of genitalia or specific sexual acts is pornographic; this definition fails because sexual acts and genitalia may be portrayed for medical purposes, or in edu­cational material, without the intent to arouse. A second approach is by the observer's use of the materials: those materials which produce sexual arousal are pornographic. This approach fails be­cause images not intended for arousal, and not found arousing by most, can be used to produce sexual arousal; conversely, some are not stimulated by scenes which the majority finds intensely erotic. Finally, there is the intent of the producer: those materials which are intended to arouse the viewer, reader, or listener are pornographic. As a legal criterion this approach also fails, because intent can be disguised or denied, and can never be established directly or with absolute certainty. However, it is sufficient for critical purposes and is the definition used in this article.
Value of Pornography. Pornogra­phy has often been considered a symptom of societal illness, and its demise predicted. That the gradual removal of restrictions on sexual activities has not produced a parallel decline in pornography, but rather the reverse, suggests that it satisfies a deep need. While animal sexual excitement is produced by odors, a consequence of the estrus cycle, human beings use their minds. The separation of sexuality from repro­duction, the increased lifespan civiliza­tion has brought, and the anti-erotic trends in modern society mean that glandular impulses toward sexual activity are insuf­ficient. Hence the production and con­sumption of pornography as a stimulant of sexual activity.
The production of pornography, then, is a naturally human activity, stem­ming from the same sorts of inner drive that lead to the production of music, art, and literature. It has been found among many tribal peoples. That sexual excite­ment, like laughter, is contagious lies at the root of pornography's power.
Pornography is, for many people, pleasurable, directly and indirectly pro­ducing orgasm, and that alone is a power­ful argument for it. It relieves guilt over sexuality, encourages masturbation and fantasy, and is a substitute for risky sexual encounters; as such, it can be relationship-enhancing. Through pornography the crea­tor and consumer can explore and accept aspects of their sexuality which cannot be acted upon. Although some pornography transmits misinformation, on the whole it provides education about sex and contrib­utes to public acceptance of sexuality. Through pornography society does its thinking about sex and to some extent about relationships. Pornographers and the legal struggles they have fought have made it possible for non-pornographic sex edu­cation materials to circulate freely. Pornography also provides the historian and anthropologist with evidence of sexual activities and attitudes.
Homosexual Pornography. It has been argued that almost all pornography is homosexual. Save for those small portions consumed by women, or created by women for consumption by men, pornography has been created by men in order to stimulate other men. Even if heterosexual activities are described or portrayed, even if the producer and consumer are heterosexually identified, the intent and, in some way, the true nature of such pornography is homosexual. That homosexuality and pornography tend to be accepted or con­demned together gives further support to a probable deep relationship, perhaps that they both encourage and require societal tolerance of non-procreative sexuality. There has also been significant involve­ment of homosexuals in the production and sale of materials directed to the hetero­sexual public.
However, pornography is usually considered homosexual if it has homosex­ual content or subject matter. While erotic portrayals of men, and descriptions or expressions of homosexual love, are widely found, homosexual pornography is much more restricted. Where it exists it shows an acceptance by society, however begrudg­ing and limited, of homosexuality and homosexual sexual relations. The occa­sional exposure of non-homosexuals to it has in turn contributed to further societal acceptance of homosexuality.
History. Pornography is excep­tionally subject to destruction, homosex­ual pornography doubly so, and the follow­ing discussion is presumably incomplete. The earliest homosexual pornography occurs in Greek vase paintings, which show much sexually explicit homosexual activity (oral, a ¡al, and intercrural inter­course). Prima îy pédérastie, these depic­tions constitute a body of work unsur­passed in artistic value and positive atti­tude toward sex.
Little is known in the West about the homosexual pornographic writings (mujun) of the classical Islamic cultures or the pederastic paintings of Persia. In China the Ming period (1368-1644) saw the ap­pearance of sexually explicit literature and prints, including same-sex material. De­spite the disapproval of the rulers, these interests continued in the succeeding Manchu dynasty, when China's greatest novel,
The Dream of the Red Chamber, which has a bisexual hero and many homosexual episodes, appeared. One of Japan's major writers, Saikaku Ihara, spe­cialized in frank writing about both amo­rous women and the male-male loves of the Samurai.
Until the nineteenth century, homosexual pornography in the West was often combined with defenses of sodomy. Such works include
Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, an erotic defense of pederastic love from seventeenth-century Italy; the bisex­ual, philosophical fiction of the Marquis de Sade; and The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, or the Recollections of a Mary-Anne (1881), the earliest such work that sur­vives in English and the first that is un­abashed masturbatory fiction, with brief appended essays on "Sodomy" and "Triba­dism." Pornographic scenes are found in the famous Teleny (1893), a novel falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde. The number of published works, however, was small. Well into the twentieth century pornographic stories, such as Seven in a Barn, circulated in typewritten form.
The Pulp Novel. The vast major­ity of written gay male pornography in the United States is issued in the form of paperback novels printed on pulp. Most of this material is of no literary value what­soever, being typically composed at a rate of over 50 pages a day by writers who often have little or no understanding of the set­tings (interstate trucking, rodeos, the Navy, etc.) involved. Typical pay for a full book is $250. Writers may chum out scores of books using the same basic ingredients: several pages of sexual description fol­lowed by several pages of "plot/character" in a pattern repeated throughout the book. Occasionally, however, one finds well-written pornography, often by professional writers "moonlighting" under pseudo­nyms, in which a talent for almost poeti­cally concise description of characters and setting is clearly visible, and sometimes an exotic setting is portrayed with such telling detail that one must presume the author is drawing on personal experience or thorough research.
A wary consumer is well advised to browse such novels before purchase, as the title and cover illustration may have norelationtothecontents. Until the 1970s, novels invariably were introduced by pseudo-scientific statements, supposedly from psychiatrists or clergymen, often denouncing the behavior depicted therein, and intended to provide the "redeeming social value" then required by the Ameri­can courts, but actually providing no little humor in a genre seldom noted for a comic touch.
The sexual scenes in these books are surprisingly varied, given their mass-production origins, and reflect the great diversity of exotic styles and tastes among their readers and writers. While male or­gans are invariably huge, ejaculations copious, and recuperation of potency in­stantaneous, and there is a definite bias in favor of youthful characters and settings [teenagers being most popular, perhaps reflecting ephebophilia), working-class occupations, and macho rather than re­fined or effeminate characters, neverthe­less a considerable age range, a rainbow of racial types, and a wide palette of sexual styles is to be found in these novels.
Among writers who have sought to find a place in the territory between purely ephemeral pornography and litera­ture are Richard Amory (Song
of the Loon trilogy), Casimir Dukahz, Gordon Mer­rick, John Preston, John Rechy, Samuel M. Steward ("Phil Andros"), Larry Townsend, Dirk Vanden, and Marco Vassi.
Modem Visual Pornography. The invention of photography in the nineteenth century provided a new medium for the pornographer. The best-known creator of sexually stimulating male portraits was the Baron von Gloeden, although there were others in both England and Germany. Sexual activity was often the subject of photographs, though legal restrictions kept them underground.
Twentieth-century homosexual visual pornography in the United States and Germany, other than that which was underground, began as an offshoot of the naturist and physical-culture movements. Erotic "physique" magazines, picture sets, and films were published under the pre­tense of non-sexual interest in body devel­opment. More explicit were the drawings of "Blade" (Carlyle Kneeland Bate; 1917-1989).The devastation of German culture by the Nazis and World War II left the United States as the principal center of gay erotica. Eight and 16mm homosexual films, progressively more straightforward in subject matter and more open in their circulation, were made and screened. A major figure is Bob Mizer, who founded the Athletic Model Guild in Los Angeles in 1945.
The last two generations have seen a continual attack through the courts on censorship of pornography. Supported by an ever more tolerant public, these efforts have gradually brought upholdable convictions for publication or distribution of pornography to an end in most of the United States (except for child pornogra­phy). However, legal harassment and prose­cutions have continued, and increased toward the end of the Reagan years. The freeing of the mails to pornography in the 1970s was an influential step,- anotherwas the Danish decision, in the late 60s, to end all legal restrictions on pornography.
Pornographic Filmmaking. Gay porno films typically have much lower budgets than their heterosexual counter­parts, being limited to a smaller market, and pay their actors less: a few hundred dollars for a couple of days' work is typical. In the heterosexual business, actresses are paid much more than actors, but for gay films their absence helps keep expenses down. The primary requirement for a male pornography actor is the ability to main­tain an erection while being aware of such technical matters as camera angle, director's instructions, soundtrack, and so forth. This is no mean feat, and a produc­tion can be held up for many hours for lack of an erection,- sometimes skillful editing can disguise this failing.
Filmed pornography has always been "safe sex" in that, by convention, ejaculation is always external (in order to be visual). Producers may, however, resort to such tricks as using beaten egg-white to simulate semen.
Early films tended to have rock-bottom budgets and were intended only for cinematic use; as home videos became more popular, budgets expanded to the point where lush background scenery is common and even special effects are used.
Leading recent gay pornographers of films and videos include Jean-Daniel Cadinot, Jack Deveau (Hand in Hand Films), Joe Gage, Sal Grasso (" Steve Scott"), Fred Halsted (d. 1989), William Higgins, Christopher Rage, and Peter de Rome.
The Porno Film Theatre. In the United States, the gay pornographic cin­ema arose in the late 1960s, originally featuring "soft-core" films but switching over to "hard-core" features in the more tolerant 70s. These movie houses soon came to be features of the gay subculture in all major cities, serving not only as places of visual entertainment, but often as sites for sexual activity as well. Spaces behind the screen or off to a side were sometimes in effect reserved as orgy rooms, while other activities took place in the seats of the theatre. Some cinemas added dance floors, bars, and other facilities so that they came to rival the bathhouses as leisure centers. With the development of the AIDS crisis, overt activity came to be frowned upon, but cruising remained a major activity.
Long before the opening of spe­cifically gay cinema houses, theatres show­ing heterosexual pornographic films had become sites for homosexual cruising, being particularly favored by those homo­sexuals attracted to "straight trade," heterosexual males who, upon arousal by the images of females on the screen, be­came less choosy about their means of relief. Even if the gay cinema should disap­pear in favor of home videos, this tradition is likely to endure.
Recent Developments. Increased gay self-awareness and self-acceptance, greater public acceptance of homosexual­ity, and the dropping of most legal barriers to the publication and circulation of por­nography have all helped homosexual pornography to grow explosively. It has today a major role in the gay male world, in which it is not controversial; few legal cases have involved homosexual pornog­raphy. While figures are unavailable, anec­dotal evidence suggests that per capita consumption is higher in the gay than in the straight community. It has shown a classic sign of economic health, the divi­sion into specialties, and the conservatism which has come to characterize part of the pornographic industry is also a sign that it is well-established. Inexpensive video equipment has made it easier for new pornographers to enter the field, although to date there has been more straight ama­teur pornography than gay. A number of glossy monthly magazines, following the model of Playboy and its successors, have strong pornographic components in pictures and text [Blueboy, Honcho, In Touch, etc.); Stroke proclaims openly that it is and wants to be pornographic and masturbatory.
In the 1980s there has been a renewed interest in written and drawn pornography, in which fantasies are not limited by what models can actually do and in which laws, as on intergenerational sex, can be broken without consequence.
The new phone sex industry offers person­alized, oral pornography. The division between pornography and high art loses its rigidity as painters, photographers, and authors of fiction and poetry produce works which stimulate sexually, and pomographers exceed the limits of popular art.
The New York editor and pub­lisher Boyd McDonald pioneered the col­lection, for pornographic ends, of confes­sional, reader-written material, an unde­terminable but large proportion of which is not fantasy but reports of authentic sexual adventures; his magazine
Straight to Hell has been succeeded by First Hand and Friction. Most of McDonald's maga­zine material has been reprinted in book form by Gay Sunshine Press (now Leyland Publications of San Francisco), and there are original books of the same type from that publisher, from Gay Presses of New York, and from Bright Tyger Press. Jack Fritscher, before turning to "documen­tary" erotic videos (Palm Drive Video), wrote and edited stories and confessions [Man 2 Man magazine). Among the other pornographic titles published by Leyland Publications is Mike Shearer's Great American Gay Porno Novel (1984). David Hurles ("Old Reliable") has recorded, first on audio and then on video tape, hustlers and ex-convicts, often filled with anger. Two leading pornographic visual artists are Tom of Finland and Rex. Pornographic comics have been collected and reprinted by Leyland Publications. In the 1980s a gay pornographic industry emerged outside the United States, first in France, then in Japan and on a smaller scale, for export only, in Thailand, Brazil, and Mexico. Just as American pornography has had consider­able influence in the spreading and homogenization of gay male culture, foreign pornography has the potential for broaden­ing American gay eroticism.
Women's Pornography. Most al­legedly lesbian pornography has consisted of fantasies for heterosexual male con­sumption. As a genre of sexual fantasy women have had romances, abundant pulp fiction with a strong sexual component. A development of the 1980s is the birth of a true women's pornographic movement, in which women create and market erotic materials for female consumption, both homosexual and heterosexual. A prece­dent is the feminist erotica of Ana'is Nin.
There are now published antholo­gies of women's erotica
(Herotica, edited by Susie Bright, The Leading Edge, edited by Lady Winston, and several other collec­tions), magazines both lesbian [Bad Attitude, On Our Backs, Outrageous Women, Yoni) and heterosexual [Eidos, Libido, YellowSilk), amajornovelist, Anne Rice ("A. N. Roquelaure," "Anne Rampling"), and filmmakers (Fatale Video; the heterosexual Candida Royalle). Lace Pub­lications has published several volumes of Lesbian erotica, including the adventure fantasies of Artemis Oak Grove and Cappy Kotz' The First Stroke. Pat Califia's Macho Sluts appeared in 1988 (Alyson Publica­tions). In comparison with men's, women's pornography is less visual, and includes more emotional context for the sexual acts. While pornography has been contro­versial in the feminist movement, and fantasies of violence or domination espe­cially so, the emergence of women's erot­ica has helped to defuse the issue. Its continued stronggrowth seems very likely.
Bisexual Pornography. As many men find lesbian lovemaking stimulating to watch, and the division between homo­sexual and heterosexual women has not been as rigid as the modern dichotomy between gay and straight men, much por­nography has presented women bisexually. The mid-1980s saw the emergence of pornography portraying men bisexually, usually using sexual trios consisting of two men and one woman. Not of "grass­roots" origin, as other forms of pornogra­phy have been, it has been a successful creation of the pornographic film indus­try, with only trivial written precedents, though books have followed in the wake. Although a product of the homosexual rather than the heterosexual branch of the industry, among non-bisexuals it seems to appeal more to heterosexual men than to the gay-identified.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Al's Male Video Guide, 1986, New York: Midway Publications, 1986; Varda Burstyn, ed., Women Against Censorship, Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & Maclntyre, 1985,- Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality in Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986; Gordon Hawkins and Franklin E. Zimring, Pornography in a Free Society, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture, New York: Viking, 1987; John W. Rowberry, Gay Video: A Guide to Erotica, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1986; Betty-Carol Sellen and Patricia A. Young, Feminists, Pornography, and the Law: An Annotated Bibliography of Conflict, 1970-1986, Hamden, CT: Library Professional Publications, 1987; Alan Soble, Pornography. Marxism, Femi­nism, and the Future of Sexuality, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986; Tom Waugh, "A Heritage of Pornography," The Body Politic IJanuary 1983), pp. 29-33; idem, "Photography, Passion & Power," The Body Politic (March 1984), pp. 29-33; Jack Wrangler and Carl Johnes, The Jack Wrangler Story, New York: St. Martin's, 1984.
Daniel Eisenberg

Porter, Cole (1891-1964)
American composer and lyricist. Porter was bom to wealthy parents in Peru, Indiana; Cole was his mother's maiden name. After studying music and law at Harvard and Yale Universities, he served in the military in France in World War I. There he met Linda Lee Thomas, and they were married in December 1919. The couple spent most of the following decade conducting a lavish version of the "lost generation" lifestyle in Europe, though Porter ocasionally returned to the United States for triumphal productions of his songs in Broadway musicals. On his various travels he was sometimes accom­panied by his comrade-in-arms Monty Woolley, and the two made no secret of their attraction to handsome young men.
In 1935 Porter wrote the score for the Hollywood musical
Born to Dance, the first of a number of such films. The following year he suffered a riding acci­dent in which both legs were crushed; in the course of his life he required more than thirty operations to avoid amputation. For long he bore the pain stoically, but in his later years he became reclusive, his days enlivened only - so it has been claimed - by a sadomasochistic relationship with actor Jack Cassidy. In 1946 Cary Grant impersonated Porter in a suck Hollywood film, Night and Day, which, true to form, entirely omitted the homosexual aspects of his life.
Porter, who wrote both the lyrics and the music to his songs, chose to oper­ate in the field of commercial music. Through his often sly wit he almost single-handedly raised the medium to an art form. Evidently he relished seeing just how far he could go in a era that exercised strict watchfulness on sexual innuendo. He was not always successful, and such songs as "Love for Sale" and "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" were long kept off the radio, while others underwent bowdlerization. In his 1929 song "I'm a Gigolo," the evidently bisexual character admits that he has "just a dash" of lavender. "But in the Morning, No" disturbed the prurient on several occasions, and alterations were made. Needless to say, these and other songs have enjoyed continuing popular­ity as cult favorites among homosexual audiences.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert Kimball, ed., The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, New York: Random House, 1983; Charles Schwartz, Cole Porter: A Biography, New York: Da Capo, 1977.
Ward Houser

Portugal
This nation of almost ten million people in the southwestern comer of Europe has had a disproportionate effect on world history through its colonies in the New World (Brazil), and in Africa and Asia. Sexual attitudes, though related to those of Spain, are nonetheless distinct.
Legal Sources. The earliest infor­mation on Portuguese homosexuality stems from the legal prohibitions, which antedate the beginning of national iden­tity in 1128. The Visigothic Code (506) of Alaric II specified the death penalty. Other punishments included public ostracism, shaving of the head, and whipping. Castra­tion was also inflicted as a penalty.
In troubadour poetry of the thir­teenth century accusations of "vice" (i.e., sodomy) were directed in poetry against men and women of the court, including troubadours themselves.
The
Leys e Posturas Antigas of Afonso rv (1324-57) condemned homo­sexuality. Influenced by the strong Castil­lan repression in Spain, they specified that homosexuals did not have (as did other offenders) the right of refuge in a church. Two centuries later, Afonso V specified burning as the punishment, and used the hitherto-unknown terms "sodomites" for homosexuals and "sodomy" for the prac­tice. In 1499, Manuel included punish­ments for women engaging in homosexual practices.
The most complete government documents are from
1571 : the "ordenaçôes Filipinas" of Felipe II of Castile (ruling also over Portugal as Felipe I). Restating the punishment of death by burning, they denied sodomites the right of burial so that their bodies would "not be remembered"; all the descendents of the victim were tainted by infamy and could not inherit. These laws employ the terms o pecado nefando (infamous sin), contra natuia (against nature), and molicie (weakness; from the Latin mollis). The latter term included anal and oral intercourse, solo or mutual masturbation, and frottage.
Gay Subcultures. However, the recent research of the Brazilian scholar Luiz Mott in the archives of the Portu­guese Inquisition has shown that condi­tions in the seventeenth century were considerably more lenient than the draconian laws would suggest. In sixteenth- and especially in seventeenth-century Portu­gal, there grew up a rich and energetic gay subculture. There were recognized slang terms, modes of dress, and wide use of female nicknames. There were also recog­nized cruising areas and sympathetic pri­vate houses in Lisbon and elsewhere where homosexuals could meet and consort with each other. A transvestite dance troup, the Dança dos Fanchonos, existed at the be­ginning of the seventeenth century. Homosexual practices within the clergy were also widespread, and some, including ones in positions of authority, defended sodomy, calling it "the most delicious sin," or not a sin at all. Several monarchs, including Pedro I and Afonso VI, had homosexual inclinations. The Inquisition tribunals were anything but vigorous in pursuing cases brought to their attention. While some victims were burned and others condemned to life imprisonment, the proportion suffering severe penalties, compared with countries such as Switzer­land and the Netherlands, was not high.
Toward the Present. With the promulgation of the Napoleonic Code, legal prohibitions of homosexuality were re­moved. Homosexuality was covered only under the more general prohibitions of public scandal and mistreatment of mi­nors. As a result, in nineteenth- and twen­teeth-century Portugal homosexuality has not been the subject of great legal persecu­tion. During the dictatorship of 1933 to 1974, for example, while the police did arrest homosexuals found in public places, they were then taken to a police station, their identities recorded, and a symbolic fine assessed. There was no imprisonment and the cases were not pursued. Discreet activity was widespread.
The fall of the dictatorship and institution of a liberal regime in
1974 permitted the establishment of Portugal's first openly gay organization. Gay periodi­cal publications began in 1977. Lisbon has a number of gay bars, discos, saunas, and hotels, and beach cruising is frequent. The monthly Homo 2000 and the irregular Oibita Gay Macho permit contacts through advertisements. AIDS has not had a major impact in Portugal, and thanks to intelligent information campaigns, it is not seen as a gay disease.
Writings. The first novel dealing openly and tolerantly with homosexuality was O Barao de Lavos (1902) by Abel Botelho. A destructive poem ridiculously accusing a bishop followed. In 1918 the great FernandoPessoa published Antinous, a treatment, in English, of the love of the Greek youth Antinous and the emperor Hadrian. In 1920 the lyric Songs of Antonio Botto appeared. A minor controversy en­sued, whose peak was the pamphlet Sodoma Divinisada of Raul Leal (1923). This exalted pederasty as "the highest form of masculinity," which "leads to a thco-metaphysical unification of life."
In 1922 Portugal produced one of the landmark monographs on the whole history of homosexuality, Dr. Arlindo Camillo Monteiro's massive
Amor Sdfico eSocratico, avolumenowrare.In 1926 Dr. Asdrubal de Aguiar published another major study, Evolucao da Pedeiastia e do Lesbismo na Euiopa, followed by his Medicina Legal: A Homosexualidade masculina atraves dos tempos (1934). It was not until 1979, however, that the concept of homosexuality as illness disap­peared from Portuguese scientific writ­ings, with the appearance of the first vol­ume of Julio Gomes' work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Julio Gomes, A Homossexualidade no Mundo, 2 vols., Lisbon: The Author, 1979-81; R. W. Howes, "Fernando Pessoa, Poet, Publisher, and Translator," British Library Journal, 9 (1983), 161-70; Luiz Mott, "Pagode portugues: a subcultura gay em Portugal nos tempos inquisitoriais," Ciencia e Cultura, 40:2 (February 1988), 120-39; Mandy Vale, "Portugal," Blueboy (January-February 1979), 64-68.
Julio Gomes

Poulenc, Francis (1899-1963)
French composer. Bom into a well-to-do Parisian family of pharmaceutical manufacturers, Poulenc received his musical formation from his pianist mother. Her brother, "Oncle Papoum," introduced his nephew to the racier aspects of the entertainment w orld of the French capital. At the age of sixteen he began taking lessons from the homosexual pianist Ricardo Vines.
After World War I Poulenc was linked to the younger innovative French composers known as Les Six, though he was not a formal member of the group. He followed their trend of reacting against romantic sentimentality and vagueness in favor of crisp frankness of statement. Fol­lowing Erik Satie, the young Poulenc sometimes imitated the comic songs of the popular music hall. In 1924 the impressario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned a ballet score from him, "Les Biches" (The Does), which spread his reputation throughout Europe. The saucy imperti­nence of his early music masked technical deficiencies - and probably personal emo­tions as well. After a period of aesthetic uncertainty, he reached a new maturity in 1935, signaled by his liaison with the barytone Pierre Bernac (also born in 1899). Over the years he wrote many songs for Bernac, and the two frequently appeared together in concert - forshadowing a simi­lar relationship between the English composer Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears.
After World War II Poulenc emerged as a champion of the moderate avant-garde as against the iconoclastic rigorism of Olivier Messiaen and the twelve-tone composers. Assessing his own position, he said: "I know perfectly well I'm not one of those composers who have made harmonic innovations . . ., but I think that there is room for
new music that doesn't mind using other people's chords." His first opera, Les Mamelles de Tiresias (1947), was set to a proto-surrealist text by Guillaume Apollinaire. The 1957 Dialogues des Carmélites, about a group of nuns condemned to death in the French Revolution, is one of the few op­eras of the second half of the twentieth century to have secured a place in the repertory. Poulenc also wrote concertos for various combinations of instruments, incidental music for plays and films, the Mass in G (1937), and the famous "Gloria" (1959).
Although the composer is said to have had some flings with Arab boys in North Africa, during the latter part of his life he lived in an essentially spousal rela­tionship with Bernac. Apparently he had no difficulty reconciling this liaison with his return to the Catholic faith. Often marked by witty sallies, his music was highly regarded as the outstanding exem­plar in his time of the distinctive French tradition of
mélodie. Poulenc influenced composers of many nations, including the American gay composer and diarist Ned Rorem.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Henri Hell, Francis Poulenc, London: Calder, 1959.
Wayne R. Dynes

Prejudice
The term prejudice and its equiva­lents in many European languages refer primarily to a negative prejudgment reached before the pertinent information has been collected or examined and there­fore based on insufficient or even imagi­nary evidence. As a rule, prejudice entails a negative attitude and an element of emotional charge; in addition there is usually, though not invariably, a readiness to express in deeds the rejection of others. The resulting actions are also described as embodying various degrees of discrimina­tion. In practice the term prejudice has been applied primarily, if not exclusively, to populations distinguished by race, eth­nic identity, language, or any combination of these. It denotes a negative evaluation of human groups perceived as different in genetic origin or in significant behavioral traits from one's own.
In his classic study of the nature of prejudice, Gordon W. Allport stated that "Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge." This principle implies that some irrational, unconscious deter­minant is shaping the feelings and opin­ions of the subject. The hostility which prejudice (as an umbrella term for antipa­thies of all kinds) engendered and the dis­crimination to which it may inspire the dominant segment of the population have caused so much harm and suffering (the Hitler era is the supreme example) that many investigators in the social sciences have directed their energies toward under­standing and controlling what they inter­preted as a form of social pathology. A crucial aspect of the maintenance of preju­dice is the transmission of stereotypes about members of the group - beliefs that may be true in regard to a small number, but are projected onto one and all. These notions may be supported by more elaborate myths and fabrications, such as the fable of the destruction of Sodom be­cause of the sexual indulgence of its in­habitants.
Prejudice is not a monopoly of any group, as oppressed minorities can develop their own ethos that includes a rejection of anything associated with the race and culture of the oppressor. Yet it would be wrong to assume that prejudice is a normal and ineradicable phenomenon of social life; its absence in young children who have not undergone acculturation argues that learning rather than nature is the crucial factor in its development.
Sexual Aspects. Sexuality plays a leading role in the maintenance of preju­dice. The restriction of legitimate sexual expression to indissoluble monogamous marriage had its counterpart in the fanta­sies of unbridled sexual aggression, of demonic instincts lurking in tabooed, outsider groups which could at the same time be sexually exploited by the domi­nant one, as when its younger members were forced to become concubines, kept boys, or prostitutes serving the erotic needs of the male members of the dominant group. Pervasive fear of aggression on the part of male homosexuals (but not lesbi­ans) underlies the accusation that homo­sexuals will seduce or molest anyone whom they encounter. Public opinion polls in the United States have found that 59 percent of those questioned believed that "homo­sexuals have unusually strong sex drives," and 35 percent agreed that "frustrated homosexuals seek out children for sexual purposes." Employers deny homosexuals jobs on the ground that they will approach fellow employees with lewd propositions.
At the same time a secret glamor attaches to the forbidden conduct; the pleasure derived from tabooed sexuality is believed more intense, more addicting than ordinary heterosexual coitus. The lure of uninhibited, promiscuous sexual gratifi­cation hovers over the gay subculture with its far more relaxed norms of sexual con­tact. The outgroup represents a threat to the moral values of Christian society, a force undermining civilization and lead­ing to its downfall, and a violation of the order of nature. Also, the homosexual is linked with a vast conspiracy, an international freemasonry from which the "normal" citizen is excluded - to his pro­fessional and economic detriment - and which (so it is believed) secretly decides the fate of crucial institutions or even of the whole society.
Although an extensive literature on prejudice was produced between the 1930s and the 1960s, in no small part in reaction to the policies of Nazi Germany, the subject of antipathy to homosexuals was scarcely mentioned. Even toward the end of that time the gay movement was tiny and semi-clandestine, and those who advocated a minimum of toleration often had to mouth the traditional defamatory
clichés. The fact that the Communist movement had disowned sexual reform endeavors in the mid-1930s also dimin­ished concern with the attitudes toward sexual "deviates." Toward the end of the 1960s terms such as racism and sexism tended to replace the notion of prejudice. The counterpart to this in the gay move­ment was the expression heterosexism, which has achieved only a limited accep­tance, and the more widely used homo­phobia. The word prejudice by contrast seemed too weak and indefinite an expres­sion, and the role of ethnic minorities, particularly of Third World origin, in shap­ing the new political ambience contrib­uted to the terminological shift.
Another relevant point is that analysts of prejudice in Western Europe and the United States tended toward inter­pretations derived from depth psychology, which was officially banned in the Soviet Union and little known in the revolution­ary Third World. Marxism itself favors a simplistic, strongly economistic explana­tion of social phenomena, which cannot easily be transposed onto the situation of the homosexual in a culture whose tradi­tion of intolerance stems from the later Middle Ages. The feminist notions of "patriarchy" and "male domination" have been evoked to explain the hostility vis­ited upon the homosexual in Western culture; but conversely the notion of "homosexuality" was itself created in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century as a political response to the defi­nitions of certain forms of sexual activity in theology and law. The particular inten­sity with which the taboo on homosexual activity was enforced - the imposition of compulsory heterosexuaiity - went so far beyond ethnic or racial prejudice, which could never deny the existence of the ob­ject of the hatred, as to be in another class of psychological phenomena altogether. Hence the term prejudice finds little appli­cation in the cuarent discussion of the attitude of Western society toward homo­sexual behavior and those identified by themselves or others as homosexual.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Barry D. Adam, The Survival of Domination: Inferiorization and Everyday Life, New York: Elsevier, 1978; Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954.
Warren Johansson

Press, Gay
A minority group such as homo­sexuals needs a press of its own for particu­lar reasons. Only at the end of the nine­teenth century did periodicals meant pri­marily or exclusively for a homosexual or lesbian readership come into being. Such publications supplemented the mass media addressed to a general readership by pro­viding news, commentary, advertisements, and later personal columns for individuals with special needs or interests. Thus the gay press cannot be compared to a Chi­nese-language or Russian-language peri­odical in the United States, or to an Eng­lish-language newspaper in Buenos Aires or Jerusalem, which provides general news and information to a public that cannot read the idiom of the country. In other respects, however, it has had problems similar to those of the Lithuanian and Ukrainian speech communities in Tsarist Russia, which before 1905 were not al­lowed to have publications in their own language; these were printed in East Prus­sia and Austrian Galicia and smuggled across the border. Publishing houses in Paris and elsewhere on the Continent performed an analogous function by issu­ing books in English with homosexual themes, though it was only in the early 1950s that the Swiss monthly Der Kreis/ Le Cercle began to include English articles on its pages.
Pioneers. The earliest serial pub­lication of this kind was the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, edited by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin from 1899 to 1923. Modeled on an academic journal, the Jahrbuch featured long and sometimes ponderous articles abounding in footnotes and learned references; it also carried a remarkable annual bibliography of new books and articles compiled by Eugen Wilhelm under the pseudonym of Numa Praetorius. A second major journal was Der Eigene, which had originally been devoted to the arts but became the organ of the pederastic wing of the German homosexual movement, the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen; it was a de luxe publication on fine paper with illustrations in black and white, in sepia, and in color that imitated such foreign models as the Yellow Book. On its pages the adolescent male nude played a prominent role. With a number of significant interruptions, Der Eigene ap­peared from 1898 to 1930.
France had only two publications in the period before World War U:
Akademos, which was issued monthly during 1909 in Paris by Count Adelsward Fersen, and Inversions, which appeared briefly in 1925 before it was suppressed by the police at the instigation of clerical members of the Chamber of Deputies. Because of the intolerance that prevailed in the English-speaking world, no counterpart could be published. In the mid-1920s a few issues of Friendship and Freedom were produced by Henry Gerber, who was promptly ar­raigned for having created a homophile organization. Later, in 1934, he and Jacob Houser issued a mimeographed newslet­ter entitled Chantecleer. At this time only semi-clandestine newsletters and similar ephemeral publications could exist in the United States, while the German move­ment of the 1920s had a whole set of journals, from Freundschaft und Freiheit to Freundin (for lesbians).
In Switzerland a bilingual monthly called
Der Kreis/Le Cercle began to appear in the mid-1930s, when the National Socialist seizure of power had obliterated the gay press in Germany proper. None of these early publications could appeal to a mass readership; most existed in the shadows of the world of journalism, dreading the intervention of the authorities under one pretext or an­other, as the sacred freedom of the press even in democratic countries never applied to journals that defended homo­sexuality.
After World War II. The revival of the homophile movement after World War II saw new journals emerge: in the United States ONE (1953-72) and Mattachine Re­view (1955-66), and for lesbians an early clandestine effort, Vice Versa (1947), and then the stable The Ladder (1956-72); in France Arcadie (1954-82); in the Nether­lands [Vriendschap, 1948 et seq.); and in West Germany Der Weg (1952 et seq.). These were monthlies discreetly mailed in unobtrusive wrappers, often at first-class rates to deter postal inspection. The contents were limited to news, editorials, commentary, and illustrations more sug­gestive than explicit; personal advertise­ments could not yet appear because these would have been construed as "inciting to immorality." Only a limited readership had access to these journals, although the American ones were at times sold on newsstands.
The radical wave of the late 1960s furthered the growth of a so-called "under­ground press," which claimed and largely enjoyed a freedom from the taboos that had long excluded explicit treatment of sexual topics from the mainstream media. Besides using obscene language galore, they carried personal ads whose authors could uninhibitedly express their most intimate wishes. Among the best known of the underground papers were the
Berkeley Barb and the Berkeley Tribe, published on the outskirts of what was to become the gay meccaof thelinited States. Following their example, the gay liberation movement that began with the Stonewall Uprising of June 1969 soon found its voice, and publica­tions such as Come Out! and the Advo­cate were joined by the Body Politic (Toronto), Gay (New York City), Gay Community News (Boston), Gay Sunshine (Berkeley), and many others.
Also characteristic of the 1970s was the emergence of magazines and newsletters for gay and lesbian readers with a more specialized identity - reli­gious, political, or professional. These were often issued by organizations or caucuses of gay members of a larger professional society or religious denomination, or local groups communicating with a member­ship drawn from a specific locale and car­rying news of events in their own area. Some of these periodicals did not survive one or two issues; others - there are now hundreds - have become monthlies of 4 or 8 pages regularly mailed to the list of members.
For the mass reader, glossy illus­trated magazines modeled on their hetero­sexual counterparts, with unabashedly erotic illustrations and short stories and personal and classified advertisements rich in explicit detail, now became part of the press. The
Advocate and Blueboy in the United States, Gai pied and Samouraï in France are the best-known examples of this genre. Their articles and editorials reach a nationwide audience and create a norm of taste and opinion within the gay community. In the United States even smaller cities, such as Anchorage, AL; Raleigh, NC; and Sacramento, CA, have tabloid size newspapers; these depend heavily on advertising and are usually distributed free in bars, bookshops, and other commercial establishments. Many of these newspapers have joined together to form the Gay and Lesbian Press Asso­ciation. The United States has also created scholarly periodicals: Gai Saber ( 1977-78) and Gay Books Bulletin/Cabirion (1979-85), both published by the Scholar­ship Committee of the Gay Academic Union, New York; and Journal of Homo­sexuality ( 1974 et seq.; edited by John De Cecco at San Francisco State University). In the Netherlands Homologie (1978 et seq. ) provides an excellent current bibliog­raphy, while the Turin annual Sodoma (1984 et seq.) has achieved a particularly distinguished level of quality.
Conclusion. The existence of a periodical addressed specifically to a gay readership is an crucial part of the building of a movement in any country. Only when a common vocabulary, a shared frame­work of ideas and aspirations can be com­municated by a specialized press can a true "gay identity" develop. Otherwise the members of the gay subculture are isolated and atomized, thrown back on their own, often limited intellectual and moral re­sources. It is characteristic of the Commu­nist bloc that even where the sodomy laws tenaciously retained by previous bourgeois regimes have been repealed by fiat, no gay periodicals are allowed, even under strict Party supervision. This prohibition con­firms that such regimes are unwilling to grant their homosexual citizens the right to a corporate personality, the status of a legitimate interest group with its own voice in public affairs. The gay press is the col­lective voice of the homosexual minority in society, and its right to exist should be defended as part of the irreducible mini­mum of toleration which such a com­munity requires. It has the function of disseminating news of importance to its readers, defending their interests in public debate, and combatting efforts at defama­tion and persecution on the part of their political and religious foes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. David Armstrong,
Trumpet to Arms: Alternative Media in America, Boston: South End Press, 1981; Joachim s. Hohmann, ed., Der Eigene: Ein Blatt für männliche Kultur, Frankfurt am Main: Foerster, 1981; idem, Der Kreis, Frankfurt am Main: Foerster, 1980; H. Rotiert Malinowsky, Interna­tional Directory of Gay and Lesbian Periodicals, Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1987.
Warren Johansson

Prince-and-Pauper Syndrome
See Working Class, Eroticization of.

Prisons, Jails, and Reformatories
Incarceration facilities have for some time provided data for those seeking a comprehensive understanding of the full range and potential of homosexual behav­ior. These facilities host social worlds in which sexual acts and long-term sexual pairing between people of the same gen­der, who consider themselves and are generally considered by others both to be heterosexual ("man"/"punk" pairs), are not only common but validated by the norms of the prisoner's subculture.
General f'eatures of Incarceration Facilities. Incarceration centers constitute a subset of the "total institution," a cate­gory which includes the several branches of the armed forces and boarding schools. Along with monasteries and nunneries, incarceration facilities are characterized by gender segregation, a limited interface with the outside world, and an official norm of sexual abstinence. Like other total institutions, confinement facilities wit­ness a good deal of resistance on the part of their inmates to the regimentation de­manded by the institution; such resistance can take the form of involvement in offi­cially censured sexual activity.
There is a great deal of diversity among institutions holding prisoners sent to them by government as a result of crimi­nal charges. Probably the most salient differences exist between confinement centers for males and for females, at least with regard to the prevalent sexual condi­tions; unless otherwise noted, the account below pertains to facilities for males, who are still nearly 19 out of every 20 prisoners in the United States, with similar ratios elsewhere. Confinement institutions for the mentally disturbed and for privately-committed juveniles have been omitted from this article for lack of data. For simi­lar reasons, there is a focus on contempo­rary American institutions, which held nearly three-quarters of a million prison­ers in the late 1980s at any one time and saw nearly eight million admissions over the course of a year (mostly short jail lock­ups for minor offenses such as public drunk­enness).
Confinement institutions for adults (most commonly 18 or over, though there is considerable variation in age lim­its) may be divided into
prisons and jails. Prisons are places of incarceration for persons serving a sentence, usually of a year or longer,- they are divided by security levelinto maximum long-term), medium, andminimum (short-term) security. A jail, properly speaking, is a place of detention for defendants awaiting trial or sentencing and for convicts serving misdemeanor or very short sentences. This division, which is characteristic of modern penal systems, is replicated at the juvenile level with reformatories (going by a wide variety of names) and juvenile detention centers. Both "prison" and "jail," though especially the latter, are also used as comprehensive terms for all confinement institutions.
The proportion of the general population which is incarcerated varies enormously from jurisdiction to jurisdic­tion; the countries with the highest rates are said to be South Africa, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the United States. Demographically, the incarcerated popu­lation is overwhelmingly young, with the late teens and twenties predominating, and lower or working class.
Historically, widespread confine­ment is a relatively recent development, replacing previous criminal sanctions of execution, banishment, and short times in the stocks and pillories. Imprisonment as a punishment for crime is unknown to the Mosaic law, whether for sexual or for non­sexual offenses. The first penitentiaries were built in the United States in the nineteenth century and were soon copied by other countries, although debtor's jails existed for some time previous.
Not all penal systems have sought to banish sex from the prisoners' lives; conjugal visits were common in English jails of the seventeenth century, while in South American countries today conjugal visits are common and in many places the prisoners are allowed visits from female prostitutes. Originally, solitary confine­ment was the rule in the penitentiaries, but so many of the prisoners became in­sane as a result that this regime was dropped. Evidence for widespread homo­sexual activity in confinement is gener­ally lacking until the twentieth century, handicapping attempts to trace its histori­cal development; there are, however, indi­cations that sexual patterns similar to those found today prevailed in the nineteenth century as well.
Sexual Rolesin Confinement. The inmate subculture has its own norms and definitions of homosexual experience, which are to some extent archaic: they derive from the period before the modern industrialized-world concept of homosexu­ality had become even imperfectly known to the educated public, much less to the criminal underworld. In general, they seem to reflect a model of homosexuality found in ancient Rome, medieval Scandinavia and the Viking realms, and in Mediterra­nean countries into modern times: any man can be active in the sexually penetrat­ing role without stigma, and does not thereby compromise either his masculin­ity or his heterosexuality. A male, on the other hand, who submits to penetration has forfeited his claim on "manhood" and is viewed with contempt unless he is too young to make the claim, is a powerless slave, or has become sufficiently feminine so as to never raise the claim. A salient difference from the Greek model is that the sexually passive youths are not being trained to become men, but are expected instead to become increasingly effeminate.
That this model is not limited to jails, prisons, and reformatories, but is also widespread (if not so sharply drawn or so clearly legitimized and institutionalized) in the lower class of the general population from which prisoners are drawn, is clear to students of sexual patterns.
Discussion of conditions in con­finement, including sexual mores, is common among outlaws, so that even a juvenile delinquent who has never been locked up has some idea of the sexual system prevalent among prisoners. The model is introduced in the reform schools and reinforced in the local jails, so that by the time a convict reaches a prison, he has already been saturated with it and consid­ers it "normal" for such institutions.
TheRoleof the "Man. "Theprison subculture is characterized by a rigid class system based on sexual roles. The major­ity of prisoners are "men" (used in quota­tion marks as a term of jail slang, not as a reflection on the masculinity of such indi­viduals), also known as "jockers," "studs," "wolves," "pitchers," and the like. These prisoners are considered to be heterosex­ual, and most of them exhibit heterosex­ual patterns before and after incarceration, though a small number of macho homo­sexuals blend with this group by "pass­ing." The "men" rule the roost and estab­lish the values and behavioral norms for the entire prisoner population,- convict leaders, gang members, and the organizers of such activities as the smuggling of contraband, protection rackets, and pros­titution rings must be "men."
Sexually, the "men" are penetrators only,- a single incident of being pene­trated is sufficient for lifelong expulsion from this class. The sexual penetration of another prisoner by a "man" is sanctioned by the subculture and considered to vali­date the "man's" masculinity. "Manhood," however, is a tenuous condition as it is always subject to being "lost" to another, more powerful or aggressive "man"; hence a "man" is expected to "fight for his manhood."
Middle-aged and older "men" are most likely to abstain from sexual activity while incarcerated. A minority of the younger "men" also abstain, but most of the young "men" who have been incarcer­ated for a significant amount of time will take advantage of any opportunity for sexual relief, despite its necessarily homo­sexual nature. The latter, however, is not recognized by the prisoner subculture, which insists that aggressive-penetrative activity is
not homosexual, while recep­tive-submissive activity is.
Some of the reasons for such involvement go beyond the necessity of relieving the sex/intimacy drive. One is that aggressive sexual activity, especially rape and possession of a known sexual receptive, are considered to validate mas­culine status and hence tend to protect the "man" from attempts to deprive him of that status. There is considerable peer pressure in many institutions to engage in "masculine" sexual activity because it validates such activity on the part of other "men" already engaged.
Other motivations are not as di­rectly sexual: deprived of almost all areas of power over his own life by the regime of incarceration, a "man" often seeks to stake out a small arena of power by exerting control over another prisoner. The exis­tence of such an island of power helps the "man" retain a sense of his own masculin­ity - the one social asset which he feels the administration cannot take from him - because of his identification of power and control with the masculine role or nature. For an adolescent prisoner, this motiva­tion is often even stronger, as he has few other means of acquiring "manhood" stat­ure. Furthermore, involvement in prohib­ited homosexual activity is an act of rebel­lion against the total institution, hence a demonstration that the institution's con­trol over that person is less than complete.
Prisoners serving long terms are often looking for a companion to "do time" with; such "men" tend to rely less on aggression and more on persuasion in their search for someone to "settle down" with, but they are not above arranging for a confederate to supply the coercion needed to "turn out" someone for this purpose.
As the demand for sexual part­ners always far exceeds the supply, how­ever, only a minority of the "men" suc­ceed in obtaining possession of a partner; these tend to be the highest-ranking "men" in the prisoner power structure. The re­mainder, including some "men" who would be able to claim and retain a sexual partner but who choose not to do so for various reasons, make use of prostitution, join in gang-rapes, borrow sexual submissives from friends who control them, or do without. "Men" who are without sexual outlet altogether may be considered mar­ginal in their claim to "man" status, and targeted for violent demotion.
The Role of the "Queen." A sec­ond class consists of the "queens," also known as "bitches," "ladies," and so forth. These are effeminate homosexuals whose sexual behavior behind bars is not mark­edly different from their patterns "on the street." They are strictly receptive (pene­trated) and are generally as feminine in ap­pearance and dress as the local administra­tion will allow. By prison convention, these prisoners are considered to be females in every possible way, e.g., their anus is termed "pussy," they take female names, and are referred to using female pronouns. The queens are submissive to the "men" and may not hold positions of overt power in the inmate social structure.
Known or discovered homosexu­als who enter confinement without a feminine identity are relentlessly pressured to assume one; the idea of a homosexual who is not a substitute female is too threat­ening to be tolerated. The more extreme the contrast between the effeminized homosexual and the super-macho "men," the more psychologically safe distance is placed between the "men's" behavior and the notion of homosexuality.
In some prisons and many jails and reformatories, queens are segregated from the general population and placed in special units, referred to by the prisoners as "queens' tanks." There they are often denied privileges given to the general population such as attendance at the rec­reation hall, yard exercise, library call, hot food, and the like. The rationale given for such units is to protect the homosexuals (who generally would prefer to pair off with the "men" instead) and reduce homo­sexuality, though in practice it simply increases the frequency of rape among the remaining population.
The actual
Ufe of prison homo­sexuals, it should be clear, has Uttle or nothing to do with the ideals propagated by the gay movement, which have barely affected prison life. There is Uttle room for the independent, self-affirming homosex­ual, who upon entering confinement faces the choice of "passing" as a heterosexual "man," submitting to the subservient role of the "queen," or risking his Ufe in com­bat time after time. Only the toughest of homosexuals can even seriously consider the third option.
The Role of the "Punk." The lowest class (though the difference be­tween the two non-"men" classes is often minimal) consists of those males who are forced into the sexually receptive role,-they are called "punks," "fuck-boys," "sweet kids," and other terms. The over­whelming majority of these punks are heterosexual in orientation; they are "turned out" (a phrase suggesting an in­version of their gender) by rape, usualiy gang rape, convincing threat of rape, or intimidation. Punks retain some vesti­ges of their male identity and tend to resist the feminizing process promoted both by the "men" and by the queens; upon release they usually revert to hetero­sexual patterns, though often with disrup­tions associated with severe male rape trauma syndrome.
Punks often try to escape their role by transferring to another cell block or institution, but almost always their repu­tation follows them: "once a punk, always a punk."
Punks tend to be younger than the average inmate, smaller, and less expe­rienced in personal combat or confine­ment situations; they are more likely to have been arrested for non-violent or vic­timless offenses, to be middle class, and to belong to ethnic groups which are in the minority in the institution.
Relations between queens, and punks are often tense, as the former tend to look down on the latter while trying to recruit them into their ranks, a process which the latter resent, though some may succumb to it over the years.
In subsequent usage, when both queens and punks are meant, the Ameri­can prison slang word "catcher," which includes both (as the opposite of "pitcher," both terms derived from the sport of base­ball) will be used here.
The percentage of queens in an incarcerated population is usually very small, from none to a few percent. The number of punks is usually much larger, given the unrelenting demand on the part of the "men" for sexual catchers,- never­theless, the supply of punks never ap­proaches the demand, so that the majority of the population is always "men." The number of punks tends to rise with the security level of the institution, as the longer the prison term, the more risks will be taken by an aggressive "man" to "turn out" a punk for his own use. Big-city jails and reform schools are also considered to have relatively high populations of punks.
Relationships. In ongoing sexual relationships, a "man" is paired ("hooked up") with a catcher; no other possibilities, such as a pair of homosexuals, are toler­ated, but this one is not only tolerated but sanctioned by the prisoner subculture. These relationships are taken very seri­ously, as they involve an obligation on the part of the "man" to defend his partner, violently if necessary, and on the part of the catcher to obey his "man." Catchers are required to engage in "wifely" chores such as doing laundry, making the bunk, keeping the cell clean, and making coffee. Owing to the shortage of catchers, only a minority of "men" succeed in entering into such a relationship, and the competi­tion for available catchers is intense, sometimes violent.
The impetus manifested by the "men" to form pairs is remarkable in light of the many disadvantages in doing so, for the "man" not only risks having to engage in lethal combat on behalf of someone else and hence suffer for his catcher's blunders, seductiveness, or good looks, but he also greatly increases his vulnerability to administrative discipline by increasing his profile and the predictability of his prohib­ited sexual activities. The fact that so many "men" seek to form pairs rather than find sexual release through rape, prostitution, etc. is strong testimony for the thesis that such relationships meet basic human needs which are related to, but not identical with, the sexual one, such as a need for affection or bonding.
Sometimes the "man" part of the relationship is actually a collective, so that a catcher may belong to a group of "men" or to a whole gang. Ownership of a catcher tends to give high status to the "man" and is often a source of revenue since the "man," who is often without substantial income, can then establish himself in the prostitution business. These relationships are usually but not always exploitive and they often result from ag­gression on the part of the "man"; the catcher may or may not have consented before the "man" "puts a claim" on him.
The relationship of involuntary to voluntary sexual activity inside prison is a complex, one. Many continuing and isolated liaisons originate in gang rape, or in the ever present threat of gang rape. Prison officials can label such behavior as "consensual," but fear on the part of the passive partner is certainly a prime stimulus.
"Freelance" or unpaired catch­ers are not very common, since they are usually unable to protect themselves and are considered to be fair game for any aggressive "man." Usually, a gang-rape or two is sufficient to persuade an unattached catcher to pair off as soon as possible. A catcher who breaks free from an unwanted pairing is called a "renegade."
Pair relationships are based on an adaptation of the heterosexual model which the prisoners bring with them from the street; the use of this model also vali­dates the jail relationship while confirm­ing the sense of masculinity of the "man." The "men" tend to treat their catchers much as they habitually did their female companions, so a wide range of relation­ships ranging from ruthless exploitation to love are encountered.
Emotional involvement by the "men" is less common than " on the street," but not rare,- long-term prisoners may even "get married" in an imitation ceremony to which the whole cell block may be in­vited. A little-noted emotional significance of the relationship for almost all the "men," however, is that it becomes an island of relaxation away from the constantly competitive jungle, with its continual dangers and fear of exposing anything which might be considered a "weakness," that mark social relations between the "man" and other "men." Confident in his male role, the "man" can allow himself to drop the hard mask which he wears out­side the relationship and express with his catcher the otherwise-suppressed aspects of his humanity, such as caring, tender­ness, anxiety, and loneliness.
Sexual reciprocation is rare, and when it does occur, is almost always kept highly secret.
Another noteworthy alteration from the heterosexual model is that the "men" tend to be considerably more cas­ual about allowing other men sexual ac­cess to their catchers than they would with regard to their females. The catchers are frequently loaned to other "men" out of friendship or to repay favors or establish leadership in a clique, and are commonly prostituted. Unlike their females, the jail catchers will not get pregnant by another man. It is very important, however, for a "man" to retain control over such access to his catcher.
The punks, who retain a desire for an insertive role which they cannot find in sex with their "men," sometimes recipro­cate with one another, giving each a tem­porary chance to play the "male" role which is otherwise denied them.
As queens are highly valued, being both scarce and feminine-appearing, they tend to have a little more autonomy than the punks, who are for all practical pur­poses slaves and can be sold, traded, and rented at the whim of their "man." The most extreme forms of such slavery, which can also apply to queens, are found in the maximum-security institutions and some jails.
Rape. Perhaps the most dreaded of all j ailhouse experiences is forcible rape. This phenomenon, while it has much in common with rape of males in the com­munity, is distinguished by its institu­tionalization as an accepted part of the prisoner subculture. Most common in urban jails and in reformatories, gang rape (and the common threat of it) is the princi­pal device used to convert "men" into punks.
In the subculture of the prison those with greater strength and knowl­edge of inmate lore prey on the weaker and less knowledgeable. Virtually every young male entering a confinement institution will be tested to see whether he is capable of maintaining his "manhood"; if a defi­ciency is spotted, he will be targeted. Sometimes an aggressive "man" will seek to "turn" the youngster using non-violent techniques such as psychological depend­ence, seduction, contraband goods, drugs, or offers of protection. There is a great variety of "turning out" games in use, and with little else to do, much time can be spent on them.
If these techniques fail, or if the patience or desire to use them is absent, or if a rival's game is to be pre-empted, vio­lent rape may be plotted. Usually this is a carefully planned operation involvingmore than one rapist ("booty bandit," "asshole bandit"). The other participants in a gang rape may sometimes have little sexual interest in the proceedings, but need to reaffirm that they are one of the "men," to retain membership in the group led by militant aggressors. In the absence of such positive identification, they would expose themselves to becoming victims.
The aggressor selects the arena for the contest, initiates the conflict, and deliberately makes the victim look as helpless, weak, and inferior as possible. The usual response is a violent defense which, if successful, will discourage fur­ther attempts. Frequently the target is seized by a number of rapists under cir­cumstances which do not even allow a defense. Sometimes the attack will be dis­continued even when the attacker (or at­tackers) has the advantage, so long as the victim puts up a vigorous fight and thereby demonstrates his "manhood." In other cases, especially with particularly young and attractive newcomers, the assault will be pressed with whatever force and num­bers it takes to subdue the victim. If the victim forcibly resists, he is liable to be wounded or mutilated, in no small part because he has no experience or skill in the use of knives and the like.
Defenses used to preempt a rape by knowledgeable but vulnerable newcom­ers include paying for protection, joining a gang, and being sponsored by relatives or friends already locked up.
Rape in prisons is less frequent than in jails and reform schools because most prisoners who are vulnerable to rape will have already learned to accommodate themselves to the punk role in jail or reform school and will "hook up" with a protector shortly after arrival. Neverthe­less, rape remains a feature of prison life since the testing process is never really concluded and the demand for punks is always high. In a minimum-security prison, rape is uncommon because few "men" want to assume the risks involved and the separation from females tends to be short or release imminent; in a maximum-secu­rity prison rape is far more prevalent be­cause the prisoners are more violent to begin with, are more willing to take the risks involved, and feel a more intense need for sexual partners.
The psychological roots of jail rape are complex, but it is clear that the primary motivation for the rapist lies more in the area of power deprivation than sex­ual deprivation, though the role of the latter should not be underestimated. In the eyes of the perpetrator the victim is less a sexual object than a means of exhibiting male dominance and superiority of the rapist. That physical qualities are signifi­cant, however, is shown by the fact that obese or older inmates are rarely selected as victims.
From a sociological perspective, rape functions as a violent
rite de passage to convert "men" into punks in order to meet part of the demand for sexual part­ners. Most jail rape victims quickly "hook up" with a "man" (not necessarily the lead rapist) in order to avoid repetitive gang-rapes; some enter "protective custody" (often called "punk city") but usually find it impossible to remain there indefinitely, or find the promised protection to be illu­sory; some take violent revenge on their assailant(s) at a later date, risking both death and a new prison term; others com­mit suicide.
The rape of an "attached" catcher is also a direct challenge to his "man," who must retaliate violently, according to the prison code, or give up his claim on the catcher and be targeted for rape himself.
It should also be mentioned that when the combination of easy victims and administrative pressure against pair-bond­ing arises, as it often does, it becomes less risky to commit rapes than to commit oneself to an ongoing consensual relation­ship.
The rape problem has class as­pects as well: the middle-class white who finds himself in an institution where he is a total stranger to its subculture, its lan­guage, even the tricks and stratagems played on unwary newcomers, simply lacks the survival skills requisite for the prison milieu, while the repeated offender of lower-class or delinquent background has mastered all of them, even if he is not adroit enough in his calling to escape the clutches of the law.
A further dimension of prison rape is the racial issue. In the United States, rape often takes on a racial dynamic as a means by which the dominant ethnic group (usually but not always black) in the insti­tution intimidates the others. Whether or not blacks constitute a majority or plural­ity of the prison population, the aggressor in rape tends to be black, the victim to be white or Puerto Rican. A study by Alan J. Davis of 129 separate incidents in the Philadelphia prison system showed that:
13 percent involved white aggressors and white victims
29 percent involved black aggressors and black victims
56 percent involved black aggressors and white victims
Hence 85 percent of the aggressors were black, 69 percent of the victims were white. The motivation for the crime is not pri­marily sexual; it is conceived as an act of revenge against a member of white society collectively regarded as exploiting and oppressing the black race. Among older boys in a reform school, the white victim was often forced to submit to a black in full view of others so that they could witness the humiliation of the white and the domination by the black. Gang rapes are typically perpetrated by black inmates from urban areas serving sentences for major crimes such as armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. The white inmates are often disadvantaged in the prison set­ting if they have not been part of a delin­quent subculture in the outside world, and they lack the sense of racial solidarity that furnishes the blacks with a group ethos and the collective will to oppose the offi­cial norms of the prison and to risk the penalties attached to fighting, even in self-defense.
Further, in some institutions blacks commit acts of sexual aggression to let the white inmates collectively know that the black inmates are the dominant element, even if they are involuntarily behind bars. It is essential to their concept of manhood to make white prisoners the victims of their assaults, and they resent the black homosexuals in the prison, whom they identify as weak and effeminate. This whole pattern of symbolic acts is first inculcated in reform schools and then carried over into the penitentiaries where the offenders are sent for the offenses of their mature years. As the black popula­tion of the United States has ceased to be concentrated almost entirely in the states of the historic Confederacy, as it was be­fore World War
I, and is now spread more evenly over the territory of the Union, the share of blacks in the prison population of other states has risen, so that a more homogeneous institutional subculture now exists in which whites are the domi­nated and exploited class.
Thus far the white prisoners have generally not developed their own sense of solidarity in order to cope with the threats inherent in the situation.
Prevalence. As noted above, reli­able statistics on the extent of homosexu­ality in confinement are notably lacking. However, some figures are worth citing from a study by Wayne Wooden and Jay Parker. It must be kept in mind that these figures derive from a low-medium-secu­rity prison, that they apply only to inci­dents affecting the prisoners while in that particular prison (thus omitting previous "turn-outs" by rape), that the percentages apply to prisoners of all age groups and races taken together, and that the authors themselves emphasized that "our study is likely underreporting certain types of sexual behavior (i.e., sexual coercion and assault)."
This study found that 55 percent of all (self-designated) heterosexuals re­ported being involved in sexual activity while in that prison, this figure breaking down into 38 percent of whites, 55 percent of Hispanics, and 81 percent of blacks; that 14 percent of all the prisoners (9 percent of heterosexuals and 41 percent of homo­sexuals) had been sexually assaulted there; that 19 percent of all the prisoners (100 percent of homosexuals and 10 percent of heterosexuals) were currently "hooked up."
Looking at the (self-designated) homosexuals alone, 64 percent reported receiving some type of pressure to engage in sex (82 percent of whites, 71 percent of Hispanics, 49 percent of blacks) and 41 percent had been forced into it. Discipli­nary action for sex had been taken against 71 percent, while 35 percent were engaged in prostitution. An eye-opener for some gay consumers of pornography featuring jailhouse sex may be the report by 77 percent of the homosexuals that they had better sex "on the street" and by 78 per­cent that they were "looked down upon and treated with disrespect by other in­mates."
The Davis study of the Philadel­phia jail system, based upon interviews with 3,304 prisoners, estimated that the number of sexual assaults in the 26 months of the study was about 2000; during this period some 60,000 men passed through the system. Of these assaults, only 96 were reported to prison authorities, only 64 were mentioned in prison records, only 40 re­sulted in disciplinary action, and only 26 were reported to the police for prosecu­tion.
Jailhouse Sexual Mores. Sexual activity in confinement may take place nearly anywhere; the expectation of pri­vacy which prevails in other circumstances often gives way to necessity. Furthermore, it is often to a "man's" advantage to be seen engaging in "masculine" sexual ac­tivity by other prisoners, enhancing his reputation as a "man." For these reasons, sex is often a group activity with some participants taking turns standing "look­out" for guards or shooing away uninvolved prisoners from the area being used.
While disciplinary codes in con­finement institutions are nearly unani­mous in outlawing all sexual activity, these codes usually have little more effect than to ensure that sex takes place outside the view of the guards. They do, however, inhibit catchers from enlisting the aid of administrators in avoiding rape situations, given the fact that such avoidance usually requires pairing off with a protector. The furtive nature of consensual activities and pairings necessitated by the disciplinary codes also works to dehumanize them and favor the quick mechanical relief as distin­guished from an affectionate relationship.
The severe sanctions provided by the prisoner code against informers pro­tect even rapists from being reported to the administration by their victims. These fear retaliation from the perpetrators, who can be well placed in terms of the inmate power structure - and famed for their crimi­nal ruthlessness and daring. The aggressor is usually guilty of the far more serious crime, while the victim may have com­mitted only a trivial one. Officials usually have a general idea of what is going on, based on reports from informers, but these reports cannot be made openly enough to provide a basis for disciplinary action.
The openness of jailhouse sexual­ity, in spite of disciplinary codes, is one of its most remarkable features. The institu­tion of "hooking up" that is the heart of the system, and that specifies that any catcher who is "hooked up" may be "dis­respected" only at the risk of violent re­taliation from his "man," is dependent on general knowledge of the specifics of such pairings among the entire incarcerated population. Virtually the first result of a claim being laid on a catcher is its an­nouncement to the prisoner population at large; sex is the number one topic of con­versation, and the news that a new punk has been "turned out" spreads like wild­fire throughout an institution.
Under such circumstances, guards and administrators with their eyes open can hardly fail to be aware of pairings.
Often, in fact, housing moves are made to facilitate keeping the pair together; practi­cal experience has shown that this tends to minimize fights and therefore keeps the general peace, which is the first priority of all officials. Thus when a "man" in a double cell acquires a catcher, he "per­suades" his current cellmate to request a move out, the new catcher requests a move in, the catcher's current cellmate is prompted to request that he be moved out, and the administration approves it to keep the peace among all concerned. A particu­larly dangerous situation is one in which a catcher is bunked with a "man" other than the one he is hooked up with. For this reason punks are often celled together, as are queens.
Female Institutions. It is not known whether the incidence of homo­sexuality in prison is higher in male or female populations. One survey that used the same criterion for male and female inmates reported the same inci­dence in both.
The role of the female inmate in lesbian activity is precisely defined by the prison subculture. The "penitentiary turn­out" is the woman who resorts to lesbian relations because the opposite sex is unavailable; in contrast, the "lesbian" prefers homosexual gratification even in the outside world, and thus is equated with the queen in the men's prison. The lesbian is labeled as sick by some of the other inmates because the preference in a situation of choice is deemed a perversion. The participant in lesbian re­lations who does so for lack of choice is not so stigmatized.
The
"femme" or "mommy" is the inmate who takes the female role in a lesbian relationship, a role highly prized because most of the inmates still wish to play the feminine role in a significant way in prison. In the context of a pseudo-mari­tal bond, the femme continues to act out many of the functions allotted to the wife in civil society. The complement is the "stud broad" or "daddy" who assumes the male role, which in its turn is accorded much prestige for three reasons: (1) the stud invests the prison with the male image; (2) the role is considered more difficult to sustain over a period of time because it goes against the female grain; (3) the stud is expected not just to assume certain symbols of maleness, but also to personify the social norms of male behavior.
In sharp contrast with the men's prison, homosexual relations are estab­lished voluntarily and with the consent of the partners; no physical coercion is ap­plied to the weaker or feminine partner. Interpersonal relations linked with homo­sexuality play a major role in the lives of the female prisoners. Cast as a quasi-mari­tal union, the homosexual pair is viewed by the inmates as a meaningful personal and social relationship. Even though for previously heterosexual women this mode of adjustment is difficult, the uniqueness of the prison situation obliges the inmate to attach new meaning to her behavior.
When a stud and a femme have established their union, they are said to be "making it" or to "be tight," which is to say that other inmates recognize them socially as a "married" pair. Since the prisoners attach a positive value to sincer­ity, the "trick" - one who is simply ex­ploited sexually or economically - is held in low esteem by the inmate subculture. Tricks are also regarded as "suckers" and "fools" because their lovers dangle unkept promises in front of them. The "commis­sary hustler" is the woman who estab­lishes more than one relationship; besides an alliance with an inmate in the same housing unit, she also maintains relations with one or more inmates in other housing units for economic advantage. The other women, labeled tricks in the prison argot, supply her with coveted material items which she shares only with the "wife" in her own unit. The femme may even en­courage and guide the stud in finding and exploiting the tricks. The legitimacy of the primary pseudo-marriage is not con­
tested, though the tricks may anticipate replacing the femme when a suitable opportunity arises.
Writers on female institutions agree that, apart from sexual relationships, such institutions are marked by quasi-family social units which provide emo­tional support to their members, in sharp contrast to the ever-competitive male environments.
Administrative Attitudes. There is, as may be expected, a wide range of administrative attitudes toward both vio­lent and consensual homosexuality in their confinement institutions. Consensual activities are accepted as inevitable by some, hunted out and seriously punished when discovered by others, while most tend to look the other way so long as the behavior does not become disruptive or too open.
Convicts have charged that ad­ministrators too often exploit rape as a tool to divide and control the inmate population, particularly in connection with racial tensions. A state commission inves­tigating the unusually violent New Mex­ico prison riot (1980) found that officials used the threat of placement of new in­mates in cells with known rapists to re­cruit informers. Other administrations have been charged with setting vulnerable prisoners up for gang rape in order to dis­charge tensions within a housing unit or reward it for keeping quiet. Administra­tors are aware that a difficult or disliked prisoner can be maneuvered into a posi­tion where he will be sexually victimized by his fellow inmates. In other cases the staff is simply resigned to what is happen­ing inside the institution and turns a blind eye to the sexual violence. Administrators themselves deny such actions and univer­sally proclaim their opposition to rape, while often saying that it is no problem in their own institution.
The uniformed guards often have a different set of attitudes. Some of them consider all participants in homosexual activity to be homosexuals; some display considerable homophobia and engage in private witch-hunts. Others, especially those with long experience as guards, may encourage a "man" whom they consider to be dangerous to get "hooked up" with a catcher on the theory that paired-off "men" are less likely to cause major trouble. Guards are also involved in setting up some rapes and sexual encounters, in exchange for payoffs or for such diverse reasons as to destroy the leadership poten­tial of an articulate prisoner. The guards are capable even of ignoring the screams of a prisoner who is being raped. The guards may even tell the prisoner that to file charges against the aggressor would be tantamount to publicizing his own hu­miliation, just as a public rape trial in the outside world exposes the female victim to shame and embarrassment.
Writings on Sex in Confinement. A good deal has been written in scholarly style, in North America at least, concern­ing homosexual behavior in prisons, jails, and reformatories. Much of this literature is fraught with controversy, and the views of penologists, often concerned more with institutional control and abstract theoriz­ing on "the problem of homosexuality" than with actual behavioral patterns, tend to differ both normatively and descrip­tively from the accounts of inmates. Penologists reflect the concerns of their employers, who usually seek to minimize aspects of life in their institutions which would arouse public indignation, and who are usually hostile to all forms of sexual contact among prisoners. The conclusions of a recent paper cited in Criminal Justice Abstracts, that "greater efforts to deter . .. consensual homosexual activity" are needed, are not untypical for penological writings.
Complicating the matter is the extreme difficulty, which is often glossed over, of a non-imprisoned investigator, usually someone associated with the administration (at least in the eyes of the prisoners), seeking to obtain reliable data on behavior which violates disciplinary
codes and which is as secretive as the most sensitive aspect of underworld life can be to the prying eyes of outsiders. As a result, armchair theorizing, remote from the actual behavior which is supposed to be its subject, is endemic to the formal literature.
A few non-penological psycholo­gists and at least one sociologist (Wayne Wooden) have published useful studies in the 1980s, but it is noteworthy that only one comprehensive survey of sexual be­havior in a prison (a low-medium-security California institution) has found its way into print (the Wooden-Parker book
Men Behind Bars, for which Jay Parker gathered information while a prisoner). The only systematic investigation of sexual behav­ior (in this case rape) in jails (the Philadel­phia system) was reported in 1968 by Alan J. Davis. Reliable statistics for juvenile institutions are apparently non-existent, though reform schools have been described as the incarceration facilities where sex­ual activity is most common, and as the locus in which habitual criminals first acquire the mores governing sexual ex­pression in the prisoner subculture.
Accounts written by prisoners or ex-prisoriers have Usually taken the form of autobiography or fiction, and these also tend to draw veils over areas which might reflect unfavorably on the writer in pre­senting himself to the general public, such as rape and homosexuality. Former prison­ers also tend to remain silent concerning their sexual experiences in confinement when conversing with people who have not shared that environment, former "punks" being most loath to disclose anything about their humiliating sexual role.
Novels by Jean Genet have de­picted homosexuality in French reform schools and prisons, and these are the only widely read books dealing with the sub­ject, though one must hesitate to conclude too much from Genet's hallucinogenic-fantastic writings. Billy Hayes' autobiographical
Midnight Express (1977) gave an explicit account of the author's homosexual experiences in Turkish pris­ons. Karlheinz Barwasser wrote from a gay inmate's point of view on German prisons in Schwulenhetz im Knast (1982), while Robert N. Boyd did the same on the Cali­fornia prison system in Sex Behind Bars (1984). The only systematic account from a "punk's" perspective can be found in Donald Tucker's revealing "A Punk's Song" in Anthony Scacco's 1982 anthology, Male Rape. A third-person novel which has dealt candidly with prison sex, based on the author's experience in the Califor­nia system, is On the Yard (1967) by Mal­colm Braly; a play by Canadian ex-inmate John Herbert, Fortune and Men's Eyes (1967), made into a movie in 1971, re­volves around sexuality in a reformatory. There are numerous gay pornographic books featuring an incarceration setting, but very few of them have been written by former inmates and they are generally extremely inaccurate.
Theories of Prison Homosexual­ity. Two major theories have been ad­vanced by penologists to account for prison homosexuality: the Importation Model and the Deprivation Model. The Importation Model suggests that the "problem" of homosexuality exists in a prison because it has been brought in from outside, the Deprivation Model assigns it to the condi­tions of incarceration where it is found.
The Importation Model rests on studies showing that the variable of previ­ous homosexual experience is significant for predicting homosexual activity in prison. It alone accounted for 29 percent of the variance of the individuals' scores on an index of homosexuality. Its major flaw is that much of the prior homosexuality - including aggression against other prison­ers - is likely to be imported from other incarceration programs rather than from the larger society outside prison. The vari­able of prison homosexuality is not a pure measure of importation free of the effects of imprisonment, since convicts have of­ten served previous sentences, some as adolescents in reform schools. The afteref­fects of such periods of incarceration are difficult to unravel from the impact of the outside world. In one study, two-thirds of those reporting prison homosexuality indicated that their first experience had occurred in a reform school. However, the validity of this finding is weakened by the absence of comparable data from non-cor­rectional institutions: how many young adults involved in homosexuality had their first experience while enrolled in high school?
An Importation Theory might more legitimately be focused on the con­cepts applied to sexual activity in confine­ment by the prisoners. There is little doubt that the dominant group seeks to apply the heterosexual models with which it is familiar from the outside world to the female-deprived prison society; if there are no females around, they will be created. The particular application of this model draws from working-class ideas of mascu­linity and homosexuality already men­tioned. Only with respect to the punks - admittedly an indispensable element - does the prisoner culture depart from these ideas in upholding the notion of the "fall from manhood" and rationalizing its vio­lent inducement through the act of rape.
The Deprivation Model focuses on the negative aspects of the prison expe­rience as a cause of homosexuality. The deprivation model predicts that persons and institutions that associate high pains and intense suffering with imprisonment are more likely to have homosexual expe­rience. Advocates of this view also assume that the harsh, depriving conditions of custody-oriented, maximum-security pris­ons would favor the development of homosexual patterns. Yet this prediction is belied by a study finding more prison homosexuality in a treatment-oriented prison (37 percent) than in a custody-ori­ented one (21 percent). The only positive correlations found are with the degree of isolation from the prisoner's family and friends, and the distance from home. The element of loneliness caused by the depri­vation of the prison experience may con­tribute to the need for sexual affection and gratification.
Perhaps it would be too much to suggest that penologists consider a Depri­vation Theory which posits that homo­sexuality results from the sexual, affectional, and emotional deprivation of pris­oners who would, if given the opportunity, otherwise continue their heterosexuality. Such a theory, however, would also have to take into account the question of power deprivation, which might motivate sexual assaults on other prisoners even if females were readily available. Another question which has yet to be addressed is why pecking-order contests are resolved in a sexual rather than some other manner.
Incarceration as Punishment for Homosexual Conduct. Imprisonment for homosexual offenses is a comparatively modern innovation. For no infraction of its commandments does the Mosaic Law prescribe imprisonment as a penalty, and as the punishment for sodomy, late medie­val law decreed castration, banishment, or death. In practice, if not in law, eight­eenth-century England commuted the death penalty for buggery to exposure in the pillory - a fate almost worse than death - together with a term of imprison­ment, and when the punishment of hang­ing established by 5 Eliz. I c. 17 was finally abolished in 1861, the sentence was re­duced only to penal servitude for life. In 1885 the Criminal Law Amendment Act prescribed a sentence of two years for "gross indecency" between males. One can ques­tion the logic of sentencing a man found guilty of homosexual acts with other males to confinement for years or even for life in an exclusively male community, but the legislatures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries evidently had no qualms.
Though until recently homosex­ual acts were illegal in most American states, relatively few men and fewer women were imprisoned for violating such laws.
More frequent was the incarceration of convicted pedophiles, which still contin­ues. Far more homosexuals arrive in local jails for prostitution (particularly "street transvestites"), and other - usually non­violent - offenses.
Conclusion. The patterns of sex­ual behavior and sexual exploitation docu­mented in recent studies have a long his­tory. In the nineteenth century such be­havior could simply be dismissed as an­other sordid aspect of "prison vice," but with the coming of a more scientific ap­proach prison administrators have had to confront this issue at least in terms of the effect on the inmates whom they held in custody. Isolation and maximum-security wards for obvious homosexual prisoners were attempted, but they did not keep the young and physically slight prisoner with no previous homosexual experience from being victimized. The lurking danger for the individual prisoner has become so overt that an appellate court has even upheld the right of a prisoner to escape if he surren­ders to the authorities within a reasonable time, and courts of the first instance have hesitated to send convicted persons to prison because of the likelihood that they would be exposed to sexual violence.
Proposals for reform include new systems of inmate classification based on scoring devices designed to indicate the level of security required for each prisoner. However, the state often does not have available space within suitably differenti­ated facilities to provide the correct berth for each prisoner. A more fundamental flaw with such proposals is that they do not address the reasons for sexual aggres­sion, so that present patterns are likely to replicate themselves within each classifi­cation level.
One strategy which, so far, has yet to be tried would be to legalize consen­sual sexuality in prison and encourage the formation of stable, mutually supportive pair-bonds in that context, while reserving the full weight of administrative attention and discipline for rape. With administra­tors continuing to regard both rape and consensual homosexuality as problems to be equally eliminated, such suggestions have produced only "we can't sanction homosexuality" replies.
So long as the sex-segregated prison remains society's answer to crime, the issues of rape and of consensual homo­sexual behavior behind prison bars are likely to persist. So, also, will the strong suggestion that most sexually active heterosexuals, deprived of access to the opposite sex and not discouraged by their peers from doing so, will eventually turn to another person of the same sex, and may even become emotionally attached to that person. The full implications of that state­ment, supported as it is by a considerable body of experience, for our concepts of sexual orientation and potential, have yet to be explored.
See also Situational Homo­sexuality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert N. Boyd,
Sex Behind Bars: A Novella, Short Stories, and True Accounts, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1984; Alan J. Davis, "Sexual Assaults in the Philadelphia Prison System and Sheriff's Vans," Transaction, 6:1 (1968), 8-16; Rose Ciallolombardo, Society of Women: A Study of a Women's Prison, New York: John Wiley, 1966; Alice M. Propper, Prison Homosexuality: Myth and Reality, Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1981; Anthony M. Scacco, Jr., Rape in Prison, Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1975; Anthony M. Scacco, Jr., ed., Male Rape: A Casebook of Sexual Aggressions, New York: AMS Press, 1982; Hans Toch, Living in Prison: The Ecology of Survival, New York: The Free Press, 1977; Wayne S. Wooden and Jay Parker, Men behind Bars: Sexual Exploitation in Prison, New York: Plenum Press, 1982.
Stephen Donaldson

Privacy
The right to privacy - freedom from unauthorized or unjustified intru­sion - has become relevant to the issue of homosexuality because of the role that has befallen it as an argument for homosexual rights. Legal and philosophical literature of the 1980s abounded in pieces arguing that the right of privacy should or should not be extended to the homosexual behav­ior of consenting adults in private.
Antecedents. Recent in its practi­cal application, the right is nonetheless grounded in a long-established dichotomy. The notion of the private as distinct from the public realm goes back to classical antiquity, to the contrasting Greek adjectives idiotikos and demosios, for which Latin used the equivalents privatus and publicus. In a much-discussed passage, Cicero has the phrase res publica, quae . . . populi res est, which means simply that the adjective publicus is equivalent to the genitive of populus: the commonwealth is the property of the people (De re publica, I, c. 26) Hence the public is that which belongs to or concerns the demos, the populus-, the private is a matter for the individual citizen. Privacy, be it noted, was not a term of Roman law or in the Romance languages; it made its appearance in English only at the close of the Elizabethan era, while French legal texts must still resort to the paraphrase vie prívée to express the notion contained in English privacy.
Common Law.
The right of pri­vacy entered the common law tradition in the middle of the eighteenth century as the heir to a long series of judicial prece­dents dating back almost to the Norman Conquest (1066) that protected the sanc­tity of individual property rights. The ini­tial logic was that the law should protect a man's letters from unauthorized use by others, not on the ground that his privacy had been invaded, but rather that his prop­erty had been stolen. In three English cases of 1741, 1820, and 1849 respectively, the right of privacy was asserted as a kind of property right. Further than this the Eng­lish courts did not go, and it was left for the American interpreters of the common law to develop the modern concept of privacy.
American Law. It was a techno­logical innovation, not a theoretical one, that proved the catalyst. Photography at its outset was a time-consuming proce­dure that required the full consent and self-discipline of the subject. However, the moment that instantaneous photogra­phy was introduced commercially, pic­tures could be taken "in a flash" without the knowledge or permission of the sub­ject. The unauthorized use of such photo­graphs by the "yellow" press of the 1880s for purposes of scandal inspired two young Boston lawyers to act. On December 15, 1890 the Harvard Law Review published an article "The Right to Privacy" by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis - an ar­ticle so splendidly conceived and executed that Dean Roscoe Pound later deemed it to have done nothing less than add a chapter to the law. Warren, a scion of a socially prominent and wealthy Massachusetts family, had been offended by the press coverage of his own social life in his home in Boston's exclusive Back Bay, and the outcome was the article written literally pro domo.
The article began with a succinct account of how the common law principle that "the individual shall have full protec­tion in person and in property" had devel­oped so that in the case of property its principles extended to the products and processes of the mind. It went on to assert that "Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that 'what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house tops.'" The two authors concluded that "the protec­tion afforded to thoughts, sentiments, and emotions expressed through the medium of writing or of the arts, so far as it consists in preventing publication, is merely an instance of the enforcement of the more general right of the individual to be let alone." They appealed to the common law notion, not always honored in practice, that "a man's house" is "his castle, im­pregnable, often, even to its own officers engaged in the execution of its commands." Even at the time the article appeared, rea­sonable men differed widely as to how much this so-called right of privacy owed to history and how much to imagination. The article partook ofboththepastandthe future, and in the course of the twentieth century, the positions taken on the issue have determined in large part whether the courts or the legislatures would emerge as guardians of privacy.
This argument applied only to the sphere of civil law. Criminal acts as such were crimes whether committed in public or in private. However, the com­mon law also knew offenses that were criminal because they were committed in public or in such a manner as to become a public nuisance. The
Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, moreover, had made acts of indecency between males punishable whether "committed in public or in private," and the supporters of the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee focused attention exactly on those "committed in private" as the ones which they sought to remove from the concern of the law. While Parliament was debating this step, the United States Su­preme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) found unconstitutional a Connecti­cut statute prohibiting all persons from using contraceptives, on the ground that the statute and its enforcement violated a married couple's right of privacy. Writing for the majority, Justice Douglas conceded that such a right could not be found on the face of the Constitution, but maintained that the right was created from "penum­bras" of the Bill of Rights "by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance."
In the wake of
Griswold, the Supreme Court had little difficulty in expanding this right of privacy to protect an interracial couple's decision to marry, a person's right to view obscene material in the privacy of his home, and a woman's decision to abort a pregnancy. In these decisions the Court employed a "substan­tive due process analysis" rather than the Griswold penumbra rationale. This proce­dure has not gone unchallenged, indeed it has been attacked as judge-made law and an expression of judicial ideology, but the Supreme Court has remained steadfast in asserting that a right of privacy exists as a product of the Constitution.
Application to Sodomy Statutes. Once recognized, the constitutional right of privacy developed in Griswold and its offshoots was advanced as a ground for attacking the constitutionality of state sodomy statutes, but the courts were uncertain as to whether this right should extend to consensual sexual activity. Since sodomy in medieval usage extended far beyond homosexuality, certain heterosex­ual acts fell within its scope, and these the courts have had no difficulty in treating as protected by the right of privacy, so that they could in good conscience strike down the laws prohibiting them. However, be­cause of the particular intensity with which the taboo on homosexual acts has been maintained in American culture, these same courts have been reluctant to extend equal protection to homosexual activity.
The issue came to a head in two cases,
Doe v. Commonwealth (1976) and Bowers v. Hardwick (1986). The first summarily affirmed the decision of the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia upholding a Virginia sodomy stat­ute on the ground that the right of sexual privacy extended only to decisions relat­ing to the home, marriage, and the family. In the second, a majority of 5-4 denied that the Court's prior decisions have construed the Constitution to confer a right of pri­vacy on homosexual activity; "No con­nection between family, marriage and procreation on the one hand and homosex­ual activity on the other has been demon­strated. " The assertion that a right to engage in homosexual sodomy is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" was dismissed as absurd. Last of all, the plaintiff's argument that his conduct should be protected because it had oc­curred in the privacy of his own home was rejected. The majority argued that a deci­sion rendered in 1969 was "firmly grounded in the First Amendment" and therefore inapplicable as the present case did not deal with printed material. The minority opinion held that homosexuals, like ev­eryone else, have a "right to be let alone" and that "A way of life that is odd ... but interferes with no rights or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different."
Broader Implications. The battle line remained drawn between those who defend the right of the state to uphold a moral code derived from the canon law of the medieval church, and those who cher­ish the Enlightenment principle that of­fenses against religion and morality, so long as they do not violate the rights of others or the interests of the state, do not fall within the scope of the criminal law. In that respect the concept of privacy is a legal weapon, an ideological innovation which the defenders of homosexual rights seek to interpose between the received law, the jus receptum, and the individual having overt sexual relations with a per­son of the same sex in the interest of a jus recipiendum, a more just law which if adopted would protect homosexuals in the exercise of sexual freedom.
The paradox of this situation is that the "deep structure" of society pre­scribes that sexual acts be private, that is to say, performed out of range of the sight and hearing of others who would rightly take offense if the acts were inflicted upon their consciousness. A legal commentator in Nazi Germany recognized that private sexual acts harm no one and are seldom detected, but argued that if they were committed in public they would cause outrage and scandal; the law should there­fore proceed
as if the private acts had been performed in public. In other words, al­though the state power is invading the privacy of the participants and exposing them to humiliation and punishment, they should be punished on the fiction that they had deliberately violated the moral feelings of others by behaving indecently in public. One could hardly imagine a better example of paranoid logic, yet it is this type of thinking that underlies the refusal of the courts to extend the protec­tion of privacy to homosexual behavior. By contrast, in the Dudgeon case (1981) the European Commission of Human Rights in Strasbourg held that laws penalizing private homosexual acts violated the right of privacy embodied in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights of 1950. The struggle for the recognition of the right of privacy in this sphere of sexual conduct will likely continue unabated into the twenty-first century.
See also Law: United States.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. "Dudgeon v. United Kingdom," European Human Rights Reports, 3 (1981), 40-75; Morris L. Emst and Alan U. Schwartz, Privacy: The Right to Be Let Alone, New York: Macmillan, 1962,- Richard D. Möhr, Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society, and Law, New York: Columbia Univer­sity Press, 1988; David A. J. Richards, "Sexual Autonomy and the Constitu­tional Right to Privacy: A Case Study in Human Rights and the Unwritten Constitution," Hastings Law Journal, 30 (1979), 957-1018; Ferdinand David Schoenman, ed., The Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; Roger D. Strode, Jr., "The Consti­tutionality of Sodomy Statutes as Applied to Homosexual Behavior," Marquette Law Review, 70 (1987), 599-611.
Warren Johansson

P
rivate Presses
Presses that produce books in limited quantities not intended for the regular channels of the book trade are termed "private." Some of them have had to operate clandestinely, as the contents of the books would have attracted the atten­tion of the authorities by their political or sexual nonconformity.
Historical Development. The invention of the printing press in fifteenth-century Europe, whose cultural life was still largely under the domination of the church, did not at first promote the spread of literature on homosexuality. The pagan classics, rich as they were in homoerotic passages and allusions, were in time printed and made accessible to a far larger public than would ever have seen them in manu­script. But the potential of the new me­dium for reproducing books and pamphlets on homosexual themes was realized only through clandestine private presses that eluded the repression and censorship exer­cised by the state and the church. The issuance of such works was a side activity of aristocratic orgy clubs that could flour­ish on the privacy of estates to which the authorities had no easy access. One of the first presses of this kind was created by the Duc d'Aiguillon on his estate at Verets in Touraine, which in 1735 issued the Re­cueil de pièces choisies, rassemblées par les soins du Cosmopolite. In England Horace Walpole, Earl of Oxford, had his own private press somewhat later in the century.
Subsequently the actual work of producing such books in a limited edition was transferred to master-printers in the publishing capitals of Europe, who issued them as custom pieces for wealthy patrons and connoisseurs. With the coming of the French Revolution, the breakdown of authority made it possible for printers to produce a variety of erotica, some of which had an explicitly homosexual content, and at this time the works of the Marquis
de Sade transformed pornography itself by admitting themes of aberrant and forbid­den sexuality. While Holland had been the principal source of clandestine literature under the Old Regime, in the nineteenth century France and Belgium took the lead in this area. The phenomenon that has gained the Russian name of tamizdat ("publication elsewhere") is characteris­tic of erotic literature: books were pub­lished in France in English for sale to Englishmen, in Brussels in French for sale to Frenchmen, because it was too danger­ous to produce them in the country for which they were destined. Thus the earli­est defenses of homosexuality in English were printed on the continent in the 1830s; of these only the so-called Don Leon poems have survived.
Typical of erotica issued by pri­vate presses is the use of false imprints on the title page. The place of publication may be given as "Sodom and Cythera" or "Eleutheropolis" - "Ville Franche" -"Freetown" or even "Partout et nulle part" (Everywhere and Nowhere); the publisher may have a facetious name such as "Uriel Bandant" or a classic pseudonym like "Pierre Marteau" - "Peter Hammer" or a parody of some institutional name such as "Society for Propagation in Foreign Parts." Even the year of publication, if not given wrongly to mislead the authorities into believing that this is
not a new edition, may take the form of "An de la liberté."
Later in the nineteenth century such publishers as Auguste Poulet-Malassis, Isidore Liseux, and Charles Carrington issued editions of the erotic classics, trans­lations of foreign works, and even contem­porary writing for clandestine sale to lov­ers of erotica. The British collector Henry Spencer Ashbee assembled some 1517 volumes of erotica and kryptadia, among them many books enlarged with additional illustrations, which upon his death he bequeathed to the British Museum Library. For the purpose of illustrating such vol­umes the talents of artists and engravers of the first rank could be employed, as the price of a de luxe volume on fine paper ran into several pounds or scores of francs. Works written primarily or exclusively for a homosexual readership began to appear only toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the emerging movement awakened a consciousness that homoerotic literature had a past of its own, together with a public that would buy and collect such writings. In Leipzig the Max Spohr firm began openly issuing scholarly publi­cations in the field during the last decade of the century.
Ephemeral and Popular Ma terial. Naturally private presses could also turn out an ephemeral literature, some of it today known solely from references in booksellers' catalogues or bibliographers' lists, in the form of pamphlets, brochures, and similar trivia meant only for brief diversion. In the United States and Eng­land the restrictions on publishing even medical and anthropological literature that dealt with homosexuality remained in such vigor that as late as the 1930s private presses were issuing reprints and transla­tions "in 1500 numbered copies for sub­scribers only." The Nonesuch Press and the Fortune Press in England - which had ties to Carrington's firm in Paris - were two such ventures. Also, little coteries of boy-lovers published their verses and apologetic writings in tiny editions for circulation solely amongthe initiate. Such works could never be advertised or sold through conventional channels, but the international publishing underground saw them to their destination. Even in the 1950s it was common for American travel­ers to purchase sexually explicit works in Paris - usually under the imprint of Mau­rice Girodias' Olympia Press - and then to hide them in their baggage to escape the attention of customs officers.
Another class of literature was the paperback novel or piece of reportage with a homosexual theme, typically sold in a particular sort of bookshop tolerated by the police in return for regular payoffs. For the United States market crude homosexual pornography was published in the 1940s and 1950s in Mexico (mainly in Tijuana) and smuggled across the bor­der. As restrictions were relaxed in the 1960s, some of the firms moved across the border to San Diego and Los Angeles. At the same time the incipient gay move­ment tried to set up presses for book pub­lishing, but with little success. It was the upsurge of underground newspapers that probably laid the groundwork for such gay and lesbian publishers of today as Alyson, Gay Sunshine Press, and Naiad. The ad­vent of desktop publishing in the 1980s doubled and then tripled the number of small presses, and made it possible for authors to publish and distribute their own works if they wish.
During the closing years of cen­sorship, photographs of the male body in a state as close to nudity as current mores would allow were circulated in the form of pictorial magazines, or in a more elegant guise, as art books on glossy paper. Much of this clandestine literature is fast disap­pearing, as the volumes could not find their way into public or scholarly libraries, and in a private collection they were as likely as not to be dispersed or simply destroyed on the death of the owner.
Conclusion. The significance of the private press was that it undercut the monopoly of the commercial publishers and also the control exercised by the state in the form of prior censorship or the prosecution for obscenity of works that violated the "moral standards of the com­munity." In a time when homosexuality was virtually unmentionable in public, and every oblique reference to it in the media had to be accompanied with execra­tion, such publishers issued a trickle of independent writing, and also preserved and disseminated classics of homoerotic literature that had survived from earlier centuries. With the advent of a general tolerance for public discussion of sexual matters, and the rise of publishing houses openly issuing erotica - and more serious works - for a gay readership, as well as the emergence of electronic non-print media, the older form of the private press is reced­ing into the past.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Patrick J. Kearney,
The Private Case, London: Jay Landesman, 1981; Gershon Legman, The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Polklore and Bibliogra­phy, New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1964; Pascal Pia, Les Livres de l'Enfer, 2 vols., Paris: C. Coulet et A. Faure, 1978¡ Timothy d'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of Enghsh 'Uranian' Poets from 1889 to 1930, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Wazzen Johansson

P
rostate
The prostate is a male gland surrounding the urethra, between the bladder and the penis. It secretes seminal fluid, which is almost the entire component of semen; the sperm cells are only a minute part. Adjacent to it are seminal reservoirs, which when full contribute to sexual de­sire, and when empty diminish it. Muscles around the prostate play a key role in the sensations of orgasm.
It seems to have been as a result of treatment of prostate disorders that its function in the male sexual cycle was discovered. It is the prostate, not the tes­ticles, that is necessary for ejaculation. It was discovered that the screening proce­dure of palpation (feeling) of the prostate by a finger inserted in the rectum could be surprisingly pleasurable. Part of the pleas­ure of anal intercourse, for the male recipi­ent, lies in the stimulation the penis pro­vides to the prostate. The prostate may also play a role in the pleasure produced by other anal practices such as handballing and enemas. Direct anal stimulation of the prostate with a finger or a toy which can­not cut, scratch, or get "lost" can produce orgasm in men.
The Grafenberg or G-spot in women, located on the upper wall of the vagina, is anatomically related to the pros­tate, and women report that stimulation of it can be especially pleasurable.
Daniel Eisenberg

prostitution
Male homosexual prostitution is and has long been a widespread phenome­non attested in all high civilizations. At the same time it has in the course of the centuries been strongly conditioned by the attitudes of the host society toward homosexual behavior. By prostitution is meant a sexual relationship in which one partner is paid by the other to perform a specific act or set of acts on a particular occasion. The prostitute may himself be the employee of a service that arranges the encounter and collects a portion of the fee, or may simply be an entrepreneur whose clandestine income is more often than not unreported to the tax collector.
Because of the legal and social stigma attaching to homosexuality itself, only rarely in modern times has the state power attempted to regulate and control male prostitution ("hustling"). By contrast, heterosexual prostitution has in some countries been the object of rigorous
po­lice measures intended not just to prevent the phenomenon from becoming a public nuisance, but also to inhibit the spread of disease and to hinder the movement of prostitutes across national or state bounda­ries (the so-called "white slave trade").
History. Over the centuries, pros­titution has taken three forms: guest pros­titution, sacred prostitution, and commer­cial prostitution. The ancient world was familiar with the second category as both male and female hierodules plied their trade at the shrines of the deities of pagan­ism. The kádesh of the Bible sold his sex­ual favors in the service of Ishtar, to the scandal and outrage of the priests of the cult of Yahweh who branded the practice an "abomination." A large measure of the condemnation of sexuality in the Old Tes­tament stems from the association of orgi­astic sexual activity with the rites of Semitic polytheism.
In ancient
Greece cities such as Corinth were famed for the extent of their commercialized erotic life, just as today resort towns are a prime source of busi­ness for the hustler encountering clients in search of sexual pleasures as part of a vacation. Prostitutes were usually either slaves or freedmen; the free citizen who sold his body to other males incurred loss of civic rights [atimia). In Athens and other Greek cities male brothels flourished, as they did in ancient Rome, where male prostitutes even had a holiday of their own (April 25). In recent centuries, servicemen (such as London's guardsmen) have made their services available for a fee.
Phenomenology. In the simplest terms, prostitution exists because there is a demand for it, that is to say, the physical beauty and virility of the male in his teens or twenties are a commodity for whose enjoyment homosexually oriented males are willing to pay in accordance with an informal scale that is usually fixed by social convention in a given geographical area at a particular time. The fee varies depending on the length of time the pros­titute is expected to stay with the client (least for an encounter of a few minutes, most for a whole night) and with the char­acter of the service demanded (the more aberrated, demanding, or painful forms of sexual submission being the most costly). There are rendezvous where the client and the prostitute (hustler or call-boy) can meet or indirectly make contact; in recent times there have been gay publications that accept advertisements (ordinarily billed as "Models and Masseurs") for prostitutes who describe their formulaic attributes and range of services in concise but appe­tizing detail.
The complexity of the world of male prostitution forbids any generaliza­tions in regard to either the prostitute or the client. The youth may come from the stereotypical impoverished, broken fam­ily or may be attending an exclusive secon­dary school or college; he may hustle only occasionally or may have prostitution as his sole source of income; he may be little more than moderately attractive or may be an aspiring actor or model temporarily out of work. Many hustlers refuse the label "homosexual" entirely, insistingthat they perform sexually "only for money," or that they are at least "bisexual." Call-boy services generally screen out applicants who assert that they are heterosexual.
Social Structure. The world of the male prostitute has a hierarchy that runs from the street hustler and the bar hustler to the call-boy and the kept boy. The first of these types encounters his client in a zone where any boy idling casu­ally on the street announces thereby that he is "for sale"; the bar hustler meets his "trick" in the atmosphere of a gay bar known for its hospitality to the prostitute; the call-boy either prints his number in an advertisement or secures his customers through a commercial service; the kept boy lives wholly at the expense of a single client for a longer or shorter period of time. A significant difference between male and female prostitution is that the client of the female prostitute never thinks of her as a potential marriage partner, while even the street hustler occasionally receives offers of a long-term relationship from his clients,-in other words, there is no sharp or abso­lute dividing line between the hustler and the kept boy.
In motivation and degree of in­volvement, there are three subcategories of male prostitute: the professional, the amateur, and the runaway. The profes­sional is typically in his late teens or older, has had a good deal of experience with commercial sex, and is able to make a steady living or to supplement his earn­ings from other sources - acting or model­ing - by the sale of his services. The ama­teur performs only sporadically, when he needs the money or for the thrill or adven­ture involved in the activity. The runaway may be quite young, may have been dis­owned by his family and find himself strug­gling to survive "on his own" by selling his body. Since there is always an element of competition in this field, and the aging hustler finds little demand for his services (although a few manage to pursue their commercial activity into their mid-thir­ties, or may become managers of call-boy services), the career of male prostitutes is relatively brief.
Sexual Services. The range of physical acts which the male prostitute is willing and able to perform runs the whole gamut of erotic possibilities, though the individual offering his sexual services usually specifies in advance what he is willing to do with a specific client. Fear of disease was not a particularly inhibiting factor until AIDS made its appearance in the chief centers of homosexual life; today some prostitutes refuse to engage in more than erotic massage and mutual mastur­bation, while others insist on wearing a condom for acts that involve penetration of the body. The subculture of male pros­titution has its norms (including ethics), its folklore, its camaraderie, even a certain agreement to keep a floor on the minimum price asked of a prospective client.
Clientele. The client (or "John") is ordinarily somewhere between his thir­ties and his sixties; he may be of undistin­guished middle-class background or may come from the very top of society. His choice of a commercial partner may be determined by a variety of factors: the wish for a brief, impersonal contact with no later commitments or compromising self-revelation, the desire to have a partner with the highest degree of beauty and virility, or even the need to make an erotic quasi-conquest by displaying his wealth. Famous clients rely upon the reputation of a call-boy service and its boys for main­taining the confidentiality of their clien­tele, a marked point of prostitution ethics. If he finds a particular hustler exception­ally to his liking, he may try to establish a permanent relationship, or at least to re­tain the youth for a time as a "traveling companion" or under some other guise.
Many clients prefer to seek their boys in other cities than the one in which they live in order to avoid the possibility of being recognized. Not a few even prefer to travel abroad to Third World countries where there is an abundant supply of young hustlers, many straight identified, and prices are cheap. The Arab countries of North Africa enjoy a time-honored reputa­tion for such sexual tourism. In recent years Latin America has increased in popu­larity, while those in search of really young partners are said to prefer Thailand, the Philippines, and Korea.
The Boys. Initially, at least, pros­titution can be a highly attractive means of earning money for many youths. Not only is the "work" often if not always enjoyable, but it is tax-free, the hours are set by the worker at his convenience, and there is no paperwork involving social security numbers, working papers, and the like. The rate of pay, even when time spent "on the street" awaiting a client is consid­ered, is usually much higher than what a youth can find in other lines of work. In addition, there are often considerable fringe benefits such as free liquor or drugs, meals, entertainment, even vacations and foreign travel.
There are, however, other moti­vations for remaining involved in prosti­tution: the continuing ego-boosts provided by the tangible evidence of one's desirabil­ity, the opportunity to witness and (to a small degree) experience the private life­styles of the wealthy, and the often inter­esting clients to be met.
Since for many hustlers their earning ability is dependent on the num­ber of times they are able to ejaculate in the course of an evening, teenagers often find their income declining as they grow older. This may cause them to drop out, to take sexually passive roles they had previ­ously declined, or to leave the streets in favor of listing with a call-boy service.
Enlistment with a call-boy serv­ice is generally considered to be the career goal of the serious street hustler. The bet­ter services greatly increase a boy's earn­ings, despite their commissions, because their customers tend to be wealthier and pay more to begin with, and because the boy need not waste time hanging out in bars and on street corners. The services furthermore provide security (not only for the client), advice, and professional tips, health care, and quasi-family functions such as Thanksgiving dinners and picnic outings. Both a brothel and a call-boy serv­ice can provide a pleasant environment in which the boys can "hang out" with their peers when not actively working. Male madams of call-boy services can steer their boys to lucrative work in the pornography industry, and can teach their boys the social graces needed to operate in upper-class environments.
Legal Aspects. The focus which heterosexual society long kept on female prostitution, and the illegality of homo­sexual acts per se, often led to a situation in which the law and the police authorities took far more cognizance of the woman as prostitute than of the man. On the other hand, some legislation has tried to sup­press commercial homosexual activity, or to prevent the "corruption of minors," while leaving private consensual acts outside the scope of the law. With the creation of vice squads within the police forces of the large cities of Western Europe and the United States, the authorities of necessity became aware of the extent of male prostitution, even if they only inter­mittently and haphazardly acted to re­press it. They were obliged to maintain a certain surveillance if solely to obtain information on other illegal activities that overlapped with male prostitution: assault, robbery, blackmail, murder, more recently the clandestine traffic in drugs. With in­creasing availability in the 1970s and 80s, many hustlers found the attractions of drugs irresistible, even though persistent use of stimulants may reduce their capac­ity for sexual performance.
Because of the illegality and clan-destinity that until quite recent times attached to homosexual prostitution, the whole phenomenon existed in the shadow of violence, extortion, and blackmail, all the more because the victim, no matter how well placed in society, could not complain to the police if he was assaulted and robbed; even when the hustler mur­dered his client, he could plead that "his masculinity had been insulted" by the other male. Some adolescents even made a regular practice of attacking and robbing men whom they allowed to approach them with requests for their sexual services, or in some cases of going through the act and then assaulting the partner. Houses of male prostitution could exist, though they usually had to pay off the police or other authorities charged with the suppression of vice. Such male brothels exist even today in some large European cities. The police most of the time chose the path of least resistance and preferred to arrest the street hustler, the transvestite, and other marginal elements of the world of prostitution.
Unlike his female counterpart, the male prostitute usually has no need of a pimp and retains the whole of his earnings, unless he works for a call-boy service with which he splits his fee in a prescribed ratio.
Contemporary Scene. With the rise of a flourishing commercial gay sub­culture in the wake of the homosexual liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, male prostitution thrived, and individual hustlers or call-boy services were able to advertise their wares on the pages of the magazines, some of them elaborate productions on glossy paper, that addressed themselves to a homosexual readership. The organized gay movement has paid little attention to the phenome­non of prostitution, probably thinking it one of the less defensible aspects of the homosexual subculture; Vanguards, an organization of San Francisco hustlers, however, was admitted to the North American Conference of Homophile Or­ganizations (NACHO) in the late 1960s. A positive side of recent developments has been action by the police to protect the client who is victimized by the male pros­titute. The accessibility of bathhouses and hotels that cater to prostitute-client liai­sons has also removed some of the prob­lems attendant on the commercial rela­tionship. The interest of society does not he in trying to suppress prostitution, but in acting to minimize the abuses that have historically been linked with it: to prevent the spread of disease, to counter violence or robbery committed on the margin of the activity, and to offer an escape for the runaway who against his own wishes finds himself trapped in a life of prostitution.
Not to be omitted from any seri­ous consideration of the role of prostitu­tion in society are those who are most in need of its services: unmarried men well past their prime, those lacking in their society's standards of beauty, the physi­cally and mentally handicapped, and those with unusual fetishes. For these men, whose access to non-commercial sexual­ity is severely restricted, the denial of the use of prostitution effectively denies them a sexual life.
With continuing changes in the structure of the labor market throughout the advanced countries, it is likely that prostitution (perhaps redefined as "inti­mate personal services") will serve as an alternative occupation for those displaced from more traditional careers. Apart from the financial rewards, the successful male prostitute can utilize his contacts with the upper strata of male society as a spring­board for later economic advancement, provided that he has proved his reliability and discretion. But whatever the economic situation, the prevalence of unfulfilled homoerotic desires - and of income ear­marked for "leisure activity" - will ensure that prostitution continues into the in­definite future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Iwan Bloch, Die Prostitution, Berlin: L. Marcus, 1911-25, Bd. 1 and Bd. 2, Hälfte 1; Debra Boyer, "Male Prostitution and Homosexual Identity," Journal of Homosexuality, 17 (1989), 151-84; Eli Coleman, "The Development of Male Prostitution Activity Among Gay and Bisexual Adolescents," Journal of Homosexuality, 17 (1989), 131^9; Neil R. Coombs, "Male Prostitution: A Psychosocial View of Behavior," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 44 (1974), 782-89; Mervyn Harris, The Dillyboys: The Game of Male Prostitution in Piccadilly, Rockville: New Perspectives, 1973; David F. Luckenbill, "Entering Male Prostitution," Urban Life, 14 (1985), 131-53; Paul W. Mathews, "On 'Being a Prostitute,'" Journal of Homosexuality, 15:3/4 (1988), 119-35; JohnRechy, City of Night, New York: Grove, 1963; A. J. Reiss, Jr., "The Social Integration of Queers and Peers," Social Problems, 9 (1961), 102-20.
Warren Johansson

P
rotestantism
Of the approximately one billion adherents of Christianity, 630 million are Catholic, 100 million Orthodox, 375 mil­lion Protestant, and a few million are Copts, Nestorians, and others. Of the 142 million Christians in the United States (60 percent of the population), 52 million are Roman Catholic and 79 million Protestant.
General Features. Late medieval Albigensian, Waldensian, Lollard, and Hussite heretics had criticized the hierar­chy for worldliness, greed, luxury, and sins of the flesh, including sodomy. Intensify­ing these proto-Protestant critiques, Lutherans, Anglicans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists agreed that no Scriptural ba­sis existed for clerical celibacy, which encouraged sexual depravity. Luther him­self denounced homosexuality in Old Tes­tament and Pauline terms, condemning penitentials, scholasticism, and canon law for laxly allowing a mortal sin to be con­fessed and atoned through penance. All Protestant churches and governments continued the Catholic policy of prescrib­ing death for sodomites whom they too considered enemies of God and allies of the Devil.
Protestants elevated marriage above celibacy but condemned simple fornication more than had the medieval church. Harking back to the precedents of Biblical Judaism, they opposed clerical celibacy, excoriating the clergy, including nuns, for indulging in sodomy among themselves and with the laity. In their view, a principal advantage of abolishing monasticism and allowing marriage of priests and bishops was to discourage cleri­cal sodomy. Reformers also tried to abolish prostitution which Catholics before the Counterreformation had condoned as less evil than adultery or homosexuality. But in making that choice less available, they increased the risk of homosexual activity which some of them denounced more vehemently than did Catholics. Lutherans and Calvinists, as well as Dominicans and Jesuits, persecuted Jews,
Moriscos, and heretics as well as sodo­mites to effect conversion or repentance through force and intimidation. Witches were sometimes confounded with sodo­mites; the Theologia moralis (1625) main­tained that sodomy led to witchcraft.
Monter's study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Switzerland shows that Geneva Protestants and Fribourg Catholics condemned sodomites with much the same zeal. After 1628, when the Spanish Inquisition quit burning sodo­mites, Protestants increased their execu­tions. A great persecution in the Nether­lands in 1730-31 resulted in the hanging, burning, and drowning of fifty-seven men and boys. In England an average of two hangings a year took place between 1806 and 1836. Most Catholic countries had by then abolished the death penalty, follow­ing the lead of France in 1791.
The
Lutheran Tradition. The Augustinian monk Martin Luther (1483-1546) condemned clerical celibacy as part of his attack on the efficacy of good works. Only a few, he maintained, could remain continent. Marriage he praised as the foundation of society, begun in Para­dise, and endorsed by the Fifth and Sev­enth Commandments. It eliminated lust. He himself set the example by marrying Katherine von Bora, an ex-nun, and pro­ducing five children. Sex he limited strictly to marriage and for procreation. Perhaps influenced by the spread of syphilis that had begun in Western Europe in 1493, he broke with the indulgent medieval church and denounced prostitution.
Regarding sodomy as more hei­nous than fornication, Luther fulminated against all non-procreative sex: "The hei­nous conduct of the people of Sodom is extraordinary, in as much as they departed from the natural passion and longing of the male for the female, which was implanted by God, and desired what is altogether contrary to nature. Whence comes this perversity? Undoubtedly from Satan, who, after people have once turned away from the fear of God, so powerfully suppresses nature that he beats out the natural desire and stirs up a desire that is contrary to nature."
Converting Denmark (1520), Finland (1523), Sweden (1524), and Nor­way (1534), Lutheranism became the offi­cial religion of most north German states as well, with 35 million adherents in Germany and 25 in Scandinavia today. Scandinavian and German immigrants made it one of the most important de­nominations in the United States with 8 million members in various branches. Over the opposition of Lutheran pastors, Den­mark in 1866 abolished capital punish­ment for all offenses, including homosex­ual acts, while Sweden mitigated its pen­alties for sodomy in 1864. Between 1930 and 1948 the Scandinavian countries under Social Democracy abolished sodomy laws in spite of Lutheran opposition. Mostly Lutheran Prussia, however, extended its punishments to all citizens of the German Empire in the infamous
antihomosexual Paragraph 175 in the Penal Code of 1871, which was stiffened by the Nazis in 1935. Traditionally subservient to the state, Lutherans became notorious for failing to oppose Hitler, with rare exceptions such as pastors Dietrich Bonhoeff er and Martin Niemoller.
Secularism, which helped under­mine clerical power, has not led twenti­eth-century American Lutherans to ac­cept homosexuality. The moderate Lu­theran Church in America at their conven­tion in 1970 stated that "homosexuality is viewed biblically as a departure from the heterosexual structure of God's creation. Persons who engage in homosexual behav­ior are sinners only as are all other per­sons - alienated from God and neighbor. However, they are often the special and undeserving victims of prejudice and dis­crimination in law, law enforcement, cultural mores, and congregational life. In relation to this area of concern, the sexual behavior of freely consenting adults in private is not an appropriate subject for legislation or police action. It is essential to see such persons as entitled to under­standing justice in church and commu­nity." Three years later the conservative Missouri Synod convention resolved: "Whereas, God's Word clearly identifies homophile behavior as immoral, and con­demned it (Lev. 18:22; 20:13 and Rom. 1:24-27); and Whereas, The Law and the Gospel of Jesus Christ are to be proclaimed and applied to all conditions of mankind; therefore be it Resolved, That the Synod recognize homophile behavior as intrinsi­cally sinful. . . ." In 1977 the American Lutheran Church's Standing Committee for the Office of Research and Analysis declared: "We believe that taken as a whole the message of Scripture clearly is that: a. Homosexual behavior is sin, a form of idolatry, a breaking of the natural order that unites members of the human com­munity; b. Homosexual behavior is con­trary to the new
Ufe in Christ, a denial of the responsible freedom and service into which we are called through baptism; c. God offers the homosexual person, as every other person, a vision of the wholeness He intends, the assurance of His grace, and His healing and restoration for the hurting and broken. Nevertheless, we recognize the cries of our homosexual brothers and sisters for justice in the arena of civil affairs. We cannot endorse their call for legalizing homosexual marriage. Nor can we endorse their conviction that homo­sexual behavior is simply another form of acceptable expression of natural erotic or libidinous drives. We can, however, en­dorse their position that their sexual ori­entation in and of itself should not be a cause for denying them their civil liber­ties."
Anabaptists and Others. Anabap­tists, various continental groups in the sixteenth century who refused infant baptism, including Thomas Miinzer and the Zwickau prophets, and who sympa­thized with the Peasants' Revolt of 1525, taught the doctrine of the inner light, later adopted by Quakers. The Swiss Brethren, who in Zurich in 1525 reintroduced from Patristic sources believers' baptism (i.e., of conscious adults), taught non-resistance and rejected participation in the magis­tracy. Their views spread into the Rhineland and southwest Germany. The Breth­ren took refuge in Moravia under Jacob Hutter (d. 1536) with community of prop­erty. The Melchiorites from northwest Germany and the Low Countries learned from Melchior Hoffmann chiliastic expec­tations. Vigorously denounced by Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Catholics, the Mennonites, reorganized in the Netherlands and Friesland by Menno Simons, strongly emphasized pacifism. Hostility to Mennonites, today numbering 700,000, con­tinues today. Denounced and persecuted by mainstream Protestants, tens of thou­sands of Anabaptists were probably put to death by the Inquisition, mainly in the Low Countries and in Bohemia - less developed regions where they had sought refuge before being attacked by the Counter-Reformation. Subject to severe persecution, Anabaptists, like the Socinians, early favored toleration.
A place apart belongs to the Socinian sect. Fausto Sozzini (1539-1604), a Sienese jurist settled in Venice, the most sophisticated city of the Italian Renais­sance, before visiting France, England, the Netherlands, and stopping in Calvin's Geneva, from where he visited Melanchthon, Luther's assistant, and Poland, spreading radical ideas. His even more radical nephew, who denied the essential divinity of Christ and the immortality of man, eventually settled in remote Tran­sylvania and then in Krakow, Poland, out of which the Jesuits eventually hounded him. Socinian ideas were among the formative influences in the emergence of Quakerism.
Quakers. First mentioned in Ol­iver Cromwell's proclamation of 1654 persecuting them for refusal to serve in the military and to take oaths, the Quakers, officially designated the Religious Society of Friends, grew from a wave of religious ferment in seventeenth-century England. Disdaining ordained ministers and conse­crated buildings, George Fox proclaimed after 1647 the immediacy of Christ's teach­ings. After their "yearly meeting" in Lon­don in 1675, which established a "meeting for sufferings," Friends have been in the forefront of race relations, penal reforms, social relief, and conciliatory work. Before the Toleration Act of 1689, 15,000 had been sentenced and more than 450 died in prison in Great Britain. In 1682 William Penn founded the British colony of Penn­sylvania on Quaker principles. Pennsylvania's law code of 1682 all but decriminalized sodomy for the first time in Christian lands since 342, when the Roman emperors introduced the death penalty.
Quakers have been in the fore­front of homosexual toleration. As early as 1963 English Friends published
Towards a Christian View of Sex: "One should no more deplore homosexuality than left-handedness. Homosexual affection can be as selfless as heterosexual affection, and therefore we cannot see that it is in some way morally worse." Ten years later the influential Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends declared: "We should be aware that there is a great diversity in the rela­tionships that people develop with one another. Although we neither approve nor disapprove of homosexuality, the same standards under the law which we apply to heterosexual activities should also be applied to homosexual activities. As per­sons who engage in homosexual activities suffer serious discrimination in employ­ment, housing and the right to worship, we believe that civil rights laws should protect them. In particular we advocate the revision of all legislation imposing disabilities and penalties upon homosex­ual activities."
Baptists. Largest of Protestant sects, the Baptists have a total formal membership of 30,000,000 that extends to every continent. They look to John Smyth, an English Separatist under Mennonite influence, who in 1609 in Amsterdam exile reinstituted the baptism of those believers able to understand and commit themselves to the faith. Like the earlier Anabaptists, he rebaptized those whom the established churches had christened as infants. Mem­bers of his congregation established the first English Baptist Church in 1612. As the church grew, attracting some converts from Calvinism, complete immersion became their normal form of baptism. Baptists pioneered religious liberty and freedom of conscience and in the seven­teenth century with Independents and Presbyterians formed the three denomina­tions of Protestant Dissenters.
Roger Williams' church in Rhode Island began America's Baptist history in 1639. The Great Awakening in New Eng­land (1740) quickened Baptist missionary activity, particularly on the western fron­tier. By 1980 the 26 million North Ameri­can Baptists were organized into four major conventions (as well as twelve splinter groups): the Southern, largest and most conservative, the American, and two black ones. Over 66 percent of black churchgo­ers in the United States, including the late Martin Luther King, are Baptists. Perhaps out of recognition of their own persecuted past, black Baptists have been helpful in the passage of ordinances in New York in 1986 and Chicago in 1988 protecting gay rights. The American Baptists recently proclaimed: "We, as Christians, recognize that radical changes are taking place in sex concepts and practices.... [W]e call upon our churches to engage in worship, study, fellowship and action to provide for mean­ingful ministries to all persons as mem­bers of the 'Family of God' including those who are homosexuals."
Southern Baptists, however, in­spired by and recently presided over by Bible-thumping Adrian Rogers of the Bellevue Baptist Church of Memphis, who defeated the moderates to become presi­dent of that largest Protestant group in the United States (membership 14.7 million), are adamantly homophobic. At their con­vention in 1976 they passed the following resolution: "Whereas, homosexuality has become an open lifestyle for increasing numbers of persons, and Whereas, atten­tion has focused on the religious and moral dimensions of homosexuality, and Whereas, it is the task of the Christian community to bring all moral questions and issues into the light of biblical truth; Now therefore, be it resolved that the members of the Southern Baptist Conven­tion . . . affirm our commitment to the biblical truth regarding the practice of homosexuality and sin. Be it further re­solved, that this Convention, while ac­knowledging the autonomy of the local church to ordain ministers, urges churches and agencies not to afford the practice of homosexuality any degree of approval through ordination, employment, or other designations of normal lifestyle."
"Fundamentalists" are now purg­ing "moderates" from their colleges and six seminaries, even though these "mod­erates" themselves anathematize homo­sexuality. In March 1988 a theological conservative, Lewis A. Drummond, an associate of Billy Graham, was elected president of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Declaring that he would hire only faculty who accepted the Bible as literally true even in science and history, he pledged to carry out the agenda of the conservatives. Of the 25 American states which have decriminalized sodomy, not one is in the Bible Belt in the South - of which Memphis is described as the buckle - where Baptists predominate. Virginia-based Jerry Falwell, who pioneered in the use of contemporary media in his Moral Majority (disbanded in 1989), has emphasized opposition to homosexuality.
Anglicans. Declaring Henry VHI (1509-1547) supreme head of the Church of England in 1535, Parliament instituted a political church close in liturgy and doctrine to the Roman Catholic but abol­ishing monasteries, whose estates and revenues the king desired, and translating the liturgy into English. In the spirit of Henry's daughter Elizabeth I (1558-1603), who maintained that she did not want "to open windows into men's souls," Arch­bishop Matthew Parker issued the Book of Common Prayer, beautifully written but ambiguous so that all but extreme Catho­lics and ultra-Protestants could interpret it to their liking, giving the church a latitudinarianism which it has preserved. It has never executed a single heretic and to the disgruntlement of Puritans rather laxly enforced morality. Trials and executions of sodomites remained rare under Henry Vffl's statute of 1533 and Elizabeth I's of 1561, the first being the Earl of Castlehaven in 1631. William Blackstone argued in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) that "the express law of God... by the destruction of two cities by fire from heaven... [commands] such miscre­ants to be burned to death." A wave of anti-Jacobin nationalism resulted in the hang­ing of about 60 sodomites between 1806 and 1836; in 1861 English law was re­formed to abolish execution for sodomy. The Wolfenden Report of 1957, inspired by Canon D. S. Bailey's Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (1955), recommended eliminating the penalties for consenting homosexual behavior, which was achieved for England and Wales in 1967 with considerable church support.
The Church of England (Episco­palian in the United States) claims, by dividing the orthodox into their various national churches, to be second only to the Roman Catholic in size with 70 million members. Not without controversy, it has given support to women's and minority rights, installing the first female bishop in all history in the apostolic succession, Barbara Harris, who is also black, in the Massachusetts diocese in 1988. Bishop Desmond Tutu combats apartheid in South Africa. In America and the Common­wealth, in all of which the church has had a largely upper-class membership with many only rarely attending services, Epis­copalians have been in the forefront of homophile movements, spurred by their active gay organization, Integrity, largest next to the Catholic, Dignity. In 1973 the
Report of the Commission on Homosexuality of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan declared that "homosexuals seriously seeking to build such (loving) relation­ships with one another are surely as de­serving as heterosexuals of encouragement and help from the Church and its ministry. ... Historical studies disclose that perse­cution and discrimination have been the homosexual's lot in Western society and that the Church bears a heavy share of responsibility for this state of affairs." In 1976 the American Episcopal Church re­solved: "that it is the sense of this General Convention that homosexual persons are children of God, who have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral concern and care of the Church [and] that homosexual per­sons are entitled to equal protection of the law with all other citizens, and calls upon our society to see such protection is pro­vided in actuality."
Since then, in Britain at least, there has been a backlash, caused by con­cern over AIDS, but urged on by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who for the first time in history, on January 1, 1988, elevated a rabbi to the peerage in England, Immanuel Jakobovits, Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, because, some claim, he declared homosexual acts "morally wrong. My creator tells me it is grievously wrong under the heading of immoral acts. I want to cultivate a moral sense in which society will differentiate between what is acceptable and what is morally unacceptable." His views run counter to the official position of the state of Israel, which in March 1988 decriminal­ized homosexuality. Although on Novem­ber 11,1 987, by a vote of 388 to 19, leaders of the Church of England rejected a move to expel its homosexual priests, calling instead for them to repent and to be treated with compassion, an Anglican Synod in England has since passed a motion calling for practicing homosexuals to change their lifestyle and turn their back on homosex­ual activity as contrary to the will of God. In an editorial of January 3, 1988 in the
Sunday Times Peter Nott, Bishop of Nor­wich, perhaps angling for Thatcher's sup­port to be designated Archbishop of Can­terbury, denied the right of practicing homosexuals to be ordained and called for the reassertion of the normality of the single and the celibate. Church authori­ties in London have taken legal action to force the closure of the headquarters of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement at St. Botolph's Church, Aldgate.
The backlash has also had some effect among Episcopalians on the other side of the Atlantic. On November 7,1987, Episcopalian laity in Boston voted down by 82-140 a resolution approved by a 114-79 margin among the clergy to de­velop a liturgy blessing gay couples. Shep­herded through by the liberal Bishop John S. Spong, in January 1988 the Diocese of Newark voted to encourage its priests to bless gay
couples. Spong quoted a pro­posed rite to bless a same-sex union: "The joining of two persons in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy, for the help and comfort... in prosper­ity and adversity ... in accordance with God's intention for us." None of the other dioceses or any mainstream Protestant de­nominations followed suit. Bishop Arthur E. Walmsley of the Diocese of Connecti­cut denied that Spong spoke for the Church and retorted that "the sanctity of holy matrimony is not a debatable issue in the Episcopal Church." Indeed, despite the 1976 pronouncements of the national church calling homosexuals "children of God" entitled to participate in all church services, three years later it denied practic­ing homosexuals entrance into the priest­hood.
Calvinists. Generally more fa­natic than the other Protestants and more prone during the religious wars to torture monks and priests, Calvinists vehemently denounced clerical homosexuality when shutting down monasteries, often looting and always expropriating wherever they could. John Calvin (1509-1564), who pub­lished his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, created a theocracy in Ge­neva which drew like-minded preachers from all over Europe, sending them out when indoctrinated to establish congrega­tions everywhere. It has been said that paradoxically "Calvin abolished the mon­astery but made every man a monk." With his legal training, Calvin in his Institutes gave his Church a consistency greater than any other denomination's. Not going as far as Luther in equating the Sodom story with homosexuality, Calvin followed Thomas Aquinas in condemning all non-procreative intercourse as unnatural. In Geneva thirty sodomites were put to death between 1555 and 1680. Catholic writers published scurrilous writings charging Calvin with pederasty. While these charges are lacking in foundation, those laid at the door of the Reformer's lieutenant, Theodore de Beze, are more plausible.
In Scotland, John Knox drove out the lascivious Mary Stuart in 1568 and established the Kirk, henceforth known as Presbyterian because elders governed each congregation. Presbyterians gained a repu­tation for severity with executions. Scot­land with its own criminal law continued to uphold the statute against sodomy longer than England, from 1967 to 1980. In 1976 the 188th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States, with over 3 million members in addition to those of various splinter groups, de­clared: "The 188th General Assembly calls to the attention of our Church that, ac­cording to our most recent statement, we 'reaffirm our adherence to the moral law of God ... that... the practice of homosexu­ality is sin. Also we affirm that any self-righteous attitude of others who would condemn persons who have so sinned is also sin.'. . . [OJn broad Scriptural and confessional grounds, it appears that it would at the present time be injudicious, if not improper, for a Presbytery to ordain to the professional ministry of the Gospel a person who is an avowed practicing homosexual."
In the Netherlands, where the Dutch Reformed helped inspire the Revolt against Spain in 1566, the dour Calvinists of the rural churches were tempered by the suave urbanity of the merchants and sea­men of Amsterdam, both joining to domi­nate the Catholic minority. Anti-sodomite hysteria reached a zenith in 1730-31 with fifty-seven executions and nearly two hundred expulsions from the country, but afterwards it waned. When Napoleon annexed Holland in 1811 the French codes were introduced at one stroke, effectively decriminalizing sodomy. The fight for toleration began as a branch of the German emancipation movement founded in 1897 when in 1911 a clerical ministry passed a bill raising the age of consent from 14 to 21 - the first such innovation in modern times. The Netherlands branch of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee con­tinued until the German occupation of the country in May 1940.
Being a minority in a Catholic land, the French Huguenots nevertheless continued to persecute sodomites in the towns they controlled but with less vehe­mence than elsewhere. After publishing
fuvenilia in 1548, describing affection for his mignon Audebert, Theodore de Beze converted, becoming a leader of the Hu­guenots and succeeding Calvin as leader in Geneva. Catholic polemicists claimed that he remained a sodomite at heart although he married. Following release from his first imprisonment, Beze's contemporary Marc-Antoine Muret, although in his youth his writings harshly disapproved of sod­omy, was charged a second time with sodomy and of being a Huguenot as well.
Found guilty in absentia, he was burned in effigy. In 1558, this time in Padua rather in France, he was again charged but fled and died a Catholic. In
The Princes the Hugue­not poet Agrippa d'Aubigne accused the royal family, including Henri III, of acting contrary to nature, blaming Henri's prob­lems on his mother, Catherine de' Medici, for encouraging the depravity of her chil­dren so that she could rule.
Calvinists, Puritans disapproving all frivolity and strictly enforcing Old Tes­tament morality, failed to rule England under Parliament, Oliver Cromwell, and his son from 1649 to 1660, but in New England they predominated, outlawing sodomy in the colonies that they ruled. In 1629, on the vessel
Talbot sailing for Massachusetts, "5 beastly Sodomiticall boyes" were examined and after landing in New England sent back by the governor to "ould England" for punishment, where they were probably hanged. In 1642, three of the most distinguished clergymen of the Plymouth colony, founded by Pilgrims rather than Puritans, concluded that the Bible ordained the death penalty for sodo­mites and executed several. In 1646 Wil­liam Plaine, accused of sodomy, mastur­bation, and atheism, was executed in New Haven, where ten years later the Puritans prescribed death for lesbians following the current interpretation of the law against buggery originally promulgated by Henry Vm in 1533. Wealthy merchants from Boston and Salem and increasing Anglican influence lessened homophobia in New England during the eighteenth century. New England Puritans evolved into more tolerant Congregationalists, while those who did not defect to Anglicanism later turned into highly tolerant Unitarians.
Methodists. Formally founded in 1784 by John Wesley (1703-1791), whose Notes on the New Testament (1754) and four volumes of sermons form their stan­dard doctrine, Methodists have debated whether ordination was conferred by the imposition of hands, with or without bish­ops being merely supervisors. Disputes over discipline and polity have caused offshoots and reunifications, as in 1857 with the establishment of the United Methodist Free Churches in England. The Northern and Southern Methodist Churches, the two main branches in the United States, split before the Civil War but reunited in 1939. The United Method­ist Church now has 9.3 million members, with another 4 million, mostly blacks, in splintered churches. Actively concerned with evangelism and social welfare, one of the Church's glories is William Wilberforce's efforts to end the slave trade. Methodists have a worldwide member­ship of over 20 million and a total commu­nity of nearly 50 million.
As an organization, Methodists have generally stood between Episcopali­ans and Baptists in their attitude to sexu­ality and homosexuality. Spurred by United Methodists for Lesbian/Gay Concerns, the United Methodist Church published the following manifesto at its Quadrennial Conference in 1976: "Homosexuals no less than heterosexuals are persons of sacred worth, who need the ministry and guid­ance of the church in their struggles for human fulfillment, as well as the spiritual and emotional care of a fellowship which enables reconciling relationships with God, with others and with self. Further we in­sist that all persons are entitled to have their human and civil rights ensured, though we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching." In a retreat from toleration, on May 2, 1988, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church meeting at St. Louis, Missouri voted to maintain its stance that homosexual behavior is "incompatible with Christian teaching" and a bar to the ordained ministry.
Unitarianism. A pupil of Reuchlin, Martin Solarius (1499-1564), in his De operis Dei in 1527 became the first expo­nent of Unitarianism. Juan Valdés, Mi­chael Servetus, and Bernardino Ochino were sympathetic. The first organized communities appeared in seventeenth-century Poland, Hungary, and England. Rejecting Trinitarian doctrines and the divinity of Christ, Unitarians possess no formal creed, but in the nineteenth century James Martineau in England and Theodore Parker in the United States developed a rational Biblical Unitarianism with reason and conscience rather than tradition as the criteria of be­lief and practice.
In 1658 the Jesuits suppressed Unitarianism in Poland. England enforced penal acts against Unitarians until 1813. The first Unitarian congregation in Amer­ica, King's Chapel in Boston, in 1785 adopted a liturgy modified to suit Unitar­ian doctrines. Descended from Puritan groups, many other Congregational churches adopted Unitarianism in the early nineteenth century. William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson empha­sized ethical and philosophical aspects. By 1900 American Unitarians had become very liberal, with great influence at the Harvard Divinity School as reconstituted in 1880 by President Charles W. Eliot. In 1961 the Unitarian Association joined the Universalist Church to form the Unitar­ian Universalist Association. Unitarians acquired a gay offshoot, Unitarian Universalists for Lesbian and Gay Concerns, and like Episcopalians have assisted gay breth­ren threatened with ADDS. Unitarians were the first group to establish a lesbian/gay office, eventually merged with their office of elderly affairs. The General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Churches in North America in 1970 stated: "1. A significant minority in this country are either homosexual or bisexual in their feelings and/or behavior; 2. Homosexual­ity has been the target of severe discrimi­nation by society and in particular by the police and other arms of government; 3. A growing number of authorities on the subject now see homosexuality as an in­evitable sociological phenomenon and not as a mental illness; 4. There are Unitarian Universalists, clergy and laity, who are homosexuals andbisexuals; therefore be it resolved: That the 1970 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association: 1) Urges all people immediately to bring an end to all discrimination against homo­sexuals, homosexuality, bisexuals, and bisexuality, with specific immediate at­tention to the following issues: Private consensual behavior between persons over the age of consent shall be the business only of those persons and not subject to legal regulations."
Disciples of Christ. Claiming 1,132,000 members, the Church of Christ (Disciples of Christ) broke off in Kentucky in 1804 and in Pennsylvania in 1809 as Evangelical Presbyterians protesting the decline of fervor and Protestant factional­ism. Organized in 1832 in congregational fashion with adult baptism, trying to avoid any ritual or doctrine not explicitly pres­ent in the first century of the Church, they claim: "Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent." Highly tolerant, the General Assembly declared in 1977: "It has never acknowledged barriers to fellowship on the basis of dogma or life style. Homo­sexuals may be included in the fellowship and membership of the community of faith where they are to love and be loved and where their gifts of ministry are to be welcomed."
Mormons. Founded in 1827 in New York by Joseph Smith (1805-1844), who received a divine revelation on golden tablets, the theocratic Mormons (Church of Latter Day Saints; 3.6 million members in the United States) practice adult bap­tism as well as baptism for the dead. Al­though the faith emerged from the Ameri­can tradition of religious pluralism, Mormonism is not a Protestant denomi­nation, but an independent religion. It had conflicts with the authorities for practicing polygamy, officially renounced in 1890. After the lynching of Smith, the Mormons emigrated in the 1840s to Utah, then still Mexican territory, where they founded their own commonwealth. In 1860 they reorganized their church, abandoning the greater part of their peculiar beliefs and practices except their scripture, the Book of Mormon. The ideal Mormon is temper­ate, hard-working, communal-minded, and implacably hostile to sexual freedom. Affinity, a group of lesbian and gay Mormons, is officially shunned by the church.
Adventists. The Adventists, Christian groups expecting the imminent Second Coming, numbering over 600,000 in the United States, date as a denomina­tion from 1831 when William Miller pro­claimed in Dresden, New York, the Sec­ond Coming in 1843-44. With combined world membership over three million, both chief branches, Second Advent Christians and Seventh-Day Adventists, emphasize that the human body, a temple of the Holy Spirit, requires strict temperance and mandate abstinence from alcohol and tobacco. They baptize adults with total immersion. In January 1988, the Seventh-Day Adventists asked a US District Court in California to bar a support group for homosexuals, the Seventh-Day Adventist Kinship International Inc., from using the church's name, declaring that homosex­ual and lesbian practices are "obvious perversions of God's original plan" for the proper association of the sexes.
Jehovah's Witnesses. In the 1870s a Congregationalist draper from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Charles Taze Russell, founded Jehovah's Witnesses, originally called the International Bible Students Association, now counting 1.3 million members, 700,000 of them in the United States. "Pastor" Russell published The Object and Manner of Our Lord's Return, predicting the secret second coming of Christ in 1874 and the end of the world forty years later. Through a spate of books, pamphlets, and magazines, including The Watchtower, the movement's chief liter­ary organ, which is still published, he at­tracted a considerable following. Proclaim­ing a workers' revolution as the prelude to the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judg­ment, and the reign of the Messiah, when only the "elect of Jehovah" would be members, and denouncing institutional churches, governments, and business en­terprises as instruments of Satan, Jehovah's Witnesses suffered persecution not only in liberal Australia and New Zealand but in totalitarian Soviet Russia and Nazi Ger­many. During Hitler's Holocaust thou­sands of the "Ernsten Bibelforscher" per­ished in concentration camps. On the other hand, the United States Supreme Court has time and again upheld their rights under the First Amendment, thus strength­ening the principle of freedom of con­science and separation of church and state.
Christian Scientists. Of New Hampshire Calvinist background, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), believing in heal­ing by prayer alone, claimed to have redis­covered Christ's healing spiritual influ­ence through revelation. Publishing Sci­ence and Health (1875), she opened her first church in Boston four years later. Christian Science teaches the unreality of matter, sin, and suffering. The Church, wealthy from the bequests of the elderly it exhorts to avoid doctors, publishes The Christian Science Monitor, a purportedly liberal newspaper that is as homophobic as the mother church and even in the 1980s purged homosexuals from its staff. Chris­tian Scientists have, however, organized gay groups. Membership has declined from 270,000 in the 1930s to 170,000 in the 1980s and licensed practitioners from 8,300 in 1960 to 3,500 in 1989.
Pentecostals. Splintering from Methodism and other sects in 1901 in Topeka, Kansas, and in 1906 in Los Ange­les as a response to the decline of Protes­tant fervor, the Pentecostal Church evolved from a "holy roller" movement to organ­ized bodies with an informal service marked by hymns and spirit baptism. Standing apart from middle-class main­stream churches, Pentecostalism stresses perfection and lifestyle austerity.
United Church of Christ. Founded in 1957 by the union of Calvinist Congre­gationalist with Lutheran Evangelical and Reformed Churches, the United Church of Christ features infant baptism and the Lord's Supper with a simple liturgy cen­tered on the sermon. Tolerant, it pays attention to social problems, declaring in 1975: "Therefore, without considering in this document the Tightness or wrongness of same-gender relationships, but recog­nizing that a person's affectional or sexual preference is not legitimate grounds on which to deny her or his civil liberties, the Tenth General Synod of the United Church of Christ proclaims the Christian convic­tion that all persons are entitled to full civil liberties and equal protection under the law. Further, the Tenth General Synod declares its support for the enactment of legislation that would guarantee the liber­ties of all persons without discrimination related to af fectional or sexual preference."
Orthodox Christians. Often united with Protestants to oppose Catholi­cism, Orthodoxy with its autocephalous national offshoots has roots in Greece and the Byzantine empire. Based on the first seven ecumenical councils (325-787), during which the Monophysite, Jacobite, Armenian, Coptic, and Ethiopian Churches split off, it has celibate monks, bishops, and patriarchs and married priests but does not recognize the authority of the Pope, and assigns a great role to secular monarchs and the state. The majority live in Russia - where ecclesiastical homophobia often eclipsed that of Roman Catholics until the end of Tsarism in 1917. The Churches of Serbia, Macedonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Russia, the Ukraine, Cyprus, Greece, Lebanon (the Malekites), and Albania, all weakened by centuries of Tatar (1227-1783) and/or Ottoman (1354-1913) oppression, today profess Orthodoxy. All except Greece, Cyprus, and Lebanon suffered under Communist hostility after 1945. Axios is its American gay group, imitating Dignity and the Prot­estant analogues.
In 1976, before AIDS, in its Bien­nial Clergy-Laity Congress, the Greek Orthodox Church, with 3.5 million members in the United States, declared: "The Orthodox Church condemns unre­servedly all expressions of personal sexual experience which prove contrary to the definite and unalterable function ascribed to sex by God's ordinance and expressed in man's experience as a law of nature. Thus the function of the sexual organs of a man and a woman and their biochemical gener­ating forces in glands and glandular secre­tions are ordained by nature to serve one particular purpose, the procreation of the human kind. Therefore, any and all uses of the human sex organs for purposes other than those ordained by creation, runs contrary to the nature of things as decreed by God. The Orthodox Church believes that homosexuality should be treated by society as an immoral and dangerous per­version and by religion as a sinful failure."
Conclusion: A Variegated Pic­ture. In spite of the growing homophobic backlash, some hopeful signs have recently appeared. On December 10, 1987, 150 clergy and religious professionals from the United Methodist, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Episcopal, Unitarian Universalist, and American Baptist de­nominational leaders as well as officials of the American Jewish Congress, the Ameri­can Jewish Committee and individual congregations appealed in vain to the Massachusetts Senate to approve a gay rights bill, opposed by Cardinal Bernard Law. In 1988 after a bitter debate, the United Church of Canada, consisting of Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists, voted by a narrow margin to ordain open homosexuals. Moreover, at the end of the 1980s the sex scandals of the charismatics Jim Bakker of the PTL Minis­tries (who has been accused of homosexual conduct) and Jimmy Swaggart undermined the self-styled "moral majority." In 1988 Jerry Falwell endorsed George Bush rather than Pat Robertson for President, and the failed candidacy of Robertson indicates that the strength and influence of the homophobic New Christian Right may be waning. But even today, with the excep­tion of Episcopalians, Unitarians, and Quakers, and of course the Metropolitan Community Church founded in 1968 by Troy Perry as part of the gay movement, many American Protestants tend to be as homophobic as Orthodox and Roman Catholics, the last now in full retreat from Vatican II liberalism and reaffirming as perennially valid the thirteenth-century doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas.
As has been noted, most Ameri­can denominations have acquired gay/ lesbian affinity groups, which provide a sense of fellowship and press for change within the denomination. Perhaps para­doxically, the most successful of these groups in the 1970s and early 1980s was Catholic; Dignity, whose membership once reached 7,000, by 1989 - after the devasta­tion of two antihomosexual Vatican pro­nouncements and expulsion from church premises - counted only half as many. Integrity, the Episcopalian counterpart, has had difficulties, though these are less seri­ous. As a rule, these affiliates are found only in English-speaking countries. In 1976, however, Pastor Joseph
Douce, a gay Bel­gian Baptist, founded the Centre du Christ Libérateur in Paris,- its mission subse­quently spread to a number of other Euro­pean countries.
See also Churches, Gay; Clergy, Gay.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Edward Batchelor, Jr., ed., Homosexuality and Ethics, New York: Pilgrim Press, 1980; Vem L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: Wiley, 1976; F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd ed., London: Oxford University Press, 1974; Tom Horner, Homosexuality and the Judeo-Christian Tradition: An Annotated Bibliography, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981; Malcolm Macourt, ed., Towards a Theology of Gay Liberation, London: SCM Press, 1977; E. William Monter, "Sodomy and Heresy in Early Modem Switzerland," Journal of Homosexuality, 6 (1980-81), 42-55; John Shelby Spong,
Living in Sinf, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.
William A. Percy

Proust, Marcel (1871-1922)
French novelist. Born to wealthy bourgeois parents at the beginning of the Third Republic, he suffered from delicate health as a child and was lovingly tended by his mother. Despite his partly Jewish origins he aspired to mingle in the high society of a Paris that had entered the belle evoque, and in 1896 he published his first work, Les Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days), in which an astute reviewer discerned "a depraved Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and an ingenu Petronius."
Plagued by asthma, after the deaths of his parents he increasingly with­drew from social life, and after 1907 lived mainly in a cork-lined room where at night he labored on a monumental novel, unfin­ished at his death, and ultimately pub­lished in 16 volumes between 1913 and 1927,
A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). If the first part went unnoticed, the second, A Y ombre des jeunes filies en flews [Within a Bud­ding Grove) won the Goncourt Prize for 1919. The semi-autobiographical novel is superficially an account of the hero's ac­count through childhood and through youthful love affairs to the point of com­mitment to literary endeavor. It is less a narrative than an inner monologue; alive with brilliant metaphor and sense imagery, the novel is rich in sociological, philo­sophical, and psychological understand­ing. A vital theme is the link between outer and inner reality found in time and memory, which mock man's intelligence and endeavor; if memory synthesizes past experience, it also distorts it. Most experi­ence produces only inner pain, and the objects of desire are the causes of suffering. In Proust's thinking man is isolated, soci­ety is false and ridden with snobbery, and artistic endeavor is elevated to a religion and judged superior to nature. His ability to interpret man's innermost experience in terms of such forces as time and death gives the novel transcendent literary power, assuring its place as one of the great works of the twentieth century.
Proust was the first major novel­ist to deal extensively with the theme of homosexuality, and more than any other writer, he bears the responsibility for in­troducing the topic into the mainstream of modem literature, ending the centuries of spoken and unspoken taboo on mention­ing it in other than a subtle and oblique manner. Yet so strong was the negative attitude in the 1920s and later that the adjective
Pioustian served in literary circles as a euphemism for homosexual, and crit­ics who grasped the full importance of homosexuality in Proust's life and art avoided the subject out of shame, embar­rassment, prejudice, and the tendency in academic circles to suppress the realistic and erotic sides of French literature when addressingundergraduate audiences orthe general public. Only in the late 1940s did critics begin to evaluate in print the homosexual element in Proust's novel, and then with biases and superficial gener­alizations. Even later work was marred by an exclusively psychoanalytic approach to Proust's psyche or a vulgar Freudian atti­tude toward sexuality as a whole. The novelist's sexual orientation could be written off as a fixation, a dead-end of psychological development, rather than as the logical and inevitable maturation of a psychic nucleus inseparable from the constitution of the subject and from his artistic experience of self and the world.
Homosexuality is an integral part of Proust's literary creation. Many of the major and minor characters of the novel - Saint-Loup, Morel, the Prince de Guermantes,
Jupien, Legrandin, Nissim Ber­nard, and of course the immortal Baron de Charlus - prove to have homosexual incli­nations. And lesbianism is no less one of Proust's preoccupations: the narrator spends much of the novel pondering the implications of female homosexuality and trying to discover whether Albertine has ever loved other women. The role of homosexuality in Proust's work was not accidental; it was to him a theme of capital importance on which he lavished a great deal of reflection and painstaking crafts­manship. When the novelist began to write, the theme was so shocking and unaccept­able that he had to approach his publisher, Gaston Gallimard, rather diplomatically to assure him that the sub j ect w ould not be treated in a sensational manner, but inte­grated into the narrative.
The crucial date in Proust's ca­reer was April 30, 1921, on which the
Nouvelle Revue Française issued a book containing the second part of Le Côté de Guermantes (Guermantes' Way) and the first part of Sodome et Gomonhe (Cities of the Plain). In the latter, the narrator dis­covers the homosexuality of the Baron de Charlus (modeled on the real-life Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac) and presents his famous essay on the nature of homo­sexual love, seen by many critics as an indirect confession of Proust's own orien­tation and an oblique plea for understand­ing and tolerance of the homosexual and his way of life. The novelist's own sexual life, as far as can be judged, was marred by pain, rejection, and unrequited love - which is often the bitter experience of the homosexual attracted to a heterosexual man who cannot return his affection. Proust's relationship with his dashing secretary-chauffeur Albert Agostinelli partook of this character; it was cruelly disappointing, because it not only went unrequited but was cut short by the trag­edy of unexpected death. (Agostinelli per­ished while piloting an airplane Proust had given him.)
The mature Proust also witnessed two scandals: the Dreyfus case that di­vided France - and the salon society of which the writer was a part - into irrecon­cilable camps, and the Harden-Eulenburg affair in which the favorite of Kaiser Wilhelm II was pilloried for his homosexual
proclivities. These current events sank into his mind, and the former plays no slight role in the novelist's depiction of the evolution of French society from the early years of the Third Republic down to 1919. At the same time Proust was conscious of the complex, Protean quality of homo­sexuality itself, of the nuances and contra­dictions that invalidate any formula which movement apologists were promoting as the politically correct understanding of the matter in their effort to reform public opinion. Sometimes Proust created homo­sexual stereotypes in order to shatter them, utilizing the artist's freedom to project an image and then reshape it. Internalized self-hatred was not alien to his personal­ity, and from time to time it irrupts into the novel. But the total picture of homo­sexuality combines great structural and expressive beauty with unprecedented insights into human nature, and the over­all artistry of the novel resisted the ten­dency of a still intolerant Western society to relegate the work to the "memory hole" of literary oblivion. Proust was thus a trailblazer who made the literary treat­ment and analysis of homosexuality pos­sible, and reached an audience that would never have read a medical study or a movement brochure. In the emancipation of homosexuality from post-medieval taboos, Marcel Proust played a central and incomparable role.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Henri Bonnet, Les amours et la sexualité de Marcel Proust, Paris: A.-G. Nizet, 1985; George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, 2 vols., London: Chatto & Windus, 1959-65; J. E. Rivers, Proust the Art of Love: The Aesthetics of Sexuality in the Life, Times, &> Art of Marcel Proust, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
Warien Johansson

P
rzhevalsky, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1839-1888)
Russian army officer, geographer, and explorer. Descended from a small Cossack landowner, Przhevalsky finished school at Smolensk in 1855 and entered military service, becoming an officer in the following year. In the summer of 1866 he met Robert Koecher, a young Pole of German ancestry who was to be the first of his traveling companions. Each of Przhevalsky's expeditions into Central Asia was planned with the presence of a young male traveling companion between sixteen and twenty-two. On these proteges he lavished expensive gifts, he sponsored their educations, and arranged for them to be commissioned as army officers; in re­turn they had to shun women, share his tent, and give him unquestioning obedi­ence. In the village of Sloboda (today Przheval'skoe) in the northern part of the government of Smolensk he acquired a remote country estate where he was sur­rounded by a retinue of male visitors. Throughout his life he basked in an all-male ambience from which the presence of women was rigorously excluded. His biographers ascribe his loathing of the coarseness and debauchery of the towns in which he resided to the cultured side of his personality; more likely he had little use for the interests and preoccupations of the heterosexual men who would otherwise have been his boon companions.
Przhevalsky led four major expe­ditions: in 1870-73 to Mongolia, China, and Tibet, in 1876-77 to Central Asia (Lobnor and Dzhungar), in 1879-80 to Tibet, and in 1883-85 a second to Tibet. At the start of a fifth expedition in the fall of 1888 he died not far from Lake Issyk-Kul', where today his grave and museum are found in the city of Przheval'sk.
During his lifetime Przhevalsky's travels and the books in which he recorded them captured the imagination of a world­wide audience. His books were translated into English at a time when the classics of nineteenth-century Russian literature were barely glimpsed in Great Britain and the United States. He discovered species of wild plants and animals that still bear his name: poplar, rose, and rhododendron; gerbil, carp, and lizard; but above all Equus
przewalskii, the only species of horse that survived undomesticated into modern times and caused a major revision of the evolutionary history of the animal.
With Fyodor Eklon, whom he met in the summer of 1875, he had a liaison that lasted until the summer of 1883, when the youth summoned up the courage to tell him that he was to be married and that he could not accompany him on the next expedition to Tibet. This confession led to a bitter scene and rupture, as Przhevalsky never forgave the women who deprived him of the male companionship that he needed. But in the winter of 1881-82 he met a distillery clerk, Pyotr Kozlov, who proved to be "the young man who had been eluding him all his life: alert, submissive, loyal and handsome." Kozlov not only accompanied his protector on his last and most important journeys, but after his death went on to a distinguished career of his own as explorer, archeologist, and author of travel books. He also fulfilled the dream that his mentor's premature death prevented him from attaining: to visit the forbidden city of Lhasa and meet the Dalai Lama.
Przhevalsky was a hunter and explorer who revived an almost archaic homosexual personality type: that of the leader who willingly faces hardship and danger with only other males as compan­ions, and a younger male as his beloved
protege.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Donald Rayfield, The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky, Explorer of Central Asia, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1977.
Warren Johansson

P
sychiatry
The discipline of psychiatry ad­dresses the problem of mental illness and its treatment, in contrast with psychol­ogy, which is the academic study of men­tal processes and functions in human subjects. There is an assumption on the part of the public - and often of psychia­trists themselves - that anything with which psychiatry deals falls into the cate­gory of the pathological. The profession of psychiatry has not always been interested in the phenomenon of homosexuality, and when it has considered the subject its approach has not been detached and impartial, but reflected prevailing social attitudes, derived as these were from the cultural and religious beliefs of the community.
Origins of Psychiatry's Concern with Homosexuality. It was only in the last third of the nineteenth century that psychiatry began to study what it called "sexual inversion," and it did so not spon­taneously, but at the prompting of the earliest spokesmen for the emerging homosexual liberation movement, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Károly Mária Kertbeny. Thus it was not the psychiatrist's own insight, or the data collected from patients under observation, that enabled such authors as Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing to reach the formulations which they published in their pioneering papers, it was the claim of homophile writers that there were human beings without attrac­tion to members of the opposite sex, but with a paradoxical inborn attraction to members of the same sex which they experienced as perfectly natural and con­sonant with their inner selves.
However, the character of the patient universe from which the earliest cases were drawn - mainly individuals observed in prisons, psychiatric wards, and insane asylums - led the psychiatrists to hold that sexual inversion was, if not an illness itself, at least a symptom of a psy­chopathic personality. At first homosexu­ality was thought to be an extremely rare condition: in fact the book published in 1885 by lulien Chevalier,
De Tinversion de l'instinct sexuel, listed the total num­ber of known cases in the entire world - 35! At that time the paper which Vladimir Fiodorovich Chizh had read in St. Peters­burg in 1882 was still unknown in West­ern Europe; in it the author remarked that so far from being rare, the phenomenon in question could account for many of the cases of pederasty that daily came before the courts.
From the outset of the discussion in modern times, psychiatry has found itself in an ambivalent position: on the one hand, it sought to present itself to an in­creasingly secular society as an objective discipline that couldreplace the traditional moral authority of the Christian church - and for many the psychiatrist took the place of the confessor in the religious cul­ture of the past; on the other hand, it found itself invoked as a source of scientific authority by the church itself to bolster its "revealed" teachings on the subject of sexual morality. Caught between two fires, most psychiatrists have opted for one party or the other; and by and large those who accepted the principle that homosexuality was inborn and unmodifiable have sup­ported the homosexual emancipation movement, while those who believed that it was an acquired condition, a pathologi­cal fixation, a mental illness have sided with the theologians and formulated their judgments in terms that amounted to condemnation, when they did not openly reaffirm the traditional attitudes.
Homosexuality as a Congenital vs. Acquired Condition. At the moment when Krafft-Ebing summarized the early papers that had appeared in psychiatric journals between 1869 and 1877, psychia­try was so strongly influenced by the belief in the congenital origins of mental illness that homosexuality quite effortlessly fell into this category. His views were echoed by many others down to the early decades of the twentieth century: Arrigo Tamassia, Julien Chevalier, Albert Moll, Paul Nacke, Havelock Ellis. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did the pioneering work of Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing in the use of hypnosis open the way to a developmental theory of sexual orientation in which Freudian psycho­analysis was to occupy a prominent place. Psychoanalysis began as a particular method for the treatment of mental and emotional disturbances that were psy­chogenic in origin, but expanded into a psychology of all "unconscious" mental processes, including those of normal in­dividuals. The psychoanalytic school claimed rather that homosexuality was the outcome of faulty psychological de­velopment in childhood, that it represented an inhibition of the heterosexual potential present in all human subjects. Thus homo­sexuality tended rather to be classified as a neurosis or as the expression of a neu­rotic personality disorder "than as an erotic monomania.
Forensic Aspects. The forensic evaluation of homosexuality has had its own history since the 1870s. On the one hand, psychiatric testimony was at times introduced in trials for sodomy with the aim of proving that the defendant was suffering from a mental illness that dimin­ished or abolished his legal responsibility; on the other, the notion that the homosex­ual was a "psychopathic personality" led to the introduction of many disabilities in civil and administrative law that were added to the criminal statutes already in force. In the English-speaking world the latter trend actually made the legal posi­tion of the homosexual even worse than it had been when the defendant was simply "guilty of unnatural vice." Down to the 1960s the psychiatric profession remained largely indifferent to the legal problems of the homosexual, even if individual psy­chiatrists would at times testify on behalf of a particular defendant. The fact that psychiatrists obtain the largest segment of their referrals from the clergy made them unwilling to argue for a change in the traditional punitive attitudes, or for liber­alization of the statutes which maintained penalties for private sexual acts far more severe than those for such crimes as armed robbery or beating or neglecting a small child. As late as 1956 a report by a group of American psychiatrists could criticize the law only on the ground that "some inno­cent persons" might be punished.
Psychiatric "Cures" vs. Gay Rights. Also included in the psychiatric confrontation with homosexuality was the matter of enforced therapy - individuals required by court order to undergo psychi­atric treatment, or in other cases com­pelled by their parents to submit to ther­apy for their unwanted "tendencies." This treatment could take exceptionally cruel and humiliating forms, including shock therapy and other painful procedures designed to create an aversion to homo­sexual stimuli.
Even when the Wolf enden Report (1957) heralded the movement for crimi­nal law reform, the psychiatric profession remained indifferent, insisting only that homosexuality was "a serious disease" and that measures had to be taken to combat its spread. It was the gay liberation movement itself that had to rouse the psychiatrists out of their inertia, and spe­cifically put pressure on the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexu­ality from its roster of mental illnesses - which it did in 1973. In 1986 even the substitute "ego-dystonic homosexuality" disappeared from the list (DSM-UIR). The importance of this change, as mentioned above, was that in the meantime the no­tion of homosexuality as disease had been used to deny homosexuals a whole range of civil rights, including immigration, employment, adoption, service in the armed forces and other benefits accorded to the rest of the population. But the deci­sion of the American Psychiatric Associa­tion was more the outcome of political pressure and manipulation than an expres­sion of the sincere belief of the members. The psychiatrists who have been the most outspoken in proclaiming homosexuality to be a "disease" - Edmund Bergler, Abram Kardiner, Irving Bieber, Charles Socarides - usually express reservations if not outright opposition to any demand for gay rights in the sphere of civil or admin­istrative law - a clear proof that their be­lief rationalizes the traditional condemna­tion of homosexual expression by Judaism and Christianity.
A number of psychiatrists have claimed success in "curing" homosexual­ity, but their results have been questioned on a number of grounds, including the lack of follow-up studies. In some instances the individual merely became far more inhib­ited in expressing his homosexual desires, which is to say more guilt ridden and unhappy than before. Nearly all practitio­ners conceded that only carefully selected subjects could benefit from their proposed therapy; Edmund Bergler, for example, maintained that the patient had to experi­ence conscious guilt over his homosexual practices. Many practitioners would ad­mit that some foundation of heterosexuality is necessary for even a temporary "cure" to be effected; that is to say, they choose to treat bisexuals in whom it is possible to suppress one side of the equation. There are few, if any, well attested cases of per­manent reversal from complete homosexu­ality to complete heterosexuality. In any event, the inability of the psychiatrists to distance themselves from traditional morality has often been striking, even if they were oblivious of the normative dimension of their practice.
Exclusion
of Homosexuality from the Realm of Mental Illness. The contem­porary gay liberation movement has been characterized by an effort to remove the stigma of "mental illness" from homo­sexuality and therefore to renounce any benefits that might have accrued from the appeal to psychiatry as a shield from the law. The virtual cessation of prosecutions for consenting homosexual activity be­tween adults has made this degrading demarche a thing of the past. A number of psychiatrists now practice a Une of ther­apy that enables the patient and his family to accept the homosexuality as an integral part of his personality, and then to opti­mize his personal adjustment to a society with many vestiges of intolerance. Self-
acceptance and openness are recognized as preferable to a forced adherence to the ascetic morality once regarded as the abso­lute norm.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychia­try: The Politics of Diagnosis, 2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987; Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider, Deviants and Medicahzation: Prom Badness to Sickness, St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1980; Martin S. Weinberg and Alan P. Bell, Homosexuality: An Annotated Bibhography, New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
Warren Johansson

P
sychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is the movement that takes its start from the ideas set forth by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the pres­ent century. The movement, which has had a vast influence on many realms of modem thought, remains hard to classify. The lay public tends to confuse it with psychology, yet academic psychologists remain among the most determined doubt­ers of the value of psychoanalytic tech­niques and concepts. Although psycho­analysis claims to be a form of mental therapy - indeed the only truly serious one - the efficacy of its procedures in pro­moting mental health has never been conclusively demonstrated, and indeed an increasing number of observers question whether they possess any intrinsic thera­peutic value. The popular mind associates the views of Freud and his followers with sex, believing that psychoanalysis is cen­trally concerned with the erotic, or that it was the first discipline to discuss the matter in an ordered way. These assertions are false. Freud actually arrived as a late-comer at the crest of a period of sex research, the main center of which lay in Berlin, not in Vienna. Moreover, the views of Freud and his followers are addressed primarily to nonsexual issues. In addition to its con­cern with the mind, psychoanalysis also has a metapsychological side, in which it offers views and speculations on human destiny and the nature of civilization. Finally, psychoanalysis has had an enormous influence over modem litera­ture and art, where it may be said to play a role similar to that of mythology in the creative work of classical Greece and Rome. Increasingly questioned by scientists, the lasting significance of psychoanalysis is now seen more and more to reside in this cultural realm.
History. Freud founded the Vi­enna Psychoanalytic Society in 1902 and the International Psychoanalytic Society in 1910. His organizations attracted a number of talented followers, but their history was marred by defections, notably those of Alfred Adler in 1911 and Carl Gustav Jung in 1914. Although, as has been noted, Freud's theories are not exclu­sively or even centrally sexual, he rightly criticized both men for their excision of the sexual element from psychoanalysis.
At first psychoanalysis was largely restricted to German-speaking countries, but it was diffused to some extent in France thanks to the work of Marie Bonaparte and in England through Freud's faithful fol­lower Ernest Jones. Although Freud vis­ited the United States in 1911 (in the company of Jung), he came to dislike the country, in part because of personal finan­cial losses in World War I.
On at least two occasions, in 1905 and 1935, Freud gave statements that were remarkably sympathetic to homosexuals as individuals. The lesbian tendencies of his favorite daughter Anna (which were quietly, though discreetly acknowledged in his immediate circle) may have helped to soften his views. Yet, when all is said and done, his theory relegates homosexu­als to a category of the mentally second class. Human psychosexual development Freud sees as an arduous journey through the oral and anal to the mature genital stage, which he equates with heterosexuality. Instead of obeying the summons to complete this journey, homosexuals have lingered along the way. Important psychic developments have been "inhibited," and they remain immature.
In the 1920s professional psycho­analytic circles debated the question of whether a homosexual might be qualified to become an analyst. Freud answered that under certain conditions such a person could be accepted. Ernest Jones, however, disagreed, and this ban came to be the dominant view, so that overt homosexu­als in the course of a training analysis presumably had to he blatantly to their analyst, while the exclusion practiced by the psychoanalytic profession provided a model for discrimination in other fields calling for confidentiality and intimacy.
Ironically, in view of Freud's dis­like, America seemed the nation in which psychoanalysis achieved its greatest triumphs, thanks the the large number of
emigré analysts who settled there in the 1930s because of Hitler's persecutions. In fusing with the American ethos, psycho­analysis blurred some of its essential fea­tures. The notion of primordial bisexuality was thrown overboard (especially in a key paper by Sandor Rado), and new handi­caps were discovered in homosexuality (e.g., the supposed tendency to "injustice collecting" promoted by Edmund Bergler and the "close-binding mother" of Irving BieberJ. Seeing only homosexuals who came to them for help as patients, the practicing psychoanalyst is tempted to project the neuroses of this selected group on the entire homosexual population.
All too frequently American psy­choanalysis seemed to wish nothing more than to acquiesce in, and even to abet, the then prevailing demands for adjustment and conformity. In this way it lost what­ever emancipatory vigor it had originally possessed. In the period after World War II countless numbers of homosexuals and lesbians were analyzed at enormous ex­pense, the result usually being misery in that they could not "adjust" to society's norms by overcoming the "neurosis" of homosexuality.
Critiques. In the 1960s discor­dant voices came to be heard, including those of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), both well-informed central Europeans. Different as they were, Reich and Marcuse seemed to offer a more "revolutionary" brand of psychoanalysis which would meld per­sonal change with radical societal recon­struction. Yet these new trends reckoned without the social pessimism of the founder, who had counseled, in effect, "repression will ye always have with you."
More damaging were challenges that went to the heart of the therapeutic claims of psychoanalysis. In the 1950s H. J. Eysenck produced a statistical study showing that psychoanalytic patients re­covered no more quickly (in fact some­what more slowly) than those who re­ceived no therapy at all. While the psycho­analytic establishment has sought to pour cold water on this and similar studies, it has yet to produce conclusive evidence that psychoanalysis has any distinctive therapeutic efficacy. Considering the length and expense of the treatment, and the increasing availability of more concise therapies, this critique has struck home. When asked to supply empirical evidence of the success of their therapeutic ses­sions, psychoanalysts commonly reply that the analyst-client relationship is privi­leged, and must not be monitored by a third party. Thus the efficacy of psycho­analytic procedures is presented as self-validating. Such defensive measures can­not be employed by any true science, which by definition must always take the risk that it will be falsified by independent tests.
Nor are self-reports even of pa­tients who have enjoyed "successful" analyses uniformly encouraging. Some even return for a "retread" program. Forced to renounce even the claim that psycho­analysis makes one happy, its defenders have retreated into the position that pro­longed analysis offers the benefit of show­ing the tragic ambiguity of life. This claim would suggest that it is a poetics or lay philosophy rather than a therapy. Such assertions would seem to be buttressed rather than countered by the opaque writ­ings of Jacques Lacan, a French "deconstructionist" psychoanalyst much in vogue in the 1980s in some circles in England and America.
In the 1980s criticism mounted. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Martin Swales presented evidence that showed the personal ethics of Freud to be question­able. It has also been charged that he remained a cocaine addict through the 1890s, when he began to present his dis­tinctive theories. Other researchers have emphasized the eclecticism of his ideas, their lack of originality: the idea of the unconscious came as part of the legacy of German romanticism; universal bisexuality derived from Freud's mentor Wilhelm Fliess; and infantile sexuality was pur­loined (without acknowledgement) from Albert Moll. Individually these critiques may not suffice to overturn psychoan­alytic theory, but they have seriously eroded the popular perception, so carefully nourished by the psychoanalytic estab­lishment over the years, that Freud was a secular saint. More generally, it has been justly remarked that psychoanalysis is culture-bound, a product of middle-class Viennese society at the end of the nine­teenth century. Thus the "penis envy" that is supposed to be a universal stage of women's self-understanding is nothing more than the confluence of Victorian prudery and the subjection of women. Yet the most damaging critiques are those which challenge the very core of psychoa­nalysis: its logical status. Adolf Grunbaum and Morris Eagle argue that psychoanaly­sis works essentially as a placebo. Forming an emotional bond with the analyst (" trans­ference"), the patient gradually internal­izes the concepts of psychoanalysis. For example, patients of Freudian analysts tend to have "Freudian" dreams with "Freu­dian" symbols, those of Jungian analysts have "Jungian" dreams with matching symbols. This process of assimilation is then labeled therapeutic progress.
The ultimate value of psycho­analysis remains hard to assess. There can be no doubt that in the early decades its ideas, novel to the lay public, helped to undermine conventional moral certain­ties and to stimulate new thought. Yet once psychoanalysis was itself assimilated into the conventional wisdom this benefit was lost. The problems experienced by analysands (therapeutic clients) were compounded for gay men and lesbians. Many believed that they benefited from analysis, but a great many more have emerged with negative feelings about the process and recurrent difficulty in accept­ing their sexual nature.
Despite its problematic charac­ter, psychoanalysis has proved a hardy perennial through the twentieth century. Although the twenty-first is unlikely to see its final triumph, this trend in modern thought may yet have new contributions to make.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Frederick Crews, Skeptical Engagements, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986; Richard C. Friedman, Male Homosexuality: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspec­tive, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; Robert Friedman, "The Psychoana­lytic Model of Male Homosexuality: A Historical and Theoretical Critique," Psychoanalytic Review, 73 (1986), 483-519; Adolf Griinbaum, The Founda­tions of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; Richard A. Isay, Being Homosexual: Cay Men and Their Development, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989,- Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuahty, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988; Timothy F. Murphy, "Freud Reconsidered: Bisexuality, Homosexuality, and Moral Judgment," fournal of Homosexuality, 9:2/3 (1983-84), 65-77; Paul Roazen, Encoun­tering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989; idem, Freud and His Followers, New York: Basic Books, 1976.
Wayne R. Dynes

P
sychology
Psychology is the discipline that studies the phenomena of mental life and the conditions that produce them. Psy­chology differs from psychotherapy in being a strictly empirical field: it observes human mental processes and behavior but does not try to change them. Social psychology, which is concerned with the group aspect of human behavior, with the collective counterpart to the individual personality, stands on the borderline of sociology. Psychology must be distinguished from psychiatry, the branch of medicine which studies and seeks to cure mental illness.
History and Character of the Field. Psychology originated in the eight­eenth century as that branch of philosophy which studied the phenomena of mental life, that is to say, what is introspectively observed as happening in the mind, to­gether with perception, memory, thought, and reasoning. Only in the closing decades of the nineteenth century did psychology as an academic discipline escape from the tutelage of philosophy and become an independent department of the university, with its own methods, books and periodi­cals, courses, and professional societies. The two leading figures were Wilhelm Wundt and William James. In 1875 Wundt founded the first laboratory dedicated to the experimental study of sensation, memory, and learning. In 1890 James published the classic Principles of Psy­chology, which defined the branches of the discipline; the chapters of today's text­books are still devoted to perceiving, remembering, thinking and language, concepts and reasoning, as well as emo­tions, needs, and motives, learning, coping behavior, and conflicts, intelligence and skills, and attitudes and beliefs in regard to social and cultural phenomena.
The growth of the discipline was accompanied by mounting specialization, and also by the formation of schools such as behaviorism, physiological psychology, Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, pur­posivism, factor analysis, and ethology. Behaviorism had the effect of narrowing the definition of the subject to exclude all that could not be directly observed and rather to focus on those aspects of behav­ior that could be mechanically recorded and measured, while psychoanalysis ad­dressed those phenomena which could not be observed - because inaccessible to the conscious mind - but only inferred from the observable ones. The rigorous defini­tion of scientific psychology came to mean that the study must be systematic, with observations made under controlled con­ditions that allow reliable conclusions to be drawn, and with inclusion of the subject's responses to external events or stimuli, whether occurring naturally or under the manipulation of the experi­menter. Psychology remains on an uncer­tain borderline between the natural sci­ences and the social sciences, and it has further opted to concentrate on particular sets of mental phenomena that are only to a limited extent the subject of political or ideological controversy.
These circumstances, and the legacy of nineteenth-century positivism, have given psychology a peculiar empha­sis on the quantifiable, so that the develop­ment of tests and scales of all kinds for measuring intelligence, aptitude, and the degree of mastery of academic subjects in relation to native ability has become a prime task of the psychological establish­ment, which justifies its existence by providing society with the means for de­termining who is qualified for higher education, employment, and advancement. This very fact led academic psychology to ignore the issue of homosexuality, and of attitudes toward homosexuality - a rather different matter - because these topics rarely intersected with the goals of the discipline as it had come to be defined. Even the specialty of abnormal and clini­cal psychology, which overlapped with psychiatry, since the Ph.D. in that field could practice psychotherapy, could deal with homosexuality only as a form of pathology, as a deviation that needed to be cured.
Psychology and Prejudice. The study of prejudice against minority groups within society began in the 1940s, and received a tremendous stimulus from the publication of the work of T. W. Adorno and his associates in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which found common denominators in personality types that accepted or rejected individuals who dif­fered markedly from themselves. When the subject of homosexuality became more acceptable, numerous questionnaire stud­ies addressed the problem of attitudes toward homosexuals and the factors that tended to alter them, either positively or negatively. The evaluation of such find­ings suffers from numerous biases, in par­ticular the tendency of academic psycholo­gists to rely almost entirely on college student populations as the ones most eas­ily accessible and also the most easily instructed in the manner of taking the test, as contrasted, one might say, with barely literate juvenile-delinquent popu­lations. Likewise the pressure exerted by the makers of mass opinion to indoctri­nate the general public with a "correct" set of attitudes on sundry issues leads to a certain conformity, as the subject senses that there is a right answer to particular questions - which may differ profoundly from his spontaneous reactions and inner beliefs.
Identity. In general, identity means a person's self-definition in rela­tion to others, but more specifically it connotes the definition derived from membership in various social groups. Iden­tity has both social and personal aspects, the former having to do with the experi­ence of belonging to a defined group, the latter having to do with individual psychodynamics. The concept of social iden­tity has occupied a central place in both social psychology and sociology. Kurt Lewin, for example, whose field theory inspired a whole generation of postwar social psychologists, did extensive research on the psychological significance of group affiliation, especially for minority and marginal groups. Social identity is also a factor in intergroup discrimination, even in the absence of real conflicts of eco­nomic interest, and sheds light on such problems as the dilemma of minority groups, industrial conflicts overpay differ­entials, and linguistic differences between classes and ethnic groups.
A homosexual identity is a prob­lem for the individual in that it entails first, the discovery of being psychologi­cally different from the norm of the popu­lation, and second, the acceptance or rej ection of affinity with the collectivity of persons labeled "homosexual" (or "gay") by themselves and by the larger society. It further imposes upon the individual the task of managing a self-concept that in many circumstances of life is perceived as a distinct liability, even an impossible handicap. Because of the attitudes toward homosexuality that have prevailed in Western society the individual with an "inner" homosexual identity has often had to cultivate an "outer" heterosexual one - to function in two social worlds simulta­neously.
The range of subcultures and life­styles within the gay community requires that the individual identify with one in order to be accepted as a full-fledged member and to interact sexually with others in the subculture. This identity must be validated not just by appropriate sexual behavior, but also by the adoption of the style of dress, the mannerisms, the argot, and the ideology of the particular segment of the homosexual world into which the subject desires acceptance. Psychological studies have focused on the process by which the homosexual identity is acquired (or rejected) and the skills needed to cope with the accompanying stigma are developed and internalized.
Functioning. Psychological func­tioning is another major concern of the academic psychologist. A whole series of papers and monographs has produced evi­dence to support the claim that homo­sexuals function in the circumstances of public and private Ufe as well as hetero­sexuals, in opposition to the charge that they are neurotically disturbed and con­flict-ridden to the point of being dysfunc­tional. Some authors have even found that their homosexual subjects functioned better than the matching heterosexual control group. Mark Freedman, for ex­ample, did a Ph.D. dissertation at Case Western University which concluded that his lesbian subjects differed from hetero­sexual women in having more independ­ence and inner direction, more acceptance of aggression, and more satisfaction in work. It is remarkable that advocates of gay rights have had to substantiate the claim that their constituency functioned as well as the heterosexual majority de­spite the psychological pressures imposed by society's intolerance, while for others no such attestation is required to seek escape from inferior status. The inferior performance of some (but not all) mem­bers of ethnic minorities is generally as­cribed to centuries of discrimination and prejudice, but this insight is withheld in respect to members of sexual minorities.
Attitudes Toward Homosexual­ity. Only recently has the study of atti­tudes toward homosexuality been differ­entiated from psychological inquiry into the phenomenon itself. Here again, the demand for moral conformity in sexual matters made it impossible until then even to suggest that there could be another attitude than one of uncompromising re­jection. Comparative studies have shown that dislike of homosexuals parallels nega­tive attitudes toward other "outsider" groups, but with the difference that dec­ades of propaganda against racial and reli­gious prejudice have compelled most of the general public to profess a formal tol­erance of such minorities in reply to ques­tionnaire or interview studies, while open hatred and contempt for homosexuals can still be voiced with no social disapproval.
Hence homosexuals come at the very bottom in nearly all polls of attitudes toward minority and deviant groups. In general, the greatest intolerance is found among the elderly, the poorly educated, and those most involved with traditional religion - categories that overlap to a con­siderable extent - while the most tolerant are those who have been exposed to the modern psychological and sociological literature on homosexuality.
Conclusion: Structure and Limi­tations of the Discipline. To a great extent the discipline of psychology, emerging as it did on the threshold of the second Indus­trial Revolution, has come to reflect the needs of an increasingly complex society to ensure that its members fitted into the model of a self-regulating component of a production team, whether in the office or on the assembly line. Aptitude and per­formance tests measured whether the educational system was effectively sort­ing and processing the human raw mate­rial fed into it to be readied for active participation in the labor force. Thus aca­demic psychology was oriented toward predominantly utilitarian ends, not toward idle speculation on the "mind-body di­chotomy" and other classical issues in philosophy. In a pluralistic society like the United States, moreover, psychology felt summoned to address issues of intergroup relations and the tensions and conflicts which these engendered, including the relationship of the mass culture shared by all Americans to the particular value sys­tems of ethnic and socio-economic sub­groups.
The findings of academic psychol­ogy are often limited in value by the lack of cross-cultural comparison, although as the discipline grows in other parts of the world it is becoming possible to admini­ster standard tests and questionnaires to individuals raised in very different cul­tures. The notion of homosexuality, which originated in Northern Europe and has only partially spread into non-Western countries, poses real problems for the psychologist studying the issues of iden­tity formation, functioning, and public opinion on the subject. Also, the campus-bound inertia of many psychologists makes the base of their investigations too narrow and too divorced from everyday life. Col­lege sophomores figure in small print as the subjects in paper after paper, hence the findings apply to this upwardly mobile, middle-class population. Public opinion sampling has addressed the issue of con­structing representative groups of respon­dents who accurately reflect the range of attitudes within a heterogeneous society, but also of ascertaining regional and class dimensions of political and social belief. These inquiries, however, often lack the precision and depth of the psychologist's elaborately constructed and administered questionnaire or interview.
The number of papers and disser­tations in which homosexuality figures in one connection or another continues to grow, and the stigma that once attached even to the academic investigator of the subject is waning. So psychology will in the future confront the problem of homo­sexuality with all the issues that arise from the subject's interaction with the special areas of investigation that com­prise the discipline.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Gonsiorek, Psychological Adjustment and Homo­sexuality, Washington, dc: American Psychological Association, 1977; Stephen F. Morin, "Heterosexual Bias in Psycho­logical Research on Lesbianism and Male Homosexuality," American Psycholo­gist, 32 (1977), 629-37; Lon c. Nungesser, Homosexual Acts, Actors and Identities, New York: Praeger, 1983; Alan T. Watters, "Heterosexual Bias in Psychological Research on Lesbianism and Male Homosexuality (1979-1983), Utilizing the Bibliography and Taxonomic System of Morin," Journal of Homosexuality, 13 (1986), 35-58.
Warren Johansson

P
sychotherapy
The effort to treat mental or emotional disorders by psychiatric means, sometimes accompanied by drugs and surgery, is a characteristic modern phe­nomenon, stemming originally from a "social engineering" belief system - the idea that societal ills may be attacked and banished in the same way as public health problems such as epidemics and poor sanitation. Recent experience indicates that more modest expectations are in order.
History and Rationale. Medieval and early modern society regarded the insane as simply irretrievable, and rele­gated them permanently to the margins of society. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, a new group of alienists, influenced by the Enlightenment, sought to cure the insane by humane treatments. Their success in this recuperative effort, qualified as it was, nonetheless contrib­uted to the growth of the idea that there was no sharp break between the insane and the mentally healthy, but rather a continuum, with various states of neuro­sis occupying the zones between the two poles. Human hypochondria being what it is, the spread of this nuanced view had the unfortunate side effect of causing many functioning human beings to regard them­selves as neurotic and to seek psychother­apy. Also, many individuals whose prob­lems were essentially ones of morale - an indefinable malaise, lack of purpose in life, boredom at work, the drying up of the creative impulse - sought relief from the psychotherapist as if their difficulties were medical, although they were suffering from no known clinical entity.
Recent social critiques distin­guish sharply between coercive and volun­tary psychotherapy. It is recognized that coercive therapy, which ranged from fam­ily-compelled visits to the therapist to such brutal treatments as psychiatrist-ordered electric shock, has been overused. Even with voluntary treatments, however, clients were kept attending sessions for years, being bled white of their money and developing a crippling emotional depen­dence on the therapist. To all intents and purposes, the psychotherapist had taken the place of the priest or astrologer of former times, but with such a heavy bag­gage of medical and pseudomedical as­sumptions that consultation of the priest or astrologer might have been more effec­tive. Many now recognize the limitations of psychotherapy, and shorter, result-ori­ented programs are more common. For the individual seeking voluntary treatment today, however, a bewildering variety of therapies - as many as 250 according to one account - are available.
Homosexuals and Psychother­apy. During the height of the modern coercive therapy trend in the first half of the twentieth century, many homosexu­als were treated against their will. Such barbarous treatments as lobotomy and electroshock were widely practiced. In many instances the victims of these proce­dures were young people who had been committed by their parents or guardians. In keeping with the law in some American states homosexuals were even castrated. Even when these steps were not actually taken, dread that they would be applied, often accompanied by open threats, served to reduce many to the status of miserable accomplices in their own degradation. Adverse publicity and the abandonment of the idea that homosexuality is an illness eventually greatly reduced the prevalence of these appalling punitive practices. Yet incarcerated pedophiles are still subjected to a variety of involuntary treatments - some amounting to chemical castration.
The subjection of homosexuals to barbaric therapies, an accepted proce­dure within living memory, is one of the factors that have caused a healthy skepti­cism of the ethics of psychotherapy. In most countries of the First World greater sensitivity is found among professionals. In countries of the Soviet bloc and many Third World nations arbitrary use of coer­cive psychotherapy persists as a way of coping with political dissent.
Over the years there have un­doubtedly been many closeted homosex­ual therapists, professionals who concealed their orientation in order to retain their positions. The most famous example is Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), who headed the William Allenson White Foun­dation in New York City. Because of this factor of professional concealment, homo­sexuals could be undertaking treatment from another homosexual without realiz­ing it. Apart from this problem, many earlier treatment programs were simply exercises in futility with the patient agree­ing pro forma to the goal of change of orientation, but in fact continuing to cher­ish his deeply rooted wishes and desires.
Realism requires one to concede that even overt identity of the client's sexual orientation with that of the thera­pist offers no guarantee of a satisfactory outcome - or even inception. Today, however, there are many affirmative gay and lesbian therapists who are concerned not with changing the client's orientation but with making possible a richer and more rewarding life within that orienta­tion. Many hold that a lesbian should seek a lesbian therapist, a gay man a gay male therapist. The main point is that the pro­cedures should be affirmative and con­structive in the best sense. To this end, client and therapist should achieve a firm understanding of goals and commitments, including costs, before undertaking work together. It should be recognized that other complications, such as alcoholism and family relations, may need to be taken into account. Even so, therapy is at best an art, not a science, and no exaggerated hopes should be entertained of any major person­ality transformation. The most that ther­apy is likely to achieve is to permit the client more effectively "to play the hand he or she is dealt."
Under the editorship of Professor David Scasta (Temple University Medical School), a
Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy was founded in 1989 (Haworth Press).
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Sidney Bloch and Paul Chodoff, eds., Psychiatric Ethics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981; Eli Coleman, ed., Psychotherapy with Homosexual Men and Women: Inte­grated Identity Approaches for Chnical Practice, New York: Haworth Press, 1987; John C. Gonsiorek, A Guide to Psychotherapy with Gay and Lesbian Chents, New York: Harrington Park Press, 1985; Mamy Hall, The Lavender Couch: A Consumer's Guide to Psycho­therapy for Lesbian and Gay Men, Boston: Alyson, 1985; Michael Ross, ed., Psychopathology and Psychotherapy in Homosexuality, New York: Haworth Press, 1988.
Wayne R. Dynes

P
ublic Schools
This is the British name for the private secondary schools that educate, for sizable fees, upper-class and upwardly mobile middle-class children between the ages of twelve and eighteen - the future elite of the nation. Their educational methods and the environment in which adolescents spend the formative years of their adolescence have done much to shape British character. Although some of them were founded in the mid-fourteenth cen­tury beginning with Winchester in 1378, whose statutes, enacted in 1400, governed it until 1857, they took on their present character only with the reforms of Tho­mas Arnold (father of Matthew) toward the middle of the nineteenth century, but during the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth the study of Latin and Greek formed practically the entire curriculum.
Basic Features. Traditionally boarding schools with harsh living condi­tions (including physical discomfort and corporal punishment for misdemeanors), public schools permitted a good deal of autonomy, allowing the adolescent sub­culture - with all its cruelty and demand for conformity - to dominate the lives of the boys. The curriculum introduced by Arnold was strongly classical, Latin and Greek being the principal subjects; but public schools also emphasized athletics and teamwork that made for success on the playing field. At the same time Victo­rian evangelism invested the schools with the pietistic ideal of creating "Christian gentlemen." Graduates of the "public schools," the best secondary institutions in the country, have an enormous advan­tage in competing for admission to the leading universities - Cambridge and Ox­ford as well as London, or to Sandhurst or the Royal Naval College. And to boot, access to the nine great public schools, led by Eton and Harrow, was limited to the sons of alumni, who had to be registered with the school at the time of their birth.
Homosocial and Homosexual As­pects. The public schools have a homoerotic ambiance that may not find overt expression; but confined as they are with members of their own sex, at what is for many the "homosexual phase," and ap­proaching the peak of their physical beauty, the boys are perforce involved in intense friendships that amount to love affairs. The degree of acceptance of these attach­ments has varied over the decades, but there is abundant evidence for homosex­ual affairs between public school boys and between them and their teachers, who are in some instances homosexuals of the pederastic type - attracted solely to boys of that age, not to adults.
At the same time the public schools inculcate an ethos of duty, of loy­alty, of service to king and country that amounts to an initiation into what Hans Bliiher called the "male society," the form of social organization based on male bond­ing that is the foundation of the state and of its administrative and military appara­tus. And the public schools, whatever defects their curriculum may have had, did train and instill in the men who gov­erned the Empire the virtues requisite for ruling.
Evidence for homosexual activ­ity within the public schools is slight from the early modern period, although Nicho­las Udall, the headmaster of Eton, was in 1543 exposed as a result of an unsuccessful attempt of two of his pupils implicated in the theft of silver objects to blackmail him into silence. The death penalty for buggery to which he would have been subject was commuted to imprisonment by the Privy Council, and in 1547 he was released and appointed headmaster of Westminster.
In the nineteenth century C. J. Vaughan, the headmaster of Harrow, was compromised when a good-looking boy named Alfred Pretor revealed to John Addington Symonds that Vaughan had been having an affair with him. Symonds kept the secret for eight years, then re­vealed it to a professor at Oxford who told him to disclose the information to his father. The elder Symonds promptly forced Vaughan to resign as headmaster and to promise that he would never hold any high position in the Church of England. This scandalous (but suppressed) episode ex­plains why Vaughan mysteriously "curbed his ambition" for the rest of his life.
If only a fourth of the public school boys are involved in overt homosexual activity, far fewer become lifelong homo­sexuals, yet they all share a lingering at­tachment to the camaraderie and the group identity crucial to the "male society." That sense of solidarity and cohesiveness stood Britain in good stead during the two world wars; but weaknesses in the public schools' curriculums share in the blame for the decline of Britain in an age when science and technology are increasingly important factors in a nation's competi­tiveness.
The American boarding schools, especially ones in New England, are mod­eled on the British public schools, though they are less rigorous and less insistent upon the Greek and Latin classics. But like their counterparts in the (British) Com­monwealth, they foster homoeroticism. The same is true of the military schools that predominate in the American South, more removed as they are from the British public school model. Thus much of the elite of the whole Anglo-Saxon world passes through this male bonding process before college and the military.
In the eighteenth century Count Beccaria recommended abolishing one-sex schools precisely because they served as breeding grounds for "Greek customs." The spread of the coeducational model in Western industrial societies reflects in part such cautionary views, as well as feminist aspirations for equality.
Female Parallels. Girls' schools in many respects mirror the male ones, but they earlier introduced more modem sub­jects - science, history, and living lan­guages. Not a few of the teachers are lesbi­ans who cherish a dislike of men and a resentment of male privilege which they subtly convey to their pupils. The univer­sal feature of the sexual life at girls' schools is the "crush" - the love of a younger girl, one between eleven and fourteen, for an older one who often played the role of surrogate mother. Older girls tend to be attracted to teachers and are rivals for their favor as in the school of Sappho. The embargo placed on heterosexual relation­ships - with the perils of loss of virginity and pregnancy - encourages strong physi­cal attraction to members of one's own sex. Measures to discourage contact be­tween members of different age-cohorts and the ensuing " sentimental friendships" have not been able to suppress the emo­tional needs of those experiencing the first flush of adolescence.
Literary Aspects. Its rigors not­withstanding, the sentimental attachment to the public school has fostered a genre of popular no vels in which homoerotic senti­ments pervade - but usually only as a subtext that the casual reader may miss. The archetype of the genre is Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's SchoolDays (1857). H. A. Vachell's The Hill: A Romance of Friendship (1905) is a chaste version of the David and Jonathan theme. Michael Campbell's Lord Dismiss Us (1968) cap­tures some of the emotional intensity of (unconsummated) love between two six­teen year olds.
The French diplomat and novel­ist Roger Peyrefitte wrote candidly of his school in
Les Amitiesparticulieres (1945), his friend Henry de Montherlant less so.
Catholic boys in French boarding schools were educated by Jesuits and other celi­bate members of the clergy, who [though usually chaste) were often inclined to homoerotic sentiments. Colette recalled her schoolgirl lesbianism in a matter-of-fact way, while the German writer Christa Winsloe (in
The Child Manuela, and its several film versions entitled Mädchen in Uniform) emphasized the conflicts stem­ming from an idealistic love affair between a teacher and her girl pupil.
Conclusion. The overall pattern of public school homosexuality is one of intense emotional bonds between adoles­cents, sometimes encouraged or facilitated by pédérastie homosexuals or corophile lesbians on the staffs. For most these erotic attachments are transitory; for a few, they mark the onset of a homosexual career. In Britain especially, the collective experi­ence does much to strengthen the kind of same-sex bonding that gives elite society its distinctive ethos and value system.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. John Chandos, Boys Together: English Public Schools 1800-1864, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984; Jonathan Gathome-Hardy, The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of the Enghsh Public School, New York: Th£ Viking Press, 1977; Claude Pujada-Renaud, L'Ecole dans la Httérature, Paris: Editions ESF/Science de l'Education, 1988; Jeffrey Richards, Happiest Days: The Public Schools in Enghsh Fiction, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988; Martha Vicinus, "Distance and Desire: English Public School Friendships," Signs, 9 (1984), 600-22.
Warren Johansson and William A. Percy

P
ublic Sex
See Impersonal Sex.

P
unk
In American prison and hobo usage this word has had (at least since the beginning of the twentieth century) the meaning of a young, usually smaller and heterosexual, male who is exploited as a female surrogate by older, tougher, more powerful (and for the most part essentially heterosexual) males, or "jockers." Since less is known about hobo punks, the fol­lowing discussion focuses on the jailhouse punk.
fail Punks. A punk in this sense is involuntarily recruited to the role, usually through gang rape, though he is likely to adapt to it over time if he does not commit suicide; in the prison class structure, he stands apart from the "man" and the "queen," or effeminate homosexual. Of­ten there is considerable tension between the two sexually passive classes, as the "queens" reinforce the feminizing process initiated by the "men," and the punks resist it. The "queens" also tend to look down on the punks as weak, while seeing themselves as doing what they want.
The process of converting some­one into a punk is called "turning out" and its climactic point is the moment of sexual penetration, after which the punk is said to have "lost his manhood," considered by prisoners to be irreversible; hence "once a punk, always a punk."
Studies of prison sexual patterns indicate that considerable numbers of heterosexualyoungmales are "turned out" in this manner. A careful sociological survey by Wayne Wooden and Jay Parker defined punk as "an inmate who has been forced into a sexually submissive role" and reported that at least nine percent of the heterosexual inmates (of all ages and ethnic groups) in a medium-security prison had been sexually assaulted in that prison. The frequency of "turning out" for young­sters in a big-city jail or high-security prison or many juvenile prisons is likely to be much higher, though never sufficient to meet the demand. Factors which raise the likelihood of a prisoner's becoming a punk, in addition to youth and small size, are lack of combat skills or experience, middle-class background, lack of familiarity with jail and criminal mores (first-timers], lack of gang membership, non-violent offenses as reason for incarceration, and adherence to an ethnic group which is in an unfavor­able power situation in that particular institution.
After being "turned out," a punk is usually paired off with a dominant male who "owns" him, providing protection from gang rape in return for sexual and other services (such as doing laundry, cellkeeping, and other tasks). Punks are comparable to slaves in that they are commonly sold, traded, and have no rights of their own; their social status in the jailhouse society derives from their own­ers, who tend to be high-ranking, since there is always a considerable amount of competition for the punks. They are fre­quently directed into prostitution for the profit of their owners. "Commissary punks," in contrast, voluntarily engage in prostitution in order to obtain goods from the prison store.
It is not, however, uncommon for emotional bonds to form over time be­tween) ockers and their punks, resulting in the distinctive situation of a sexual-emo­tional pair bonding between two hetero­sexual males. While very little research has been done on the psychology of punks (or of their jockers), investigation may throw considerable light on the nature of homosexual relationships as intensely experienced by the heterosexually oriented.
Punks do retain some fraction of their original masculine identity and usu­ally revert to heterosexual or bisexual patterns after release, though their sexual­ity may be seriously warped by their expe­rience and sense of compromised man­hood. Punks characteristically exhibit the symptoms of male rape trauma syndrome, usually heightened if they are caught in the punk role for any length of time and are forced to adapt to it. Some punks seek to "reclaim their manhood" through rape or other acts of violence after release, in sharp contrast to the non-violent offenses which they committed before undergoing rape trauma.
In many ways, the punk role rep­licates or perpetuates into contemporary times the tradition of the
paihic as seen in ancient Roman and Viking cultures. A similar pattern prevails today in many Mediterranean cultures and in Latin America. Other terms used in prison slang for punks include "sweet boys," "kids," "fuck-boys," and "catchers."
Other Senses of the Term. The prison/hobo meaning, until recently un­known in the general society, may de­scend directly from the Elizabethan punk orpunck(e), a harlot or kept woman, though its usage in this sense is not documented in America. (The variant form, punquetto, suggests an origin from the Italian panchetta, a pallet on which the woman would he.) An alternative derivation may come from the usage, which dates to at least the 1920s, of "punk" as "a juvenile delin­quent, a young outlaw, a young hoodlum," since it was such persons who ended up in jails and as the youngest were particular targets for "turning out." Another possi­bly related usage is punk as "a person of no importance, someone worthless or infe­rior."
In the circus "punk" designated untrained animals, while in other usage the term could simply mean an inexperi­enced young man or novice, without sex­ual implications. To the ordinary middle-class person a faded adjectival meaning was all that was usually recognized: "poor, inferior"; thus someone who is under the weather might remark, "I feel punk to­day."
This situation changed in the middle 1970s with the appearance of the punk (rock) subculture, with its character­istic music, types of dress, and attitudes, bringing the term into wide currency with connotations of "rebellious youth."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Anthony M. Scacco, ed.,
Male Rape, New York: AMS Press, 1981; Wayne S. Wooden and Jay Parker, Men Behind Bars: Sexual Exploitation in Prison, New York: Plenum Press, 1982.
Stephen Donaldson

P
unk Rock
"Punk rock" is a genre of rock and roll music which originated in an "under­ground" musical protest movement in New York in 1975 and quickly spread, first to Britain in 1976 and later throughout the industrialized world, as the unifying focus of a "punk" youth subculture which con­siders itself a defiant alternative to com­mercial popular music and to the general social order. With an "underground" form of music that had little hope for airplay on commercial or state radio, the punks were able and encouraged to break allthetaboos they could find. Punk lyrics have from the beginning frequently touched on homo­sexual topics and the punk subculture has been notable for its ongoing discussion of homophobia, which is generally con­demned as incompatible with punk ideol­ogy.
The "Classic" Period (1975-79). The American founders of punk rock, the singer Patti Smith and the band The Ramones, both included songs on homo­sexuality in their debut albums. In 1975 Smith released "Horses" with a long song of the same name which describes the rape of a boy and his consequent suicide, and the bisexual singer followed it on the same album with a lesbian love dirge, "Redondo Beach." The Ramones' 1976 self-titled album contains a song, "Fifty-Third and Third," describing a male prostitute work­ing that New York street intersection. In a later song, "We're a Happy Family," the chorus Une comments: "Daddy likes men." Bassist DeeDee Ramone is reported to have had a long affair with singer Neon Leon.
Not to be outdone, the English band The Sex Pistols also referenced homosexuality in their debut album "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" (1977) in the song "New York," when singer Johnny Rotten (Lydon) urged a "faggot" to "kiss me!" Lydon and Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious (John Ritchie) were occasionally involved with each other sexually during the early days of the band, before Vicious met up with Nancy Spungen, according to several reports, and Vicious was photographed wearing a Tom of Finland type gay T-shirt.
Many of the early leaders of the punk rock movement had been heavily influenced by early-seventies American bands such as the New York Dolls (who appeared in drag and with female makeup) and singers like Lou Reed, who was some­times assumed to be homosexual after re­leasing his 1972 hit, "Walk on the Wild Side."
During the later 1970s, British punk rock saw the rise of Tom Robinson, who had been a volunteer for the London Gay Switchboard and whose bitterly ironic anthem "Glad to Be Gay" became a sur­prise underground hit in 1978. The song, which angrily catalogues a long list of English homophobic practices and is proba­bly the only commercially successful song in the history of rock and roll to treat homosexuality as a political issue, drew thousands of predominantly heterosexual young punk rockers to sing along with Robinson at concerts throughout the United Kingdom and helped to establish the condemnation of homophobia as a part of the punk ideology. As the leading band The Jam put it (in "Alone in a Strange Town [1980]"): "We have our own mani­festo/ we are kind to queers." Robinson's American double album "Power in the Darkness" listed the telephone numbers of the New York and Los Angeles gay switchboards on the inner sleeve.
Singer Pete Shelley of the very popular Buzzcocks (whose first single, "Orgasm Addict," describes a bisexual) eventually went solo with a gay love song, "Homo Sapien," which crossed over to mainstream dance charts. Also notable in Britain were Elton Motello's "Jet Boy Jet Girl" (with the chorus "He gave me head") and Alternative TV's "Sniffin Glue."
Back in the United States, the singer Wayne County eventually became transsexual Jane County, while Lance Loud, who sang for The Mumps, "came out" to his family while being filmed for the television series An
American Family, and for a while was one of the most famous homosexuals in America. Many of the clubs which served as centers for the grow­ing punk subculture, such as New York's Mudd Club and Max' Kansas City, were openly "mixed," drawing a considerable anti-disco gay crowd (musically alienated from gay bars) as well as the punk rockers.
Throughout this period, the gen­eral emphasis was on becoming free of society's concepts and moral prescriptions, on being experimental and breaking "rules" of all kinds, on freedom from the bounda­ries restricting sexual expression, rather than endorsing a ghettoizing "gay"
iden­tity. To a certain extent, there was also an undercurrent of hostility, derived from the association of homosexuals with disco music (which the punks detested) and the early-70s "glitter rock," but this was not a serious concern.
American "Hardcore" in the Eighties. Around the turn of the decade, punk underwent a transformation with the introduction of "hardcore" punk, origi­nating in California. A new emphasis on machismo and the emergence of homo­phobic right-wing "skinheads" (modeled on the British variety) as a violent part of the otherwise anarchistic-leftist punk subculture brought with them an open homophobia, represented musically by the Rastafarian-influenced Bad Brains and the satiric Angry Samoans ("Homosexual"). At the same time, G. G. Allin was promot­ing a polymorphously perverse "slut rock" and a quartet of Texan bands (many of whom relocated to more hospitable San Francisco) was taking up the gay theme in a positive way. The Butthole Surfers, Millions of Dead Cops (MDC), the Dicks and the Big Boys all featured gay singers or songs. MDC, whose anthemic "Dead Cops" complains about police homopho­bia and whose singer, Dave, occasionally performed in drag, engaged in a celebrated feud with the Bad Brains over the latter band's homophobic statements, fueling a vigorous discussion of homophobia in the flourishing punk press. This debate con­tinued throughout the decade in such publications as the international monthly Maximum Rock a) Roll, with homopho­bia becoming disreputable among punk rockers as a result, though it is still found occasionally among "rank and file" punks and among skinheads, some of whom have been involved in "queerbashing." There are also gay punk publications origi­nating in Toronto (J.D.s) and San Francisco (Homocore).
Stephen Donaldson