R


Racha
This word is found only in some manuscripts of the New Testament Gos­pel of Matthew at 5:22, where the King James Version reads:
But I say unto you, that.. .whoso­ever shall say to his brother, Racha, shall be in danger of the counsel....
The text of the gospel includes no explana­tory gloss, as is usual with foreign words that would otherwise have been unintelli­gible to the Greek reader, and the majority of modern commentators understand the word as Semitic: raka = Hebrew leqa "empty, emptyheaded, brainless." Yet there is an alternative meaning proposed in 1922 by Friedrich Schulthess, an expert in Syriac and Palestinian Christian Ara­maic: he equated the word with Hebrew iakh, "soft," which would thus be equiva­lent to Greek malakos/malthakos, which denotes the passive-effeminate homosex­ual. Further, in 1934 a papyrus was pub­lished from Hellenistic Egypt of the year 257 before the Christian era that con­tained the word mchas in an unspecified derogatory sense, but a parallel text sug­gests that it had the meaning kinaidos ("faggot"). It would thus have been a loanword from Hebrew in the vulgar speech of the Greek settlers in Egypt. A modern counterpart is the word lach, "tender, soft, effeminate, timid, cowardly" in the Gaunersprache, the argot of German beg­gars and criminals, which has absorbed many terms from Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic because of social conditions that created a linguistic interface between the Jewish "fence" and the gentile thief.
The import of the Gospel passage is that whereas the old Law forbade only murder, the new morality of the church forbids aggression even in purely sym­bolic, verbal forms; and the ascending scale of offenses and penalties is tantamount to a prohibition of what is called in Classical Arabic mufaharah, the ritualized verbal duel that is often the prelude to combat and actual bloodshed. So Jesus is repre­sented as forbidding his followers to utter insults directed at the other party's mascu­linity - a practice that has scarcely gone out of fashion in the ensuing nineteen centuries, as the contemporary vogue of faggot well attests.
So it cannot be maintained that Jesus "never mentioned homosexuality," as some gay Christian apologists claim. In the sphere of sexual morality Jesus de­manded an even higher standard than did contemporary Palestinian and Hellenistic Judaism, which uncompromisingly re­jected and condemned the homosexual expression that was commonplace and tolerated in the Gentile world. Thus Chris­tianity inherited not merely the Jewish taboo on homoerotic behavior, but an ascetic emphasis foreign to Judaism itself, which has always had a procreation-oriented moral code. What the text in Mat­thew demonstrates is that he forbade acts of violence, physical and verbal, against those to whom homosexuality was im­puted, in line with the general emphasis on self-restraint and meekness in his teach­ing. The entire passage is not just a legal­istic pastiche of Jewish casuistry, but also a polished gem of double entendre and irony.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Warren Johansson, "Whosoever Shall Say to His Brother, Racha (Matthew 5:22)," Cabirion, 10 (1984), l-A.
Waiien Johansson

Radicalism
See Left, Gay.

Rape of Males
Rape is a sexual act imposed upon a nonconsenting partner. The method of imposition is often violent, though it may be by threats or intimidation or abuse of positions of authority. Rape is one of the most misunderstood of all crimes, and when the victim is male, the misconcep­tions are severely compounded. Many legal jurisdictions do not even recognize a crime of rape against a male victim, but instead use terms such as "forcible sodomy" or "child abuse." Nonetheless, rape of males in the non-legal sense is a much more common event than is usually supposed, covered as it is with a blanket of silence. If prisoners are included, on any given day in thelinited States there may be more males raped than females.
It appears that the rape of females by females, while not unknown, is very rare, and little is known about it.
The rape of males by males is a practice protected by the silence observed by its victims, responding to a set of popu­lar beliefs centering around the notion that a "real man" cannot be raped. The phrase "homosexual rape," for instance, which is often used by uninformed per­sons to designate male-male rape, camou­flages the fact that the majority of the rapists as well as of the victims are gener­ally heterosexual.
History. In antiquity, the rape of males was more widely recognized. In Greek mythology, Zeus, king of the gods, abducted Ganymede for sexual purposes. In the Oedipus myth, Laius, king of Thebes and Oedipus' father, abducted Chrysippus, son of his host, King Pelops; the boy killed himself out of shame, occasioning Pelops' curse on Laius that he should be slain by his own son.
In some societies the rape of a defeated male enemy was considered the prerogative of the victor in battle, and served to indicate the totality of the former's defeat. Even in ancient times, we find the widespread belief that an adult male who is sexually penetrated, even by force, thereby "loses his manhood," and hence can no longer be a warrior or ruler. In the twentieth century, the best-known instance of this kind of humiliation oc­curred when the Englishman T. E. Law­rence ("Lawrence of Arabia") was cap­tured by the Turks, who were well known for this custom, during World War I. The subsequent disruption of Lawrence's life, while a surprise to his contemporaries, can now be recognized as a typical consequence of male Rape Trauma Syndrome.
Gang-rape of a male was also considered an ultimate form of punish­ment, and as such was known to the Romans (for adultery) and Iranians (for violation of the sanctity of the harem).
In modem Western societies, until recently, rape of one male by another was considered rare outside of the special context of incarceration. Virtually all the non-penological literature on rape assumes that the victim is female; police did not [and usually still do not) even collect sta­tistics on "male rape."
When the feminist movement led to the establishment of rape crisis centers in the United States in the 1970s, how­ever, it became obvious that there was a large number of hidden cases of male rape. Most of these came to the attention of rape counselors owing to injuries inflicted on the victims (usually anal) which could not be hidden from medical personnel. Rape crisis centers willing to deal with male victims found that anywhere from three to forty percent of their counselees were male, with the higher figures resulting from specific efforts to publicize the availabil­ity of the centers for male victims.
This development led to research aimed at discovering the extent of male rape, and in 1982 to an anthology on the subject, Anthony M. Scacco, Jr.'s Male Rape. The results of this research have surprised virtually everyone by indicating the vast extent of rape of males in North America.
Extent of Male Rape "in the Com­munity. " Students of sexual abuse, draw­ing upon a wide number of studies con­ducted in the 1980s which sought to overcome the reluctance of the abused to discuss their experiences, have now con­cluded that boys and girls up to the early teen years have an equal chance of being sexually victimized; a summary of these studies wis published by Eugene Porter in 1986.
For the later teens and adult males, figures are harder to come by, but a consen­sus appears to be forming that "in the community" (a phrase excluding incar­ceration facilities] between one-seventh and one-fourth of all rapes involve male victims. A household survey conducted for the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics stated that the rapes of males reported to their interviewers were 25.9 percent of the number of completed rapes reported by females in the same survey,-when applied to the national population that would be about 12,300 rapes of males per year. These figures are believed to be underestimates owing to a reluctance of male victims to identify themselves to the interviewers.
Phenomenology of Male Rape. Research in America indicates that the most common sites for male rape involv­ing post-puberty victims "in the commu­nity" are outdoors in remote areas and in automobiles (the latter usually involving hitchhikers). Boys in their early and mid teens are more likely to be victimized than older males (studies indicate a median victim age of 17). The form of assault usually involves penetration of the victim anally and/or orally, rather than stimula­tion of the victim's penis.
Comparing rapes of females with rapes of males, it has been found that in cases involving male victims, gang-rape is more common, multiple types of sexual acts are more likely to be demanded, weapons are more likely to be displayed and used, and physical injury is more likely to occur, with the injuries which do occur being more serious than with injured females.
Whereas cases of sexual assault of young girls usually involves a relative or family friend, young boys are more likely to be sexually abused by strangers or au­thority figures in organizations such as church, school, athletics, or scouting. It is also noteworthy that men who rape boys, according to one study, have on the aver­age well over three times as many victims each as men who rape girls. One perpetra­tor kept records showing he had sexually assaulted over three hundred boys in one summer, mostly hitchhikers; he was ar­rested only when one of the boys com­plained to the police, the rest having remained silent.
While gay males are also raped, there is no evidence that they are victim­ized in appreciably greater numbers than their proportion of the general population; most male rape victims are heterosexual.
What is even more surprising to the average man is that, according to sev­eral studies, most rapes of males are com­mitted by men who are heterosexual in their consensual sexual preference and self-identity,- only 7 percent of the rapists of men in the Groth-Burgess study were homosexual. (Indeed, it has been reported that homosexual men are far less likely to engage in rape than heterosexual men.) Half or more of these rapists choose vic­tims from both genders.
Theorists have sought to explain this as rooted in the nature of rape as primarily a crime of power and domina­tion through violence rather than a sexu­ally motivated act, though it is clear that sexuality has something to do with it. The exact relationship between the quest for power and dominance on the one hand and sexual drive on the other is little under­stood, and probably varies a great deal from one rapist to another. It is clear that rapists are often not erotically attracted to their victims, and examples of sexual dysfunction (impotence, inability to ejacu­late) are common in "community" rape. On the other hand, one can cite instances of "marital rape" among gay couples where an erotic element is clearly present.
One of the most interesting find­ings of recent research on rape has pro­found implications for public policy re­garding male rape: anywhere from 80 to 100 percent (depending on the study) of adult male rapists (of women) have a his­tory of childhood sexual victimization themselves. The implication is that rape is a vicious cycle in which boys, unable to even discuss their own rape traumas, much less find effective treatment for them, grow up to take revenge on others in the same fashion.
Public Attitudes Toward Male Rape. Generally speaking, rape of males is a taboo subject for public discussion, so that for most women and many men, it does not exist. On the popular level, however, there are numerous mistaken beliefs which are common among the male population. These include the notions that male rape is very rare; that to be raped indicates a weakness which is not to be found in a "real" male, hence "real men" cannot be raped; that rapists of males are necessarily homosexual; that being raped turns the victim into a homosexual; and most importantly, that for a man to be raped is to "lose his manhood" perma­nently.
It is because of these attitudes, which surround male rape with an aura of total humiliation for the victim, that it is rare for a male rape victim (especially past the early teens) to acknowledge his vic­timization even to his family or friends, much less to the police. If ever there was a crime hidden by a curtain of silence, it is male rape. For the same reason, most vic­tims outside of jail consider themselves to be almost unique, and loathe to call atten­tion to themselves.
Given such pervasive silence^ there is no demand for treatment programs for male victims as there is for female victims,- there is no pressure for law en­forcement activity; and the perpetrator is usually protected from even being accused, much less convicted. So powerful is the suppression of knowledge of male rape that criminals such as burglars and robbers sometimes rape their victims as a sideline solely to prevent them from going to the police.
Rape Trauma Syndrome. Rape is an extremely traumatic experience cen­tering on the total loss of control of one's own body and usually the inside of that body, the most intimate sanctum of self. On top of this trauma, which is common to all rape victims, the heterosexual male survivor must deal with the experience of sexual role inversion and the pervasive popular mythology revolving around "loss of manhood" and homosexuality. The psychological devastation of rape is diffi­cult to imagine for a male who has not been through such an experience.
Survivors of rape, and often of rape attempts, usually manifest some ele­ments of what has come to be called Rape Trauma Syndrome (RTS), a form of Post­traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The effects of RTS often last for years or dec­ades, and can be lifelong. Apart from a small number of therapists and counselors specializing in sexual assault cases, few psychotherapists are familiar with the lit­erature on RTS. For this reason, a rape survivor is usually well advised to consult with a rape crisis center or someone knowl­edgeable in this area rather than relying on general counselingTresources. The same applies to those close to a rape victim, such as a lover or parent; these people are termed "secondary victims" by rape crisis coun­selors.
Typically, the first stage of RTS involves a phase of* denial and disbelief.
Child victims commonly experience amnesia, partial or total, regarding the assault; memory, however, may return years later and initiate a psychological crisis.
A sense of guilt, shame, and humiliation is commonly found, exacer­bated by the common tendency of those who should be supportive to instead "blame the victim." The sense of stigma, whether internalized or reinforced by others (in the case of public knowledge of the rape), is pervasive. Heterosexual male survi­vors typically show enormous anxiety and confusion regarding issues of masculine identity and homosexuality. The survivor's sexuality may show severe distortions and malfunctions. Serious depression is likely and suicide may result. The victim's rage may explode under unpredictable circumstances.
Other manifestations of RTS include a sense of heightened vulnerabil­ity, anxiety, powerlessness, helplessness, nightmares, paranoia, sleep disturbances, fixation on the incident, inability to con­centrate, dependency, fear of intimacy, chaotic relationships, multiple personal­ity development, drug and alcohol abuse, and revictimization.
Survivors of childhood sexual assault and of rape in institutional sur­roundings often have to contend not with a single incident, but with a continuing series of involuntary sexual activities which may stretch over years. In such cases, the adaptation process by which the victim learns to live with the continuing pattern of assault further complicates and strengthens the RTS pattern.
As mentioned above, a certain number of male rape survivors become rapists themselves. It is not known how large this number is, though it appears to be more common among those victimized as boys than as adults.
It has also been suggested that "queer-bashers," violently homophobic males, are likely to be survivors of child­hood sexual abuse, laboring under the usually mistaken idea that the male who assaulted them must have been homosexual.
fail Rape. While rape of males is a serious problem in the community, it is in the institutions of confinement (prisons and jails, reformatories, mental institu­tions) and, to a markedly lesser extent, in other all-male residential settings (board­ing schools, hobo camps, the military) that male rape is most common, even an ac­cepted part of institutional life.
Rape of males in confinement differs from male rape in the community in that it is generally open, is accepted if not condoned by the prisoner subculture, usually involves repeated patterns of sex­ual assault following the initial rape, is far more likely to be interracial, and serves a social function in converting heterosexual young prisoners into sexual slaves to be acquired by more powerful men. Thus, once raped, the victim is forced into a pattern of perpetual sexual abuse which may in time appear consensual to a casual observer, but which is rooted in the need for protection of the rape survivor from further mass assaults.
Confinement institutions further­more have the effect of legitimizing to their graduates the use of rape as a means of validating their masculinity, and of converting non-violent offenders, by rap­ing them, into ex-convicts full of rage and potential for violence (often rape) once released. In these ways the institutions help perpetuate the practice of rape of women and of men.
Conclusion. Rape of males, while a widespread and extremely serious prob­lem, has escaped the attention of society because of deep taboos springing from popular conceptions that to be raped is to forfeit one's masculinity. The actual dy­namics of rape are only beginning to be explored, and very little of what is known to students of the phenomenon has pene­trated the public consciousness.
Rape crisis centers in the United States have developed much of what is known about rape and its effects, includ­ing Rape Trauma Syndrome, yet many if not most such centers, run by feminist women, still see rape as a "women's issue" only and have made little or no effort to reach out to boys and men who have expe­rienced rape. The public media have con­tinued to treat rape of males as a taboo subject.
Until this taboo is broken, there can be little hope that survivors of male rape will be enabled to deal constructively with rape trauma or that the vicious cycle of rape will be effectively undermined.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Stephen Donaldson, The Rape of Males: A Preliminary Statistical Look at the Scope of the Problem, 2nd ed., Ft. Bragg, CA: People Organized to Stop Rape of Incarcerated Persons, 1985; A. Nicholas Groth and Ann W. Burgess, Men Who Rape, New York: Plenum Press, 1979; idem, "Male Rape: Offenders and Victims," American Journal of Psychiatry, 137(1980), 806-10; Arthur Kaufman, et al., "Male Rape Victims: Noninstitutionalized Assault," American Journal of Psychia­try 137 ¡1980), 221-23; Eugene Porter, Treating the Young Male Victim of Sexual Assault, Syracuse, NY: Safer Society Press, 1986; Anthony M. Scacco, Jr., ed., Male Rape: A Casebook of Sexual Aggressions, New York: AMS Press, 1982; Wayne S. Wooden and Jay Parker, Men Behind Bars: Sexual Exploitation in Prison, New York: Plenum Press, 1982.
Stephen Donaldson

raucourt, stage name of Françoise Marie Antoinette Joseph Saucerotte (1756-1815)
French tragédienne and foremost lesbian of her time. Daughter of a third-rate actor, she served an apprenticeship in the provinces before making her debut at the Comédie française in 1772 as Dido. It was a prodigious "success, owing to her beauty, expressive mime, melodious voice and "prodigious intelligence, " as well as to a short-lived reputation for virtue. Within two years she was embroiled in scandals that made her notorious. She and the Opera soprano Sophie Arnould (1740-1802) vied for lovers of both sexes; virtually bank­rupt, she and her inseparable companion, the German Jeanne-Françoise-Marie Souck or Sourques, were summoned for bad conduct, insolence, and threats to credi­tors. Her early popularity faded and she was hissed in 1776. Expelled from the Comédie for absenteeism, she went to Russia but was recalled to the Comédie to take on the emploi of tragedy queens and mothers. Her new masculine manner and coarsened voice enabled her to do so with magnificence, but without tenderness. When she made a hit as a captain of hus­sars in Le Jaloux, her rival Mile, de Saint-Val remarked, "What a pity she persists in wishing to play women's roles."
According to the scandal-sheets, Raucourt was president of the sapphic Sect of Anandry nes, founded in 1770 by Thérèse de Fleury; it met in the Rue des Boucheries-Saint-Honoré, where novices were stripped and examined for the seven marks of beauty that would ensure them mem­bership. Surviving documents suggest that the Anandrynes subscribed to Enlighten­ment principles. A quarrel arose between Arnould and Raucourt over the admis­sions policy: the former insisted on women exclusively, the latter wanted to admit as voyeurs men who practiced women's ways (she had in mind the homosexual Marquis de Villette). Arnould's rallying-cry "Either whores or tribades" signaled the dissolu­tion of the Sect in 1784. By then Raucourt had become synonymous with lesbianism and was exploited as a character in erotic fictions such as Pidansat de Mairobert's Confessions of a Young Girl.
A rabid royalist, Raucourt was imprisoned by the Jacobins in 1793, but released thanks to former actor Charles Labussière, a clerk of the Committee of Public Safety. She inaugurated the Second Théâtre Français in 1796, and when the Comédie was reconstituted, returned to it.
Napoleon, an admirer, sent her with two troupes to Italy to spread French culture, but she had scant success. Retiring to her estate on the banks of the Loire, she de­voted herself to horticulture and died of an inflammation. Her funeral caused another scandal, for the curé of St. Roch, who had benefitted financially as her almoner in her lifetime, refused to admit her body to the church. A mob of over 15,000 persons broke in bearing her coffin, and an order of Louis xvïïi assured her the last rites. She is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Jean de Reuilly, La Raucoutt eu ses amies, Paris: Biblio­thèque de Vieux Paris, 1909.
Laurence Senelick

Recruitment Concept
Recruitment is a military term referring to the outreach whereby soldier candidates are solicited for enlistment. As applied to homosexuality, it represents, on the one hand, a heterosexual fantasy or myth, on the other, a recognition that rites of passage are part of the process of joining any group. There are no "recruiting sta­tions" for homosexual behavior, but indi­viduals may seek to join their fellows and, in this sense only, become recruits.
The Myth. The recruitment myth is the notion that since homosexuals for the most part, and exclusive homosexuals by definition, do not reproduce, they must constantly recruit new acolytes to their forbidden practices from the ranks of the society in which they live. This assertion then becomes the basis for the claim that young people need to be "protected" from homosexuals and even kept in ignorance of the facts of homosexual behavior as long as possible. Also, the pederast is in the light of this assumption seen as an "ag­gressive homosexual" vigorously recruit­ing adolescents for the gay subculture that flourishes in the large cities of every Western country.
The truth of the matter is other­wise. Most of those who are predomi­nantly or exclusively homosexual as adults become aware of their feelings long before they make their first contact with the world of gay bars and bathhouses, homophile groups and organizations, the vast majority of which are composed solely of adults. It is principally on the college campuses that student organizations are active, and these serve as a focus of social life for those who are already fully aware, at seventeen or later, of the direction of their sexual interests.
Initiation. Because of the semi-clandestine nature of the gay subculture, even in recent times, there is a phase of initiation in which the newcomer learns the rules of behavior, the argot of the group, and the fund of information that permits him to interact with other mem­bers of the subculture in the manner of his choice. But this is true of any social group that differs in some degree from the domi­nant, mainstream culture of the nation in whose midst it is located. The most impor­tant single fact is that the individual who cannot experience sexual relations with members of his own sex pleasurably will be repelled by such contacts, and even if he experiments with them, will decide never to return.
Religious Analogues. The anal­ogy that is undoubtedly present, at some level of consciousness, in the minds of those who cherish the recruitment myth is with religious conversion and apostasy. It is perhaps not fortuitous that pervert in English was originally the antonym of con­vert, hence "religious apostate," and that the modern meaning appears only in the 1880s under the influence of German pervers as used by forensic psychiatrists. But all the evidence shows that the homosexual orientation emerges in indi­viduals who have been exposed from the beginning of their lives to every form of direct and indirect promotion for heterosexuality. If any "recruitment" occurs, it is to heterosexuality. The apologetic dis­course of the homophile movement serves in most cases to give the subject a political identity and a sense of pride and self-worth that he could never extract from writings in which his sexual feelings are branded an abomination. That many homosexuals still cling to the religious faith of their upbring­ing, despite official refusal to accept them into the organized churches and syna­gogues, proves the element of apostasy to be absent.
The Pederastic Subculture. An­other crucial point is that the pederastic subculture is totally distinct from the main gay subculture of the late twentieth cen­tury; in many respects the two are in watertight compartments. The pederast has no sexual interest in adult males and does not wish to be the object of their attention; even the handsomest college athlete has no appeal whatever for him. He does not frequent the bars, baths, clubs, and other rendezvous of the androphile (adult-oriented) homosexual, because he can find there no one for whom he would feel the slightest attraction. Moreover, the androphile political groupings generally, though not always, bar the North Ameri­can Man-Boy Love Association and similar organizations of boy-lovers from membership and participation in their activities. And finally, the pederast usually has an upper age limit after which he has no further erotic feelings for the boy and does not care if as an adult the latter gravitates toward exclusive heterosexuality.
Biological Aspects. The homo­sexual is a good and true member of the racial and ethnic group to which he be­longs; in demographic terms, the proto­plasm of his ancestors is continued in him, even if not by him. In each generation a certain percent of the offspring of hetero­sexual unions are homosexually oriented, but this fraction does not diminish the vitality or the evolutionary capacity for survival of the race. The variations in the birth rate in modem times, just as in antiq­uity, are explained by economic and cul­tural factors, not by the occurrence of homosexuality. In early modem China the number of reported male births was al­most twice that of female, but this is explained simply by the practice of infan­ticide on unwanted female babies. Like­wise the low birth rates of some strata of the intelligentsia in contemporary society result from the deliberate choice of mar­ried couples to employ birth control de­vices and techniques rather than to have one child after another, as was the norm among all classes well into the nineteenth century.
A minority of the members of any society will always by virtue of inner pre­disposition be predominantly or exclu­sively homosexual, and no "recruitment" is needed to swell the number. The homo­sexual does not reproduce, but nature reproduces him. The evolutionary dialec­tic that produced exclusive heterosexual­ity in homo sapiens has exclusive homo­sexuality as its necessary antithesis and complement.
Warren Johansson

Redl, Alfred (1864-1913)
Chief of espionage and counter­espionage for the Austro-Hungarian Mon­archy who divulged military secrets for financial gain to the intelligence service of Tsarist Russia. The seventh of thirteen children born of middle-class parents, Redl possessed an intellect and creativity (along with the pension and special allowances granted upon his father's death in 1875) that quickly led him into a military-school education. From the very outset of his military career, he was rewarded with promotions, and by 1900 Redl had joined the General Staff. During a year spent in Russia (1898-99), learning the language and training as an espionage operative, he came to the attention of Russian officials who, since Redl had no private income like many other members of the officer corps, took advantage of his financial dependence. By 1902 he was functioning as a double agent. His information proved invaluable, for Redi was promoted to Chief of Counter-intelligence and chief of the Operations Section of the Austro-Hungarian intelligence apparatus.
Alfred Redi maintained his double secret - that of his work for the Russians and that of his homosexuality - until his death. He fell in love with Lt. Stefan Horinka (referred to as Hromodka in some works) and financed his military career. Horinka knew nothing of Redl's involve­ment with the Russians and kept a certain distance from him on the emotional plane by having a liaison with a woman at the same time he was seeing his protector.
On May 24, 1913, Austrian au­thorities discovered Redl's treason when he picked up two letters full of cash which the Russians had sent to him under a code name and which had aroused the suspi­cions of the Austrian postal authorities. The military representatives confronted Redi in his hotel room and left a pistol on the table. He committed suicide in the early morning of May 25. Upon searching Redl's apartment, the authorities discov­ered the rest of his secret life when they found perfumed letters from men, photo­graphs of nude males, and copies of docu­ments with state secrets.
Redl's treason has been appraised as a major factor in Austria's defeat in World War I, as her enemies knew most of her plans before the outbreak of hostili­ties. The additional fact that Redi was homosexual was exploited by the oppo­nents of the homosexual emancipation movement which was then growing in the German-speaking countries, and even found mention in a United States Senate subcommittee report of 1950 - during the epidemic of McCarthyism - as proof that homosexuals were "security risks."
Redl's life has been the subject of several fictionalized treatments, includ­ing John Osborne's play A Patriot for Me (1965) and four German-language films (1925, 1930, 1955, 1984).
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert B. Asprey, The Panther's Feast, New York: Putnam, 1959; Egon Erwin Kisch, Der Fall des Generalstabschefs Redl (Aussenseiter der Gesellschaft: Die Verbrechen der Gegenwart, 2), Berlin: Verlag die Schmiede, 1924; Georg Markus, Der Fall Redl, Vienna: Amalthea, 1984; Valentin Pikul', "Chest' imeiu. Ispoved' of it sera rossiiskogo genshtaba" [I Have the Honor. Confessions of an Officer of the Russian General Staff], Nash sovremennik, No. 9 (1988), pp. 74-76.
fames W. Jones

Reformation
See Protestantism.

Reich, Wilhelm (1897-1957)
Psychoanalyst and sexual re­former. Born to an assimilated Jewish family in Galicia in 1897, he suffered a severe trauma when his mother commit­ted suicide, as he feared that he had been unwittingly responsible in revealing her love affair with one of his tutors. His atti­tude toward his father may be judged from his belief that he was not really his father's son.
After serving in the Austrian army in World War I, Reich studied medicine in Vienna. He spent his internship in the clinic of the Nobel Prize winner Julius Wagner-Jauregg, and married a fellow medical student, Annie Pink, who also became a psychoanalyst. In the Jewish intellectual circles of interwar Vienna, both Marxism and psychoanalysis were fash­ionable, and Reich set about the task of synthesizing them. How could the discov­eries of Marx and Freud be placed at the service of the masses? He first joined the Austrian Socialist Party and became a clini­cal assistant at Freud's Psychoanalytic Polyclinic, which gave him close contact with the working class. Reich aspired to put knowledge of sexual hygiene within the reach of the industrial worker and remove the reproach that psychoanalysis was a middle-class luxury. Five years later, in 1929, he opened the first sex hygiene clinic in Vienna that offered free advice on birth control, child rearing, and sex education.
Reich's political interests soon led him to question the neutrality required of orthodox Freudian analysts. In 1927 his book on The Function of the Orgasm was issued by the International Psychoanalytic Publishing House, and in 1928 he pub­lished a paper on "Character Analysis" that he subsequently elaborated into a book which is still regarded by many as his most important contribution to the disci­pline. Idealizing the Soviet Union for the reforms it had undertaken after the Revo­lution of 1917, he went to Moscow in 1929 expecting to find a new society, but dis­covered instead that the need to industri­alize backward Russia had taken prece­dence over sexual hedonism, and that under Stalin reaction was slowly but inevitably setting in.
The rapprochement between Marxism and Freudianism for which Reich was striving was doomed to fail, so that in the end he was expelled from both the International Psychoanalytic Association and the Communist Party. Moving to Berlin in 1930, he promoted the German Association for Proletarian Sexual Poli­tics, which advocated abolition of the laws against homosexuality, and also reform of the marriage and divorce laws, free birth control counseling and contraceptive devices, abolition of laws prohibiting sex education, and an end to the restrictions on abortion - all measures that have since won general acceptance by reformers.
After publishing The Mass Psy­chology of Fascism Reich returned to Vienna, but the rise of Nazism in Germany and the complete repudiation of the sexual reform movement in Stalinist Russia marked the onset of a period of trials and reverses that undoubtedly embittered him. Rejected in one country after another, he found refuge in Norway, where he was able in 1936 to found the International Institute for Sex-Economy to study the way the human body utilizes sexual en­ergy. The unifying principle of his theories was the concept of energy, by which he meant no mystical elan vital, but an actual, physical component of man and the universe that could be measured and harnessed. The pursuit of this idea degen­erated into an obsession in the last phase of his life.
Advised by a psychiatrist at Co­lumbia University, Theodore P. Wolfe, to emigrate to the United States, he joined the throng of Jewish refugees from Nazi-ruled Europe in New York a few days before the outbreak of war in 1939. In Forest Hills, New York, he established the Orgone Institute, a laboratory and later a hospital. Despite his vicissitudes, he was now convinced that he had found a new kind of energy that could be stored in accumulators and used to strengthen the body against disease. He even ventured to treat cancer patients by placing them in boxes resembling telephone booths which supposedly collected orgone energy. This practice spawned the rumor that orgone accumulators could restore waning potency.
Such activities were not only denounced by the American Medical As­sociation, but also investigated by the Food and Drug Administration, which in 1954 enjoined him from distributing orgone accumulators and operating the Orgone Institute Press. When a court order was issued for the destruction of all accumula­tors, Reich defied it and soon found him­self the defendant in a trial that ended with a verdict of guilty and a two-year prison sentence. In March 1957 he entered Danbury Penitentiary where he was diag­nosed as paranoid, but he disdained treat­ment and died of heart disease in Lewisburg Penitentiary on November 3.
Although Reich has become almost synonymous with "sexual free­dom" in some quarters, and his admirers include some gay activists and theoreti­cians, there is not a single favorable refer­ence to homosexuality in his writings. He loathed homosexuals, never knowingly accepted a homosexual for treatment; and avoided overt homosexuals in his social and professional life. When a Norwegian physician recommended an individual for training with Reich, no sooner had the latter learned of the candidate's homo­sexuality than he rejected him with the words; "Ich will mit solchen Schweinereien nichts zu tun haben" (I want noth­ing to do with such filthiness). In a letter to A. S. Neill in 1948, Reich stated that while his discipline of sex economy dealt with the problems of natural genitality, the sexology promoted by the World League for Sexual Reform (Hirschfeld's bailiwick) concentrated on lingams, condoms, and homosexual perversions. He had earlier maintained that homosexuality was a disease of fascism that would "wither away" under socialism. Despite all this, the radical wave of the 1960s and later saw counterculture homosexuals turn to Reich as an authority for repudiating conven­tional morality and equating socialism with the untrammeled gratification of their own sexual impulses.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. David Boadella, Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of his Work, London: Vision Press, 1973; Eustace Chesser, Reich and Sexual Freedom, London: Vision Press, 1972; Use Ollendorff Reich, Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1969.
Warren Johansson

Renaissance, Italian
In Italy the term Renaissance designates a period somewhat different from that in the rest of Europe: the Italian Renaissance embraces the epoch that stretches from the late fourteenth century through the later decades of the sixteenth century, when the Catholic Counterreformation took hold. On the other side of the Alps, the Renaissance did not commence until the beginning of the sixteenth cen­tury, when it was introduced from Italy; yet it lasted somewhat longer there, at least in Protestant countries.
The word Renaissance (literally: rebirth) alludes to the impression, wide­spread in the period itself, that the ongoing cultural and artistic flowering was a kind of revival - on a Christian base, to be sure - of the glory of the ancient Romans, a revival attained on the very soil from which Rome itself had arisen.
A notable feature of the Italian Renaissance was an intense drive to re­cover the authentic character of classical antiquity. This impulse led to the redis­covery of original texts, chiefly Latin ones - though the study of Greek and Hebrew was also promoted. As a result of this trend, ancient manuscripts thought to have been lost were copied and disseminated, and a new branch of learning, philology, was founded.
The roots of the Renaissance He in the great upsurge of commerce and industry that occurred in Italy after the year 1000. These advances required cul­tural changes: merchants needed to know how to read and write and to keep ac­counts. A surplus of wealth accumulated that sufficed to maintain a number of scholars and investigators in "full-time employment." Since the traditional train­ing that religious schools provided was inadequate, lay schools appeared, from which a number of prestigious Italian universities developed. Becoming famous throughout Europe, the universities were one of the channels that diffused the Ital­ian Renaissance, permanently injecting its values into Western civilization.
Social Background. With respect to homosexuality the Renaissance atti­tude was not uniform. The beginning of the Renaissance - the late fourteenth century - coincided with increased perse­cution of homosexuals. Toward the middle of the fifteenth century, however, a more tolerant atmosphere began to prevail, and capital punishment became uncommon.
The upper classes - in part under the umbrella of libertine currents of thought - witnessed the spread of a mood of "live and let live," which did not ap­prove of homosexual behavior, but felt no obligation to condemn it either.
Evidence of the mindset that lies behind this trend is found for instance in the letters Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) and his friend Francesco Vettori (1474-1539) exchanged between 1513 and 1515 commenting about the homosexual behavior of this or that friend as the most natural and obvious thing in the world. Similarly, Baldassare Castiglione (1474-1529) treated homosexuality quite nonchalantly in his famous classic of manners, II Cortegiano (1529).
In short it is not an accident that beginning in the fifteenth century infor­mation proliferates on the rise of a sodo­mite subculture in the major Italian cities. Even in the previous century documents lament the existence of sodomite coteries. That these complaints were not baseless is shown by the documents of mass trials preserved in municipal archives, and in the literary allusions to the existence of specific zones in the cities where the sodo­mites went to look for sexual partners. The sermons St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) preached against sodomites in 1424-25 seem an almost inexhaustible source of relevant anecdotes.
Italian Renaissance Literature and Homosexuality. If society tolerated the subculture, the world of letters did not lag behind. Because of the boundless affection that humanist men of letters cherished for the Ancients, few had the courage to condemn, or even to refuse to condone, the tastes which the great Latin and Greek poets accepted without ques­tion. In emulation of the antique there appeared a rich literature of homosexual themes both in Latin and in Italian - so rich that it has no equal in quantity and quality until the twentieth century.
Naturally, one should not con­clude that every declaration of homosex­ual love stemming from the Renaissance corresponds to experiential reality, rooted in the emotional preference of the author. Often writers of the fifteenth century contented themselves with imitating Vergil, Martial, Catullus, and other major figures of the past. A similar trend ap­peared in Elizabethan England.
Nonetheless, it is a mistake to interpret, as is often done, every homosex­ual utterance as simply the product of literary convention. In the Italian Renais­sance no risk attended the expression of homosexual sentiments and wishes. Hence many, profiting from literary and amatory conventions, took advantage of this free­dom to set down their own homosexual feelings, though in the guise of "imita­tions" of the revered models of antiquity.
For these individuals the coming of the Counterreformation was a real trag­edy that effectively ended the Renaissance. Shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century this rigorist trend brought a chill climate of moralism and censure that proved intensely hostile to the expression of homoerotic themes.
Classical Imitation. Italian Ren­aissance homosexual discourse was much given to donning the garments of classical antiquity. Latin Renaissance poetry often shows it proximity to its sources by its choice of terms and themes. On the one hand, one finds recyclings of specific au­thors, of Martial, as in the case of the Hermaphroditus (1425) of Antonio Beccadelli (1394-1471), and of less jocular authors, as in the Hecathalegium (1489) of Pacifico Massimo of Ascoli (ca. 1400-1500) - not to mention the invec­tives that Italian Humanists launched against one another. One finds classical trappings in the accusations of sodomy that Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481) launched against Cosimo de' Medici in 1448; or in those of Giovanni Pontano (1426-1503) against a certain "Antonino," or yet again by Andrea Dazzi (1473-1538) against Poliziano. As regards invectives against behavior Juvenal remained the obvious point of reference, as had occurred earlier in the Middle Ages. Imitation also involved other authors (e.g., Vergil), as seen in Niccolo Lelio Cosmico (before 1420-1500), who was accused by contem­poraries of being a sodomite; Angelo Ambrogini, known as Poliziano (1454 - 1494), who wrote also in classical Greek; Pomponio Leto (1421-1498), who was also arrested on suspicion of sodomy; and Pietro Bembo (1470-1547).
Jocose Poetry. Jocose or burlesque poetry enjoyed particular favor. In Florence it became so popular that as early as 1325 a law explicitly forbade the composition and singing of sodomitical songs, which were usually in verse.
Satirical poetry in Italian contin­ued the traditions of medieval jocose and burlesque poetry; thus one finds the invec­tives (in which accusations of sodomy abound) of Matteo Franco (1447-1494) against Luigi Pulci, and of Nicolo Franco (1515-1570) against Pietro Aretino ¡1541).
To this general class belong the pasquinades, or public satires, in which the accusations of sodomy are unceasing. Valerio Marucci has provided an excellent sampling of this material, but much of it remains unpublished.
In burlesque poetry, as early as 1406-7 one finds two significant docu­ments, the so-called "Tenzone fra Dante e Forese" (long attributed to Dante himself) and the work entitled L'Aquettino. From 1407-9 comes a long poem entitled La Buca di Monteferrato of Stef ano Finiguerri (d. after 1422), in which a large number of Florentines were accused of sodomy and chastised for it in allusive language that abounds in double entendres.
This kind of cryptic language was carried to perfection in the so-called Burchiellesque poetry, and utilized also in Bernesque poetry, which enjoyed immense fame in the fifteenth and sixteenth centu­ries. A later development of of burlesque poetry was to give rise to Fidentian verse, which was also homoerotic in theme.
Prose. Relying upon the prece­dent of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), one of the "fathers" of the Italian lan­guage, who included stories with homo­sexual motifs in his Decameron, Italian writers did not flinch from offering an abundance of new tales and anecdotes featuring homosexual characters. Citing only the most important, one may note short stories and jokes on homosexual themes by the following: Gentile Sermini (fifteenth century), Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), Sabbadino degli Arienti (1450-1510), Nicolo dell'Angeli dal Bucine (ca. 1448-1532), Matteo Bandello (1485-1561), Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1543), Girolamo Morlini (sixteenth century; wrote in Latin), Francesco Molza (1489-1544), and Sebastiano Erizzo (1528-1585).
A particular type of writing, a mock essay on an erotic theme, appeared in the Commento alia "ficheide" di Padre Siceoot Anibal Caro (1507-1566) and with the audacious La Cazzaria (1531) of Anto­nio Vignali de' Buonagiunti (d. 1559).
In prose writing a special place belongs to the numerous treatises on love, starting with that of the neo-Platonist Marsilio Ficino, in which the discussion of the permissibility of love between men is almost an obligatory commonplace. Among authors of treatises discussing this question are Tullia d'Aragona (1508-1556), Girolamo Benivieni (1453?-1542), Giu­seppe Betussi (1512?-1573?), Giovanni Pico della Mirándola (1463-1494), Flaminio Nobili (1530-1590), and Francesco Sansovino (1521-1583).
Theatre. Homosexual characters and situations appear in the Janus Sacerdos, a Latin comedy of 1427, as well as dramas by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), Pietro Aretino, and Poliziano.
Love Lyrics. Lyrical love poetry addressed to persons of the same sex was cultivated during the Renaissance by poets who often assembled a genuine canzoniere or personal anthology for the beloved.
From the imposing collection of Tuscan lyrics of the fifteenth century edited by Antonio Lanza, one must note at least Giovanni Gherardi (ca. 1367-1446), Andrea Bellacci (fifteenth century), Filippo Scar­latti (1442-after 1487), and Antonio di Guido (d. 1486). Also noteworthy is the love poetry of Michelangelo, Francesco Beccuti (1509-1553), Benedetto Varchi, and Torquato Tasso (1544-1595).
Serm ons. The social historian will find much material in sermons, providing anecdotes and detailed descriptions of elements of the homosexual life. Among the most important are, besides those al­ready cited by Bernardino of Siena, the sermons of Antonino of Florence (Antonio Pierozzi; 1389-1459), Roberto of Lecce (Roberto Caracciolo,- 1425-1495), and the famous Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498).
Visual Arts. In the late Middle Ages, artists were organized in workshops whose personnel were made up, for the most part, of members of a single extended family. In fifteenth-century Florence, however, rising prosperity and new tech­nical advances made it possible for gifted artists to set up studios of their own. In these independent establishments they hired unrelated young men [garzoni) who served as apprentices, models, and ser­vants. Women did not function as models and, in an era in which ideal beauty was a supreme value, comely youths posed for renderings of both the male and female form. At the same time, artists became familiar with the ancient heritage of ped­erasty that the humanists had been uncov­ering. The homosexual character of classi­cal themes, such as Ganymede and Or­pheus, became known and cherished. In this climate it is not surprising that some artists succumbed to the charms of their garzoni and to those of other attractive youths. Such major figures as Donatello, Leonardo, and Botticelli are known to have had homosexual affairs. At the end of the fifteenth century a period of religious and political disturbances began, which made the situation of the artists, then reaching the zenith of prestige in what subsequently came to be known as the High Renais­sance, more uncertain, though their same-sex amours by no means ceased. Here the names of Michelangelo, Giovanni Anto­nio Bazzi (called "II Sodoma"), Benvenuto Cellini (twice accused), Jacopo Pontormo, and Caravaggio must be recorded. Eventu­ally, however, the Counterref ormation put an end to this period of efflorescence of homoeroticism in the arts.
See also Art, Visual; Florence; Papacy; Venice.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Giovanni Dall'Orto, "La Fenice di Sodoma: essere omosessuale nell'Italia del Rinascimento," Sodoma, 4 ¡1988), 31-53; Antonio Lanza, ed., Lirici toscani del quattrocento, 1 vols., Rome: Bulzoni, 1973; Valerio Marucci, ed., Pasquinate romane del Cinquecento, 2 vols., Rome: Salerno, 1984; James Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance, New Haven: Yale Univer­sity Press, 1986.
Giovanni Dall'Orto

Renault, Mary (pseudonym of Mary Challans; 1905-1983)
Born in England in 1905, Mary Challans was educated at St. Hugh's Col­lege, Oxford, in preparation for a teaching career. When she decided to become a writer instead, she concluded that she needed to see more of life and trained as a nurse from 1933 through 1937. After World War II broke out, she worked as a nurse and wrote in her off hours.
After the war, Challans settled in South Africa, where she spent the rest of her life, traveling periodically to mainland Greece, Crete, and other points. She was an intensely private woman, as shown by her use of a pseudonym, and never sought the "writer-celebrity" limelight, despite the fact that she was world-famous and highly esteemed. Since she never married, and since homosexuality and the nature of male and female are constant leitmotifs of her fiction, it would be only sensible to presume that she wrote about things which concerned her; from this one would con­clude that Challans was a lesbian - or at least bisexual - but there is, as yet, no direct biographical evidence.
She began her career with an apprenticeship in the world of popular fiction, or romance novels. She later as­serted that if everything she had written before The Charioteer were to perish, she would only feel relief. Her first novel, Promise of Love (1939), dealt with lesbian­ism as a subtheme, and her other romance novels continued to probe the nature of male and female in a very nonstandard way for the genre. Also nonstandard was the continued development of her writing style and a constant background of ancient Greek themes.
With The Charioteer in 1953, Challans began to break new ground for the popular novel. (The book's publication was delayed until 1959 in America, a fact which Challans attributed to McCarthyism.) The ancient Greek subthemes as­sume a much more prominent role, and the foreground tale is an overt account of male homosexual love. The novel describes physical love largely through ellipses (Challans was never to vary this habit of restraint), but otherwise pulls very few punches.
With her next book, The Last of the Wine (1956), Challans left popular romances behind her and took up a career in historical fiction. This is a problematic genre, since it has been so often abused. Yet, very early on, she was receiving the highest possible accolades for her faithful recreations of ancient Hellas. She typi­cally included a bibliography and an "Author's Note" in each novel, explaining what was historical fact and what was not.
The Last of the Wine is one of the few classic novels of male homosexual love, and has been cherished by many gay men since it first appeared (it has never gone out of print). Other novels followed in steady progression: The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, The Mask of Apollo,
Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and The Praise Singer. She also published a non-fiction work describing her research into Alexander the Great: The Search for Alexander. Almost all her historical nov­els seem assured of a healthy life for many years to come. The theme which is dating the novels most quickly is the Freudian mythology which Challans unfortunately decided to weave into her tales.
Challans' significance is similar to that of Marguerite Yourcenar, another lesbian who wrote magnificent books about male homosexuality. It is a somewhat puzzling phenomenon, in that one would expect them to write novels about women in love, and the beauty of women. But somehow these two women (and they are not alone) had extremely strong percep­tions of male beauty and of love between men. In Challans' case, that has left The Charioteer, The Last of the Wine, and The Persian Boy as a literary heritage.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Bernard F. Dick, The Hellenism of Mary Renault, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972.
Geoff Puterbaugh

Resorts
Resorts frequented by homosex­ual men - and to a lesser extent by lesbi­ans - tend to be at the shore. A few inland exceptions, such as Palm Springs and Russian River in California occur, but winter resorts, such as skiing sites, have rarely developed a visible homosexual presence. The reason for this specializa­tion lies probably in the association of sun and sensuality, and gay resorts function more clearly as places of sexual assigna­tion than those favored, say, by family groups. An interesting contrast is that between nude beaches, which attract a gay clientele, and nudist camps, which rarely do.
Some well-heeled gay visitors travel to resorts in the company of their regular lovers, while others hope to find romance there - either with other visitors or with hustlers. The availability of the latter depends in large measure on the economic situation of the region in which the resort is situated; those which are remote from a demographic reservoir of impoverished individuals tend not to have many hustlers. Apparently, gay resorts do not favor the migratory legions of prosti­tutes that work the heterosexual circuits, so that local talent is necessary. In a wealthy town, such as Palm Springs, this pool of sex workers is simply lacking. Hence the attraction of Third World countries for some "sexual tourists."
This article observes a distinc­tion between resorts proper, which are located away from major population cen­ters (their attraction lying in part in this very distance), and metropolitan beaches. Distance lends enchantment - or at least a sense of security inasmuch as those em­ployed in such conservative occupations as banking and law often do not feel that they can truly relax except far from their business associates and family. During the tourist season the typical resort town functions around the clock: bars, restau­rants, and other places of relaxation and social contact are open into the wee hours of the morning, in contrast with an indus­trial town where all night life ends by eleven in the evening. In resorts frequented by homosexuals, many of the guest houses are owned by gay proprietors and solicit patrons through advertisements in the gay press. Occasional exceptions to the sepa­ration between resort towns and metro­politan centers occur, as Rio de Janeiro, which has beaches for its residents, but which functions as a resort for foreign gay men, especially during the mardi gras or carnival season.
History. The sources for the popu­larity of modern gay resorts are various, including the old arcadian dream of a place apart from hostile heterosexual pressures, a long-standing tradition of homosexual travel, and the sexual exiles and remit­tance men who tended to flock together during their involuntary foreign sojourns. The first stirrings of the impulse to the gay resort stem from the beginnings of mass travel to the Mediterranean in the nine­teenth century. During the previous cen­tury the homosexual archeologist J. J. Winckelmann had been responsible for popularizing, in elite circles at least, a notion of Italy as the homeland of aes­thetic paganism. This idea was subse­quently reinforced by such writers as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds. As a practical matter the opening of trunk railway Unes linking northern Europe to the Mediterranean made the fabled spots available to a considerably enlarged clien­tele. By the end of the nineteenth century Florence, Capri, and Sicily had well devel­oped colonies of homosexual and lesbian expatriates. The Tuscan capital tended to attract the more intellectual and artistic visitors for longer stays, the southern is­lands a more hedonistic and nomadic crowd. The special qualities of Capri have been captured by such novelists as Norman Douglas, Compton Mackenzie, and Roger Peyrefitte. Later in the twentieth century, as Capri's attractions faded, other Medi­terranean islands, including Mykonos, Lesbos, and Crete in Greece, became cen­ters of gay tourism. At the end of the 1980s the top three gay summer resorts were all in Spain: Sitges, Ibiza, and Torremolinos.
The French acquisition of North Africa (beginning in 1830) had opened up historic Islamic countries with a long tra­dition of availableyouth. Thus Andre Gide was to find Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas visiting Algeria for sexual pur­poses in 1894; he was surprised not so much by the purpose of their visit as the frankness with which it was avowed. Because of its international status, the city of Tangier in Morocco remained a gay center at least through the 1960s. More adventurous travelers could, of course, visit Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, but these coun­tries seem not to have developed any spe­cific sites of fascination for the sexual tourist.
Contemporary Patterns. In the United States, the east coast boasts two resorts of particular renown: Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Key West, Florida. Just when these locales emerged as gay meccas is hard to say because they began their careers as places favored by artists, writ­ers, and theatre people, with a consider­able though not originally dominant gay admixture - "tipping" probably only in the 1960s. Fire Island, easily accessible on day trips from New York City, belongs to a special category intermediate between the metropolitan beach and the true resort. In a number of states of the United States enterprising individuals have set up gay ranches for private customers. To some extent this practice parallels nudist camps, which are themselves part of a large, but little known subculture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. James Money, Capri, Island of Pleasure, London: Deutsch, 1987; Odysseus . .. An Accommoda­tions Guide for Gay Men, New York: Odysseus Enterprises, 1989; Spartacus International Gay Guide, Berlin: Bruno Gmunder, 1989.
Wayne R. Dynes

Richard I the Lion-hearted (1157-1199)
King of England. Richard was famed for his reckless courage and ex­treme cruelty - he massacred 3,000 brave Moslems who had surrendered Acre to the Crusaders under his safe conduct - as well as for gallantry to many, including Saladin. Favorite of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who set him against his royal father Henry IT of England - himself falsely accused of having loved Thomas Becket, with whom he did share a bed on occasion while carousing and wenching together before Becket became Archbishop of Can­terbury - Richard has been seen by some as a mama's boy.
The Norman and Angevin (Plantagenet) kings of England were, along with their courtiers, regularly accused by monk­ish chroniclers of sodomy. It was not true of Henry II, who made his son's fiancee Alice of France his mistress to the outrage of Eleanor and Richard. The accusation rings true, however, for William IT Rufus (ca. 1056-1100), as for his nephew Prince William (son of his brother Henry I), who was coasting down the Channel with his frivolous, effeminate companions, when the White Ship capsized - "God's venge­ance on the sodomites," as the chroniclers declared.
Richard was the great-grandson of Henry I and scion on the other side of the brutal, vicious, exuberant counts of Anjou, thought by some to be genetically sadistic. It is perhaps not true that Richard fell in love with the young king of France, Philip IT Augustus. Their intimate friend­ship was occasioned by their plotting against Richard's father. But Richard never showed any serious interest in women. He waited very late to marry Berengaria of Navarre; he spent practically no time with her, and failed to sire any heir, an impor­tant obligation of kingship. During a stay in Messina in 1190 he seems to have de­cided to abjure his preference for male sexual partners. He appeared barefoot in a chapel and, surrounded by high ecclesias­tics, Richard confessed his past misdeeds. Although he was absolved on promise of good behavior, he apparently relapsed later.
When Richard, who spent only ten months of his eleven-year reign in England, was imprisoned or captured on his way back from Jerusalem by the Duke of Austria, an ally of Philip II of France, now his enemy, a visitor sang outside the prison a troubadour's song, composed long before by the king, as a signal of his arrival. Perhaps this was a lover, but the sources do not name a single one of them.
To Richard's reign belongs the account of the London underworld and its homosexual denizens composed by Rich­ard of Devizes. Like Edward II (1284-1327), Richard IT (1367-1400) probably practiced sodomy. None of the medieval sodomitical monarchs and princes of England died a natural death, unlike almost all their exclusively heterosexual royal rivals in France, the Capetians.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. James A. Brundage, Richard Lion Heart, New York: Scribner's, 1974.
William A. Percy

Rimbaud, Arthur (1854-1891)
French symbolist poet. The son of an army officer who deserted his wife and family in 1860, he had an unhappy childhood under his mother's harsh disci­pline that may explain the spirit of adoles­cent rebellion that characterizes his first poems, written in 1870-71. Some of these astonishingly mature pieces attack those in authority, while others dream of a dif­ferent world of total freedom. The most celebrated is "Le Bateau ivre," in which the poet imagines himself as a boat com­pletely out of control, drifting wildly down rivers, into seas, and across oceans. Imme­diately after writing this poem, he set off for Paris in September 1871, where he was welcomed by Paul Verlaine, ten years his senior, whose unorthodox versification appealed to him. He then put into practice the code that he had formulated in his famous "Lettre du voyant" of May 1871, that the poet should sharpen his percep­tion by submitting to every sort of experi­ence and then transmitting what he has perceived directly, without conscious control.
Nearly all of his poetry belongs to the period of his homosexual love affair with Verlaine, which ended in July 1873 when the two quarreled violently and the older man shot him in the wrist. He had broken away from verse forms and adopted the prose poem in a group of some forty passages called the Illuminations, which however obscure in meaning, have a unique and compelling poetic quality that springs from the vividness of the imagery, the rhythm of the phrases, and the directness of the language. In the summer of 1873 he wrote Une Saison en enfer, again in an obscure but often compelling prose, in which he admitted to having lived in a fool's paradise and to have spent a "season in hell" with his lover.
After this he abandoned litera­ture, and in a sense abandoned life, becom­ing a solitary wanderer, first in Europe and then the East Indies, and finally in Ethio­pia, where he may have had some homo­sexual liaisons with the natives. He died in a hospital in Marseille in 1891 at the age of 37, indifferent to the extraordinary reputation as a youthful genius of the poetic that he had acquired after Verlaine wrote an essay on him in his Poetes maudits in 1884.
The homosexual elements in Rimbaud's work are slight, even if the creative period of his life was one of his liaison with Verlaine, and some modern critics have seen in his adolescent eroti­cism the key to his life's work, a rebellion that transcends the mere personal and culminates in the shattering of society's moral conventions and the negation of its traditional values. By seeking inspiration through narcotics that placed him on the margin of respectable society and its realm of experience, Rimbaud reinforced the image of the poet as outsider, as one who has the right to create his own mode of expression rather than adhering to the received canons of literature. He remains the unmatched archetype of the adoles­cent poet whose homoerotic feelings lifted him far above the imitation of which most youthful writers alone would be capable - into the sphere of creative genius.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert Montal, L'adolescent Rimbaud, Lyon: Les Ecrivains réunis, 1954; Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, New York: New Directions, 1961.
Warren Johansson

Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of (1647-1680)
English poet and intellectual. After receiving the privileged education of a Restoration nobleman - Wadham Col­lege, Oxford, followed by the grand tour of the continent - Rochester became a member of a clique at the court of Charles II, where he was famous for his wit, skep­ticism, and ostensibly dissolute life. His surviving works are few. about 75 poems, an adaptation of a tragedy, and a scene from an unfinished play. Although his free use of sexual language earned him censure and bowdlerization over the centuries, his satirical bite has always guaranteed him admirers. Restoration culture underwent strong French influence, and it is from the libertine poets of that country, as well as the Latin satirists that were a common source, that Rochester seems to have de­rived his main impetus. As understood in the seventeenth century, libertinism meant not praise of licentious excess, but a skeptical attitude toward received val­ues that went hand in hand with an effort to set forth a new and more rational ap­proach to living. Thus the light-heartedness and flippancy of some of Rochester's poetry must be viewed within a larger context of serious purpose.
Contemporary testimony leaves little doubt that Rochester was personally bisexual. His account of a rake's reminis­cence is probably not too far from his own attitudes: "Nor shall our love fits, Chloris, be forgot,/ When each the well-looked linkboy strove t'enjoy,/ And the best kiss was deciding lot/ Whether the boy fucked you or I the boy." ("The Maimed De­bauchee," 11. 37-40). The same approach, recallingHorace's statement that a woman or a boy would suit his needs equally well, recurs in "The Platonic Lady," "Love a Woman? You're an Ass!," and "Upon His Drinking Bowl."
There has been some dispute about the canon of poems to be attributed to Rochester. It seems generally agreed, however, that the obscene play in rhyming couplets Sodom, first published in 1684 and frequently reprinted under his name, is not by him.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Works: The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Roches­ter, David M. Vieth, ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968. Criticism: R. M. Baine, "Rochester or Fishboume: A Question of Authorship," Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), 201-6; Dustin H. Griffin, Satires Against Man: The Poems of Rochester, Berkeley: Univer­sity of California Press, 1973.
Wayne R. Dynes

Rock and Roll
See Music, Popular; Punk Rock.

Röhm [Roehm], Ernst (1887-1934)
German soldier and politician; leader of the Schutz-Abteilung (SA) of the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the Weimar Republic. Röhm was an organizer of right-wing paramilitary groups who, in 1919, first made Hitler aware of his own political potential, and for the following fifteen years the two were close friends. Magnus Hirschf eldremarked that the only photograph in which Hitler appeared smiling was one in which he was in Röhm's company.
From the fall of 1930 onward Röhm transformed the SA Brownshirt militia from a handful of unemployed thugs and embittered veterans of World War I into an effective fighting force some half a million strong - an instrument of Nazi terror. He had in 1928-30 lived abroad as an instructor of the - largely Amerindian - Bolivian Army and boasted in letters to his friends in Germany that he had introduced the recruits not only to Prussian discipline but also to homosexual love - which until then had supposedly been unknown there. Róhm, who made no secret of his homo­sexual proclivities and of his aversion to women, was well known in the gay sub­culture of Berlin, and had down to the end of 1932 been the object of five different court proceedings for his "immoral" con­duct. Hitler had resolved to rid himself of his chief of staff, all the more as the Social Democratic newspaper Münchner Post had published letters that established Röhm's homosexuality beyond doubt. Also, oppo­nents of Röhm within the Nazi ranks and the psychiatrist Oswald Bumke had writ­ten to Hitler denouncing the S A leader and the homosexuals in his entourage as a corrupting example for the youth of Ger­many. One opponent went so far as to say that even intellectuals could not under­stand how it was that so many homosexu­als occupied leadership positions in the Nazi Party. Röhm for his part proudly asserted that the homoerotic, male-bond­ing element within the Nazi paramilitary units had given them the crucial edge in the struggle with the Reichsbanner and the Communists.
After the accession of the Na­tional Socialists to power in March 1933, Röhm remained in Hitler's good graces, but as part of a compromise with the Reichswehr leadership, whose support he needed to become Führer. Hitler allowed Goring and Himmler to murder Röhm together with dozens of loyal SA officers on the night of June 30-July 1/ 1934 - the "Night of the Long Knives." It was later said, somewhat dubiously, that with Röhm the last socialist in the Nazi Party died, but so perished the quixotic hopes of homo­sexuals such as Hans Blüher within the right-wing, pro-Nazi groups that Hitler's rule would mean greater toleration. The regime hypocritically used Röhm's sexual life as a pretext for claiming that it was "protecting German youth from corrup­tion" by liquidating Röhm and his clique, but a newspaper in Kassel created a scan­dal by publishing stories to the effect that the truth had long been known to Hitler and his chief associates.
See also Fascist Perversion, Myth of.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Max Gallo, The Night of the Long Knives, New York: Harper and Row, 1972; James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, New York: Amo Press, 1975.
Warren Johansson

Role
In social science usage, the con­cept of role contrasts with that of self (or identity). In dramaturgical sociology, as on theatre stages, an actor plays many roles over the course of a career, or even on a single night. Some actors always play the same kind of character. Some are swal­lowed up in one role, while others have extensive repertoires of different types and do not live onstage roles when they are offstage. Similarly, "homosexual roles" are enacted in appropriate settings by persons who play other roles at other times or places. As important as affirming homo­sexuality may be to some individuals, or as recognizing homosexuals may be in some cultures, no one is onstage as "a homosex­ual" and nothing but "a homosexual" all the time.
Theoretical Considerations. In the basic social science introduction to the concept, Ralph Linton (1936) defined status as "a collection of rights and duties," and role as dynamic status: how rights and duties are realized in interaction. Each person in a society has more than one status, and therefore plays multiple roles. Moreover, a particular status involves, not a single role, but an array of associated roles, e.g., the "teacher role" in relation to students is not the same as the "teacher role" to administrators (or to the Parent-Teachers Association, etc.). There are overlapping simultaneous statuses so that different roles may be played even within a single setting. For instance, in a women-only bar it may not matter that one is a lesbian lawyer. Entry depends upon being a woman and of legal age. If there is a raid on the bar, the attorney role may be activated. Responding to a sexual proposition makes sexual status salient. Within this interaction, being a mother,
daughter, wife - all roles that she plays in other times and places - may not matter, although these outside statuses may affect where or whether the sexual proposition is accepted, if one of the perceived require­ments of the mother, daughter, or wife role is not to bring sexual partners home. Obli­gations to another person not present may impinge on interaction, and may do so whether or not the woman explicitly defines herself as, say, "wife" [to herself, to others present, or to those with whom she resides).
Analysis of shifting, overlapping, and multiple simultaneous status enact­ment in roles easily becomes very com­plex. Sometimes, it seems that an abstract "situation" determines (rather than merely limits) statuses; at other times it seems that role theorists believe that any sort of role can be presented (that is, that there are no constraints of plausibility on acting in public). Phenomenological analysis can make the "local accomplishment" of even the simplest communication seem mi­raculous. Perhaps even more confusingly, as Goodenough noted, use of the term "role" often drifts from this definition of enacted rights and obligations to any and all kinds of statements about social cate­gories, selves, and "personality structures." In the case of "homosexual role," discus­sion blithely posits psychological entities detached from any interaction, although to be meaningful "role" must be a rela­tional term, involving relation to actors of other roles and/or to an audience. Enacting a role plausibly does not require full com­mitment to a role or total self-identifica­tion with it. Indeed, an individual's "role distance" may facilitate plausible perform­ance, whereas totally embracing a role may land a person in the realm of psycho-pathology (Goffman). And role strain is "normal: in general the individual's total role obligations are over-demanding" as well as incompatible (Goode).
Homosexual Aspects. In an often cited paper which consolidates Anglo-American stereotypes into a "theoretical construct," Mcintosh (1968) posited a dichotomous homosexual/heterosexual categorization apart from any interaction and, indeed, based on no empirical data. Mcintosh's "homosexual role" lacks any of the subtle multiplicities of situated meanings of role as used by classical role theorists (none of whose writings she cited). It is a functionalist, not an interactionist construct, in effect a bogeyman to scare boys away from homosexuality. What those enacting a (the?) heterosexual role expect from those playing "the homosexual role," according to Mcintosh, is exhibi­tion of (1) effeminacy, (2) more or less exclusive homosexual feelings and behav­ior, (3) attraction to and (4) attempted seduction of all young men, or, perhaps all men ("sexuality will play a part of some kind in all his relations with other men"). Where, when, or whether the person play­ing Mcintosh's version of "the homosex­ual role" has a right to act effeminately and seduce men and/or boys is matter she does not discuss. Implicitly, this un-male "role" was enacted to/for a heterosexual male other. In some other cultures (especially Polynesian ones) in which there is a socie­tal conception of gender-crossing homo­sexuality, blatant specimens of failed masculine socialization could be tolerated, because such persons provided vivid warn­ings of what boys must avoid becoming.
Although, as Whitam noted, Mcintosh's treatment "violates the pre­vailing definition and conventional usage of this concept in sociology," and cannot "explain homosexuality," there are homo­sexual roles to analyze apart from the monster of the heterosexual imagination conjured up by Mcintosh. Within homo­sexual interactions and relationships, complementary roles exist, e.g., mentor/ initiate or sodomite/catamite occur where homosexuality is organized by age; hus­tler/trick or patron/protégé in class socie­ties, especially where there are "homosex­ual occupations" such as dancing boys; trade/queer, hombre/maricón (in Latin America), or brave/berdache (among the North American Indians) where homo­sexuality is organized by gender distinct­iveness. Each of these pairs has been listed in insertor/insertee order, although sexual behavior is only one aspect of these roles. A person may play one or more of these roles without possessing a homosexual identity, any strong commitment to or preference for homosexuality. Indeed, some of the roles may not require even feigned homosexual desire.
How to perform the sexual and other rights and obligations of these roles is learned. One does not learn how to be a homosexual any more than one learns how to be a husband or a wife directly in pri­mary socialization with one's natal fam­ily. One may learn about such roles, that is, learn the cultural script for each. Boys may learn about "the male role" without male role models, just as they may learn about queers without seeing any. Simi­larly, girls may hear about dykes. Learning about a "homosexual role" of the sort Mcintosh portrayed may motivate suppressing homosexual desires, and may also motivate acting out exaggerated cross-gender behavior before realizing that such behavior is not a necessary attribute of homosexuality within a homosexual sub­culture. Some observers have discerned a transient effeminate stage in the uniniti­ated boy's or man's process of distinguish­ing societal expectations of effeminacy from actual subcultural expectations. Similarly, a butch phase may have made a woman's sexual interest in other women visible. Such a traditional phase of cross-gender role exaggeration may be attenu­ated or altogether lacking for those who, growing up with homosexual desires, are able to perceive a lesbian or gay role for themselves unmarked by cross-gender behavior and demeanor. More recently, a phase of hypermasculinity ("macho") has been central to socialization into some gay male worlds.
Prior to contact with other gay or lesbian people or groupings, gender exag­geration (toward either extreme of the gender continuum) may be the only con­ceivable way to signal desired sexual vari­ance. Generally, anticipatory socialization is incomplete and either ambiguous or stereotyped. Moreover, anticipatory so­cialization "helps only to the extent it is accurate. ... If it is not accurate, it may actually impede adjustment, for perform­ing the acquired role will necessitate un­learning as well as further learning" (Thornton and Nardi). The gender-cross­ing idiom for recognizing homosexuals, is learned in early socialization in many societies (including the United States) in which age-grading is not central to organizing homosexual relations.
"Learning about" may heavily condition initial attempts to do what is expected of a sexual partner (husband, wife, or homosexual), but there is also secon­dary socialization onstage in the role, as well as intra-psychic rehearsal for playing it. Gender roles (how to act male or female) are part of primary socialization in Anglo-Saxon North America, but the roles en­acted in heterosexual marriage, as well as those enacted in gay subcultures are part of later learning/socialization. Breaking the externally imposed notion that homo­sexuality requires having to live out society's stereotypes of what "a homosex­ual" are is a key part of secondary sociali­zation within gay and lesbian subcultures. Nonetheless, neophytes tend to play their preconceptions of a role rigidly, or even ritualistically (Goffman). Within gay or lesbian communities or networks, most people discard the "queer" or "dyke" role (at least as conceived in the dominant society) and learn what others involved in homosexual scenarios expect. Such expec­tations may be only slightly conditioned by societal stereotypes, although residues of such images may be eroticized, or other­wise unconsciously maintained.
In all cultures, whatever the dominant conception or valuation of homosexuality, a merger of self and role is not inevitably achieved. Not only is there homosexuality outside subcultures, and behavior contrary to societal expectations, but there are individual conceptions of all roles in all societies. The process of role acquisition is not mere training in au­tomaton-like replication of fixed roles. Human beings create meaning even when they are trying to follow a social script exactly. Conceptions of what homosexual roles require vary within as well as among societies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Erving Goffman, Encounters, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961¡ William J. Goode, "A Theory of Role Strain," American Sociological Review, 25 (1960), 483-96; Ward Goodenough, "Rethinking Status and Role," in S. Tyler, ed., Cognitive Anthropology, New York: Holt, 1965, pp. 311-30; Ralph Linton, The Study of Man, New York: Appleton, 1936; Mary Mcintosh, "The Homosexual Role," Social Problems, 16(1968), 182-92; Russell Thornton and Peter M. Nardi, "Dynamics of Role Acquisition," American Journal of Sociology, 80 (1975), 870-84; Frederick J. Whitam, "The Homosexual Role Revisited," Journal of Sex Research, 13 (1977), 1-11.
Stephen O. Murray

Rolfe, Frederick William ("Baron Corvo"; 1860-1913)
English adventurer, novelist, and historian. Born in London as the son of a dissenting piano manufacturer, he left school at 15, then studied briefly at Ox­ford. He served as a tutor and made ends meet as a poorly paid hack writer. He found a number of patrons during his ca­reer, but his lifelong attempt to convince the Catholic Church - to which he had become a convert - that he had a vocation for the priesthood developed (or rather accented) a pathological state of mind that bordered on paranoia, and inevitably led to his break with it.
In 1890 he received from Caro­line, the Duchess of Sforza-Cesarini, the title of Baron Corvo, and she regarded him as her adopted grandson. While working for the firm of G. W. Wilson &. Co. in London in 1893, he invented underwater photography, but with no financial gain. To the Yellow Book he contributed six "Stories Toto Told Me" (1898); these leg­ends of the saints, with 26 additional ones, were printed as In His Own Image (1901). A work written on commission for the money, the Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901), displays his curious fund of knowledge, vivid but undisciplined imagi­nation, and considerable prose talent. His self-deluded, self-justifying, spiritual dreams of a rejected convert who became the noblest of popes furnished the material for his best work of fiction, Hadrian the Seventh (1904), to which he added mali­cious sketches of his supposed enemies. The central character, Hadrian, though endowed with Rolfe's identity, still blurs the boundaries between autobiography, while the secondary characters, all pup­pets manipulated as part of the drama of Hadrian, stem directly from Rolfe's expe­rience. Although the work is remarkable for its passages of wit and erudition, it spoils its effect by yielding to anti-socialist melodrama. The last years of his life were spent as a parasite in Venice. An idealized chronicle of the period from December 1908 to July 1909, with parting shots at his enemies, is contained in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, edited by A. J. A. Symons in 1934. To this subject matter Rolfe added a tender account of homosex­ual love, disguised as the hero Nicholas Crabbe's love for Zilda, a girl who lived and dressed as the boy Zildo.
Homosexuality, and more particularly pederasty, as subjects for lit­erature, were much in Rolfe's mind while he was writing this work. Sometime in 1909 he had sent to the British pederast John Gambril Nicholson a "specimen" of some ten thousand words, an experiment in f ormulatinghomosexual experiences as though they were his own. In September of the sameyear he began writing to an English visitor to Italy, Charles Masson Fox, a series of letters that may well be the most painful and the most erotic homosexual correspondence in English. Readers have found in them evidence that Rolfe was a corruptor of innocent youth, an insatiable and unrepentant sodomite, or contrari­wise mere begging letters concocted out of the literature of homosexuality and the author's own imagination. They in effect promise his patron the sexual services of fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boys, many of them inexperienced.
Rarely has any man left so clear an account of his own sexual nature and his passionate hunger for its fulfillment, along with the tragic evidence of its con­stant frustration. Rolfe's own preference was for boys sixteen to eighteen years old - the upper limit of the pederast's range of interest. But with his slender and uncer­tain means he simply could not pay hus­tlers' fees or rent suitable premises for the rendezvous. He felt real sympathy for the Venetian boys - gondoliers and the like - with whom he associated, and bitterly regretted that he could do no more for them. His failure to achieve the erotic conquests for which he longed paralleled all of the other disappointments of his life. He succeeded in nothing that he attempted, and was denied everything that he sought from the church except faith itself.
Rolfe has been the object of a cult, inspired perhaps by the fascination which the career of a pretender with equal touches of the holy and the demonic exerts on those fated to live their adventures vicari­ously through literature. He is a classic type of the homosexual "begging intellec­tual," constantly trying to live by his wits and to bask in the favor of the wealthy and powerful, yet doomed by the inner flaws of his personality to the margin of society and even of sanity. Bom without the means and social position to realize his grandiose ambitions, he nevertheless left a heritage that is part of English literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Miriam J. Benkovitz, Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977; A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo, New York: Macmillan, 1934.
Warren Johansson

Roman Emperors
Although many Roman sover­eigns took their official duties seriously, others - especially in the first century of the empire - used their almost limitless powers to secure personal pleasure. Ro­man biographers and historians supply abundant records of their careers, includ­ing their characteristic weaknesses. The first emperors, known as Julio-Claudian, came from the family of Julius Caesar. Although no Roman emperor ever failed to marry, Edward Gibbon remarked that "of the first fifteen emperors Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct" (heterosexual).
Julio-Claudian Dynasty. Julius Caesar [ca. 102-44 b.c.), notorious as "the husband of every woman and the wife of every man," prostituted himself as a teen­ager to the Hellenistic monarch Nicomedes of Bithynia. His grand-nephew and succes­sor Octavian - known as Augustus when emperor from 31 b.c. to a.d. 14 - was a handsome lad beloved, perhaps physically, by Cicero, although in later life his wife Livia, the sole empress, provided him with as many women as he wished. The slide of Tiberius (ruled 14-37) into debauchery in his old age, analyzed by the genius of Tacitus in his Annals, on the isle of Capri, from whose fatal cliffs he pushed 76 sus­pect senators, is embellished by Suetonius, who in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars described the swimmingpool he kept filled with his "minnows," young boys and girls he taught to swim through his ancient legs and nibble his private parts. His vicious minister Sejanus had once been a senator's catamite.
Tiberius' nephew and assassin, the mad Caligula (37-41), who made his horse consul, ripped open the womb of his sister Drusilla out of fear that the progeny might succeed him and also indulged in pederasty with the patricians Marcus Lepidus and Valerius Catullus, Mnester the Comedian, and even foreign hostages. The drooling hunchback and stutterer Claudius (41-54), who survived Caligula's tyranny by pretending to be an imbecile, was dragged from his hiding place in a closet in the palace by the Praetorian guards who after assassinating Caligula made him Emperor, although his own sympathies were republican. He later had his first wife Messalina beheaded after she "married" a courtier in a revel without divorcing the Emperor. Claudius' son-in-law was, how­ever, found dead in bed with a boy, and he himself waspoisoned with abowlof deadly mushrooms by his beautiful niece Agrippina, whom he had forced to marry him in spite of his repulsiveness, but she did so to arrange the succession of her son by a previous marriage, Nero.
Nero (54 - 69), who succeeded in murdering his mother on the third at­tempt and forced his tutor Seneca, the greatest Latin writer and philosopher of stoicism, of the Silver Age, to commit suicide, was quite effeminate, but took as his bride in an elaborate wedding the eunuch Sporus because his face resembled that of his former wife Poppea. Nero's patrician contemporary Sempronius Grac­chus, who degraded himself to fight as a gladiator, married a young male comet player.
Year of the Four Emperors and Flavian Dynasty. The suspicious, parsi­monious Galba, who replaced Nero, was succeeded by the effeminate Otho, and he then by Vitellius, the last of the four emperors to die in the year 69. The victor in the civil war, doughty Italian Vespasian [69-79), of equestrian rather than senato­rial background, tried to restore to the principate the rectitude that the elderly Augustus pretended to have, but the elder of his sons Titus (79-81) owned a troop of pathics and eunuchs. The embittered, tyrannical Domitian (81-96) went mad, indulging in heterosexual and homosex­ual orgies, although pretending to enforce chastity. Before conspirators, including his wife, succeeded in assassinating him, he executed three Vestal Virgins unfaithful to their vows and enforced the Lex Julia against pederasts.
Adoptive and Antonine Emper­ors. Although Suetonius and Tacitus, the main sources for the sexual lives of the first twelve Roman emperors, as pro-re­publican senators denigrated their charac­ter with scandal, their mostly creditable tales only slightly exceed the accounts of the immorality common in the late Re­public in avant-garde aristocratic circles. About the five "good emperors" who suc­ceeded one another "by adoption of the best" more than by the close family ties of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties and came from the provinces, the histo­rian is far less well informed. They seem to have been more moderate sexually as well as less tyrannical. Nerva [96-98), septua­genarian when proclaimed Emperor, is, however, rumored to have buggered his younger predecessor Domitian.
Trajan (98-117), the hero whom the army forced the old senator to adopt as successor, descended from Roman colo­nists in Spain. A heavy drinker, Trajan practiced pederasty uninhibitedly and "without harming anyone." His cousin and successor, the philhellenic Hadrian (117-138), who composed pederastic verses in Greek imitating Anacreon - though respecting his wife Faustina - had a pas­sionate affair with the beautiful Antinous. After the favorite drowned himself in the Nile, Hadrian declared him a god and erected so many statues for his cult that no other figure of antiquity has so many sur­viving representations.
Of Antoninus Pius (138-161) the least is known, but his successor Marcus Aurelius (161 -180) noted that he had over­come any passion for boys. Unlike the other "good emperors," Marcus unfortu­nately produced a son and heir, the mad Commodus (180-192), sexually wild and impossibly tyrannical. Fancying himself a gladiator, he butchered cripples and other handicapped and otherwise shackled vic­tims before seventy or eighty thousand spectators in the Colosseum. He is said to have prostituted himself to men and to have kept a harem of 300 girls and 300 boys.
Severans. Although Commodus' successor the elderly Pertinax (193) reigned only 87 days and auctioned off Commodus' harem (except those who had been intro­duced into the palace by force, whom he freed), the old man bought some of them back for his own pleasure. The Praetorians sold the Empire to the wealthy, hen-pecked Didius Julianus, whose wife wished to be the first lady of Roman society, but mur­dered him after two months. Upon his assassination the "pax Romana" perma­nently ended in a bloody civil war in which Septimius Severus (193-211), of Punic descent, triumphed. The African Septimius married Julia Domna, the heir­ess of the priestly family of the sun god Baal from Emesa in Syria. She and her sister and daughter became the powers behind the throne during the reign of their mad progeny. Beside the unreliable continuators of the biographer Suetonius, known as the "Augustan historians," who wrote lives of the emperors from Hadrian to the last of the Thirty Tyrants in 284, the modem scholar has better sources, Herodian and Dio Cassius, to tell him of the political and sexual exploits of the Severi.
Using the term Dominus (Lord) to replace Princeps Senatus (Chief of the Senate), the Severi transformed the Em­pire into an overt military dictatorship that began to use the trappings of Oriental despotism and forbade Christians to prose­lytize, forcing Clement to flee Alexandria. Septimius was the first emperor to learn Latin as a foreign tongue, as in the eastern half of the Empire Greek remained the language of administration and Latin was used only in the army.
Septimius' elder son and succes­sor Caracalla ¡211-217) treacherously murdered his brother and coemperor in his mother's arms. By enfranchising all free inhabitants of the Empire citizens in 212, Caracalla accidentally made it harder to find a legal homosexual partner because only freedmen, slaves, and foreigners were fair game, Roman citizens being shielded from stupium by Domitian's extension of the Lex Julia to homosexuality among citizens, if not by earlier decrees. In other words, provincials and members of other ethnic groups, henceforth Roman citizens, could no longer assume the passive role.
Julia Domna's and Septimius' great-nephew, the effete transvestite Heliogabalus (218-222) attempted to popular­ize the worship of the Black Stone, a symbol of Baal. Accompanied by eunuch priests in saffron robes with cymbals, he officiated in public, the soldiers cheering his danc­ing. Twice married, once to a Vestal Vir­gin, Heliogabalus had agents scour the Empire for men with "large organs and bring them to court so that he could enjoy them." He also offered a great reward to the physician who could perform a transsexualizing operation on him, but this feat lay far beyond the Greco-Roman art of medicine.
After his assassination, his cousin Alexander Severus (222-235), who as­cended the throne at fourteen and at sev­enteen married the daughter of a senator, saw his jealous domineering mother ban­ish his wife and afterwards remained single until his assassination.
Imperial Crisis. Of the Thirty Tyrants who reigned in the fifty years that separated the death of Alexander to the accession of Diocletian (235-284), only two died peacefully, if we exclude the one stricken by plague. Famine, pestilence, and war civil and foreign devastated the Empire during that half-century. Debase­ment of the coinage and ruinous over­taxation exacerbated the crisis. The bar­racks emperors who fought their way to the throne, if not illiterate, were generally peasants, often from Illyricum and unfa­miliar with upper-class Greek (and Ro­man) pederastic traditions. Neoplatonists who attempted to refute Christians came to resemble their adversaries in trying to escape from a hopeless world and resorting to mysticism, and the majority of them were sex-negative and disapproving of homosexuality.
The crude giant from Thrace, Maximus (235-238), who assassinated the whimpering Alexander Severus in his tent along with his mother and faithful friends, was the first Emperor never to visit Rome. Descended from the Gracchi, Gordian I managed only 36 days, but his grandson Gordian II (238-244) lasted under the control of his mother's eunuchs and then his father-in-law until assassinated by followers of Philip the Arab (244-249), reputed to be black and even Christian. Celebrating the thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome in 247, he also at­tempted unsuccessfully to suppress male prostitution and to enforce the Lex Scatinia. Decius (245-251) began the great persecu­tion of the Christians, but Gallienus (253-268) refused his father Valerian's (253-257) policy of persecution and re­placed it with toleration, hoping to win over the Christians with his neo-Platonic arguments.
The grave disorders may have destroyed one-third of the population, devastated the cities, which had been the focus of classical pederasty, and destroyed the old upper classes. Provincial and even villa autarky (self-sufficiency) replaced the capitalistic trading network that had sus­tained the old cities. They also had to be walled to protect against marauders and invaders. Pederastic writing, like all other non-religious literature, declined sharply under the Thirty Tyrants. Physicians and philosophers increasingly recommended sexual restraint.
Christian Emperors. Even with the accession of Christian Emperors, who soon imposed the death penalty for sod­omy, classical pederasty did not die out at once. Constantine's sons Constantius and Constans (the latter's bodyguards chosen for their beauty rather than their compe­tence), following the lead of Church coun­cils and ascetic theologians, first decreed death for even consenting, adult sodomites in 342. In 390 Theodosius the Great (379-395) with his sons Arcadius and Honorius and coemperor Valentinian II prescribed burning at the stake for those found guilty of anal intercourse with an­other male. In two novellae appended to his summation of previous Roman laws condemning pederasty in the Corpus Juris Civilis, Justinian the Great (527-565), who married the former showgirl Theodora, decreed death at the stake for unrepentant sodomites because the Biblical account of the conflagration of Sodom proved that they had brought ruin upon society, caus­ing famines, earthquakes, and pestilences. Justinian, who closed the pagan schools of philosophy, also ended the classical ped­erasty institutionalized by the Greeks in Crete and Sparta toward the end of the seventh century b.c., 1300 years earlier. He set the tone for the persecution codi­fied by Patristic writers, penitentials, canon law, and scholastic philosophy, as well as laws (feudal and royal) and laws (munici­pal) that still endures in Christian society, only relieved of the death penalty begin­ning with reforms of the French Revolu­tion and of Joseph II of Austria inspired by the Enlightenment ideas of Beccaria.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Eva Cantarella, Secondo Nature, Rome: Riuniti, 1987; Michael Grant, The Roman Emperors: A Biographical Guide to the Rulers of Imperial Rome, 31 BC-AD 476, New York: Charles Scribner's, 1985; Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934.
William A. Percy

Rome, Ancient
The erotic life of ancient Rome - the Republic and the Empire - has long fascinated philologists and historians, novelists and moralists. Whether on ac­count of its long dominance of Western civilization, its role as the primary antago­nist of early Christianity, or its apparently contradictory images of robust, virile military power and orgiastic, "polymor­phously perverse" decadence, Roman sexuality has provided fodder for unceas­ing polemics, ranging from the moralism of the church fathers to the lauding of antiquity by homophile antiquarians. Some assert with seeming assurance that law and custom forbade male homosexuality as incompatible with civic virtue, while others are confident that the Romans casu­ally accepted homosexuality or at least bisexuality as a natural, common part of their society.
These discordant images stem from the contradictory attitudes of Ro­mans whose works have survived into modem times, from the scanty documen­tation for actual practices, especially among the bulk of the Roman population, and, most important, from the anachro­nistic application of a modern concept of homosexuality to a period which, not recognizing it as a unitary phenomenon, separated it into discrete practices based on class and role.
Historical Background. Accord­ing to tradition, the city was founded in 753 b.c., but archeologists have unearthed remains of settlements from as early as the middle of the second millennium, when the several hamlets on the site were begin­ning to coalesce. Etruscans dominated the nascent city-state for at least a century setting examples of sexual promiscuity, but in time Romans supplanted their tu­tors, exiling Tarquin, the proud last Etrus­can king. They then overcame the Cartha­ginians, from whom they learned to cru­cify rebel slaves and pirates and to culti­vate latifundia worked by slaves, and be­tween 202, the defeat of Hannibal, and 30 b.c., the death of Cleopatra, imposed their rule on the entire Mediterranean. Preem­inent among the older cultures on whom the Romans imposed their rule were the Greeks. To paraphrase the poet Horace, politically prostrate Greece triumphed culturally over the barbarous victor, and Rome became the first exemplar of a post-Hellenic civilization in the wake of ancient Greece. Roman borrowings were accom­panied by a hounding sense of inferiority to Greek culture. In reaction, some Ro­mans withdrew into a kind of anti-intellectualism that abandoned such fripperies as literature and the arts to the decadent Greeklings. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, Vergil portrays Anchises recommending that the Romans specialize in governing, and freely acknowledging that the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean with their far older civilizations would always surpass his own in the arts and sciences. Another defensive response to perceived inferiority stressed Rome's primordial simplicity and purity before alien luxury corrupted its people. According to the patriotic fables of historians like Livy, the early Romans were paragons of guileless virtue. Toiling in the fields kept them too busy to plot intrigues against their neighbors, and yielded too few worldly goods to incite envy. This idealized picture of the early Republic served as a foil for castigating ubiquitous luxury, corruption, and covet­ing of goods and sex objects in the later times. Wide acceptance of such myths of a vanished golden age of virtue legitimized attacking contemporaries for "un-Roman" behavior, especially sexual indulgence. The invidious contrast between present cor­ruption and past simplicity increased in popularity during the last century of the Republic (146-27b.c), aperiodmarked by brilliant military success abroad and po­litical disaster at home. Rome's modest institutions were not designed to cope with the sudden influx of booty - luxury goods, art objects, and, especially, slaves - from foreign conquests. The rise of many, some not even citizens, from straitened circumstances to great wealth stimulated a vulgar opportunistic tone which grated on those loyal to the old ways, whose relative status was declining. Despite the earnest striving of Augustus to reform imperial Roman society, the ostentatious nouveau riche style persisted for several generations, into the second century of the present era.
The Role of Slavery. A massive influx of slaves accompanied Roman rise to domination in the Mediterranean. Al­though, like almost all ancient peoples, Romans had probably always counte­nanced slavery, the early peasant commu­nity had few. However, success in the Samnite, Punic, and eastern Mediterra­nean wars yielded enormous infusions, as many as 25,000 captives in a single day. By the end of the Republic, slaves comprised 30 to 35 percent of the population of Italy, a proportion comparable to that of the antebellum American South. Their cheap­ness and abundance clearly invited arbi­trariness and maltreatment. Slaves were routinely beaten for "sport" and to relieve masters' frustrations. Until the time of Hadrian, Roman law permitted owners to execute slaves summarily. Slaves were objects for lust as well as sadism. As Sen­eca remarked, "Unchastity {impudicitia) is a crime in the freeborn, a service (officium) for the freedman, and an obligation for the slave" {Controversies IV, 10). This common situation made the role of slav­ery in same-sex relationships far more salient than in Greece, where of course it was not absent, but was on a much reduced scale and counterbalanced by the concept of pederasty as an instrument of education and state-building. The comedies of Plautus (who died ca. 184 b.c.) already make the master's lust for his slave boys the chief same-sex theme. Attractive slaves in the great houses of the rich were expected not only to cater to their master's lust, but also to be sexually available for guests (see Horace's Satires, 1.2.116-119). For all its importance, tantalizingly little is known about the sexual aspects of the Roman trade in slaves. The paucity of information reflects not only the prudery of modern scholars, but also the very banality of the activity in ancient times. Slaves were part of the taken-for-granted background of life, omnipresent but little noticed. It is certain that many slaves were sold by free but indigent parents. Others were foundlings.
Captives taken in military campaigns supplied the bulk of young flesh for the slave markets and thence the numerous brothels. Slaves would be set upon a slowly rotating platform, while the auctioneer lifted the garments so as to display not only the musculature and general physical condition of the specimen, but also the sexual endowments. Often deprived of access to women, sometimes even shack­led slaves enjoyed one another sexually.
Roman Roles. Although Roman women had somewhat more power and influence than those of ancient Athens and were not secluded, Roman society was overwhelmingly male-dominated, with a consequent dearth of surviving references to lesbianism except for epigrams scat­tered throughout Martial's collected poems. Roman custom accepted a para­digm of sexuality which observed a stark dichotomy between the penetrator, who was seen as engaging in normal aggressive and dominating masculine behavior re­gardless of the gender of his object, and the penetrated (pathic), who was considered to be weak, submissive, and powerless. Under this system, any Roman male citizen could be a penetrator without fear of aspersions or disgrace, though some criticized any homosexual activity. On the other hand, the penetrated role was considered appro­priate only for those who were submissive because of their exclusion from the power structure: women, slaves, and provincial or foreign boys, but not free boys destined to become citizens. A male adult Roman citizen who became a sexual receiver was seen as yielding his birthright of power and hence compromising the power position of all other male adult citizens. As so much of the homosexuality took place between penetrating masters and recep­tive slaves, the conception of master-slave relationships became entangled in the agent-pathic one. The salience of the for­mer, implying that the man who "takes it" enslaves himself to his penetrator, is char­acteristically Roman. Moreover, as Eva less. A large number of the graffiti discov­ered in the ruins of Pompeii are bisexual or homosexual in content. Moreover, they do not seem to include any real "homopho­bia," and even romantic sentiments ap­pear occasionally. Frequently signed, these homoerotic graffiti indicate no fear of social repercussions. The graffitists appear to be penetrative males, usually directing their attentions to boys.
Roman Law. The earliest and most problematic landmark is the shad­owy Lex Scantinia (or Scatinia), purport­edly dating from the third century b.c. The text has not survived, and the question of its meaning still defies adequate interpre­tation. To interpret this moot testimony as indicating the Romans were antihomo­sexual because "they had a law against it" goes beyond the evidence. As is so often the case, part of the problem stems from applying the modern comprehensive no­tion of homosexuality to an earlier era which had no such overall concept. The Latin stuprum covered a whole range of prohibited sexual behavior. The same act might or might not be stuprum according to the circumstances. To copulate with a freeborn teenage girl was stuprum; but not with a teenage girl who was a slave or freedwoman, but officially registered as a prostitute. It was the status of the actors rather than the act itself that determined whether or not it was licit. It seems likely that the boundaries of stuprum varied over time, but the late imperial codifications, extending from Ulpian to Tribonian, failed to preserve earlier legislation. If there were restrictions on same-sex behavior in the Lex Scantinia, they do not seem to have been enlarged, or even reaffirmed at any later stage of lawmaking. In fact, there were complaints from some moralists that the statute had fallen into disuse like modern blasphemy statutes. The few cases under the republic typically refer to a superior pressuring an inferior in the army to submit to him sexually. Interestingly, pronatalist legislative initiatives of the early Imperial period, most famously the Cantarella has pointed out, this asymme­try was reinforced by the Roman impera­tive to rule over subject peoples, so that the position of the sexually penetrated was analogous to that of a conquered province. This concatenation of degradations lent itself to particularly vicious exploitation in Roman political campaigning, as in Cicero's attacks on Mark Antony, whom he accused of being not only a woman but a slave for being pathic. This notion of self-abasement through accepting the role of pathic, even though Antony was a boy when with Curio, seems to have struck a particularly sensitive nerve. Perhaps it was being so outnumbered in their empire that confirmed Roman citizens in their sense that an instance of one member of their collective yielding himself to sexual "degradation" was a lessening of the strength of the community. In the army, sex with a male citizen was punishable by death, but in times of war, according to Cicero, soldiers were permitted to rape (enemy) freeborn youths and virgins. Male prostitution was extremely widespread - the boys even having their own annual festival day (Robigalia, April 25) - and was not only looked upon with general favor but was taxed by the state. While most of the prostitutes were slaves, a few of them were freedmen, and most were boys. Ped­erasty did not, as in Greece, play a compen­sating role in the training and toughening of young men for duty to the State. Relatedly, the Romans before the introduction of gymnasia on the Greek model permit­ted nudity only in the bathhouses, a mi­lieu of selfish and hedonistic indulgence, in contrast to the Greek consolidation of the link between pederasty and male char­acter formation through public nude ath­letics. Very little is known about the sex­ual life of the Roman proletariat, the lower class of citizenry - after 200 b.c. often of Oriental or Greek origin - that owned no slaves. According to some graffiti at Pom­peii, there were, however, prostitutes for the poor available for the equivalent of an unskilled laborer's hourly wage or even Lex Julia de adulteriis of Augustus, were entirely devoted to curbing men's activi­ties with prohibited women, completely disregarding any dalliances with boys.
Literary Evidence. Valuable evi­dence from Roman writers begins with Cicero, who Latinized many Greek tech­nical concepts, accusing opponents - as Attic orators routinely did - of pathic behavior. How much irritation at his tire­some moralizing provoked the triumvirs' secret decision to proscribe him can only be a speculation, but such scurrilous accu­sations became a common feature of Roman political life. If Cicero was hostile, the Epicurean Lucretius was merely indif­ferent, nowhere condemning same-sex relations. Nonetheless, by elevating gen­eration through the pivotal principle nihil ex nihilo fit ("nothing can come from nothing"), he unwittingly laid a founda­tion for later prescriptivists' obsession with procreation. Allegedly at least the later Stoics opposed same-sex pleasure, and indeed all sex outside marriage, and be­queathed this view to Christian rigorism. On the whole, evidence fails to support so austere a view, although Stoics, like most Epicureans, their main philosophical ri­vals, did stress the advantages of modera­tion and indifference to passion. One could, however, be a moderate pederast, instead of a frenzied one. Only Musonius Rufus, seemingly following the track of Plato in The Laws in rejecting same-sex copula­tion as "against nature," specifically sought to discourage homosexuality (a citation of Seneca offered by St. Jerome being of dubi­ous import shorn of its original, now lost context). In the sphere of sexual morality, the early church fathers' debt to the Stoics was slight. Patristic thinkers used Stoic and Platonic phrases mainly as window-dressing for a sex-negative, other-worldly, at times dualistic, oriental, anti-intellec­tual dogma. In sum, a few Romans de­nounced or discouraged some aspects of homosexuality, but most did not com­ment on the matter - and in the general setting of Mediterranean social life, it can reasonably be concluded that their silence implied consent.
Evidence from poetry and belles lettres is more abundant. Catullus wrote some of his most piercingly eloquent lyr­ics on the joys and sorrows of being in love with a boy. Recent research has shown how extensively Catullus relied on Helle­nistic prototypes, exemplifying the Ro­man duality between immediate experi­ence and hallowed Greek models. Catul­lus' pederastic love poetry is echoed in more muted fashion by his contemporary Tibullus. Vergil's Second Eclogue, with his immortal homosexual swain Cory don, an object case of the Greek-Roman dual­ity, imitates a heterosexual idyll of The­ocritus - who wrote his own share of homo­sexual verse. Crossovers of this kind, anomalous only in light of a rigid heterosexual-homosexual dichotomy, occurred as a matter of course in antiquity. Even Ovid, exiled under the Lex Julia for being one of many lovers of Augustus' daughter Julia, and apparently the most heterosexual of the Latin poets, wrote nonchalantly of pederasty and magical changes of sex.
Satire is the only distinctly Roman literary form. Although claiming to act from the high motive of purging the body politic of hypocrisy and corruption, often the satirist was actuated by personal spite and love of gossip. Juvenal's criticism of Roman same-sex customs in the first century of the present era revolves around the familiar contrast between the artless simplicity of the revered past and the luxury of the depraved present. For him a symp­tom of this degeneration was the violation of class barriers in the obsessions of Roman aristocrats for low-bom favorites, usually of foreign descent. His Second Satire had scions of patrician families offering them­selves in marriage, replete with Oriental rites, to their darlings. As in analogous cases from Martial (e.g., XII.42) and Sue­tonius {Life of Nero), they sought to dig­nify their male-male unions by assimilat­ing them to religious rites wherein the initiate "weds" the god. Stripping away Juvenal's veneer of moral indignation, one can see that these weddings in fact re­flected an innovatory striving to regular­ize a type of relationship that, however well-worn in practice, was nonetheless marginal to the official structure of Ro­man ideology and institutions. Some may have been merely travesties. Very differ­ent is Petronius' ambitious picaresque novel, the Satyiicon, of which only about a tenth has survived. These fragments recount the bawdy adventures of two friends, rivals for the favors of Giton, a fickle pretty boy. Holding very definite opinions about literature and art, Petronius was as nonjudgmental about sexual be­havior as anyone could be. Martial, too, has been considered unedifying, often even accused of sensationalism and of purvey­ing scurrilous gossip for mere titillation. Yet he operated within certain cultural restraints, e.g., believing it better to fuck than to be fucked, better to have the means to invite others to dine with one than to cadge invitations, and, best of all, to be open about one's tastes rather than hypo­critical. His writings are a cornucopia of information on Roman customs relating to sex, such as the cutting of the hair of slave boys to signal the end of their availa­bility as sexual utensils. Martial throws some light also on the vexed question of the cinaedus, a kind of gigolo, often trained as a dancer or entertainer, who would perform as the agent for adult pathics. Martial alleged that cinaedi often serviced wives as well. His favorable comments on pueri delicati, handsome boys who seem to have appealed to his own taste, leave the impression that in his time there was a definite bifurcation between the ephebe (in his teens) and the cinaedus (in his twenties) as sexual objects, the former being pathic, the latter not.
The mass of Roman literature - all of which could be printed in about 500 modern volumes - is not large, and much of it does not provide any information on sexual customs and attitudes. Even so, from the historians, notably Suetonius and Tacitus, the reader quickly learns that the emperors were - to say the least - poly­morphous perverse, and that their omnisexuality served more to titillate than nauseate the Roman populace.
Debates over the Fall of Rome. Modern historians have assembled a be­wildering variety of contradictory expla­nations for the fall of the Roman Empire: external pressures vs. internal decay, fail­ure of leadership at the top vs. festering anger welling up from below; a shortage of manpowervs. maldistribution of resources; physical causes such as plagues vs. collec­tive psychic exhaustion signified by the fading of Rome's ancient religion and civic spirit before cults from the East, such as Manichaeanism and Christianity. Draw­ing in part on the harsh judgments of their satirists and historians, the modern stere­otype was mainly shaped by nineteenth-century French writers and painters, who were uncomfortably aware of parallels between the decline of their own cultural hegemony and that of their Latin fore­bears. Popular culture (including the film Cahgula and the television series "I, Clau­dius") has picked up their lurid images. This moralistic sleaze is completely ir­relevant to the fall of Rome, for most of it is firmly set in the first century of our era, before the Empire reached its zenith with the Five Good Emperors and even before the starting point of the narrative of Ed­ward Gibbon's Decline and Fall.
In order to relate this varied ma­terial causally to Rome's fall one would have to assume a "latency period" of six to eight generations. Indeed, as early as 180 b.c. Cato the censor condemned Scipio, conqueror of Hannibal and of Antiochus HI, for importing luxury and Greek profli­gacy to corrupt the mos maiomm, the strict ancestral morality of the early Romans such as Cincinnatus. This plaint continued with Sallust, who had Jugurtha, king of Numidia say upon leaving Rome that there was nothing in the city that was not for sale. Cicero too argued that moral and social decadence epitomized by Catil­ine and Antony caused Rome's disgrace. But these laments ceased in the second century, and it was only long after those halcyon days of sexual abandon that the fall ensued. To conflate Caligula (much less Catiline or Antony) and the fall of Rome is like finding in Sir Walter Raleigh's behavior the cause of the decline of the British Empire. Caligula had no more to do with the fall than Raleigh with the Boer War.
What were the views of the Romans themselves? Many castigated the falling away from the sturdy virtues of the Republic, and saw such conduct as indi­vidually and collectively shameful with­out threatening the foundations of the Empire. For Rome had been given imperium sine fine, dominion without limit. Even during the dark days of the third century, orators celebrating the thousandth anniversary of the founding of the city regularly summoned up the image of Roma aeterna. Only after the fact was the idea expressed that indulgence, sexual or oth­erwise, caused Rome's collapse. The first instance of what was later to become a commonplace reproach is in De gubematione Dei, a moralistic diatribe composed by Salvian, a Christian presbyter of Mar­seilles, about a.d. 450. In discussing Carthage (by then a Roman city, not the old Semitic realm) Salvian contrasted the former degenerate effeminacy of the city, its ostentatious queens on parade, with the severe, highly moral regime instituted by the Germans after their successful siege. Thus, in Salvian's overoptimistic view of the horrible Vandals, the most destructive of all the Germanic tribes that overran the western provinces, the material and intel­lectual losses caused by the barbarian incursions were compensated for by a moral advance. The contrast between the older pluralistic civilization and obsessive early Christian moralizing could scarcely be clearer, and in longer historical perspec­tive, Salvian's arbitrary linking of sexual freedom, particularly same-sex activity, with political weakness and instability was to become a pernicious legacy, one of the cornerstones of the later decadence myth. Besides this, the eastern provinces of the Empire, just as corrupt and sexually permissive as the west, in fact more given to pederasty, survived for another thou­sand years until conquered by the Otto­man Turks in 1453, though Justinian in the early sixth century voiced the Judeo-Christian belief that sodomites caused earthquakes, plagues, and famines.
Conclusion. Rome shared with Greece (and other Mediterranean cultures) the fundamental agent/pathic distinction in sexual transactions. Apart from a common Indo-European heritage, its ori­gins lost in the proverbial mists of prehis­tory, Rome was subject to a massive and continuing influx of Greek culture with Greek models adapted to and merging with Latin and Etruscan tendencies, Oriental ones appearing later with the conquest of Syria and Palestine by Pompey in 66 b.c. and of Egypt by Julius Caesar. Neverthe­less, significant differences make the con­ventional compound term Greco-Roman civilization questionable. (1) Rome gener­ally lacked the Hellenic concept of ped­erasty as contributing to the collective (civic) good quite beyond the pleasure af­forded the agent. (2) There was an absence of public nudity - except in the baths, where men and women were often nude together - in the socially sanctioned peda­gogical setting of the gymnasium. (3) With hordes of slaves, imperial Rome differed from the Greek city-states, and the master-slave relationship was the para­digmatic locale of sexual pleasure in Rome, but not earlier in Greece. (4) In the nou­veau-riche atmosphere of the late Repub­lic and early Empire, the role of cinaedus with respect to his patron paralleled the more respectable asymmetrical relation­ship of parasite and client, less extreme but still akin to the slave-master dispar­ity. (5) Greek idealism about sexual pas­sion as a motive for improving the mind of the sexually receptive contrasts sharply with the thoroughly materialistic Roman use of property for sexual gratification. (6) Rome's exploitation of a vast empire cre­ated an inequity between rulers and ruled that influenced paradigms of sexual con­duct.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, London: Duckworth, 1982; Eva Cantarella, Secondo Natura, Rome: Riuniti, 1987; Danilo Dalla, "Ubi Venus mutatur": omosessualità e diritto nel mondo romano, Milan: Giuffrè, 1987; Françoise Gonfroy, "Homosexual­ité et idéologie esclavagiste chez Cicerón," Dialogues d'histoire ancienne, 4 11978), 219-65; Pierre Grimai, L'Amour à Rome, Paris: Belles Lettres, 1980; Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, London: Routledge &. Kegan Paul, 1934; Saara Lilja, Homosexuality in Republi­can and Augustan Rome (Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum, 74), Helsinki, 1982; Beert Verstraete, "Slaves and the Social Dynamic of Male Homosexual Relations in Ancient Rome," fournal of Homosexuality, 5 (1980), 227-36.
Wayne R. Dynes

Römer, L. S. A. M. von (1873-1965)
Dutch physician, historian, and student of homosexuality. Lucien Sophie Albert Marie von Römer was born in Kampen as the scion of a noble family that had lived in the Netherlands since the eighteenth century. He studied medicine at Leiden and Amsterdam, passing the licensing examination in 1903. Thereafter he studied and worked in Berlin with Albert Moll and Magnus Hirschfeld, and met two well-known transvestites, Willibald von Sadler-Grün and Freiherr Hermann von Teschenberg, who made no secret of their predilection and let themselves be photo­graphed for Hirschfeld's fahrbuch. Von Römer had an idealistic philosophy of life and a great reserve of personal dyna­mism; he was an admirer of Erasmus,
Spinoza, and Nietzsche, whose Thus Spake Zarathustra he translated into Dutch. A trip to Greece in 1912 interrupted his term of service as health official in the Royal Navy. After 1913 he settled in the Dutch East Indies, where he occupied various functions in the health service until 1932. In the course of his career his campaign against injustice earned him the hostility of many of his colleagues, and his energetic measures against unhygienic conditions won him the title of "the medical Napoleon." After his retirement he practiced neurology and psychiatry in Malang, where he lived until his death at the age of 92.
Von Romer's articles on various aspects of homosexuality were for their time major, path-breaking studies that assembled a vast amount of material that was little-known or had been deliberately ignored by official scholarship. His first article was a biography of "Henri the Third, King of France and Poland," which ap­peared in the fourth volume of the fahrbuch in 1902; in the same volume he com­mented on the abusive reception of Arnold Aletrino's paper at the Congress of Crimi­nal Anthropology in Amsterdam the pre­vious year. In the fifth volume (1903) he issued a study of more than two hundred pages on "The Androgynous Idea of Life," a survey of myths and beliefs concerning androgyny and hermaphroditism from remote antiquity to the present. In 1904 he published in Dutch a book entitled Un­known People: The Physiological Devel­opment of the Sexes in Connection with Homosexuality, and in the following year The Uranian Family: A Scientific Investi­gation and Conclusions on Homosexual­ity. This latter work examined disparities from the normal sex-ratio in the siblings of homosexuals in the aim of demonstrating that they were biologically disguised members of the opposite sex. A German version was published in 1906, together with an article in the fahrbuch on "Uranism in the Netherlands before the Nineteenth Century, with Especial Reference to the Great Uranian Persecution in the Year 1730," the classic study of a wave of intolerance in which 250 men and boys were prosecuted and 57 put to death. His last work on the subject appeared in 1908, an anthology of passages from Nietzsche on homosexuality in the Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft. In the same year he unsuccessfully attempted to have a medi­cal dissertation on homosexuality accepted by the University of Amsterdam, but it was rejected on the ground that a number of passages were judged "in conflict with morality and offensive to others." The hostile climate engendered by the Harden-Eulenberg affair in Germany may have influenced him to turn away from the subject. Following Hirschfeld, von Römer always laid stress in his writings on the social obloquy and blackmail that embit­tered the lives of his homosexual subjects, and by defending the existence of innate homosexuality he sought to deliver them from the reproaches of sin, sickness, and degeneracy. He also combatted the Dutch version of the "social purity" movement of his time and idealization of sexual absti­nence. A last work of his, the fruit of thirty years' labor, he showed in manuscript to Magnus Hirschfeld when his former teacher visited the East Indies in 1931; it has remained unpublished.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Maurice van Lieshout, "Stiefkind der natuur. Het homobeeld bij Aletrino en von Römer," Homojaarboek I, Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1981, pp. 75-105.
Warren Johansson

Roosevelt, Eleanor (1884-1962)
American public figure and jour­nalist. Born into an old New York family of Dutch patroon ancestry, she was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of Franklin Delano Roosev­elt, whom she married in 1905. Even be­fore her marriage she had been an active and able promoter of social causes, and she continued this career after becoming the wife of a rising star in the Democratic Party who was its vice presidential nomi­nee in 1920. When Franklin was stricken with poliomyelitis in 1921, she overcame her shyness in order to be his liaison with the political scene. When her husband, returning to the political arena, was elected first governor of New York (1928) and then president of the United States (1932), she played a leading role in women's organiza­tions, in promoting consumer welfare, in struggling against unemployment and poor housing, and in furthering the rights of minorities. In 1933 she held the first press conference ever staged by a president's wife, and in 1935 she began a daily column "My Day," which, syndicated in newspa­pers throughout the country, gave her the opportunity to focus attention on social problems of the time.
Eleanor Roosevelt recast the role of president's wife in a far more activist, political tone, breaking with older con­ventions and earning the intense hatred of the foes of the New Deal. In an era when the feminist movement, having achieved the goal of women's suffrage in 1920, was in abeyance, she symbolized the career-oriented, politically active, socially con­cerned woman of modern times.
From 1945 to 1953, and again in 1961, she was United States delegate to the fledgling United Nations Organiza­tion, and in 1946 she was named chair­woman of the Commission on Human Rights, a subsidiary of the Economic and Social Council. In the 1950s she remained in politics as a leader of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and a supporter of Adlai Stevenson. As one of the most promi­nent women of the first half of the twenti­eth century, she won an enduring place in American political and social history.
The question of a lesbian compo­nent in Eleanor Roosevelt's life and per­sonality is somewhat complicated by the problematic of lesbian self-definition as it emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It is clear that the wife of an American president in the 1930s could have had no part in an overt lesbian subculture, but on the other hand Eleanor exchanged passionate letters with the journalist Lorena Hickock. These Doris Faber first tried to suppress out of fear that others might "misunderstand" them, but failing this, she wrote a book, The Life of Lorena Hickock, E. R.'s Friend (1980), as a lengthy polemic to the effect that neither "of these women can be placed in the contemporary gay category." Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a noted apologist for the Roosevelt administration, tried to defend the two women by placing them in "a well established tradition" as "children of the Victorian age." It is impossible on the basis of surviving evidence to assert that they had an overt lesbian relationship, but they undeniably had an emotional friend­ship with homoerotic overtones.
Those attuned to the theme of "great lesbians in history" will no doubt wish to include such a notable as Eleanor Roosevelt on their list, while her enemies will seize upon the label as a confirmation of their dislike. The affairs of the heart are not so easily categorized as the alliances and affinities of political life. Eleanor Roosevelt overcame the feminine shyness and passivity into which she had been socialized to play a role in American poli­tics of the 1930s that was not in her husband's shadow, and possibly she over­came sexual conventions as well. Herneed for intense female companionship may have been the equivalent of male bond­ing - with its nuances and ambiguities. Her role as promoter of women's rights and as a symbol of the emancipated woman of the New Deal era is her chief legacy to the lesbian/feminist movement of today.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickock, E. R.'s Friend, New York: Morrow, 1980; Jess Flemion and Colleen M. O'Connor, Eleanor Roosev­elt: An American Journey, San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1987.
Evelyn Gettone

Rorschach Test
The Rorschach test is the inven­tion of the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), a disciple of Eugen Bleuler. In 1921 he published Psychodiagnostik, which was the outcome of a decade of work with a very large number of bilaterally symmetrical inkblot cards administered to a variety of psychiatric groups. After supplementary testing with so-called normal subjects, retarded per­sons, and other special categories he is­sued the first German edition with its 10 standard cards that have been used ever since. The crucial feature of the test is that there is no meaning in the inkblots, it is simply "projected" from the mind of the subject onto the shapes and colors which he sees on the cards. The projective prin­ciple had been familiar to artists since the time of Leonardo da Vinci; new was its application to depth psychology. The test was scored primarily for the ratio of color to movement responses, and Rorschach's somewhat typological scoring system was based upon a combination of the observ­able with clinical insight or intuition. In the 1920s some 30 titles relating to Ror­schach technique were published, in the next decade some 200 more, and in the following decades the literature swelled into thousands of items.
The popularity of the Rorschach stemmed from a time when psychoana­lytic views predominated, and inner proc­esses and the unconscious were the object of clinical assessment. Enthusiastic users claimed that the Rorschach test was a foolproof x-ray of the personality not sub­ject to any situational set, but others re­jected the test and predicted its abandon­ment. The current mean of opinion is that "The Rorschach is a field of study in re­search which permits workers to investi­gate such diverse concepts as body image, primary process thinking, hypnotizability, orality, and ego strength." It is further understood that the Rorschach is a com­plex instrument that cannot yield a simple score, rather the entire configuration must be compared with the clinical picture obtained from other procedures such as psychiatric examination.
From 1945 onward, a number of investigators sought to establish the use­fulness of the Rorschach test in the diag­nosis of male homosexuality. In a paper of 1949, W. M. Wheeler developed 20 content signs which he attempted to make as unambiguous and objective as possible, and found a low, but consistently positive relationship between them and clinical diagnoses of homosexuality. Five years later, R. Shafer published a book in which he outlined a number of themes in Ror­schach content relating to homosexuality.
In 1954 Evelyn Hooker set out to compare the incidence of the Wheeler homosexual content signs in the Rorschach protocols of overt male homosexuals as compared with the protocols of hetero­sexuals, and also to compare the two groups with respect to the frequency of occur­rence of Shafer's content themes relating to homosexuality.
Hooker's findings, published four years later, were that the Wheeler signs did, as a whole, differentiate a homosexual from a heterosexual group, but only when matched pairs were considered. When highly qualified Rorschach experts at­tempted to • distinguish the homosexual records, the process was marked by uncer­tainty and precarious vacillation. Agree­ment was primarily in the correct identifi­cation of records characterized by open anality, perverse or parhedoniac sexuality, and "feminine emphasis." In other words, the Rorschach test served to diagnose homosexuality correctly only in a limited number of cases in which specific ele­ments of personality distortion were pres­ent. The relationship of the Rorschach picture to overt behavior depended upon many complex variables in the subject's life situation which tended to be over­looked in the clinical picture of homo­sexuality that prevailed in the 1950s. Continued use of the Rorschach technique alone for diagnosis of homosexuality, without other substantiating evidence, Hooker concluded, would lead to errone­ous findings, both positive and negative, and perpetuate false concepts that disre­garded the cultural aspect of the problem by focusing on the supposed clinical one.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Evelyn Hooker, "Male Homosexuality in the Rorschach," Journal of Projective Techniques, 22 (1958), 33-54; R. Shafer, Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing, New York: Grune and Stratton, 1954; W. M. Wheeler, "An Analysis of Rorschach Indices of Male Homosexuality," Journal of Projective Techniques, 13 (1949), 97-126.
Warren Johansson

Rough Trade
See Trade.

Roussel, Raymond (1877-1933)
French poet, novelist, and play­wright. Roussel was born into an upper-class Parisian family, friends and neigh­bors of Marcel Proust. Jean Cocteau (who spent time with him in a drug treatment program at St. Cloud) called Roussel "the Proust of dreams."
The young Raymond studied piano, composed songs but at seventeen turned to poetry because "the words came easier." Publication of his first book La Doublure (1897) led to a deep depression and treatment by the noted psychiatrist Pierre Janet, who published an account of his patient. Another book of poems, La Vue (1904), followed and two novels, Impressions d'Afrique (1910) and Locus Solus (1914).
In 1909, Roussel wonagoldmedal for his marksmanship; he was an avid chess player and adored the writings of Jules Verne. He was an early fancier of camp since he enjoyed melodramas and in 1914 had his own roulette (housetrailer) built.
In 1912 Impressions d'Afriqueran as a play with a distinguished cast and important praises by Apollinaire, Duchamp, and Picabia, but its unorthodoxy aroused vehement public ridicule. Locus Solus was likewise adapted for the stage in 1922, and Roussel wrote two additional plays, L'Etoile au Front (1925) and La Poussiere de Soleils (1927). The surrealists defended L'Etoile and con­fronted the jeering audiences; the fighting aroused public scandal.
Roussel's sexuality is described by Houppermans as not unlike his writing: "Pluperversity, that fundamental elastic­ity, that continuous back and forth of libidinal drives, was to be the hallmark of a new universe." Roussel found a new realm of libidinal pleasures (including both drugs and men) in travel: in 1920-21 he visited India, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, China, Japan, the United States, and other developing areas. His greatest fascination was with Africa, where he often visited and found inspiration.
In 1933 he took up lodgings in Palermo, Sicily, with his platonic com­panion Madame Du Frene, who never established whether his death was by accident or suicide. His ending, like his writing, remains (as he said of the surreal­ists) "a bit obscure." Roussel's obscurity was not entirely clarified by his posthu­mous (1935) explanations of Howl Wiote Certain of My Books (perhaps an echo of Nietzsche's "Why I Write Such Good Books"). "Taking the word palmier I de­cided to consider it in two senses: as a pastry and as a tree. Considering it as a pastry, I searched for another word, itself having two meanings which could be linked to it by the preposition a; thus I obtained (and it was, I repeat, a long and arduous task) palmier (a kind of pastry) a restauration (restaurant which serves pastries); the other part gave me palmier (a palmtree) a restauration (restoration of a dynasty). Which yielded the palmtree in Trophies Square commemorating the res­toration of the Talou dynasty."
Michel Foucault analyzed the relation between Roussel's cryptology and homosexuality: "When Cocteau wrote his works, people said, 'It's not surprising that he flaunts his sexuality and his sexual preferences with such ostentation since he is a homosexual.'... and about Proust they said, 'It's not surprising that he hides and reveals his sexuality, that he lets it appear clearly while also hiding it in his work, since he is a homosexual.' And it could also be said about Roussel, 'It's not surprising that he hides it completely since he is a homosexual.'"
BIBLIOGRAPHY. François Caradec, Vie de Raymond Roussel, Paris: Pauvert, "FontStyle239">The Last of the Wine (1956), Challans left popular romances behind her and took up a career in historical fiction. This is a problematic genre, since it has been so often abused. Yet, very early on, she was receiving the highest possible accolades for her faithful recreations of ancient Hellas. She typi­cally included a bibliography and an "Author's Note" in each novel, explaining what was historical fact and what was not.
The Last of the Wine is one of the few classic novels of male homosexual love, and has been cherished by many gay men since it first appeared (it has never gone out of print). Other novels followed in steady progression: The King Must Die, The Bull from the Sea, The Mask of Apollo,
Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy, and The Praise Singer. She also published a non-fiction work describing her research into Alexander the Great: The Search for Alexander. Almost all her historical nov­els seem assured of a healthy life for many years to come. The theme which is dating the novels most quickly is the Freudian mythology which Challans unfortunately decided to weave into her tales.
Challans' significance is similar to that of Marguerite Yourcenar, another lesbian who wrote magnificent books about male homosexuality. It is a somewhat puzzling phenomenon, in that one would expect them to write novels about women in love, and the beauty of women. But somehow these two women (and they are not alone) had extremely strong percep­tions of male beauty and of love between men. In Challans' case, that has left The Charioteer, The Last of the Wine, and The Persian Boy as a literary heritage.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Bernard F. Dick, The Hellenism of Mary Renault, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972.
Geoff Puterbaugh

Resorts
Resorts frequented by homosex­ual men - and to a lesser extent by lesbi­ans - tend to be at the shore. A few inland exceptions, such as Palm Springs and Russian River in California occur, but winter resorts, such as skiing sites, have rarely developed a visible homosexual presence. The reason for this specializa­tion lies probably in the association of sun and sensuality, and gay resorts function more clearly as places of sexual assigna­tion than those favored, say, by family groups. An interesting contrast is that between nude beaches, which attract a gay clientele, and nudist camps, which rarely do.
Some well-heeled gay visitors travel to resorts in the company of their regular lovers, while others hope to find romance there - either with other visitors or with hustlers. The availability of the latter depends in large measure on the economic situation of the region in which the resort is situated; those which are remote from a demographic reservoir of impoverished individuals tend not to have many hustlers. Apparently, gay resorts do not favor the migratory legions of prosti­tutes that work the heterosexual circuits, so that local talent is necessary. In a wealthy town, such as Palm Springs, this pool of sex workers is simply lacking. Hence the attraction of Third World countries for some "sexual tourists."
This article observes a distinc­tion between resorts proper, which are located away from major population cen­ters (their attraction lying in part in this very distance), and metropolitan beaches. Distance lends enchantment - or at least a sense of security inasmuch as those em­ployed in such conservative occupations as banking and law often do not feel that they can truly relax except far from their business associates and family. During the tourist season the typical resort town functions around the clock: bars, restau­rants, and other places of relaxation and social contact are open into the wee hours of the morning, in contrast with an indus­trial town where all night life ends by eleven in the evening. In resorts frequented by homosexuals, many of the guest houses are owned by gay proprietors and solicit patrons through advertisements in the gay press. Occasional exceptions to the sepa­ration between resort towns and metro­politan centers occur, as Rio de Janeiro, which has beaches for its residents, but which functions as a resort for foreign gay men, especially during the mardi gras or carnival season.
History. The sources for the popu­larity of modern gay resorts are various, including the old arcadian dream of a place apart from hostile heterosexual pressures, a long-standing tradition of homosexual travel, and the sexual exiles and remit­tance men who tended to flock together during their involuntary foreign sojourns. The first stirrings of the impulse to the gay resort stem from the beginnings of mass travel to the Mediterranean in the nine­teenth century. During the previous cen­tury the homosexual archeologist J. J. Winckelmann had been responsible for popularizing, in elite circles at least, a notion of Italy as the homeland of aes­thetic paganism. This idea was subse­quently reinforced by such writers as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds. As a practical matter the opening of trunk railway Unes linking northern Europe to the Mediterranean made the fabled spots available to a considerably enlarged clien­tele. By the end of the nineteenth century Florence, Capri, and Sicily had well devel­oped colonies of homosexual and lesbian expatriates. The Tuscan capital tended to attract the more intellectual and artistic visitors for longer stays, the southern is­lands a more hedonistic and nomadic crowd. The special qualities of Capri have been captured by such novelists as Norman Douglas, Compton Mackenzie, and Roger Peyrefitte. Later in the twentieth century, as Capri's attractions faded, other Medi­terranean islands, including Mykonos, Lesbos, and Crete in Greece, became cen­ters of gay tourism. At the end of the 1980s the top three gay summer resorts were all in Spain: Sitges, Ibiza, and Torremolinos.
The French acquisition of North Africa (beginning in 1830) had opened up historic Islamic countries with a long tra­dition of availableyouth. Thus Andre Gide was to find Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas visiting Algeria for sexual pur­poses in 1894; he was surprised not so much by the purpose of their visit as the frankness with which it was avowed. Because of its international status, the city of Tangier in Morocco remained a gay center at least through the 1960s. More adventurous travelers could, of course, visit Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, but these coun­tries seem not to have developed any spe­cific sites of fascination for the sexual tourist.
Contemporary Patterns. In the United States, the east coast boasts two resorts of particular renown: Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Key West, Florida. Just when these locales emerged as gay meccas is hard to say because they began their careers as places favored by artists, writ­ers, and theatre people, with a consider­able though not originally dominant gay admixture - "tipping" probably only in the 1960s. Fire Island, easily accessible on day trips from New York City, belongs to a special category intermediate between the metropolitan beach and the true resort. In a number of states of the United States enterprising individuals have set up gay ranches for private customers. To some extent this practice parallels nudist camps, which are themselves part of a large, but little known subculture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. James Money, Capri, Island of Pleasure, London: Deutsch, 1987; Odysseus . .. An Accommoda­tions Guide for Gay Men, New York: Odysseus Enterprises, 1989; Spartacus International Gay Guide, Berlin: Bruno Gmunder, 1989.
Wayne R. Dynes

Richard I the Lion-hearted (1157-1199)
King of England. Richard was famed for his reckless courage and ex­treme cruelty - he massacred 3,000 brave Moslems who had surrendered Acre to the Crusaders under his safe conduct - as well as for gallantry to many, including Saladin. Favorite of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who set him against his royal father Henry IT of England - himself falsely accused of having loved Thomas Becket, with whom he did share a bed on occasion while carousing and wenching together before Becket became Archbishop of Can­terbury - Richard has been seen by some as a mama's boy.
The Norman and Angevin (Plantagenet) kings of England were, along with their courtiers, regularly accused by monk­ish chroniclers of sodomy. It was not true of Henry II, who made his son's fiancee Alice of France his mistress to the outrage of Eleanor and Richard. The accusation rings true, however, for William IT Rufus (ca. 1056-1100), as for his nephew Prince William (son of his brother Henry I), who was coasting down the Channel with his frivolous, effeminate companions, when the White Ship capsized - "God's venge­ance on the sodomites," as the chroniclers declared.
Richard was the great-grandson of Henry I and scion on the other side of the brutal, vicious, exuberant counts of Anjou, thought by some to be genetically sadistic. It is perhaps not true that Richard fell in love with the young king of France, Philip IT Augustus. Their intimate friend­ship was occasioned by their plotting against Richard's father. But Richard never showed any serious interest in women. He waited very late to marry Berengaria of Navarre; he spent practically no time with her, and failed to sire any heir, an impor­tant obligation of kingship. During a stay in Messina in 1190 he seems to have de­cided to abjure his preference for male sexual partners. He appeared barefoot in a chapel and, surrounded by high ecclesias­tics, Richard confessed his past misdeeds. Although he was absolved on promise of good behavior, he apparently relapsed later.
When Richard, who spent only ten months of his eleven-year reign in England, was imprisoned or captured on his way back from Jerusalem by the Duke of Austria, an ally of Philip II of France, now his enemy, a visitor sang outside the prison a troubadour's song, composed long before by the king, as a signal of his arrival. Perhaps this was a lover, but the sources do not name a single one of them.
To Richard's reign belongs the account of the London underworld and its homosexual denizens composed by Rich­ard of Devizes. Like Edward II (1284-1327), Richard IT (1367-1400) probably practiced sodomy. None of the medieval sodomitical monarchs and princes of England died a natural death, unlike almost all their exclusively heterosexual royal rivals in France, the Capetians.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. James A. Brundage, Richard Lion Heart, New York: Scribner's, 1974.
William A. Percy

Rimbaud, Arthur (1854-1891)
French symbolist poet. The son of an army officer who deserted his wife and family in 1860, he had an unhappy childhood under his mother's harsh disci­pline that may explain the spirit of adoles­cent rebellion that characterizes his first poems, written in 1870-71. Some of these astonishingly mature pieces attack those in authority, while others dream of a dif­ferent world of total freedom. The most celebrated is "Le Bateau ivre," in which the poet imagines himself as a boat com­pletely out of control, drifting wildly down rivers, into seas, and across oceans. Imme­diately after writing this poem, he set off for Paris in September 1871, where he was welcomed by Paul Verlaine, ten years his senior, whose unorthodox versification appealed to him. He then put into practice the code that he had formulated in his famous "Lettre du voyant" of May 1871, that the poet should sharpen his percep­tion by submitting to every sort of experi­ence and then transmitting what he has perceived directly, without conscious control.
Nearly all of his poetry belongs to the period of his homosexual love affair with Verlaine, which ended in July 1873 when the two quarreled violently and the older man shot him in the wrist. He had broken away from verse forms and adopted the prose poem in a group of some forty passages called the Illuminations, which however obscure in meaning, have a unique and compelling poetic quality that springs from the vividness of the imagery, the rhythm of the phrases, and the directness of the language. In the summer of 1873 he wrote Une Saison en enfer, again in an obscure but often compelling prose, in which he admitted to having lived in a fool's paradise and to have spent a "season in hell" with his lover.
After this he abandoned litera­ture, and in a sense abandoned life, becom­ing a solitary wanderer, first in Europe and then the East Indies, and finally in Ethio­pia, where he may have had some homo­sexual liaisons with the natives. He died in a hospital in Marseille in 1891 at the age of 37, indifferent to the extraordinary reputation as a youthful genius of the poetic that he had acquired after Verlaine wrote an essay on him in his Poetes maudits in 1884.
The homosexual elements in Rimbaud's work are slight, even if the creative period of his life was one of his liaison with Verlaine, and some modern critics have seen in his adolescent eroti­cism the key to his life's work, a rebellion that transcends the mere personal and culminates in the shattering of society's moral conventions and the negation of its traditional values. By seeking inspiration through narcotics that placed him on the margin of respectable society and its realm of experience, Rimbaud reinforced the image of the poet as outsider, as one who has the right to create his own mode of expression rather than adhering to the received canons of literature. He remains the unmatched archetype of the adoles­cent poet whose homoerotic feelings lifted him far above the imitation of which most youthful writers alone would be capable - into the sphere of creative genius.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Robert Montal, L'adolescent Rimbaud, Lyon: Les Ecrivains réunis, 1954; Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, New York: New Directions, 1961.
Warren Johansson

Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of (1647-1680)
English poet and intellectual. After receiving the privileged education of a Restoration nobleman - Wadham Col­lege, Oxford, followed by the grand tour of the continent - Rochester became a member of a clique at the court of Charles II, where he was famous for his wit, skep­ticism, and ostensibly dissolute life. His surviving works are few. about 75 poems, an adaptation of a tragedy, and a scene from an unfinished play. Although his free use of sexual language earned him censure and bowdlerization over the centuries, his satirical bite has always guaranteed him admirers. Restoration culture underwent strong French influence, and it is from the libertine poets of that country, as well as the Latin satirists that were a common source, that Rochester seems to have de­rived his main impetus. As understood in the seventeenth century, libertinism meant not praise of licentious excess, but a skeptical attitude toward received val­ues that went hand in hand with an effort to set forth a new and more rational ap­proach to living. Thus the light-heartedness and flippancy of some of Rochester's poetry must be viewed within a larger context of serious purpose.
Contemporary testimony leaves little doubt that Rochester was personally bisexual. His account of a rake's reminis­cence is probably not too far from his own attitudes: "Nor shall our love fits, Chloris, be forgot,/ When each the well-looked linkboy strove t'enjoy,/ And the best kiss was deciding lot/ Whether the boy fucked you or I the boy." ("The Maimed De­bauchee," 11. 37-40). The same approach, recallingHorace's statement that a woman or a boy would suit his needs equally well, recurs in "The Platonic Lady," "Love a Woman? You're an Ass!," and "Upon His Drinking Bowl."
There has been some dispute about the canon of poems to be attributed to Rochester. It seems generally agreed, however, that the obscene play in rhyming couplets Sodom, first published in 1684 and frequently reprinted under his name, is not by him.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Works: The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Roches­ter, David M. Vieth, ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968. Criticism: R. M. Baine, "Rochester or Fishboume: A Question of Authorship," Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), 201-6; Dustin H. Griffin, Satires Against Man: The Poems of Rochester, Berkeley: Univer­sity of California Press, 1973.
Wayne R. Dynes

Rock and Roll
See Music, Popular; Punk Rock.

Röhm [Roehm], Ernst (1887-1934)
German soldier and politician; leader of the Schutz-Abteilung (SA) of the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the Weimar Republic. Röhm was an organizer of right-wing paramilitary groups who, in 1919, first made Hitler aware of his own political potential, and for the following fifteen years the two were close friends. Magnus Hirschf eldremarked that the only photograph in which Hitler appeared smiling was one in which he was in Röhm's company.
From the fall of 1930 onward Röhm transformed the SA Brownshirt militia from a handful of unemployed thugs and embittered veterans of World War I into an effective fighting force some half a million strong - an instrument of Nazi terror. He had in 1928-30 lived abroad as an instructor of the - largely Amerindian - Bolivian Army and boasted in letters to his friends in Germany that he had introduced the recruits not only to Prussian discipline but also to homosexual love - which until then had supposedly been unknown there. Róhm, who made no secret of his homo­sexual proclivities and of his aversion to women, was well known in the gay sub­culture of Berlin, and had down to the end of 1932 been the object of five different court proceedings for his "immoral" con­duct. Hitler had resolved to rid himself of his chief of staff, all the more as the Social Democratic newspaper Münchner Post had published letters that established Röhm's homosexuality beyond doubt. Also, oppo­nents of Röhm within the Nazi ranks and the psychiatrist Oswald Bumke had writ­ten to Hitler denouncing the S A leader and the homosexuals in his entourage as a corrupting example for the youth of Ger­many. One opponent went so far as to say that even intellectuals could not under­stand how it was that so many homosexu­als occupied leadership positions in the Nazi Party. Röhm for his part proudly asserted that the homoerotic, male-bond­ing element within the Nazi paramilitary units had given them the crucial edge in the struggle with the Reichsbanner and the Communists.
After the accession of the Na­tional Socialists to power in March 1933, Röhm remained in Hitler's good graces, but as part of a compromise with the Reichswehr leadership, whose support he needed to become Führer. Hitler allowed Goring and Himmler to murder Röhm together with dozens of loyal SA officers on the night of June 30-July 1/ 1934 - the "Night of the Long Knives." It was later said, somewhat dubiously, that with Röhm the last socialist in the Nazi Party died, but so perished the quixotic hopes of homo­sexuals such as Hans Blüher within the right-wing, pro-Nazi groups that Hitler's rule would mean greater toleration. The regime hypocritically used Röhm's sexual life as a pretext for claiming that it was "protecting German youth from corrup­tion" by liquidating Röhm and his clique, but a newspaper in Kassel created a scan­dal by publishing stories to the effect that the truth had long been known to Hitler and his chief associates.
See also Fascist Perversion, Myth of.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Max Gallo, The Night of the Long Knives, New York: Harper and Row, 1972; James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, New York: Amo Press, 1975.
Warren Johansson

Role
In social science usage, the con­cept of role contrasts with that of self (or identity). In dramaturgical sociology, as on theatre stages, an actor plays many roles over the course of a career, or even on a single night. Some actors always play the same kind of character. Some are swal­lowed up in one role, while others have extensive repertoires of different types and do not live onstage roles when they are offstage. Similarly, "homosexual roles" are enacted in appropriate settings by persons who play other roles at other times or places. As important as affirming homo­sexuality may be to some individuals, or as recognizing homosexuals may be in some cultures, no one is onstage as "a homosex­ual" and nothing but "a homosexual" all the time.
Theoretical Considerations. In the basic social science introduction to the concept, Ralph Linton (1936) defined status as "a collection of rights and duties," and role as dynamic status: how rights and duties are realized in interaction. Each person in a society has more than one status, and therefore plays multiple roles. Moreover, a particular status involves, not a single role, but an array of associated roles, e.g., the "teacher role" in relation to students is not the same as the "teacher role" to administrators (or to the Parent-Teachers Association, etc.). There are overlapping simultaneous statuses so that different roles may be played even within a single setting. For instance, in a women-only bar it may not matter that one is a lesbian lawyer. Entry depends upon being a woman and of legal age. If there is a raid on the bar, the attorney role may be activated. Responding to a sexual proposition makes sexual status salient. Within this interaction, being a mother,
daughter, wife - all roles that she plays in other times and places - may not matter, although these outside statuses may affect where or whether the sexual proposition is accepted, if one of the perceived require­ments of the mother, daughter, or wife role is not to bring sexual partners home. Obli­gations to another person not present may impinge on interaction, and may do so whether or not the woman explicitly defines herself as, say, "wife" [to herself, to others present, or to those with whom she resides).
Analysis of shifting, overlapping, and multiple simultaneous status enact­ment in roles easily becomes very com­plex. Sometimes, it seems that an abstract "situation" determines (rather than merely limits) statuses; at other times it seems that role theorists believe that any sort of role can be presented (that is, that there are no constraints of plausibility on acting in public). Phenomenological analysis can make the "local accomplishment" of even the simplest communication seem mi­raculous. Perhaps even more confusingly, as Goodenough noted, use of the term "role" often drifts from this definition of enacted rights and obligations to any and all kinds of statements about social cate­gories, selves, and "personality structures." In the case of "homosexual role," discus­sion blithely posits psychological entities detached from any interaction, although to be meaningful "role" must be a rela­tional term, involving relation to actors of other roles and/or to an audience. Enacting a role plausibly does not require full com­mitment to a role or total self-identifica­tion with it. Indeed, an individual's "role distance" may facilitate plausible perform­ance, whereas totally embracing a role may land a person in the realm of psycho-pathology (Goffman). And role strain is "normal: in general the individual's total role obligations are over-demanding" as well as incompatible (Goode).
Homosexual Aspects. In an often cited paper which consolidates Anglo-American stereotypes into a "theoretical construct," Mcintosh (1968) posited a dichotomous homosexual/heterosexual categorization apart from any interaction and, indeed, based on no empirical data. Mcintosh's "homosexual role" lacks any of the subtle multiplicities of situated meanings of role as used by classical role theorists (none of whose writings she cited). It is a functionalist, not an interactionist construct, in effect a bogeyman to scare boys away from homosexuality. What those enacting a (the?) heterosexual role expect from those playing "the homosexual role," according to Mcintosh, is exhibi­tion of (1) effeminacy, (2) more or less exclusive homosexual feelings and behav­ior, (3) attraction to and (4) attempted seduction of all young men, or, perhaps all men ("sexuality will play a part of some kind in all his relations with other men"). Where, when, or whether the person play­ing Mcintosh's version of "the homosex­ual role" has a right to act effeminately and seduce men and/or boys is matter she does not discuss. Implicitly, this un-male "role" was enacted to/for a heterosexual male other. In some other cultures (especially Polynesian ones) in which there is a socie­tal conception of gender-crossing homo­sexuality, blatant specimens of failed masculine socialization could be tolerated, because such persons provided vivid warn­ings of what boys must avoid becoming.
Although, as Whitam noted, Mcintosh's treatment "violates the pre­vailing definition and conventional usage of this concept in sociology," and cannot "explain homosexuality," there are homo­sexual roles to analyze apart from the monster of the heterosexual imagination conjured up by Mcintosh. Within homo­sexual interactions and relationships, complementary roles exist, e.g., mentor/ initiate or sodomite/catamite occur where homosexuality is organized by age; hus­tler/trick or patron/protégé in class socie­ties, especially where there are "homosex­ual occupations" such as dancing boys; trade/queer, hombre/maricón (in Latin America), or brave/berdache (among the North American Indians) where homo­sexuality is organized by gender distinct­iveness. Each of these pairs has been listed in insertor/insertee order, although sexual behavior is only one aspect of these roles. A person may play one or more of these roles without possessing a homosexual identity, any strong commitment to or preference for homosexuality. Indeed, some of the roles may not require even feigned homosexual desire.
How to perform the sexual and other rights and obligations of these roles is learned. One does not learn how to be a homosexual any more than one learns how to be a husband or a wife directly in pri­mary socialization with one's natal fam­ily. One may learn about such roles, that is, learn the cultural script for each. Boys may learn about "the male role" without male role models, just as they may learn about queers without seeing any. Simi­larly, girls may hear about dykes. Learning about a "homosexual role" of the sort Mcintosh portrayed may motivate suppressing homosexual desires, and may also motivate acting out exaggerated cross-gender behavior before realizing that such behavior is not a necessary attribute of homosexuality within a homosexual sub­culture. Some observers have discerned a transient effeminate stage in the uniniti­ated boy's or man's process of distinguish­ing societal expectations of effeminacy from actual subcultural expectations. Similarly, a butch phase may have made a woman's sexual interest in other women visible. Such a traditional phase of cross-gender role exaggeration may be attenu­ated or altogether lacking for those who, growing up with homosexual desires, are able to perceive a lesbian or gay role for themselves unmarked by cross-gender behavior and demeanor. More recently, a phase of hypermasculinity ("macho") has been central to socialization into some gay male worlds.
Prior to contact with other gay or lesbian people or groupings, gender exag­geration (toward either extreme of the gender continuum) may be the only con­ceivable way to signal desired sexual vari­ance. Generally, anticipatory socialization is incomplete and either ambiguous or stereotyped. Moreover, anticipatory so­cialization "helps only to the extent it is accurate. ... If it is not accurate, it may actually impede adjustment, for perform­ing the acquired role will necessitate un­learning as well as further learning" (Thornton and Nardi). The gender-cross­ing idiom for recognizing homosexuals, is learned in early socialization in many societies (including the United States) in which age-grading is not central to organizing homosexual relations.
"Learning about" may heavily condition initial attempts to do what is expected of a sexual partner (husband, wife, or homosexual), but there is also secon­dary socialization onstage in the role, as well as intra-psychic rehearsal for playing it. Gender roles (how to act male or female) are part of primary socialization in Anglo-Saxon North America, but the roles en­acted in heterosexual marriage, as well as those enacted in gay subcultures are part of later learning/socialization. Breaking the externally imposed notion that homo­sexuality requires having to live out society's stereotypes of what "a homosex­ual" are is a key part of secondary sociali­zation within gay and lesbian subcultures. Nonetheless, neophytes tend to play their preconceptions of a role rigidly, or even ritualistically (Goffman). Within gay or lesbian communities or networks, most people discard the "queer" or "dyke" role (at least as conceived in the dominant society) and learn what others involved in homosexual scenarios expect. Such expec­tations may be only slightly conditioned by societal stereotypes, although residues of such images may be eroticized, or other­wise unconsciously maintained.
In all cultures, whatever the dominant conception or valuation of homosexuality, a merger of self and role is not inevitably achieved. Not only is there homosexuality outside subcultures, and behavior contrary to societal expectations, but there are individual conceptions of all roles in all societies. The process of role acquisition is not mere training in au­tomaton-like replication of fixed roles. Human beings create meaning even when they are trying to follow a social script exactly. Conceptions of what homosexual roles require vary within as well as among societies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Erving Goffman, Encounters, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961¡ William J. Goode, "A Theory of Role Strain," American Sociological Review, 25 (1960), 483-96; Ward Goodenough, "Rethinking Status and Role," in S. Tyler, ed., Cognitive Anthropology, New York: Holt, 1965, pp. 311-30; Ralph Linton, The Study of Man, New York: Appleton, 1936; Mary Mcintosh, "The Homosexual Role," Social Problems, 16(1968), 182-92; Russell Thornton and Peter M. Nardi, "Dynamics of Role Acquisition," American Journal of Sociology, 80 (1975), 870-84; Frederick J. Whitam, "The Homosexual Role Revisited," Journal of Sex Research, 13 (1977), 1-11.
Stephen O. Murray

Rolfe, Frederick William ("Baron Corvo"; 1860-1913)
English adventurer, novelist, and historian. Born in London as the son of a dissenting piano manufacturer, he left school at 15, then studied briefly at Ox­ford. He served as a tutor and made ends meet as a poorly paid hack writer. He found a number of patrons during his ca­reer, but his lifelong attempt to convince the Catholic Church - to which he had become a convert - that he had a vocation for the priesthood developed (or rather accented) a pathological state of mind that bordered on paranoia, and inevitably led to his break with it.
In 1890 he received from Caro­line, the Duchess of Sforza-Cesarini, the title of Baron Corvo, and she regarded him as her adopted grandson. While working for the firm of G. W. Wilson &. Co. in London in 1893, he invented underwater photography, but with no financial gain. To the Yellow Book he contributed six "Stories Toto Told Me" (1898); these leg­ends of the saints, with 26 additional ones, were printed as In His Own Image (1901). A work written on commission for the money, the Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901), displays his curious fund of knowledge, vivid but undisciplined imagi­nation, and considerable prose talent. His self-deluded, self-justifying, spiritual dreams of a rejected convert who became the noblest of popes furnished the material for his best work of fiction, Hadrian the Seventh (1904), to which he added mali­cious sketches of his supposed enemies. The central character, Hadrian, though endowed with Rolfe's identity, still blurs the boundaries between autobiography, while the secondary characters, all pup­pets manipulated as part of the drama of Hadrian, stem directly from Rolfe's expe­rience. Although the work is remarkable for its passages of wit and erudition, it spoils its effect by yielding to anti-socialist melodrama. The last years of his life were spent as a parasite in Venice. An idealized chronicle of the period from December 1908 to July 1909, with parting shots at his enemies, is contained in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, edited by A. J. A. Symons in 1934. To this subject matter Rolfe added a tender account of homosex­ual love, disguised as the hero Nicholas Crabbe's love for Zilda, a girl who lived and dressed as the boy Zildo.
Homosexuality, and more particularly pederasty, as subjects for lit­erature, were much in Rolfe's mind while he was writing this work. Sometime in 1909 he had sent to the British pederast John Gambril Nicholson a "specimen" of some ten thousand words, an experiment in f ormulatinghomosexual experiences as though they were his own. In September of the sameyear he began writing to an English visitor to Italy, Charles Masson Fox, a series of letters that may well be the most painful and the most erotic homosexual correspondence in English. Readers have found in them evidence that Rolfe was a corruptor of innocent youth, an insatiable and unrepentant sodomite, or contrari­wise mere begging letters concocted out of the literature of homosexuality and the author's own imagination. They in effect promise his patron the sexual services of fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boys, many of them inexperienced.
Rarely has any man left so clear an account of his own sexual nature and his passionate hunger for its fulfillment, along with the tragic evidence of its con­stant frustration. Rolfe's own preference was for boys sixteen to eighteen years old - the upper limit of the pederast's range of interest. But with his slender and uncer­tain means he simply could not pay hus­tlers' fees or rent suitable premises for the rendezvous. He felt real sympathy for the Venetian boys - gondoliers and the like - with whom he associated, and bitterly regretted that he could do no more for them. His failure to achieve the erotic conquests for which he longed paralleled all of the other disappointments of his life. He succeeded in nothing that he attempted, and was denied everything that he sought from the church except faith itself.
Rolfe has been the object of a cult, inspired perhaps by the fascination which the career of a pretender with equal touches of the holy and the demonic exerts on those fated to live their adventures vicari­ously through literature. He is a classic type of the homosexual "begging intellec­tual," constantly trying to live by his wits and to bask in the favor of the wealthy and powerful, yet doomed by the inner flaws of his personality to the margin of society and even of sanity. Bom without the means and social position to realize his grandiose ambitions, he nevertheless left a heritage that is part of English literature.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Miriam J. Benkovitz, Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977; A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo, New York: Macmillan, 1934.
Warren Johansson

Roman Emperors
Although many Roman sover­eigns took their official duties seriously, others - especially in the first century of the empire - used their almost limitless powers to secure personal pleasure. Ro­man biographers and historians supply abundant records of their careers, includ­ing their characteristic weaknesses. The first emperors, known as Julio-Claudian, came from the family of Julius Caesar. Although no Roman emperor ever failed to marry, Edward Gibbon remarked that "of the first fifteen emperors Claudius was the only one whose taste in love was entirely correct" (heterosexual).
Julio-Claudian Dynasty. Julius Caesar [ca. 102-44 b.c.), notorious as "the husband of every woman and the wife of every man," prostituted himself as a teen­ager to the Hellenistic monarch Nicomedes of Bithynia. His grand-nephew and succes­sor Octavian - known as Augustus when emperor from 31 b.c. to a.d. 14 - was a handsome lad beloved, perhaps physically, by Cicero, although in later life his wife Livia, the sole empress, provided him with as many women as he wished. The slide of Tiberius (ruled 14-37) into debauchery in his old age, analyzed by the genius of Tacitus in his Annals, on the isle of Capri, from whose fatal cliffs he pushed 76 sus­pect senators, is embellished by Suetonius, who in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars described the swimmingpool he kept filled with his "minnows," young boys and girls he taught to swim through his ancient legs and nibble his private parts. His vicious minister Sejanus had once been a senator's catamite.
Tiberius' nephew and assassin, the mad Caligula (37-41), who made his horse consul, ripped open the womb of his sister Drusilla out of fear that the progeny might succeed him and also indulged in pederasty with the patricians Marcus Lepidus and Valerius Catullus, Mnester the Comedian, and even foreign hostages. The drooling hunchback and stutterer Claudius (41-54), who survived Caligula's tyranny by pretending to be an imbecile, was dragged from his hiding place in a closet in the palace by the Praetorian guards who after assassinating Caligula made him Emperor, although his own sympathies were republican. He later had his first wife Messalina beheaded after she "married" a courtier in a revel without divorcing the Emperor. Claudius' son-in-law was, how­ever, found dead in bed with a boy, and he himself waspoisoned with abowlof deadly mushrooms by his beautiful niece Agrippina, whom he had forced to marry him in spite of his repulsiveness, but she did so to arrange the succession of her son by a previous marriage, Nero.
Nero (54 - 69), who succeeded in murdering his mother on the third at­tempt and forced his tutor Seneca, the greatest Latin writer and philosopher of stoicism, of the Silver Age, to commit suicide, was quite effeminate, but took as his bride in an elaborate wedding the eunuch Sporus because his face resembled that of his former wife Poppea. Nero's patrician contemporary Sempronius Grac­chus, who degraded himself to fight as a gladiator, married a young male comet player.
Year of the Four Emperors and Flavian Dynasty. The suspicious, parsi­monious Galba, who replaced Nero, was succeeded by the effeminate Otho, and he then by Vitellius, the last of the four emperors to die in the year 69. The victor in the civil war, doughty Italian Vespasian [69-79), of equestrian rather than senato­rial background, tried to restore to the principate the rectitude that the elderly Augustus pretended to have, but the elder of his sons Titus (79-81) owned a troop of pathics and eunuchs. The embittered, tyrannical Domitian (81-96) went mad, indulging in heterosexual and homosex­ual orgies, although pretending to enforce chastity. Before conspirators, including his wife, succeeded in assassinating him, he executed three Vestal Virgins unfaithful to their vows and enforced the Lex Julia against pederasts.
Adoptive and Antonine Emper­ors. Although Suetonius and Tacitus, the main sources for the sexual lives of the first twelve Roman emperors, as pro-re­publican senators denigrated their charac­ter with scandal, their mostly creditable tales only slightly exceed the accounts of the immorality common in the late Re­public in avant-garde aristocratic circles. About the five "good emperors" who suc­ceeded one another "by adoption of the best" more than by the close family ties of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties and came from the provinces, the histo­rian is far less well informed. They seem to have been more moderate sexually as well as less tyrannical. Nerva [96-98), septua­genarian when proclaimed Emperor, is, however, rumored to have buggered his younger predecessor Domitian.
Trajan (98-117), the hero whom the army forced the old senator to adopt as successor, descended from Roman colo­nists in Spain. A heavy drinker, Trajan practiced pederasty uninhibitedly and "without harming anyone." His cousin and successor, the philhellenic Hadrian (117-138), who composed pederastic verses in Greek imitating Anacreon - though respecting his wife Faustina - had a pas­sionate affair with the beautiful Antinous. After the favorite drowned himself in the Nile, Hadrian declared him a god and erected so many statues for his cult that no other figure of antiquity has so many sur­viving representations.
Of Antoninus Pius (138-161) the least is known, but his successor Marcus Aurelius (161 -180) noted that he had over­come any passion for boys. Unlike the other "good emperors," Marcus unfortu­nately produced a son and heir, the mad Commodus (180-192), sexually wild and impossibly tyrannical. Fancying himself a gladiator, he butchered cripples and other handicapped and otherwise shackled vic­tims before seventy or eighty thousand spectators in the Colosseum. He is said to have prostituted himself to men and to have kept a harem of 300 girls and 300 boys.
Severans. Although Commodus' successor the elderly Pertinax (193) reigned only 87 days and auctioned off Commodus' harem (except those who had been intro­duced into the palace by force, whom he freed), the old man bought some of them back for his own pleasure. The Praetorians sold the Empire to the wealthy, hen-pecked Didius Julianus, whose wife wished to be the first lady of Roman society, but mur­dered him after two months. Upon his assassination the "pax Romana" perma­nently ended in a bloody civil war in which Septimius Severus (193-211), of Punic descent, triumphed. The African Septimius married Julia Domna, the heir­ess of the priestly family of the sun god Baal from Emesa in Syria. She and her sister and daughter became the powers behind the throne during the reign of their mad progeny. Beside the unreliable continuators of the biographer Suetonius, known as the "Augustan historians," who wrote lives of the emperors from Hadrian to the last of the Thirty Tyrants in 284, the modem scholar has better sources, Herodian and Dio Cassius, to tell him of the political and sexual exploits of the Severi.
Using the term Dominus (Lord) to replace Princeps Senatus (Chief of the Senate), the Severi transformed the Em­pire into an overt military dictatorship that began to use the trappings of Oriental despotism and forbade Christians to prose­lytize, forcing Clement to flee Alexandria. Septimius was the first emperor to learn Latin as a foreign tongue, as in the eastern half of the Empire Greek remained the language of administration and Latin was used only in the army.
Septimius' elder son and succes­sor Caracalla ¡211-217) treacherously murdered his brother and coemperor in his mother's arms. By enfranchising all free inhabitants of the Empire citizens in 212, Caracalla accidentally made it harder to find a legal homosexual partner because only freedmen, slaves, and foreigners were fair game, Roman citizens being shielded from stupium by Domitian's extension of the Lex Julia to homosexuality among citizens, if not by earlier decrees. In other words, provincials and members of other ethnic groups, henceforth Roman citizens, could no longer assume the passive role.
Julia Domna's and Septimius' great-nephew, the effete transvestite Heliogabalus (218-222) attempted to popular­ize the worship of the Black Stone, a symbol of Baal. Accompanied by eunuch priests in saffron robes with cymbals, he officiated in public, the soldiers cheering his danc­ing. Twice married, once to a Vestal Vir­gin, Heliogabalus had agents scour the Empire for men with "large organs and bring them to court so that he could enjoy them." He also offered a great reward to the physician who could perform a transsexualizing operation on him, but this feat lay far beyond the Greco-Roman art of medicine.
After his assassination, his cousin Alexander Severus (222-235), who as­cended the throne at fourteen and at sev­enteen married the daughter of a senator, saw his jealous domineering mother ban­ish his wife and afterwards remained single until his assassination.
Imperial Crisis. Of the Thirty Tyrants who reigned in the fifty years that separated the death of Alexander to the accession of Diocletian (235-284), only two died peacefully, if we exclude the one stricken by plague. Famine, pestilence, and war civil and foreign devastated the Empire during that half-century. Debase­ment of the coinage and ruinous over­taxation exacerbated the crisis. The bar­racks emperors who fought their way to the throne, if not illiterate, were generally peasants, often from Illyricum and unfa­miliar with upper-class Greek (and Ro­man) pederastic traditions. Neoplatonists who attempted to refute Christians came to resemble their adversaries in trying to escape from a hopeless world and resorting to mysticism, and the majority of them were sex-negative and disapproving of homosexuality.
The crude giant from Thrace, Maximus (235-238), who assassinated the whimpering Alexander Severus in his tent along with his mother and faithful friends, was the first Emperor never to visit Rome. Descended from the Gracchi, Gordian I managed only 36 days, but his grandson Gordian II (238-244) lasted under the control of his mother's eunuchs and then his father-in-law until assassinated by followers of Philip the Arab (244-249), reputed to be black and even Christian. Celebrating the thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome in 247, he also at­tempted unsuccessfully to suppress male prostitution and to enforce the Lex Scatinia. Decius (245-251) began the great persecu­tion of the Christians, but Gallienus (253-268) refused his father Valerian's (253-257) policy of persecution and re­placed it with toleration, hoping to win over the Christians with his neo-Platonic arguments.
The grave disorders may have destroyed one-third of the population, devastated the cities, which had been the focus of classical pederasty, and destroyed the old upper classes. Provincial and even villa autarky (self-sufficiency) replaced the capitalistic trading network that had sus­tained the old cities. They also had to be walled to protect against marauders and invaders. Pederastic writing, like all other non-religious literature, declined sharply under the Thirty Tyrants. Physicians and philosophers increasingly recommended sexual restraint.
Christian Emperors. Even with the accession of Christian Emperors, who soon imposed the death penalty for sod­omy, classical pederasty did not die out at once. Constantine's sons Constantius and Constans (the latter's bodyguards chosen for their beauty rather than their compe­tence), following the lead of Church coun­cils and ascetic theologians, first decreed death for even consenting, adult sodomites in 342. In 390 Theodosius the Great (379-395) with his sons Arcadius and Honorius and coemperor Valentinian II prescribed burning at the stake for those found guilty of anal intercourse with an­other male. In two novellae appended to his summation of previous Roman laws condemning pederasty in the Corpus Juris Civilis, Justinian the Great (527-565), who married the former showgirl Theodora, decreed death at the stake for unrepentant sodomites because the Biblical account of the conflagration of Sodom proved that they had brought ruin upon society, caus­ing famines, earthquakes, and pestilences. Justinian, who closed the pagan schools of philosophy, also ended the classical ped­erasty institutionalized by the Greeks in Crete and Sparta toward the end of the seventh century b.c., 1300 years earlier. He set the tone for the persecution codi­fied by Patristic writers, penitentials, canon law, and scholastic philosophy, as well as laws (feudal and royal) and laws (munici­pal) that still endures in Christian society, only relieved of the death penalty begin­ning with reforms of the French Revolu­tion and of Joseph II of Austria inspired by the Enlightenment ideas of Beccaria.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Eva Cantarella, Secondo Nature, Rome: Riuniti, 1987; Michael Grant, The Roman Emperors: A Biographical Guide to the Rulers of Imperial Rome, 31 BC-AD 476, New York: Charles Scribner's, 1985; Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934.
William A. Percy

Rome, Ancient
The erotic life of ancient Rome - the Republic and the Empire - has long fascinated philologists and historians, novelists and moralists. Whether on ac­count of its long dominance of Western civilization, its role as the primary antago­nist of early Christianity, or its apparently contradictory images of robust, virile military power and orgiastic, "polymor­phously perverse" decadence, Roman sexuality has provided fodder for unceas­ing polemics, ranging from the moralism of the church fathers to the lauding of antiquity by homophile antiquarians. Some assert with seeming assurance that law and custom forbade male homosexuality as incompatible with civic virtue, while others are confident that the Romans casu­ally accepted homosexuality or at least bisexuality as a natural, common part of their society.
These discordant images stem from the contradictory attitudes of Ro­mans whose works have survived into modem times, from the scanty documen­tation for actual practices, especially among the bulk of the Roman population, and, most important, from the anachro­nistic application of a modern concept of homosexuality to a period which, not recognizing it as a unitary phenomenon, separated it into discrete practices based on class and role.
Historical Background. Accord­ing to tradition, the city was founded in 753 b.c., but archeologists have unearthed remains of settlements from as early as the middle of the second millennium, when the several hamlets on the site were begin­ning to coalesce. Etruscans dominated the nascent city-state for at least a century setting examples of sexual promiscuity, but in time Romans supplanted their tu­tors, exiling Tarquin, the proud last Etrus­can king. They then overcame the Cartha­ginians, from whom they learned to cru­cify rebel slaves and pirates and to culti­vate latifundia worked by slaves, and be­tween 202, the defeat of Hannibal, and 30 b.c., the death of Cleopatra, imposed their rule on the entire Mediterranean. Preem­inent among the older cultures on whom the Romans imposed their rule were the Greeks. To paraphrase the poet Horace, politically prostrate Greece triumphed culturally over the barbarous victor, and Rome became the first exemplar of a post-Hellenic civilization in the wake of ancient Greece. Roman borrowings were accom­panied by a hounding sense of inferiority to Greek culture. In reaction, some Ro­mans withdrew into a kind of anti-intellectualism that abandoned such fripperies as literature and the arts to the decadent Greeklings. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, Vergil portrays Anchises recommending that the Romans specialize in governing, and freely acknowledging that the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean with their far older civilizations would always surpass his own in the arts and sciences. Another defensive response to perceived inferiority stressed Rome's primordial simplicity and purity before alien luxury corrupted its people. According to the patriotic fables of historians like Livy, the early Romans were paragons of guileless virtue. Toiling in the fields kept them too busy to plot intrigues against their neighbors, and yielded too few worldly goods to incite envy. This idealized picture of the early Republic served as a foil for castigating ubiquitous luxury, corruption, and covet­ing of goods and sex objects in the later times. Wide acceptance of such myths of a vanished golden age of virtue legitimized attacking contemporaries for "un-Roman" behavior, especially sexual indulgence. The invidious contrast between present cor­ruption and past simplicity increased in popularity during the last century of the Republic (146-27b.c), aperiodmarked by brilliant military success abroad and po­litical disaster at home. Rome's modest institutions were not designed to cope with the sudden influx of booty - luxury goods, art objects, and, especially, slaves - from foreign conquests. The rise of many, some not even citizens, from straitened circumstances to great wealth stimulated a vulgar opportunistic tone which grated on those loyal to the old ways, whose relative status was declining. Despite the earnest striving of Augustus to reform imperial Roman society, the ostentatious nouveau riche style persisted for several generations, into the second century of the present era.
The Role of Slavery. A massive influx of slaves accompanied Roman rise to domination in the Mediterranean. Al­though, like almost all ancient peoples, Romans had probably always counte­nanced slavery, the early peasant commu­nity had few. However, success in the Samnite, Punic, and eastern Mediterra­nean wars yielded enormous infusions, as many as 25,000 captives in a single day. By the end of the Republic, slaves comprised 30 to 35 percent of the population of Italy, a proportion comparable to that of the antebellum American South. Their cheap­ness and abundance clearly invited arbi­trariness and maltreatment. Slaves were routinely beaten for "sport" and to relieve masters' frustrations. Until the time of Hadrian, Roman law permitted owners to execute slaves summarily. Slaves were objects for lust as well as sadism. As Sen­eca remarked, "Unchastity {impudicitia) is a crime in the freeborn, a service (officium) for the freedman, and an obligation for the slave" {Controversies IV, 10). This common situation made the role of slav­ery in same-sex relationships far more salient than in Greece, where of course it was not absent, but was on a much reduced scale and counterbalanced by the concept of pederasty as an instrument of education and state-building. The comedies of Plautus (who died ca. 184 b.c.) already make the master's lust for his slave boys the chief same-sex theme. Attractive slaves in the great houses of the rich were expected not only to cater to their master's lust, but also to be sexually available for guests (see Horace's Satires, 1.2.116-119). For all its importance, tantalizingly little is known about the sexual aspects of the Roman trade in slaves. The paucity of information reflects not only the prudery of modern scholars, but also the very banality of the activity in ancient times. Slaves were part of the taken-for-granted background of life, omnipresent but little noticed. It is certain that many slaves were sold by free but indigent parents. Others were foundlings.
Captives taken in military campaigns supplied the bulk of young flesh for the slave markets and thence the numerous brothels. Slaves would be set upon a slowly rotating platform, while the auctioneer lifted the garments so as to display not only the musculature and general physical condition of the specimen, but also the sexual endowments. Often deprived of access to women, sometimes even shack­led slaves enjoyed one another sexually.
Roman Roles. Although Roman women had somewhat more power and influence than those of ancient Athens and were not secluded, Roman society was overwhelmingly male-dominated, with a consequent dearth of surviving references to lesbianism except for epigrams scat­tered throughout Martial's collected poems. Roman custom accepted a para­digm of sexuality which observed a stark dichotomy between the penetrator, who was seen as engaging in normal aggressive and dominating masculine behavior re­gardless of the gender of his object, and the penetrated (pathic), who was considered to be weak, submissive, and powerless. Under this system, any Roman male citizen could be a penetrator without fear of aspersions or disgrace, though some criticized any homosexual activity. On the other hand, the penetrated role was considered appro­priate only for those who were submissive because of their exclusion from the power structure: women, slaves, and provincial or foreign boys, but not free boys destined to become citizens. A male adult Roman citizen who became a sexual receiver was seen as yielding his birthright of power and hence compromising the power position of all other male adult citizens. As so much of the homosexuality took place between penetrating masters and recep­tive slaves, the conception of master-slave relationships became entangled in the agent-pathic one. The salience of the for­mer, implying that the man who "takes it" enslaves himself to his penetrator, is char­acteristically Roman. Moreover, as Eva less. A large number of the graffiti discov­ered in the ruins of Pompeii are bisexual or homosexual in content. Moreover, they do not seem to include any real "homopho­bia," and even romantic sentiments ap­pear occasionally. Frequently signed, these homoerotic graffiti indicate no fear of social repercussions. The graffitists appear to be penetrative males, usually directing their attentions to boys.
Roman Law. The earliest and most problematic landmark is the shad­owy Lex Scantinia (or Scatinia), purport­edly dating from the third century b.c. The text has not survived, and the question of its meaning still defies adequate interpre­tation. To interpret this moot testimony as indicating the Romans were antihomo­sexual because "they had a law against it" goes beyond the evidence. As is so often the case, part of the problem stems from applying the modern comprehensive no­tion of homosexuality to an earlier era which had no such overall concept. The Latin stuprum covered a whole range of prohibited sexual behavior. The same act might or might not be stuprum according to the circumstances. To copulate with a freeborn teenage girl was stuprum; but not with a teenage girl who was a slave or freedwoman, but officially registered as a prostitute. It was the status of the actors rather than the act itself that determined whether or not it was licit. It seems likely that the boundaries of stuprum varied over time, but the late imperial codifications, extending from Ulpian to Tribonian, failed to preserve earlier legislation. If there were restrictions on same-sex behavior in the Lex Scantinia, they do not seem to have been enlarged, or even reaffirmed at any later stage of lawmaking. In fact, there were complaints from some moralists that the statute had fallen into disuse like modern blasphemy statutes. The few cases under the republic typically refer to a superior pressuring an inferior in the army to submit to him sexually. Interestingly, pronatalist legislative initiatives of the early Imperial period, most famously the Cantarella has pointed out, this asymme­try was reinforced by the Roman impera­tive to rule over subject peoples, so that the position of the sexually penetrated was analogous to that of a conquered province. This concatenation of degradations lent itself to particularly vicious exploitation in Roman political campaigning, as in Cicero's attacks on Mark Antony, whom he accused of being not only a woman but a slave for being pathic. This notion of self-abasement through accepting the role of pathic, even though Antony was a boy when with Curio, seems to have struck a particularly sensitive nerve. Perhaps it was being so outnumbered in their empire that confirmed Roman citizens in their sense that an instance of one member of their collective yielding himself to sexual "degradation" was a lessening of the strength of the community. In the army, sex with a male citizen was punishable by death, but in times of war, according to Cicero, soldiers were permitted to rape (enemy) freeborn youths and virgins. Male prostitution was extremely widespread - the boys even having their own annual festival day (Robigalia, April 25) - and was not only looked upon with general favor but was taxed by the state. While most of the prostitutes were slaves, a few of them were freedmen, and most were boys. Ped­erasty did not, as in Greece, play a compen­sating role in the training and toughening of young men for duty to the State. Relatedly, the Romans before the introduction of gymnasia on the Greek model permit­ted nudity only in the bathhouses, a mi­lieu of selfish and hedonistic indulgence, in contrast to the Greek consolidation of the link between pederasty and male char­acter formation through public nude ath­letics. Very little is known about the sex­ual life of the Roman proletariat, the lower class of citizenry - after 200 b.c. often of Oriental or Greek origin - that owned no slaves. According to some graffiti at Pom­peii, there were, however, prostitutes for the poor available for the equivalent of an unskilled laborer's hourly wage or even Lex Julia de adulteriis of Augustus, were entirely devoted to curbing men's activi­ties with prohibited women, completely disregarding any dalliances with boys.
Literary Evidence. Valuable evi­dence from Roman writers begins with Cicero, who Latinized many Greek tech­nical concepts, accusing opponents - as Attic orators routinely did - of pathic behavior. How much irritation at his tire­some moralizing provoked the triumvirs' secret decision to proscribe him can only be a speculation, but such scurrilous accu­sations became a common feature of Roman political life. If Cicero was hostile, the Epicurean Lucretius was merely indif­ferent, nowhere condemning same-sex relations. Nonetheless, by elevating gen­eration through the pivotal principle nihil ex nihilo fit ("nothing can come from nothing"), he unwittingly laid a founda­tion for later prescriptivists' obsession with procreation. Allegedly at least the later Stoics opposed same-sex pleasure, and indeed all sex outside marriage, and be­queathed this view to Christian rigorism. On the whole, evidence fails to support so austere a view, although Stoics, like most Epicureans, their main philosophical ri­vals, did stress the advantages of modera­tion and indifference to passion. One could, however, be a moderate pederast, instead of a frenzied one. Only Musonius Rufus, seemingly following the track of Plato in The Laws in rejecting same-sex copula­tion as "against nature," specifically sought to discourage homosexuality (a citation of Seneca offered by St. Jerome being of dubi­ous import shorn of its original, now lost context). In the sphere of sexual morality, the early church fathers' debt to the Stoics was slight. Patristic thinkers used Stoic and Platonic phrases mainly as window-dressing for a sex-negative, other-worldly, at times dualistic, oriental, anti-intellec­tual dogma. In sum, a few Romans de­nounced or discouraged some aspects of homosexuality, but most did not com­ment on the matter - and in the general setting of Mediterranean social life, it can reasonably be concluded that their silence implied consent.
Evidence from poetry and belles lettres is more abundant. Catullus wrote some of his most piercingly eloquent lyr­ics on the joys and sorrows of being in love with a boy. Recent research has shown how extensively Catullus relied on Helle­nistic prototypes, exemplifying the Ro­man duality between immediate experi­ence and hallowed Greek models. Catul­lus' pederastic love poetry is echoed in more muted fashion by his contemporary Tibullus. Vergil's Second Eclogue, with his immortal homosexual swain Cory don, an object case of the Greek-Roman dual­ity, imitates a heterosexual idyll of The­ocritus - who wrote his own share of homo­sexual verse. Crossovers of this kind, anomalous only in light of a rigid heterosexual-homosexual dichotomy, occurred as a matter of course in antiquity. Even Ovid, exiled under the Lex Julia for being one of many lovers of Augustus' daughter Julia, and apparently the most heterosexual of the Latin poets, wrote nonchalantly of pederasty and magical changes of sex.
Satire is the only distinctly Roman literary form. Although claiming to act from the high motive of purging the body politic of hypocrisy and corruption, often the satirist was actuated by personal spite and love of gossip. Juvenal's criticism of Roman same-sex customs in the first century of the present era revolves around the familiar contrast between the artless simplicity of the revered past and the luxury of the depraved present. For him a symp­tom of this degeneration was the violation of class barriers in the obsessions of Roman aristocrats for low-bom favorites, usually of foreign descent. His Second Satire had scions of patrician families offering them­selves in marriage, replete with Oriental rites, to their darlings. As in analogous cases from Martial (e.g., XII.42) and Sue­tonius {Life of Nero), they sought to dig­nify their male-male unions by assimilat­ing them to religious rites wherein the initiate "weds" the god. Stripping away Juvenal's veneer of moral indignation, one can see that these weddings in fact re­flected an innovatory striving to regular­ize a type of relationship that, however well-worn in practice, was nonetheless marginal to the official structure of Ro­man ideology and institutions. Some may have been merely travesties. Very differ­ent is Petronius' ambitious picaresque novel, the Satyiicon, of which only about a tenth has survived. These fragments recount the bawdy adventures of two friends, rivals for the favors of Giton, a fickle pretty boy. Holding very definite opinions about literature and art, Petronius was as nonjudgmental about sexual be­havior as anyone could be. Martial, too, has been considered unedifying, often even accused of sensationalism and of purvey­ing scurrilous gossip for mere titillation. Yet he operated within certain cultural restraints, e.g., believing it better to fuck than to be fucked, better to have the means to invite others to dine with one than to cadge invitations, and, best of all, to be open about one's tastes rather than hypo­critical. His writings are a cornucopia of information on Roman customs relating to sex, such as the cutting of the hair of slave boys to signal the end of their availa­bility as sexual utensils. Martial throws some light also on the vexed question of the cinaedus, a kind of gigolo, often trained as a dancer or entertainer, who would perform as the agent for adult pathics. Martial alleged that cinaedi often serviced wives as well. His favorable comments on pueri delicati, handsome boys who seem to have appealed to his own taste, leave the impression that in his time there was a definite bifurcation between the ephebe (in his teens) and the cinaedus (in his twenties) as sexual objects, the former being pathic, the latter not.
The mass of Roman literature - all of which could be printed in about 500 modern volumes - is not large, and much of it does not provide any information on sexual customs and attitudes. Even so, from the historians, notably Suetonius and Tacitus, the reader quickly learns that the emperors were - to say the least - poly­morphous perverse, and that their omnisexuality served more to titillate than nauseate the Roman populace.
Debates over the Fall of Rome. Modern historians have assembled a be­wildering variety of contradictory expla­nations for the fall of the Roman Empire: external pressures vs. internal decay, fail­ure of leadership at the top vs. festering anger welling up from below; a shortage of manpowervs. maldistribution of resources; physical causes such as plagues vs. collec­tive psychic exhaustion signified by the fading of Rome's ancient religion and civic spirit before cults from the East, such as Manichaeanism and Christianity. Draw­ing in part on the harsh judgments of their satirists and historians, the modern stere­otype was mainly shaped by nineteenth-century French writers and painters, who were uncomfortably aware of parallels between the decline of their own cultural hegemony and that of their Latin fore­bears. Popular culture (including the film Cahgula and the television series "I, Clau­dius") has picked up their lurid images. This moralistic sleaze is completely ir­relevant to the fall of Rome, for most of it is firmly set in the first century of our era, before the Empire reached its zenith with the Five Good Emperors and even before the starting point of the narrative of Ed­ward Gibbon's Decline and Fall.
In order to relate this varied ma­terial causally to Rome's fall one would have to assume a "latency period" of six to eight generations. Indeed, as early as 180 b.c. Cato the censor condemned Scipio, conqueror of Hannibal and of Antiochus HI, for importing luxury and Greek profli­gacy to corrupt the mos maiomm, the strict ancestral morality of the early Romans such as Cincinnatus. This plaint continued with Sallust, who had Jugurtha, king of Numidia say upon leaving Rome that there was nothing in the city that was not for sale. Cicero too argued that moral and social decadence epitomized by Catil­ine and Antony caused Rome's disgrace. But these laments ceased in the second century, and it was only long after those halcyon days of sexual abandon that the fall ensued. To conflate Caligula (much less Catiline or Antony) and the fall of Rome is like finding in Sir Walter Raleigh's behavior the cause of the decline of the British Empire. Caligula had no more to do with the fall than Raleigh with the Boer War.
What were the views of the Romans themselves? Many castigated the falling away from the sturdy virtues of the Republic, and saw such conduct as indi­vidually and collectively shameful with­out threatening the foundations of the Empire. For Rome had been given imperium sine fine, dominion without limit. Even during the dark days of the third century, orators celebrating the thousandth anniversary of the founding of the city regularly summoned up the image of Roma aeterna. Only after the fact was the idea expressed that indulgence, sexual or oth­erwise, caused Rome's collapse. The first instance of what was later to become a commonplace reproach is in De gubematione Dei, a moralistic diatribe composed by Salvian, a Christian presbyter of Mar­seilles, about a.d. 450. In discussing Carthage (by then a Roman city, not the old Semitic realm) Salvian contrasted the former degenerate effeminacy of the city, its ostentatious queens on parade, with the severe, highly moral regime instituted by the Germans after their successful siege. Thus, in Salvian's overoptimistic view of the horrible Vandals, the most destructive of all the Germanic tribes that overran the western provinces, the material and intel­lectual losses caused by the barbarian incursions were compensated for by a moral advance. The contrast between the older pluralistic civilization and obsessive early Christian moralizing could scarcely be clearer, and in longer historical perspec­tive, Salvian's arbitrary linking of sexual freedom, particularly same-sex activity, with political weakness and instability was to become a pernicious legacy, one of the cornerstones of the later decadence myth. Besides this, the eastern provinces of the Empire, just as corrupt and sexually permissive as the west, in fact more given to pederasty, survived for another thou­sand years until conquered by the Otto­man Turks in 1453, though Justinian in the early sixth century voiced the Judeo-Christian belief that sodomites caused earthquakes, plagues, and famines.
Conclusion. Rome shared with Greece (and other Mediterranean cultures) the fundamental agent/pathic distinction in sexual transactions. Apart from a common Indo-European heritage, its ori­gins lost in the proverbial mists of prehis­tory, Rome was subject to a massive and continuing influx of Greek culture with Greek models adapted to and merging with Latin and Etruscan tendencies, Oriental ones appearing later with the conquest of Syria and Palestine by Pompey in 66 b.c. and of Egypt by Julius Caesar. Neverthe­less, significant differences make the con­ventional compound term Greco-Roman civilization questionable. (1) Rome gener­ally lacked the Hellenic concept of ped­erasty as contributing to the collective (civic) good quite beyond the pleasure af­forded the agent. (2) There was an absence of public nudity - except in the baths, where men and women were often nude together - in the socially sanctioned peda­gogical setting of the gymnasium. (3) With hordes of slaves, imperial Rome differed from the Greek city-states, and the master-slave relationship was the para­digmatic locale of sexual pleasure in Rome, but not earlier in Greece. (4) In the nou­veau-riche atmosphere of the late Repub­lic and early Empire, the role of cinaedus with respect to his patron paralleled the more respectable asymmetrical relation­ship of parasite and client, less extreme but still akin to the slave-master dispar­ity. (5) Greek idealism about sexual pas­sion as a motive for improving the mind of the sexually receptive contrasts sharply with the thoroughly materialistic Roman use of property for sexual gratification. (6) Rome's exploitation of a vast empire cre­ated an inequity between rulers and ruled that influenced paradigms of sexual con­duct.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, London: Duckworth, 1982; Eva Cantarella, Secondo Natura, Rome: Riuniti, 1987; Danilo Dalla, "Ubi Venus mutatur": omosessualità e diritto nel mondo romano, Milan: Giuffrè, 1987; Françoise Gonfroy, "Homosexual­ité et idéologie esclavagiste chez Cicerón," Dialogues d'histoire ancienne, 4 11978), 219-65; Pierre Grimai, L'Amour à Rome, Paris: Belles Lettres, 1980; Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, London: Routledge &. Kegan Paul, 1934; Saara Lilja, Homosexuality in Republi­can and Augustan Rome (Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum, 74), Helsinki, 1982; Beert Verstraete, "Slaves and the Social Dynamic of Male Homosexual Relations in Ancient Rome," fournal of Homosexuality, 5 (1980), 227-36.
Wayne R. Dynes

Römer, L. S. A. M. von (1873-1965)
Dutch physician, historian, and student of homosexuality. Lucien Sophie Albert Marie von Römer was born in Kampen as the scion of a noble family that had lived in the Netherlands since the eighteenth century. He studied medicine at Leiden and Amsterdam, passing the licensing examination in 1903. Thereafter he studied and worked in Berlin with Albert Moll and Magnus Hirschfeld, and met two well-known transvestites, Willibald von Sadler-Grün and Freiherr Hermann von Teschenberg, who made no secret of their predilection and let themselves be photo­graphed for Hirschfeld's fahrbuch. Von Römer had an idealistic philosophy of life and a great reserve of personal dyna­mism; he was an admirer of Erasmus,
Spinoza, and Nietzsche, whose Thus Spake Zarathustra he translated into Dutch. A trip to Greece in 1912 interrupted his term of service as health official in the Royal Navy. After 1913 he settled in the Dutch East Indies, where he occupied various functions in the health service until 1932. In the course of his career his campaign against injustice earned him the hostility of many of his colleagues, and his energetic measures against unhygienic conditions won him the title of "the medical Napoleon." After his retirement he practiced neurology and psychiatry in Malang, where he lived until his death at the age of 92.
Von Romer's articles on various aspects of homosexuality were for their time major, path-breaking studies that assembled a vast amount of material that was little-known or had been deliberately ignored by official scholarship. His first article was a biography of "Henri the Third, King of France and Poland," which ap­peared in the fourth volume of the fahrbuch in 1902; in the same volume he com­mented on the abusive reception of Arnold Aletrino's paper at the Congress of Crimi­nal Anthropology in Amsterdam the pre­vious year. In the fifth volume (1903) he issued a study of more than two hundred pages on "The Androgynous Idea of Life," a survey of myths and beliefs concerning androgyny and hermaphroditism from remote antiquity to the present. In 1904 he published in Dutch a book entitled Un­known People: The Physiological Devel­opment of the Sexes in Connection with Homosexuality, and in the following year The Uranian Family: A Scientific Investi­gation and Conclusions on Homosexual­ity. This latter work examined disparities from the normal sex-ratio in the siblings of homosexuals in the aim of demonstrating that they were biologically disguised members of the opposite sex. A German version was published in 1906, together with an article in the fahrbuch on "Uranism in the Netherlands before the Nineteenth Century, with Especial Reference to the Great Uranian Persecution in the Year 1730," the classic study of a wave of intolerance in which 250 men and boys were prosecuted and 57 put to death. His last work on the subject appeared in 1908, an anthology of passages from Nietzsche on homosexuality in the Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft. In the same year he unsuccessfully attempted to have a medi­cal dissertation on homosexuality accepted by the University of Amsterdam, but it was rejected on the ground that a number of passages were judged "in conflict with morality and offensive to others." The hostile climate engendered by the Harden-Eulenberg affair in Germany may have influenced him to turn away from the subject. Following Hirschfeld, von Römer always laid stress in his writings on the social obloquy and blackmail that embit­tered the lives of his homosexual subjects, and by defending the existence of innate homosexuality he sought to deliver them from the reproaches of sin, sickness, and degeneracy. He also combatted the Dutch version of the "social purity" movement of his time and idealization of sexual absti­nence. A last work of his, the fruit of thirty years' labor, he showed in manuscript to Magnus Hirschfeld when his former teacher visited the East Indies in 1931; it has remained unpublished.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Maurice van Lieshout, "Stiefkind der natuur. Het homobeeld bij Aletrino en von Römer," Homojaarboek I, Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1981, pp. 75-105.
Warren Johansson

Roosevelt, Eleanor (1884-1962)
American public figure and jour­nalist. Born into an old New York family of Dutch patroon ancestry, she was the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of Franklin Delano Roosev­elt, whom she married in 1905. Even be­fore her marriage she had been an active and able promoter of social causes, and she continued this career after becoming the wife of a rising star in the Democratic Party who was its vice presidential nomi­nee in 1920. When Franklin was stricken with poliomyelitis in 1921, she overcame her shyness in order to be his liaison with the political scene. When her husband, returning to the political arena, was elected first governor of New York (1928) and then president of the United States (1932), she played a leading role in women's organiza­tions, in promoting consumer welfare, in struggling against unemployment and poor housing, and in furthering the rights of minorities. In 1933 she held the first press conference ever staged by a president's wife, and in 1935 she began a daily column "My Day," which, syndicated in newspa­pers throughout the country, gave her the opportunity to focus attention on social problems of the time.
Eleanor Roosevelt recast the role of president's wife in a far more activist, political tone, breaking with older con­ventions and earning the intense hatred of the foes of the New Deal. In an era when the feminist movement, having achieved the goal of women's suffrage in 1920, was in abeyance, she symbolized the career-oriented, politically active, socially con­cerned woman of modern times.
From 1945 to 1953, and again in 1961, she was United States delegate to the fledgling United Nations Organiza­tion, and in 1946 she was named chair­woman of the Commission on Human Rights, a subsidiary of the Economic and Social Council. In the 1950s she remained in politics as a leader of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and a supporter of Adlai Stevenson. As one of the most promi­nent women of the first half of the twenti­eth century, she won an enduring place in American political and social history.
The question of a lesbian compo­nent in Eleanor Roosevelt's life and per­sonality is somewhat complicated by the problematic of lesbian self-definition as it emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It is clear that the wife of an American president in the 1930s could have had no part in an overt lesbian subculture, but on the other hand Eleanor exchanged passionate letters with the journalist Lorena Hickock. These Doris Faber first tried to suppress out of fear that others might "misunderstand" them, but failing this, she wrote a book, The Life of Lorena Hickock, E. R.'s Friend (1980), as a lengthy polemic to the effect that neither "of these women can be placed in the contemporary gay category." Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a noted apologist for the Roosevelt administration, tried to defend the two women by placing them in "a well established tradition" as "children of the Victorian age." It is impossible on the basis of surviving evidence to assert that they had an overt lesbian relationship, but they undeniably had an emotional friend­ship with homoerotic overtones.
Those attuned to the theme of "great lesbians in history" will no doubt wish to include such a notable as Eleanor Roosevelt on their list, while her enemies will seize upon the label as a confirmation of their dislike. The affairs of the heart are not so easily categorized as the alliances and affinities of political life. Eleanor Roosevelt overcame the feminine shyness and passivity into which she had been socialized to play a role in American poli­tics of the 1930s that was not in her husband's shadow, and possibly she over­came sexual conventions as well. Herneed for intense female companionship may have been the equivalent of male bond­ing - with its nuances and ambiguities. Her role as promoter of women's rights and as a symbol of the emancipated woman of the New Deal era is her chief legacy to the lesbian/feminist movement of today.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Doris Faber, The Life of Lorena Hickock, E. R.'s Friend, New York: Morrow, 1980; Jess Flemion and Colleen M. O'Connor, Eleanor Roosev­elt: An American Journey, San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1987.
Evelyn Gettone

Rorschach Test
The Rorschach test is the inven­tion of the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), a disciple of Eugen Bleuler. In 1921 he published Psychodiagnostik, which was the outcome of a decade of work with a very large number of bilaterally symmetrical inkblot cards administered to a variety of psychiatric groups. After supplementary testing with so-called normal subjects, retarded per­sons, and other special categories he is­sued the first German edition with its 10 standard cards that have been used ever since. The crucial feature of the test is that there is no meaning in the inkblots, it is simply "projected" from the mind of the subject onto the shapes and colors which he sees on the cards. The projective prin­ciple had been familiar to artists since the time of Leonardo da Vinci; new was its application to depth psychology. The test was scored primarily for the ratio of color to movement responses, and Rorschach's somewhat typological scoring system was based upon a combination of the observ­able with clinical insight or intuition. In the 1920s some 30 titles relating to Ror­schach technique were published, in the next decade some 200 more, and in the following decades the literature swelled into thousands of items.
The popularity of the Rorschach stemmed from a time when psychoana­lytic views predominated, and inner proc­esses and the unconscious were the object of clinical assessment. Enthusiastic users claimed that the Rorschach test was a foolproof x-ray of the personality not sub­ject to any situational set, but others re­jected the test and predicted its abandon­ment. The current mean of opinion is that "The Rorschach is a field of study in re­search which permits workers to investi­gate such diverse concepts as body image, primary process thinking, hypnotizability, orality, and ego strength." It is further understood that the Rorschach is a com­plex instrument that cannot yield a simple score, rather the entire configuration must be compared with the clinical picture obtained from other procedures such as psychiatric examination.
From 1945 onward, a number of investigators sought to establish the use­fulness of the Rorschach test in the diag­nosis of male homosexuality. In a paper of 1949, W. M. Wheeler developed 20 content signs which he attempted to make as unambiguous and objective as possible, and found a low, but consistently positive relationship between them and clinical diagnoses of homosexuality. Five years later, R. Shafer published a book in which he outlined a number of themes in Ror­schach content relating to homosexuality.
In 1954 Evelyn Hooker set out to compare the incidence of the Wheeler homosexual content signs in the Rorschach protocols of overt male homosexuals as compared with the protocols of hetero­sexuals, and also to compare the two groups with respect to the frequency of occur­rence of Shafer's content themes relating to homosexuality.
Hooker's findings, published four years later, were that the Wheeler signs did, as a whole, differentiate a homosexual from a heterosexual group, but only when matched pairs were considered. When highly qualified Rorschach experts at­tempted to • distinguish the homosexual records, the process was marked by uncer­tainty and precarious vacillation. Agree­ment was primarily in the correct identifi­cation of records characterized by open anality, perverse or parhedoniac sexuality, and "feminine emphasis." In other words, the Rorschach test served to diagnose homosexuality correctly only in a limited number of cases in which specific ele­ments of personality distortion were pres­ent. The relationship of the Rorschach picture to overt behavior depended upon many complex variables in the subject's life situation which tended to be over­looked in the clinical picture of homo­sexuality that prevailed in the 1950s. Continued use of the Rorschach technique alone for diagnosis of homosexuality, without other substantiating evidence, Hooker concluded, would lead to errone­ous findings, both positive and negative, and perpetuate false concepts that disre­garded the cultural aspect of the problem by focusing on the supposed clinical one.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Evelyn Hooker, "Male Homosexuality in the Rorschach," Journal of Projective Techniques, 22 (1958), 33-54; R. Shafer, Psychoanalytic Interpretation in Rorschach Testing, New York: Grune and Stratton, 1954; W. M. Wheeler, "An Analysis of Rorschach Indices of Male Homosexuality," Journal of Projective Techniques, 13 (1949), 97-126.
Warren Johansson

Rough Trade
See Trade.

Roussel, Raymond (1877-1933)
French poet, novelist, and play­wright. Roussel was born into an upper-class Parisian family, friends and neigh­bors of Marcel Proust. Jean Cocteau (who spent time with him in a drug treatment program at St. Cloud) called Roussel "the Proust of dreams."
The young Raymond studied piano, composed songs but at seventeen turned to poetry because "the words came easier." Publication of his first book La Doublure (1897) led to a deep depression and treatment by the noted psychiatrist Pierre Janet, who published an account of his patient. Another book of poems, La Vue (1904), followed and two novels, Impressions d'Afrique (1910) and Locus Solus (1914).
In 1909, Roussel wonagoldmedal for his marksmanship; he was an avid chess player and adored the writings of Jules Verne. He was an early fancier of camp since he enjoyed melodramas and in 1914 had his own roulette (housetrailer) built.
In 1912 Impressions d'Afriqueran as a play with a distinguished cast and important praises by Apollinaire, Duchamp, and Picabia, but its unorthodoxy aroused vehement public ridicule. Locus Solus was likewise adapted for the stage in 1922, and Roussel wrote two additional plays, L'Etoile au Front (1925) and La Poussiere de Soleils (1927). The surrealists defended L'Etoile and con­fronted the jeering audiences; the fighting aroused public scandal.
Roussel's sexuality is described by Houppermans as not unlike his writing: "Pluperversity, that fundamental elastic­ity, that continuous back and forth of libidinal drives, was to be the hallmark of a new universe." Roussel found a new realm of libidinal pleasures (including both drugs and men) in travel: in 1920-21 he visited India, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, China, Japan, the United States, and other developing areas. His greatest fascination was with Africa, where he often visited and found inspiration.
In 1933 he took up lodgings in Palermo, Sicily, with his platonic com­panion Madame Du Frene, who never established whether his death was by accident or suicide. His ending, like his writing, remains (as he said of the surreal­ists) "a bit obscure." Roussel's obscurity was not entirely clarified by his posthu­mous (1935) explanations of Howl Wiote Certain of My Books (perhaps an echo of Nietzsche's "Why I Write Such Good Books"). "Taking the word palmier I de­cided to consider it in two senses: as a pastry and as a tree. Considering it as a pastry, I searched for another word, itself having two meanings which could be linked to it by the preposition a; thus I obtained (and it was, I repeat, a long and arduous task) palmier (a kind of pastry) a restauration (restaurant which serves pastries); the other part gave me palmier (a palmtree) a restauration (restoration of a dynasty). Which yielded the palmtree in Trophies Square commemorating the res­toration of the Talou dynasty."
Michel Foucault analyzed the relation between Roussel's cryptology and homosexuality: "When Cocteau wrote his works, people said, 'It's not surprising that he flaunts his sexuality and his sexual preferences with such ostentation since he is a homosexual.'... and about Proust they said, 'It's not surprising that he hides and reveals his sexuality, that he lets it appear clearly while also hiding it in his work, since he is a homosexual.' And it could also be said about Roussel, 'It's not surprising that he hides it completely since he is a homosexual.'"
BIBLIOGRAPHY. François Caradec, Vie de Raymond Roussel, Paris: Pauvert, 1972; Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, The World of Raymond Roussel [1963], trans. C. Ruas, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986; Hanns Grossel, Raymond Roussel, eine Dokumentation, Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1977; Sjef Houppermans, Raymond Roussel, écriture et désir, Paris: Corti, 1985. Trevor Winkfield, trans., How I Wrote Certain of My Books, New York: Sun, 1977 (includes two essays by John Ashbery and a bibliography).
Charley Shively

Rozanov, Vasilii Vasil'evich (1856-1919)
Russian writer and social critic. Rozanov came of a poor middle-class family from the government of Vetluga. Educated in a classical high school, he then studied history at the University of Moscow. He taught history and geography for many years in various provincial secondary schools, but had no vocation as a peda­gogue. About 1880 he married Apollinaria Suslova, a woman near forty, who in her youth had been intimate with Dostoevsky. Apollinaria was a cold, proud, "infernal" woman, with unknown depths of cruelty and sensuality, who left Rozanov after three years but refused him a divorce. Several years later Rozanov met Varvara Rudneva, who became his unofficial wife and with whom his liaison was completely happy.
In 1886 Rozanov published a book, On Understanding, an attack on the posi­tivism and official agnosticism that pre­vailed at the University of Moscow. Though it had no success, it attracted the attention of the historian N. N. Strakhov, who began a correspondence with him, introduced him to the conservative liter­ary press, and finally arranged an official appointment in St. Petersburg for him, which did not help him much, as he re­mained in straitened circumstances until 1899, when he was invited by Suvorin to write for Novoe vremia (New Times), the only conservative newspaper that paid its contributors well. The editor gave him not only a comfortable income, but also a free hand to write whatever he liked and as often as he liked, so long as each article did not take up too much space. Among his early writings was The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (1890), a commentary on the episode in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Having obtained through his wife access to certain hidden aspects of Dostoyevsky's mind, he discerned with wonderful acuteness the novelist's striv­ing toward absolute freedom, including the freedom of not desiring happiness.
As the years passed Rozanov's Russian style matured, and so did his in­tellectual personality. He had a profoundly mystical and religious temperament, was a born Slavophile, and detested the cos­mopolitanism of the Russian intelligent­sia just as much as their agnosticism. Recognized and lauded only by the right, he somewhat inconsistently wrote con­servative articles for Novoe vremia under his real name, and radical ones for the progressive Russkoe slovo (Russian Word) under the pseudonym V. Varvarin. At the time of the trial of Mendel Beilis in Kiev (1911-13), he wrote pieces accusing the Jewish people of ritual murder, so that he gained the reputation of a conscienceless hack journalist. In his last work, Apoka­hpsis nashego vremeni [The Apocalypse of Our Time; 1918), he decried the October Revolution as the coming of the Anti­christ. Reduced to extreme want and misery, he died in 1919.
On the subject of homosexuality he composed a work entitled Liudi lunnogo sveta: Metafizika khristianstva (Moonlight Men: The Metaphysics of Christianity; second edition, 1913), which was inspired by the writings of the pre-Freudian investigators of abnormal sexu­ality, notably Krafft-Ebing and Forel, but far transcended their narrow psychiatric approach by virtue of his insight into the role of the homosexual character type in the history of Christianity. He rejected the late nineteenth-century conception of the invert as "perverted" or "sick," arguing instead that such an individual had a di­vinely appointed mission in society, that he was not intended for heterosexuality and marriage. He claimed that the homo­sexual is "a third person around Adam and Eve, as a matter of fact, the 'Adam' from whom 'Eve' has not yet emerged - the first, complete Adam." In the cosmological scheme of things, androgyny and bisexuality preceded sexual dimorphism and re­production. As an archaic, primordial type, the homosexual has more of the intuitive, more of the metaphysical perception of the world that underlies the religious vocation.
Such anomalous individuals, Rozanov believed, were the backbone of asceticism, pagan and Christian, ancient and modem. It was Christianity that ele­vated the ascetic ideal to the center of its moral teaching. From the lives of Russian saints with their insurmountable refusal to marry or submit to the conventions of heterosexual life, Rozanov concluded that the moral "I will not!" was only the mask of a much deeper, psychological "I can­not." "A fact of Nature unknown to the compilers of the saints' vitae was taken for an especially profound, especially pure profession of a religion of chastity." Unknown in the West, and reduced to the status of a non-person in Soviet Russia, Rozanov nevertheless should be remem­bered for having probed one of the myster­ies of Christian history: the affinity of many homosexual men and women for a religion that formally condemned and excluded them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Vasilii Vasil'evich Rozanov, Four Paces of Rozanov: Christianity, Sex, Jews and the Russian Revolution, New York: Philosophical Library, 1978; Prince D. S. Mirsky, Contemporary Russian Literature, 1881-1925, New York: Knopf, 1926.
Warren Johansson

Rumi (1207-1273)
Persian poet and mystic; founder of the Malawiyya order of dervishes. His name was derived from Rum (Central Anatolia), where he mainly lived, but he was also known by the sobriquet Mawlana. Rumi was born in Balkh and died in Konya.
After schooling in theology and mysticism, Talal al-Din Rumi followed in the footsteps of his father Baha' al-Din Walad (d. 1231) and became a preacher. In 1244 he fell in love with a wandering dervish, Shams al-Din (ca.l185-1248), who became the sun in his life: "A burning candle came and fired me with its naked flame." It was a mutual attraction, and each found in the other something for which he had been looking all of his life. Rumi saw Shams as "the Beloved," while Shams found in Rumi a true master and friend.
For six months they were insepa­rable, which made Rumi neglect his reli­gious and social duties. This caused com­plaints from his wife and children and especially from his pupils, who jealously resented the intruder and even threatened him. Shams fled because of this, leaving Rumi behind full of grief: "Sweet moon without thy ray like a cloud I weep." But fortunately, Shams was found in Damas­cus and brought back by Rumi's son Walad. When they met again they embraced and kissed each other warmly, and according to Walad nobody knew who was the lover and who the beloved.
But the jealousy and hate of the pupils knew no bounds and in 1248 they killed Shams with the help of Rumi's own son 'Ala' al-Din. All of this was concealed from Rumi, who thought that Shams had just left again. He felt desolate, his eyes and soul had gone, without him life was unbearable. He searched through Syria and wrote many poems with lamentations and cries of despair, but after a time he gave up hope and found comfort by identifying with Shams, so they were one after all.
The relationship between Rumi and Shams was unique because it was not the usual adoration for Divine Beauty in the form of a beautiful youth, as in Sufism, but a love between two older mystics of great personal strength and character. According to some sources, Shams was killed by having a wall thrown upon his head, which could symbolically refer to the Islamic story of Lot. Although this may suggest homosexual behavior, the writer thinks it designates the resentment of the pupils against a person whom they considered evil in general, because he had seduced their master away from the true religion. Rumi and Shams had a quite intimate and, probably, a purely spiritual friendship, in which sex had no part be­cause it would interfere with the equality of friendship and the purity of love.
During the last twenty-five years of his life, Rumi found inspiration in music and dance and in relationships with the goldsmith Salah al-Din Zarkub (d. 1258), who became a mirror to his sun, and after his death, with Celebi Husam al-Din (d. 1283), who inspired him to write down his wisdom. This time he was more careful with his pupils, and threatened to desert them if they would not stop their mali­cious slander of his friends. In 1273 Rumi died at sunset; it is told that his cat refused food and died one week after him.
Rumi's attitude toward homosex­ual behavior was probably not different from that of his contemporaries. Dislike of passive homosexual behavior of adult men is reflected in his excoriation of the mukhannath as models of unreliability, who are bound to worldly pleasures, caught up in "forms" as women are, and not in "meanings" like real men. Loving boys was understandable because of their di­vine beauty, but Rumi warned against indulgence. Real love had to be spiritual, because love of forms was only relative to the love of God: "Human beauty is a gilt-gingerbread phenomenon, or else why does your beloved become an old ass? He was formerly an angel, but now seems to be a demon. The beauty he had was merely ephemeral."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love: the Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, Albany: SUNY Press, 1983; Annemarie Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of falaluddin Rumi, London, 1978.
Maarten Schild

Russia and USSR
As an entity with links first to Byzantine and then to Western European culture, the Russian state may be said to have begun with the conversion to Chris­tianity in 988. This development, which provided the foundation of a vast territo­rial expansion over the course of the cen­turies, brought much with it of cultural significance, including the characteristic Judeo-Christian ambivalence toward male homosexuality.
The Middle Ages. Male homosex­ual love appears in one of the earliest extant works of Russian literature, the Legend of Boris and Gleb, written by an anonymous but, one suspects, homophile monk at the beginning of the eleventh century. Combining history, hagiography, and poetry, this work enjoyed a remarka­bly wide circulation in subsequent centu­ries. It tells of the assassination in 1015, for dynastic reasons, of two young Kievan princes by minions of their half-brother Sviatopolk the Accursed. Describing the murder of prince Boris, the author of The Legend brings up the favorite squire of Boris, "Hungarian by birth, George by name" (Hungarians and Kievan Russians had a common border at the time). Boris had a magnificent golden necklace made for George the Hungarian, for "he was loved by Boris beyond reckoning." When the four assassins pierced Boris with their swords, George flung himself on the body of his prince, exclaiming "I will not be left behind, my precious lord! Ere the beauty of thy body begins to wilt, let it be granted that my life may end." The assassins tore Boris out of George's embrace, stabbed George, and flung him out of the tent, bleeding and dying. While the Legend of Boris and Gleb is couched in the standard life-of-saint format that was imported from Byzantium, the author's sympathy for the mutual love of Boris and George comes clearly through as does his realization that the gratuitous murder of George resulted from his open admission of the nature of this love.
George's brother Moses, later canonized by the Orthodox church as St. Moses the Hungarian, was the only member of Boris' retinue to have escaped the massacre. His fate is told in The Life of St. Moses the Hungarian. Moses was cap­tured by the troops of Sviatopolk the Accursed and sold as a slave to a Polish noblewoman who became enamored of his powerful physique. He spent the next year resisting this woman's efforts to get him to marry her, preferring the company of his Russian fellow prisoners. At the end of the year, exasperated by his refusals and taunts, the noblewoman ordered that Moses be given one hundred lashes and that his sex organs be amputated. Eventu­ally, Moses found his way to the Kievan Crypt Monastery, where he lived as amonk for ten more years, constantly admonish­ing other monks against the temptations of women and sin. The Life of St. Moses was obviously influenced by the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife. Its text is permeated with the hatred of women and all sexuality that is typical of the medieval monastic tradition. Yet, as the modern scholar Vasilii Rozanov main­tained, the legend of St. Moses is clearly the story of a male homosexual punished because he is unable to enter a conven­tional heterosexual marriage.
Muscovite Russia. The culturally rich Kievan period (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) was followed by 250 years of Mongol invasions and occupation by nomadic warrior tribes. The Russia that regained its independence, with a new capital in Moscow, had taken over many of the ways and customs of the Mongol occu­piers. Women were now segregated, kept in special quarters, and received virtually no education. Marriages in Muscovite Russia were arranged by the families and the two spouses were usually strangers who met for the first time only during their wedding ceremony. Romantic attach­ments between men and women, if there were any in sixteenth-century Russia, remain unrecorded. What one finds in­stead, all foreign and domestic observers agree, is that male homosexuality was astoundingly widespread.
Grand Prince Vasily II of Moscow, who ruled from 1505 to 1533, seems to have been totally homosexual. For reasons of state he married Princess Helen Glinsky, but he was able to carry out his conjugal duties with her only if one of the officers of the guard joined them in bed in the nude. His wife strongly resented this behavior, not (as one might have supposed) on mor­alistic ground, but because she was afraid that this practice would expose her chil­dren to the charge of being illegitimate. The domestic life of Vasily and Helen was hell on earth, with no quarter given on either side. One of their sons was born mentally retarded; their other son ruled Russia as Ivan IV, better known as Ivan the Terrible.
As bloody and sociopathic a ruler as his reputation credits him with being, Ivan married almost as many times as Henry VDI of England, but he was also attracted to young men in drag. One of the most ruthless chieftains of Ivan's political police, Feodor Basmanov ("with the smile of a maiden and the soul of a snake," as a later poet described him) rose to his high position through performing seductive dances in female attire at Ivan's court.
But Muscovite homosexuality was by no means limited to royalty. Sigmund of Herberstein, who visited Russia during the reign of Vasily in as the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, states in his Rerum moscovitarum commentaiii that male homosexuality was prevalent among all social classes. The minor English poet George Turberville came to Moscow with a diplomatic mis­sion in 1568 during one of the bloodiest phases of Ivan IV's regime. Turberville, however, was shocked not by the carnage but by the open homosexuality of the Russian peasants.
Apparently neither laws nor cus­toms restrained homosexual practices among the men of Muscovite Russia (there is no record of what went on among the women). The only recorded objections came from the church. Archpriest Awakum, the leader of the Old Believers during the religious schism of the seven­teenth century, considered every man who shaved his beard a homosexual. "Sermon No. 12" by Metropolitan Daniel, a popular Moscow preacher of the 1530s, is almost entirely dedicated to denouncing the gay blades of the day. These young men, Daniel thundered, behaved like whores: they shaved off their beards, used lotions and ointments to make their skins softer, rouged their cheeks and perfumed their bodies, plucked out their body hair with tweezers, changed their clothes several times a day, and wore scarlet boots several sizes too small for them. Daniel likened these young men's elaborate preparations before going out of their houses to a cook preparing a spectacularly decorated dish and ironically asked to whom the finished dish was to be served.
The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Peter the Great, who pulled Russia into the modern world at the begin­ning of the eighteenth century, was one of those heterosexuals who dabble in bisexuality when the occasion is suitable. Peter's relationship with his protege Alexander Menshikov, the baker boy whom the tsar made his orderly, then a generalissimo, and finally a prince, apparently had its sexual aspects. In battle conditions, Peter used soldiers as bed companions, prefer­ring those with big, flabby bellies on which he liked to rest his head.
Another ruler of the Romanov dynasty with a bisexual streak was Peter's niece, Anna Ioannovna, who was empress of Russia from 1730 to 1740 and who, according to some memoirists, had inti­mate relations with some of her ladies-in-waiting. The German-born Catherine II (the Great) may have had a brief lesbian fling with Princess Dashkova, the noble­woman who helped Catherine overthrow her husband Peter III and to seize the throne. But Catherine's overpowering yen for well-endowed males prevented her from forming any emotional ties with other women.
Among the western ideas that were imported into Russia after Peter's reforms was homophobia. In the eight­eenth and nineteenth centuries, the vis­ible male homosexuality of the Muscovite period went largely underground. Among the poorer classes and in remote northern regions, tolerance and acceptance of homosexual behavior survived the peas­ant eschatological dissenters that sepa­rated from the Old Believers. Two of these sects, the Khlysty (distorted plural of "Christ") and the Skoptsy (Castrates) had recognizable homosexual, bisexual, and sadomasochistic strains in their culture, folklore, and religious rituals. The Skoptsy who engaged in commerce had an institu­tionalized practice of an older merchant adopting a younger assistant-lover as his son and heir. After the older man's death this heir would repeat the process with a still younger man, thus giving rise to a mercantile dynasty.
At the opposite end of the social spectrum, we find a succession of ultra-conservative gay statesmen-writers, who moved in the highest echelons of tsarist Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ivan Dmitriev (1760-1837), the leading Russian sentimentalist poet and an author of witty satires, saccharine love songs, and didactic fables, was Minister of Justice under Alexander I. In his govern­ment career Dmitriev was noted for his nepotism, surrounding himself with hand­some male assistants, some of whom owed their advancement to the fact that they were his lovers. In his poetry, however, he wore a heterosexual mask.
Equally nepotistic was count Sergei Uvarov (1786-1855), Minister of Education under Nicholas I. To improve his financial situation, Uvarov married a wealthy heiress and had several children by her. His great love, however, was the handsome but not-too-bright prince Mikhail Dondukov-Korsakov. Other prominent and politically conservative nineteenth-century Russian gays were Filip Vigel (1786-1836), Konstantin Leont'ev (1831-1914), and prince Vladimir Meshchersky (1839-1914).
Not all the gay people of pre-Revolutionary Russia were reactionary or conservative. There was, for example, the marvelously anarchic figure of Nadezhda Durova ¡1783-1866), a woman who today would probably be classified as a transsex­ual. Forced by her parents to marry a gov­ernment official, Durova left her husband and child three years later, and donning a cossack uniform, joined the army to take part in the Napoleonic wars.
Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) is one of the most harrowing cases of sexual self-repression to be found in the annals of literature. Exclusively gay, Gogol spent his whole life denying this fact to himself and others, primarily for religious reasons. His stories and plays are permeated with fear of marriage and other forms of sexual contact with women, but Gogol developed this theme in such a cloud of symbols and surrealistic fantasies that his contempo­rary readers failed to discern its presence. Gogol's personal involvements consisted mostly of falling in love with straight men unable to respond.
Contemporaries of Gogol were already enriching Russian literature with explicitly gay poetry. One collection of these poems in a classical Russian, which had originated in the exclusive educational institutions of St. Petersburg in the late 1830s and 1840s, was published in Geneva in 1879 {Eros russe); the longest piece is entitled "Pokhozhdeniia pazha" (The Adventures of a Page).
The theme of homosexuality in the life of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) de­serves a special study which will undoubt­edly be written one day. In his childhood, Tolstoy kept falling in love with boys and girls. In Tolstoy's later writings homo­sexuality is portrayed in a negative light and in only a few instances. Resurrection (1899), is the aged Tolstoy's great indict­ment of the inequities and corruption of tsarist Russia; tolerant treatment of homo­sexuals and of those who advocate equal rights for them figure in this novel as one of the many symptoms of the country's moral decay.
One of the greatest Russian ce­lebrities of the 1870s and 80s, both nation­ally and internationally, was the explorer and naturalist Nikolai Przhevalsky (1839-1888). Each of Przhevalsky's expe­ditions was planned to include a male lover-companion between the ages of 16 and 22. His renown was so great that he could require the Russian government to pay for the education of each new lover and to commission the youth as a lieutenant in the army.
Reform and Cultural Flowering. The abolition of serfdom, the replacement of a corrupt judiciary system with trials by jury, the reduction of military service from 25 years to 4, and other liberal reforms initiated by Alexander II in 1861 did not make Russia a democracy, but they did set the stage for change. In this new atmos­phere homosexuality became far more visible in both Russian life and literature.
Prominent on the Russian liter­ary scene during the last two decades of the nineteenth century were two lesbian couples. Anna Yevreinova (1844-1919) was highly active in the feminist movement. She was the founder of the literary journal The Northern Herald, which she edited jointly with her lover-companion Maria Feodorova. Polyxena Soloviova (1867-1924), a Symbolist poet, shared her life with Natalia Maneseina. Among the no­table and overt gay male figures of the period were the popular poet Alexei Apukhin (a classmate and one-time friend of Peter Tchaikovsky); the previously mentioned prince Vladimir Meshchersky; and of course the famous Sergei Diaghilev, who headed the World of Art (Mir iskusstva) Group, before achieving international fame in the West as a ballet impresario. During this period there were at least seven gay grand dukes - uncles, nephews, and cous­ins of the last two tsars. The antihomosexual articles 995 and 996 of the penal code of the 1830s (and their successor, article 516 of the 1903 code) were hardly ever enforced. For this reason - and others - the legend that the great composer Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was forced to commit suicide is untenable.
The uprising of 1905 forced Nicho­las II to issue his October Manifesto, au­thorizing a parliamentary system and vir­tually abolishing preliminary censorship of printed material. In 1906 the sexual reform movement reached Russia, and in its wake there appeared gay and lesbian poets, fiction writers, and artists who saw in the new freedom of expression a chance to depict their lifestyle affirmatively. Mikhail Kuzmin (1872-1936), the most outspoken of Russia's gay writers, made his literary debut in 1906, when he pub­lished his autobiographical novel Wings, the story of a young man who slowly realizes that he is homosexual. Frequently reprinted, this book became the catechism of Russian gay men. Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal's (1866-1907) novel Thirty-Three Freaks (1907) and her collection of short stories The Tragic Zoo (1907) did for Rus­sian lesbians what Wings had done for gay men: they showed the reading public that lesbian love could be serious, deep, and moving.
About 1910 there appeared in Russia a group of poets called peasant - not only because of their origin, but be­cause the fate and survival of the peasant way of life was their central theme. The undisputed leader of this group was the homosexual Nikolai Kliuev (1887-1937), who was born into a peasant family be­longing to the Khlysty sect. The great love of his Ufe was Sergei Esenin (1895-1925), who was a remarkable poet in his own right. Although successively married to three women (including the dancer Isa­dora Duncan), Esenin could write mean­ingful love poetry only when it was ad­dressed to other men.
The Post-Revolutionary Situ­ation. The provisional government, formed after the abdication of Nicholas II in Feb­ruary 1917, lasted for only eight months. Constantly harassed by the monarchists on the right and the Bolsheviks on the left, the regime managed to promote human rights and freedoms on a scale not experi­enced in Russia before or since. That was when women and minorities were given full civil and political rights including the vote. The seizure of power by Lenin and Trotsky in October 1917 was hailed by many then (and is still often regarded) as an enhancement of the rights gained by the revolutions of 1905 and February 1917. But as far as rights (including gay rights) and personal freedoms are concerned, the October Revolution was actually a rever­sal and a negation of the two earlier revo­lutions rather than their continuation. To be sure, article 516 disappeared, but this was simply part of the abolition of the entire Criminal Code of the Russian Empire.
When the civil war ended, a new Soviet criminal code was promulgated in 1922 and amended in 1926. In the sexual sphere, this code prohibited sex with minors under the age of 16, male and female prostitution, and pandering. It did not mention sexual contacts between consenting adults, which meant that adult male homosexuality was legal. The provi­sions of this code extended only to the Russian and the Ukrainian republics of the USSR. But the previously widespread homosexual practices in the Caucasus and the Muslim areas of Central Asia were persecuted and punished during the 1920s as "survivals of the old way of life."
In Central Russia, including Moscow and Leningrad, two forms of the Soviet government's negative attitude to homosexuality became evident after the end of the civil war: morbidizing it by treating it as a mental disorder; and dis­missing or ignoring its manifestations in literary works that appeared in the 1920s. If the nineteenth century considered homosexuality as a crime to be punished, the Soviet regime in the 1920s saw it as an illness to be cured. It is significant that although the Soviets reject psychoanalysis on ideological grounds, they are willing to use arguments purloined from depth psy­chology to justify their condemnation of homosexuality.
The growing hostility of the So­viet government and press to homosexual­ity, observable in the 1920s, culminated in the new Stalinist law, article 121 of the Soviet Penal Code. This law, announced on December 17, 1933 and made compul­sory for all the republics of the Soviet Union on March 7, 1934 - the first anni­versary of the National Socialist seizure of power in Germany - outlawed sexual rela­tions between men and prescribed 5 years of hard labor for voluntary sexual acts and 8 years for using force or threats and for sex with a consenting minor. However, just as in Nazi Germany, lesbian relations went unpunished throughout the Stalin era. The opinion that homosexuality equaled oppo­sition to the Soviet system became en­trenched in the minds of the bureaucracy. In 1936 the Commissar of Justice Nikolai Rrylenko proclaimed that there was no reason for anyone to be homosexual after two decades of socialism; no one from the working class could possibly be homosex­ual so that the people who hang out "in their vile secret dens are often engaged in another kind of work, the work of counter­revolution."
Nonetheless, during the Stalinist era, Soviet persecution of gay men was neither continuous nor total. In the case of well-known personalities, such as the great director Sergei Eisenstein, the operatic tenor Sergei Lemeshev, the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, and numerous ballet danc­ers, the authorities were willing to look the other way - provided the man was married and kept his homosexuality out of public view.
The Post-Stalin Decades. During the decades that followed Stalin's death in 1953, foreign scholars and tourists were again able to come to the USSR for ex­tended stays. Homosexuality was - and still is - a state crime. But foreign visitors were able to find clandestine gay commu­nities in all major cities. As they had done under Stalin, the Soviet political police still used homosexuals as informers and for recruiting foreign gay men for espio­nage. In a police state, the existence of a sexual outlaw was necessarily precarious; his "weakness" constantlyput him at the mercy of the authorities.
Still, the post-Stalin years were a time of slow social change. The decade of the 1970s witnessed the emergence of gay and lesbian writers, the first under the Soviet regime (writers who treated gay and lesbian themes in the 1920s had all come out before the October Revolution). Un­able to publish their work, they had to resort to samizdat ("self-publishing") or tamizdat ("publishing over there," i.e., abroad). Well documented is the case of Gennady Trifonov, who served a hard-labor sentence in 1976-80 for privately circulating his gay poems and who since 1986 has been allowed to publish essays and reviews in Soviet periodicals, provided he makes no reference to gay topics. More light has been shed on the situation of lesbians in the Soviet Union in recent years in memoirs published abroad by women who had served time in Gulag camps and were able to observe lesbian behavior there, and in works of fiction by Soviet writers expelled from the USSR.
Under Gorbachev the situation remained uncertain. The glasnost cam­paign made homosexuality a mentionable topic in the Soviet press, but initiatives dating back to the early 1970s that evinced a tentative approach to change with regard to gay rights do not seem to have been followed up. As the historical record shows, Russia's past gives indications both of hope and despair.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Simon Karlinsky, "L'omosessualita nella letteratura e nella storia russa dal' XI al XX secolo," Sodoma, 3 (1986), 47-70; idem, "Russia's Gay Literature and Culture: Liberation and Repression," in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr., eds., Hidden from History: Reclaim­ing the Gay and Lesbian Past, New York: New American Library, 1989.
Simon Karlinsky

Rustin, Bayard (1912-1987)
American black civilrights leader. Bom in West Chester, Pennsylvania, the illegitimate son of an immigrant from the West Indies, Rustin was reared by a grand­father who worked as a caterer. In the 1930s he joined the Young Communist League, which he regarded as the youth group of the only party then truly dedi­cated to civil rights. In 1941 he became race relations director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a nondenominational group seeking solutions to world problems through nonviolence. He spent 28 months in prison for refusing military service in World War II. From 1953 to 1955 Rustin was director of the War Resisters League, a pacifist organization, and from 1955 to 1960 he worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. Having organized several earlier mass protests, he achieved his greatest success in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A believer in progress through the labor movement, he served for many years as president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.
Because of his "gradualist" labor emphasis, as well as his advocacy of black-Jewish harmony and support for Israel, Rustin was labeled conservative by some black radicals. In 1953 he was ar­rested and briefly imprisoned on a morals charge in Pasadena, California. His homo­sexuality, which was known to his associ­ates but not to the general public, is be­lieved to have been used by enemies to deny him the position of leadership to which he was rightfully entitled.